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THE POETICS OF L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Bruce Andrews (Talk delivered in the Textual Operations Talk series, organized by A. S. Bessa, at White Box in New York City, September 25, 2001)
Reading can look at
language as the arena, as the medium, the mode of engagement, the centerpiece of Method. What’s social here
is not some separable content, but the Method of writing & of editing. Editing is the reading
moment. Reading constructs. And it does so by
combating the obvious at all levels — in order to maximize
openness at every level: acoustics,
‘looks’, page layout and design, authorship, genre, grammar. The normal starts to seem
precarious, contingent, even exceptional. I want something that
holds together that’s not smooth. Something that would
agitate or reinscribe the social raw materials of agency, of subjects, of
subject positions, of persons, of
discourse — and make them the building
blocks of whatever it constructs. An Informalism. Of connections. The connectionism is a
Surprise Machine. It works by ... MULTIMPLICATION. So-called Language Writing
distinguishes itself: First, by challenging the
transitive ideal of communicating, of the direct immediate broadcast, of the Truth with a capital
T (you pompous fool) — by challenging the usual
generic architecture of signification, of the unrequited or
unrequitable sign. Second, by foregrounding in a
pretty drastic way the materiality (and social materiality) of the reading
surface, down to its tiniest markers. (Even punctuation.
Remember: Russia, the 1905 revolution – the first soviet was
formed in St Petersburg in order to coordinate a print-workers strike called to
demand payment for typesetting
punctuation marks and not just ‘letters’). Reading
Software In reading, this makes
for, instead, a drastic unnerving constructivism all the way down to the level
of the sign. And then beyond, backstage. It looks behind the sign
for the particulars, for
an extremism of raw material, of
what comes before signification, of preposterous dispersal & modularity, of
energizing strangeness, of interferences, interruptions, & noise without a
beat. (This puts the reading
experience closer to sacrifice and surrender, to anti-productive expenditures and excess, to a surplus or
hyper-trophy of enjoyments.) Faced with Collage &
Noise, Reading can be set loose
from its usual anchorings (and hankerings). Making it hard to
recuperate it, or reterritorialize it, back onto the continuities that those
anchors prescribe: First, set loose from
GENRE [The writing is more like
the music of so-called ‘free improvisation’ which means free from
prescribed genre or idiom. Nonidiomatic.] (Is normative syntax a
genre?) And second, set loose from
the usual demands for a Psychology-Centered Subjective Expressiveness
on the part of the Author (that all-purpose glue the traditional reader is
supposed to identity with) Language as an infinitive
would mean to make different
— given to us as an
opportunity. To reentangle rather than
decipher. To rerehearse the shocks. I’m all
scattered. We make ventriloquism out
of the building blocks, the raw materials of a social readymade. And try to turn literary
space into a more wide-open information space or architecture, of materialized
complicity. For reading: If Making Meaning or
Making Sense is Establishing Authority, how is this done? That’s what I want
to nudge at tonight — with glances at some parallels between how
this plays out in experimental writing and how it gets sidetracked in
hypermedia’s absorbing 3-D illusion (taking off from some points raised
in a new book by Lev Manovich on The Language of New Media). To start with: The page, like the
windowed computer screen, can encourage a looking through or a looking at approach — Looking through: as a
transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style), or a looking at (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled
material reality). Reading works as a
simulation of a flat control panel where users are getting
access to a complex body of information — more like using a search
engine, an online encyclopedia, a hyperlinked website. And just like when we use
computers for gathering information, or as a storage medium, we move away from
some of the usual expectations about being transported through an illusionary
or fictional narrative. We get closer to the
experience of actively using a
database Words can become
interfaces — precisely because of the
way they are already ‘wired’ to social codes (like the programming
codes of the computer). Writing preforms and
reading performs the equivalents of software extensions to the digital
world’s ‘Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language — B.Y.O.: pulldown menus,
cascading style sheets, layers, invisible tables, applets. The Reader becomes the
software of textuality. References? WE
are the Other of words This doesn’t call
for a reading that rejects or negates the referential, or even the baldly
representational forces of language, but one that resists
letting those forces be confined & recuperated & territorialized. It would join in the
adventure of keeping them active at a micro level, as singular & literal
events — constantly varying,
skidding, interpenetrating, mutually transforming, out in the open, on the
surface. We don’t start out
with the usual phobic rejection of reference, and certainly not with the
usual squeamishness about the non-literary social. What are we eliciting? Something of the sensing
that the social order isn’t freestanding, that language is a part of that
system and its surround, part of the way the reproduction needs of that system
get met. So that we recognize how
much both writing and language could work to record or construct or reactivate
the social body. But not smoothly, not
without an edge. Trouble is immanent to the
social. The process of social
investment (and social trouble) is ongoing. And with this kind of
writing, the reading process just pleasurably performs that social investment,
or some alternatives to it. The words aren’t
idealized, or de-realized, but hyper-realized. The politics in reading
doesn’t work by disavowal. Signifying isn’t
ruled out of court. But it’s not an end
in itself; it’s put back, in a social contextual rerouting, at the
service of a socially worked-up affect. We’re not taking up
some moralistic distance from which the mechanisms of the normal would be
exposed. It gets down and dirty,
covered with ashes. We can emphasize the force of language and not just what it ends up meaning in its customary genre-confinement. But the force of words
doesn’t just come from writing’s refusals (of anecdote or representation, of participating in
a larger scaffolding of illusion. Because to go all the way
with this refusal, to only allow purely nonreferential material, undercuts the
potential force of sense: of
capture, of captivation, of seduction and complicity. Social
Address Mixdown In this reading: There is no single
protagonist, no transcendental
spectator, no gaze that isn’t
manhandled, nothing trying to make an
idealization pass for the real. The optical — the
paperweight of cinematic illusion and of picturesque imagist poetry
— gets reduced to just one
of many channels in the final (tactile) mixdown. The words don’t
‘make images’. They implicate situations (which are social, and which are treated as
social, in a more critical way). The credo is
self-reflexive. And it calls for outreach.
This willingness to deal
with reference doesn’t have to lead the reader toward an absorption into
a separable world of illusion outside of the page, at a carefully calibrated
distance. The text broadcasts a
social address that makes a comfy suburbanizing distance impossible. It calls you out. It’s more
presentational or theatrical, less given to auratic or cinematic absorption. Look how much smoothness
of ‘editing’ is needed to sustain the illusion of a centered
subject ‘involved’ in a centerable outside world; most of that smoothness
can be jettisoned along with that illusion. If you want to immerse
yourself into a visually represented world, the severity of collage might be a threat. Drastic cutting and
montage and whacked-out juxtaposition have to be ‘dialed back’. A little of the
‘elliptical’ is okay —
right now, it’s even fashionable — but just make sure there’s not too much, because that
would endanger the fixed center of personal expression or unmediated
observation and the chance for us as readers to identify with it. We don’t ‘rule
out’ or try to escape from the mechanisms of social construction. (This isn’t the langauge equivalent
of pure abstraction.) Instead, this is what the
texts seem to wallow in: to appropriate or sample them, hyperbolically. They incite pleasure by
the scrambling of fantasy and ideological resolution. They play off a desire for subversion, for fragmentation, for
miniaturizing and maximalism, for refusing the compensatory, for
shortcircuiting. Reading helps it
‘lay bare the device’ —
at the social, not just the literary level. The writing helps stage,
rather than conceal, the particulars of its format. It helps the text
foreground its social
constructedness, as a body of social sense, not just leaving us stuck with a
fetishizing of artistic process or
the preenings of author control. Don’t be dictated
to. Don’t be sutured
— show us “some kind of rip” Nothing like digital
morphing. No pretensions to imitate (or reassure) any world we
already know. (Try to avoid making the world seem
pre-known or interpellative overall, whatever happens with its particulars.) Try to avoid the entropy
of closed systems that lose energy and wind down without enough external input.
(And the field of literature is decorated with all kinds of versions of closed
anti-social formalisms susceptible to entropy like this.) Don’t let meaning
coagulate. Help it humor us. Work to create an
anti-aura, to make language ‘famous’ (remembering
Brecht’s comment that alienation is a kind of fame). The politics point
outward, toward an embracing of concern for a public, for common goods
(language as an overall body), not merely for ‘identity
politics’, for enlisting recruits in one or another specific struggle. Our
almost automatic complicity We want a reading that
sounds that out When illusion gets
shattered, so does the comforting distance that nurtured our little dream of
subjective centeredness and mastery and protected independence. Words gain force by dispelling the illusion that Language is at my disposal (and that certifies me as a legitimate
disposer, as a safe subject). Texts that give us a
semblance of a cozy interior don’t seem so compelling any longer. Or too
sentimental. If readership is the
software, then the writing
isn’t ‘laying bare the device’ of literature, so much as
laying bare ourselves as the
device. We don’t want to
think of the vivid action of reading as just an active, conscious — and
increasingly po-mo self-conscious — reconcilement with circumstances. Even a Brechtian style
‘alienation’ of immediacy can be too prone to pride itself on its
mastery, on its meta-level ‘transcendence’. But too often this is an
empty pleasureless pride. Maybe Brechtian distance
is too reminiscent sublimation to give us a model for reading these texts. This
is personal abjection — Abject, the opposite of exalted or imperious — “offered in a humble
and often ingratiating spirit”. For reading: no
self-validation, no self-assertion. Its ‘face’ is
not recuperable as persona or as private property. Instead, we get a
relentless impropriety, a rough trade. Any fixed rendition of the
self is put in danger. Empowering of the language
works as a self-disempowering. The subject suppressed (as
a control tower) to pluralize the meaning. We aren’t surfaces
that can hide depth. We’re moebius strips
without a stabilizable outer shell (and therefore without a protected inside). Privacy in shreds, the
Other in the saddle. Why do you want to imagine
that you are conducting your own train of thought? Nothing purely interior or
individually psychological is allowed to familiarize all this. Nothing lets us person-ize or character-ize these singularities of event and experience. The self, the imagined
integrity, wrecked. The ego, that big towering
regulator, starts to give way in the face of a deregulation... of who we are
and all we might be. We face up to words which
are more like deindividuated subjectivities (or production lines for future
subjectivity). Subjectivity gets felt as
a complex bodily surface, with the familiarities of the person subject to an
ecstatic clearing and extension. Or to notice that our own
subjective and particular experiences don’t always have to be mediated
through our ‘self’, that commodification. A shifting pragmatism of
experiential reactivity: that’s what we feel like. In a more egalitarian
textuality, these aren’t impulses I can take control over, or recuperate
as personal souvenirs. We’re messing with
you. In
the Realm of the Senses Dismantling doesn’t
just occur by insouciant disavowal. Our reading’s
efforts to be freestanding and resistant gets overwhelmed. The reader is caught up in
sensory reactivation — once the words are
deregulated, once their representational uniform is put back in the closet. Radical texts can provoke
a bodily excitement, inciting a surplus of sense, with security crowded out
by sensation. Remember, traces of power
are invested in our sensory
experience; they’re not just routed through our identities. We don’t just remain
the viewing screen of representations. Those filtering devices
have been dispossessed. And the deterritorializing
of language enhances its Force, its sensational affectiveness. A projectile cluster (or
stickerball) of words offers up a staged memory trace of how earlier
word-clusters (and their repetition) turned the body into a lively,
reactive surface of inscription. We let ourselves become a
staging ground for intense visceral (and postreflective) affect, for
metamorphoses of sensation, for an ‘in your face’ Special Effects
that become possible once we abandon our attachment to the author’s
‘first hand’ point of view, that perspectival fakery. We get something more like
a ‘special effects’ writing, well outside any of the usual realist
or personally expressive protocols. Technicians
of the Social? Don’t
keep the social at a distance Distance becomes interior
constructivism — a self-reflexive social
forming. The equivalencies and
relays and thresholds don’t conceal the realities; they substantiate it. Reading makes a jigsaw
puzzle out of the snapshot. Reading: To start with,
unembarrassed by the artifice of language, but we let it operate on
us granularly. We might even find moments
of non-interactive cinema-style description or anecdote popping up in this
writing, but only within a more complex, and overall opaque surface. We’re not seeking
purity. We don’t need a tabula
rasa. We live within an immanent
overdetermination — and learn to love it. If you ask what immediate
response gets created by this hypermediacy, it’s not minimalism.
It’s not New Age; it’s not Old Age. It’s sensory overload,
omnivoyeurism. Still, this doesn’t
encourage a disinterested aesthetic contemplation (of desocialized objects,
tastefully sketched out and given ‘auratic’ presence). For that, you’d need
to lean on so much of the armature of familiarity. But this writing, mostly,
is too strange. Strangeness puts things right
in your face, right up to our ears. Strangeness doesn’t
endistance. (Remember, it’s what
reactionaries always want to quarantine.) It pulls us in, puts its
headphones on us, and requires more wide-angle work, more action. We’re not stripping
away illusions or normalizing machinery by talking about them, by
‘disagreeing with them’ or ironizing them, but by showcasing
how they work at a micro-level.
And they work by keeping us at a distance. Norms are distancing
devices. Here, once the norms start
to collapse, our proximity to textual particulars gets intense. The spectacle isn’t
something the words protect us from, or keep us safe from. The words contain it, or
burst apart trying to. The Spectacle requires
some distance for us to be absorbed in it. These language texts, on
the other hand, tend to intensify the reading action or praxis to the point where that
distance disappears. The huge horizons of
escape (from representation) pull us farther into the circuit of Language. It heightens our
captivation. The
thrill is post-personalizing The armor of the private
self gets soaked by complicity, ripped through by seduction, not by letting us
keep a ‘knowing’ (or privileged nay-saying) distance. And seduction is more than
a mental mystification we need to ‘see through’. We don’t look
through seduction; we’re
caught up in it. We’re delegated,
vicarious — in one definition,
”occurring in an unexpected or abnormal part of the body instead of the
usual one.” The interior is not a safe
haven. A fluid architecture of
information makes the contagion of the text more likely. We find ourselves the accomplices of the text’s sense, not self-conscious
lieutenants of it. Because the mission of the
text is to reenact some of the production process that stands behind (or
withstands) personal (and that means social) identity. Subjectivity is the waste
product, not the source. Subjectivity becomes a
wildly multiplying (metonymic virus-like) series of effects. [The
opposite might be a metaphoric borrowing of a secure vantage, or cannibalism.] We’re not offered up
some cathartic release from all the bonds of the subject. Instead we get an
intensifying of all its particulars — once the wrapper is off. Subjectivity gets
stimulated — at the micro, building-block level — as it gets
destabilized at the overall, macro level. And identification comes
in the form of a homeopathic medicine. We leave with bodily
excitation, but without the ‘proof of purchase’ (the valid
signature, etc.) needed to return it. After all, sometimes it
seems as though the text’s conceptual unity and wholeness is sustained by
there being an outside to the text, maybe one that could be captured by the gaze. But if there’s no outside that’s
separable (if the surface contains it all, or implicates a zillion paths
through it), then there’s likely to be no closure. An infinite extendability
or outreach, beyond any VR (‘virtual reality’) fixation. Liquid
Paper The text encourages a
spatializing performance. Reading plays along — to denaturalize or discombobulate perception. Foster a softened mental
space or architecture. Space can be less fixed
than in either: first, representational writing or second, writing that relies
on clearcut formalizations or systems to create a solid objective space. [Similar issues might
arise in the aesthetics (and theorizing about) contemporary Installation Art] Space — and the
space of meaning and sense — isn’t just a projection, or even a
clearly marked subdivision. It becomes the staging
ground for particular choices of trajectory, always on the move. We face a dizzy
proliferation of vectors, lines of flight, thresholds, fluid dynamics, the
examples of Chaos Theory, instead of an architecture fixed enough to
accommodate illusions of
transparency (or translucency): ‘can we see well
enough to drive?’. Reading becomes vectoral
rather than vehicular. Emergency rather than
immersion. A social connectionism is there for the taking, not just to be taken for
granted as something reflected or represented. Now, identity may lean on
the carefully ‘composed’ image as a prop. But a barrage or
multiplication of images (or of the raw material for images) will knock those
props out from under it. So will the page as a
flattened control panel. Action becomes
spatialized, uncentered. We become less
determinate, less neatly bordered, less fixed and fixated. As these unfixed,
navigable spaces make for a ‘liquid information architecture,’ or a
liquid paper architecture. Immersion
& Navigation Instead of opposing
Absorption (of a cinematic type) to a distancing Artifice or Theatrical Showiness, we might contrast
Immersion with a different
kind of User Control, or Praxis;
with Expedience or the Exploratory. Manovich emphasizes how
much the new media art offers us spaces of navigation. So we can think of this
binary being played out between different types of navigation. On the one hand,
there’s navigation as a souped up, hotted up menu choice within a
pre-fixed space, something likely to have an absorptive effect (here, think of
Brecht on what he called ‘culinary theater’). And, on the other hand,
there is a more activist navigation through the superimpositions and concentric
circles of resonance of Sense (that are offered up as a collage, not a
‘realistic’ continuity; more like the animated cut-outs of early
computer games sitting on separable 2-D planes, not pulled together into the
illusionary mechanics of the background). Meaning isn’t
elsewhere and fictional; it isn’t covering up some ‘Lack’. It takes place right
here, as our reading starts to
resemble the operating of a control panel. We’re using
information more like we would in the adjustment windows in a GUI (Graphic User
Interface). Similar to the way
that a cyber presentation can remind us of
cutting-edge graphic design — much less indebted to subordination as its
guiding light, less hierarchically arranged than something we’re
encouraged to look through. The ‘screen’
of reading is more opaque, not a window we call up to transport us to an
imaginary world. This is no 3-D
fly-through. The equivalents of
hyperlinks and menus (from the control panel side of the computer experience)
makes the immersive experience of conventional literature less likely. Reading these texts has
little truck with the ‘depth’ claims of cinema-style illusion.
Those claims just don’t hold up in the face of the complexity of the
tasks that these texts solicit. Illusion gets vaporized by
the specific interactive activisms called for — by constantly choosing
among competing accounts, alternate possibilities. Reading gets closer to the
moment-to-moment focus and future anticipations of gameplay. More like constantly
opening up multiple resizable windows. It doesn’t allow for
the supposed fixations and security of any unified gaze. Here, predetermined
sequence or fixed diachronics gives way to the side-by-side, to the between, to
a synchronic everything at once, to a
simultaneity of possibility, a deprivileging of time (or at least of
represented time). Montage takes place within the frame. You’re on your own
— all over the place — and your own isn’t
your own. We get a spatialized
navigable space — but mental space, no
longer based on linear argument but on words talking past each other in
simultaneous ‘accounts’ of elaborated events or experiences. Rather than a narrative,
we get a collage of multiplicitous positioning. We learn to take up
permanent residence within competing (and mutually contaminating) multiple
explanations. You can’t keep out
the NOISE. Right away, it sounds off
in a non-immersive density of juxtapositions and relations, of
micro-referencing and intimation. This is multiple
explanation as a viscerally immediate anti-absorptive readability. Words’
Nerves We’re not using the
physical choreography of language to decorate (or cover up) its referential, mediating role. We’re not digging
out latent meanings or dainty subordinations. These are not
dematerialized images we’re dealing with. Excesses from the
apparatus of illusion now get freed up and fastened on individual words. The literalisms of
language take charge (without just having to mediate ‘the real’) or take precedence over its
mediating role. They swamp that role or heighten it at a micro level. Objectification
demolished, subjectification demolished. But the spatializing of
the words by the readers’ active practice gives them a paradoxically
greater power. It makes for rough and
ready dislocations, or relocations. ‘It’s not
disjunctive, it’s leaping!’ Affective response
doesn’t get to ‘drop anchor’ in its familiar subjective
harbors. The arbitrariness of
language isn’t domesticated by being filtered through the usual
packaging. It’s not as if the
only kind of pleasure we can imagine is the stabilizing haven of a subject in a
plausible familiar world. The implausible gives
pleasure. The unfamiliar gives
pleasure. Lack of homogeneity gives
pleasure. Disillusionment gives
pleasure. Popping out of the
stitches of suture gives pleasure. Carved out of their usual
representational contexts, the language goes to work all the more extravagantly
on our nerves. Sometimes it feels like
it’s all about body reaction, corporeal sensation — the way that reading
affects, even reshapes, the body and its enjoyments. A textuality that works
(immanently) on the nervous system. Playing out on the
surfaces of the words’ flesh and our flesh. Usually, the body’s
constraint is its self-denial. If so-called language
writing is reader-centered, it’s also more body-centered than we usually
allow. (And not because the usual
normative packaging of & constraints upon the body are taken for granted or not noticed, but because they are blown away.) This is desublimating. Writing plays off the body
as a zone of multiple affect. As a polyvalent (or
multiplying) recording device. The texts touch us here
without representing some elsewhere. We don’t just go to
these texts for critical detachment, or for negative evaluations of a social
body kept at arm’s length. (We’re not just
calling out requests for our favorite so-called ‘socialist
one-liners’) A more shocking intimacy
shortcircuits the calming pillow of self-reflection, the unruffled distance
needed for subjective control. The distance rigged up for
aesthetic (or auratic) contemplation comes crashing down in an infectious,
sometimes traumatic visceral contact. Contact is corrosive. You
can’t keep it at a distance. This is more of a
free-floating fascinatability. We look for fascinating texts, not something to keep a distance from. Texts get intimate with
us, involuntarily. Which makes this writing
closer to a linguistic pornography than we usually like to think. For identification to be
hyperbolic, it miniaturizes. We swallow it in tiny
doses. Once we get beyond the
settling, unruffling visual simulations (so prominent in traditional poetry and
fiction), the flesh is subject to greater disturbances of meaning, directly
materialized and inscribed on us as readers. As the texts create a
near-behaviorism of impact and affect. Inscription on the body:
shouldn’t we admit that this is how radical texts work? The flesh gives up its
location — like flight recorder boxes. Mimetic
Responsiveness We participate in these
texts mimetically, contagiously. With
‘mimesis’, from ‘mime’, implying “portraying a
character by bodily movement” — in this case, a social character. With a direct investment
of flesh and bodily surface, we become the recording tape loop. [Compared to the
horizontal relations — of sign to sign (‘value’) or
signifier/signified (‘signifying’) — this is a vertical relation, of sign to world, of the tangle of
reference and mimesis.] This brings us close to
mimicry, an insidiousness — [insidious, from ambush and to sit: a.
awaiting a chance to entrap b.
harmful but enticing c.
having a gradual and cumulative effect d.
developing so gradually as to be well-established before becoming apparent The mimesis is bodily. Text works an immanence. Readership is the symptom. Flesh isn’t left
coordinated or packaged and organized the way it once was. In reading, this becomes
an unprotected, homeopathic flesh, prone to physical metamorphosis. A bodily mimesis may even
suggest a certain passivity. Our habits are roughed up
tactilely (not ‘tactically’) We celebrate the barely
discernible seizure and passing of our habits. The flesh is ignited
—almost like a masochism of affective stimulation. The object — or
Other — takes precedence over the subject. And it extends to the
boundary limits of language. A voyeurism or magnetized
hearing that’s combustive, abject. Time
& Time Again To give us time
experienced in material literalness, rather than the unrecoverable time of
representation. (The utopian allegory is
that of eternal life — or of recuperable time, nothing forgotten.) So here, the page (like
the computer user’s screen) functions as a site for direct sensation and future
hope, rather than (like the cinema
screen) as a safebox for memory. Real time in reading
triumphs over the fixed spaced which is usually used as a prop or support for
some imaginary represented Time captured in a bite-sized image. It helps make time (as a
reader confronts this new writing) the time of both present ‘active engagement’ as well as the
multiplex time of concentric circles of ... plausibility, authority,
explanation, sense. Reading makes a contest on
every temporal plane: a) over the Past: over a topology of meaning, fought out in the
trenches of individual words; b) over the Present: the degree to which the active user is outfitted
or energized (instead of being caught in Absorption); c) and over the Future: the degree to which we can free ourselves from
unreflective social norms, the degree of our openness to Difference. The ‘present
tense’ of writing rigs itself up to a layer of social usage that contains a less personal past and
promises a future. The future — a grasp
of its social limits —means reading a reading. Future perfect. Take
Action: Writing as Extra Rehearsal We’re back to the
choice of what to emphasize in the language experience: between information or
action, on the one hand, and immersion or representation, on the other. Words carry a dual role,
just like the image-complexes on our computer screens. They can serve as
miniature representations (of fictional depth), and also as interfaces and
control panels that govern actions on the surface — (actions, in reading, that
can even involve a parallel to cyber ‘teleaction.’ offering control
over the ‘remote’ layers of meaning or social sense). Reading combines: from
Column A, a materialized present tense activism moving through a real-time
space (of hearings and sightings and choices [of response and relation]; along with, from Column B,
a social version of movement in
psychological space. [Here, the words become the social characters, and that’s how
you’re composing: you build the text out of a broader social translation
for what goes on within and between persons, for the ‘psychological
tension between characters’ (which, in conventional literature gets
reductive and hydraulic pretty fast).] Reading needs to honor the
opening up of possibilities of relation, since reading now combines the
equivalents of editing, animation, title generation, navigation, compositing
— a micro-judging omni-attentiveness, all in one, all at once. To encourage a connectionism
given all the more force because
the words undermine the proscenium distance of separation. The combo is
‘Meta’ PLUS ‘Curiosity’. A meta attitude
isn’t enough. There’s no closure. Gotta keep things open. You
can’t act like you know it all. Meaning or social sense is
3-D animated, but by the reader, not ‘ahead of time’. We never get ahead of
time, or outside of it. It’s remote
control — over meaning. But
right here. And that’s remote
control over the possibilities of recoding. Any individual unit,
anything resembling an image, comes with its code implied, revealed — as
if everything (already, always) involves a translation, a switching back and
forth (but of active bodily energies). In reading, this is a
hyperbolic extension of the way that single words or letters or phonetic
building blocks carry a charge that is social (and too often, if unrecognized,
normalizing). It calls up the notion of concentric
circles or layers of resonance: Meaning
at the level of Signification we investigate, detonate, push into disequilibrium; Meaning
at the level of Value is something we help generate; Meaning
at the level of Discourse and Social Sense we help challenge. Writing becomes a cultural
management — hybridizing,
disappropriating. We’re exploring a
social gameworld, a multi-dimensional stadium of meaning — not being
marched through it. This is bravura
multitasking. We get sensational
involvement and Brechtian
distance — both at once, and not in contradiction with each other. We
are repercussionists But what about the things
that Poetry traditionally prides
itself on? We could still talk about
combining the Lyric with the Language focus, with Lyric regarded as a
personalized vocal music. But then we’d have
to ask what restrictions are being placed on musicality. And how phobic we are
about noise. And how penetrated and
fragile is any humpty-dumpty voice. We’re not just
waiting to peer at the ‘presence’ of the writer, with literariness
as the well-upholstered backdrop. In the interface, we stage
or sound the emotional ambivalence of our freely chosen and freely juxtaposed
possibilities of meaning. Facts make music. And the rhythm of
navigation makes up part of the acoustics of reading. To create a field of
lively reading-opportunity, you carefully gauge the resonance or ‘charge’
of individual words (and sounds). And this judgement is
entirely social. Meaning is never fixatable
privately. Meaning is a public
address technology. If address involves the
public side, the surrounding and eliciting of the public, this emphasis intersects
with an emphasis on Sound, on Noise — rather than on the visual
‘transporting’ ambitions
of writing. [If the visual is more
private — the ‘private sector’? — that would fit with
the immersive dreams of the trends
in computer hypermedia. It also brings to mind the idea, from psychoanalytic
theory, that making yourself seen
recuperates back to the subject, whereas making yourself overheard solicits ‘the Other’. So, the visual
emphasis — whether in the iconics of concrete poetry or the naturalizing
graph of voice in the New American Poetry — comes back to the subject and
reasserts a romanticism; as if you could achieve a surveillant penetration of
artifice to get to an
‘essence’. Compared to this, the
emphasis on sound seems — in general — more rhetorical,
performative, and public.] All this gives so-called
Language Writing a more explanatory thrust. Explanation is embedded in
the writing itself. Works are responses, and
the praxis of the reader reconstructs this responsiveness. And reconfigures the relation to an outside
context. Here we’re not
looking for mastery, but passionate or even dizzying embrace — of an implicated social body. The pleasures it makes
possible can’t be separated from the meanings it tenders, solicits, and
invests in us. Readership becomes a
savings and loan association. Texts invest in us. We are the newest versions of the software available
for download. We are the networked art. Thresholding The whole is phony. We are reconstellating it.
We are the reconstellation. Power leaves no escape
hatch. Complicity (“to fold
together”) is a given. Socially, we are ecstatic
accomplices, with words literalizing the vicarious. Which is us — as
personal readers. Reading reimplicates us in
the regulation and enforcement process which is immanent to our sense of
selfhood. We don’t have to
read from the inside out, identifying with a writing that’s also supposed
to work from the inside out. Instead, reading tracks
the outside in. We counter-interpellate
from the outside in, from the text being set loose to work on the affects which
it stages, traceable to a social horizon. And both are
semi-permeable, letting us create a polyphony out of a situation: a polyphony
of enunciation that pancakes the usually separate layers of a customary
hierarchy of meaning. Customary meaning tears
apart in the face of social abjection. It’s granularized
— or miniaturized —
sometimes thrillingly, sometimes with a shock or a laugh. If the work is drastic
enough, it produces an abjection, relayed from ground zero of the social, and
it takes hold of us bodily, dizzily. It makes for a social
abjection we cannot master, cannot just ‘think through’.
There’s no ‘talking
cure’ for this abjection. It’s seductive
— personally, but also socially. Language literalizes an
agitated social body and ‘brings it on home’, inside the instrument
panel of reading. And we can ask: how might this extend
outward globally, toward the translatable use we make of these texts and other writings it forms
a coalition with. Not to turn inward, or
limitedly toward the semantics of some purely national or subcultural paradigm
or secure identity. But to encourage a swerve
toward a transnational interactive space of translation and of that which is
always already a translation:
language. This is another kind of
totalizing... in reading. A thresholding. The prescription and the
infinitive are the same: to threshold. |