(An) In-cighte[1]
If noise occurs in the
communication channel, the information flow acts accordingly in order to remix
it. As an element of the communication flux, text is, by definition, in the
service of the sovereign—language. It is also a form of resistance against
contaminating noise, i.e., a means of remixing the noise. Language epitomizes the dialectic of consumption
and creation. In language it is possible to express, say, tell, present, state,
utter, but what makes language a double blessing is that it resists precise
verbalization, or, in some instances, altogether resists verbalization. Language
is frustrating because what it tends to distort the message that is to be
delivered. However, besides being elusive, language is also protective. By
making manifest the imperfection of communication, it silently acknowledges its
limits. Analogously, it shows the limits of the human grandeur and reaffirms
human potentials. It does so by demonstrating the impossibility of replicating
what the contemporary pluralist discourse suspiciously calls authenticity.
Creation
is a purifying force in the communication channel. In the parlance of Terry
Eagleton in “The Revolt of the Reader” (Against
the Grain: Essays 1975-1985
1986), it means “to take over the means of
production” (184) from the oppressor. As such, doing things with text is an
ecorebellion. In order to present instances of green storytelling uprising, the
analyses of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) and Stewart Home’s Memphis
Underground (2007) are centered
around McKenzie Wark’s cultural critique titled A Hacker Manifesto (2004). They are mainly explored
via the tacit content of the narratives because it is those layers of the text that have the capacity to
subtonicly undermine the discursive.
Relying on William S. Burroughs’s admiration of plagiarism, Acker’s Great
Expectations is read in the
light of the triumph of imagination and spirit, according to her testimonial “Dead Doll’s Prophecy” (The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility
1994).
Extralinguistic
and imponderable as it may be, silence, is also endemic to literary
playfulness. It is the impalpable level of the story that suspends the reader’s
belief, and yet sustains oscillating amidst uncertain certainties. It stirs the
slumberous spirit, sedentary heart, and (un)dead soul. It undoes
delusional thinking. Of primary concern
in this analyses is identifying the areas that can inspire suspicion
about contemporary cultural realities. The critique is based on dissensus: a
disbelief in what cultural mechanisms of control impose on one as the only way
to live. It is resistance against the entertainment-military mentality that
deprives human beings of individuality, and fellowship of communal cohesion.
Reading-writing
against noise pollution is a creative practice, a form of resistance against
oppression. It faces its own predicament resulting from the relational character
of language. Yet, there is a noise filter that literature devises to silently
clean the communication channel. The tone is the tacit layer that voices out
the unsaid of the text, thereby enabling a fruitful exchange. Through that layer Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations and Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground tell a story about
how it feels to live in the underdeveloped
and overdeveloped worlds in an age of the oddly uniforming and isolating global
politics. They challenge the reader, destabilize one’s trust in the narrative, and
open up lateral paths of undoing the forged image of the totality of discourse.
By
extension, they render remixable discursive cultural realities, cultural
constructs. Reader-writer is understood
to be the DJ--the voice sometimes manifest,
at times subtonicly present, a vessel for the free flow. As a re-enactment of
the notion of construct, storytelling shows the limits of both dehumanizing and
human control/power, thereby rendering remixable both discourse and cultural
realities.
Grace and/as Justice: Kitch’n’Sink Aesthetics of Ignoration
Reading-writing across media, genres, and
disciplines is a unifying practice combining words, sounds, and images. It is a
remixed concept of storytelling demonstrating possibilities of analogous
interventions on other planes. For example, it implies a critical reading of
self as fluid and revisable through an exchange with fellow humans. Likewise,
it opens up back alleys enabling silent disruptions in the discursive, subverting the forged image
of discursive omnipotence. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that culturally
constructed realities we know are not immune from remixing either. For that
reason, this is written in hope to reanimate the spirit that the novels
analyzed propagate: freedom from enslavement by delusion that is transforming
the world into a disney-babylonian market.
Kathy
Acker’s Great Expectations (1982)
portrays consumer paradise, the exposing the picture of Dorian Gray of
commodity culture. To elucidate the thematic,
the analysis is followed by an investigation of literary techniques in Acker’s
story “Dead Doll Prophecy” (The
Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society & Social
Responsibility 1994) Her metacritique of obsession by
possession is taken as a literary tool enabling responses to oppressive
cultural realities.
In England’s
Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001), Jon Savage contends that “history is made by those who say ‘No’”
(541). The exploration of Acker’s writing reveals a genuine punk-rock contribution
to the process of making-writing history, the process that should by no means
be confused with monopolizing history. Rather, it means
challenging and remixing bewildering realities thriving on possession and the
exercise of sheer power. McKenzie Wark:
Even
the would-be “radical” histories, the social histories, the history from below,
ended up as forms of property, traded accordingly to their representational
values, in an emerging market for commoditized communication. Critical history
only breaks with dominant history when it advances to a critique of its own
property form, and beyond, to the expression of a new productive history and
the history of the productive. (A Hacker Manifesto [094] square brackets
in original).
Great Expectations criticizes
vulgarized aesthetics rendering spectacular both life and creation. Acker presents
the schism between the everyday colonized by commodity on the one hand and, on
the other, a counteracting cultural practice. Through a layered psychodrama, characterization
in the novel epitomizes living in culture of fluctuating media, self, and storylines.
The characters flow and mutate, thereby suggesting both their interrelatedness and
diversity within one.
: ”What about the title? Does it arouse
interest?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading, ”The Adding Machine 42).
The
novel opens with a conventional introduction of a character. The narration is
measured. The storyline linear. Ignoring conventions of documenting sources,
this particular form of plagiarism remixes reader’s interest, as Anne Humpherys observes: “Acker appropriates not only one of the
greatest titles in English fiction and many sentences from Dickens’s novels,
but also the three-part structure of Pip’s expectations /childhood, which she
entitles ‘I Recall My Childhood’ and ‘I Journey to Receive My Fortune’; then
‘The Beginning of Romance,’ and finally ‘The End’” (“The Afterlife of the Victorian
Novel: Novels about Novels,”A Companion
to the Victorian Novel 449). As
such, it is a manifestation of
refacement, sustaining provocative dynamic through narrative tactics
that paint an excitingly distorted
jigsaw puzzle. As much as it is a literary
strategy, it is also a statement about the reconfiguration of control and
power. It renders remixable both tradition and contemporary cultural realities.
:”And the characters? Can you see
them? […]You can move character and the story to a different time and place” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative
Reading,” The Adding Machine 42-3).
The
instable identity of the characters is underscored by fluctuating narrative
styles. The name of the antihero is Pirrip, which might mislead the reader to
expect an overt reference to Pip from the pretext. Instead, Pip is transformed
into Peter at the end of the opening quote that is not one. That is how Acker
plays with liquid characters in liquid culture: O emerges from a conversation
with Rosa, who is introduced through a series of letters to her boyfriend
Peter, a well-connected, promiscuous, violent, and well-off cokehead.
Complicating
the themes of societal institutions and the implicated artistic practices, the
character of Kathy is mediated through the third person narrative. She, as an
artist, is mainly portrayed from the prism of her private life that underpins
the public plane. Yet, the poignancy of that sphere traverses the private. The
spectacle bridges the gap between the private and the public, if one can even
speak about the distinction any more (or, could one ever?). Focusing on the
intriguing, provocative, controversial, Acker satirizes celebrity culture that
humiliatingly redefines the human face in the language of face-lifting and sappy
entertainment. Dissolved emotionality, imbued in human life devoid of intimacy
and genuine passion is suggested through art, sex, money, and politics, sickly
conspiring in corruption.
Understandably,
the details from private life flashed out in this part of the novel are,
actually, not private at all. For instance, Kathy’s husband is involved in the
North Eastern power coalition, whose socio-political-financial positioning is
enabled by the connections with the organizations and bodies in power (218).
The story acquires the elements of a psychothriller. The husband orchestrates revenge
against his wife’s father, recklessly instrumentalizing her. Moreover, he has
sex with his wife’s mother. In the tradition of Greek tragedy-turned-melodrama,
the father/father-in-law/husband finds out about the affair and kills his wife.
Provocativeness
in Acker is a stylistic intervention against sensationalism. In order to
criticize cultural realities by demonstrating an extreme version of the
commodity-induced insanity, the text may acquire something of the sentiment it
reflects upon. However, the tone, heavily relying on irony, ensures a distinction
between those levels. The story, thus safely deploys shocking, destabilizing
techniques without being domesticated by the sentiment it scrutinizes. It provokes
the reader’s suspension of the belief that to be obsessed with possession is
what makes a human being human. That tone is here to bring to awareness what
William S. Burroughs calls “the conditions of total emergency” (Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of
William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 59).
Thus,
the subtonic layers of the narrative, in a quite clearly articulated voice speak
about how it feels to be alive in the world that makes the human face
horrifyingly invisible. Insisting on the superficial, prosaic, and vapid,
between abhorrence and abhorrency, the story shows the monstrous, inverted
image of the human face. Logically, the absurdity of such culture is presented
in the artistic context, which precludes creativity instead of enabling it to
flourish. The voice is stunningly subtle, yet disarmingly direct and paralyzingly
honest: ”All my family is dead. I have no way of knowing who means me harm and
who doesn’t” (209). That is how a human being feels in a psycho-babylonian-disney
world: family, money, family money, art, sex, celebrity, and inheritance
conspire against a person enraged on the surface and sad deep inside: “I
knew I was no longer a person to a man, but an object, a full purse. I needed
someone to love me so I could figure out reality” (209).
Latent
pain speaks particularly through the episodes about Claire’s relationship with
her family—an aloof, negligent, elusive father and a disturbingly self-centered
mother, enmeshed in an inner storm, eventually
climaxing in suicide. The family scenario is a devastation script for the
daughter: “My mother is adoration hatred plan. My mother is the world. My
mother is my baby. My mother is exactly who she wants to be. The whole world
and consciousness revolves around my mother” (176). As a consequence, Claire is
growing up into a person who will later be looking for a consolation in crude, nymphomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, self-oblivious placebo.
Syntax
signals the state of the mind in a limbo where the broken family narrative
meets the erosion of communication on the communal level. The closing paragraph
in Great Expectations is a breathless
flow of speech disjoined from thoughts. Punctuation is scant. It delineates the
horizon of their disappearance of the invisible subject and the hardly
identifiable object. The punctuation, sketching the ghostly dummy subject, is
also suggestive of the subject/object recuperation: “What is, is. No fantasy […]
I know the only anguish comes from running away” (242).
Amidst
that detrimental noise, a noise filter arises. Acker’s voice is blatantly defiant,
yet astonishingly elegant with a queer twist. Its delicacy is in surgically
meticulous (dis)obedience and wild lyricism. It is also exaltedly-humble, as
subjectless sentences evidence, showing a radical change in the character. From
such broken beat narrative is born a peculiar form of subjectivity. Antonio
Negri:”These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to
the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit, that will, through
pain, become subject—a process of redemption” The Labor of Job: the Biblical Texts as a Parable of Human Labor 107).
The path to redemption is humbleness. In storytelling, it can be manifested, as
it is in Acker’s prose, in subjectless sentences, suggesting deselfing, but
anticipating reindividualized subjectivity. Liquid identities in liquid
culture.
Subjectivity
in Acker’s prose is an answer to the dilemma presented in Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007).
She wonders why the Victorians still inspire us. Kaplan indicates that some
writers are trying to respond to the postmodernist “prematurely[,] announced
‘the death of the author’”(8). Some such attempts are, in effect, uncritical
revamping of the Victorian monolithic subject.[2]
However, there are readings of history that remix it. Kaplan claims that a
correlation between Victorian sentiment and that of our epoch lies in our need
to rediscover humanness and innocence. She puts emphasis on a humble
acknowledgement of human imperfection as a basis for empathy with the
Victorians from a contemporary standpoint.
That
certainly can be part of how a human being can be described today. However, instead of asking why the Victorians
still inspire us, one is rather inclined to accentuate the inquiry differently
and ponder the question about why they inspire us now. One wonders whether the reemergence of innocence, romance, and
the simplicity of the everyday in that context indicates a disguised
susceptibility to sentimentalism, sedentary imagination, and dormant spirit. A
possible reason for the interest in Victoriana can also be that today there is
an aspect of the antecedent era that resonates with contemporary predilection
for denial. As there was in the time of the Victorians, today there is also a
need for undoing fabricated realities. Back
then, it was the imperial myth of omnipotence. Today, it is the delusional belief
in the totality of discourse. Therefore, postfuturist research seeks “the
sediments that must be there if one
is here” (Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace 29
emphasis in original).
Jon
Savage, for example, looks for the other Victoriana in England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001). Situating the study within the
subcultural milieu, he criticizes the misconception of punks. More precisely,
he points out that a reductionist perception of those subcultural scenes as
aggressive and destructive results from a failure to recognize the subtext of
intensity in punk expressive modes. Namely, the extremity of their
idiosyncratic idiom comes from the investment in resistance against the imposed
ways of living.
In
that other Victoriana that Savage seeks, he sees the correlation between the
twentieth century and tradition: “With their syphilitic, archaic language –
‘vile’, ‘poxy’, ‘bollocks’ –and this costume which theatricalized poverty, the
Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (374). Or, perhaps, the postfuturist
renegades of Dickens. Punk rock writers, remixing the words of historical
mafothers, are not nostalgically trying to reestablish the past, as no
historical epoch seems worthy of complicity in restoring social inequities,
austerity, and inhumaneness. Instead, literary DJs critically reimagine the
past to reawake the future, by resurrecting the present.
In response to the past, one can create
“quite conventional and nostalgic novels in both form and content” (Humpherys 444).
By contrast, the postfuturist storytelling engages playful juggling of the
pretexts and aftertexts, thereby discovering “what has been ignored,
diminished, mis-stated, or distorted” (Humpherys 451). Of particular
significance are Humpherys’s remarks about the aftertext subverting the
pretexts to tell a story of resistance against politics of exclusion (Humpherys
449). Therefore, one can hardly imagine such remixes of the heritage to be
nostalgic, especially if resisting the non-existent death of the subject
entails a re-enactment of an authoritarian subjectivity:
For history to
be something more than a representation, it must seek something more than its
perfection as representation, as an image faithful to but apart from what it
represents. It can express rather its difference from the state of affairs that
present themselves under the authorship of the ruling class. It can be a
history not just of what the world is, but what it can become. (McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [091] square brackets
in original)
Indeed. Envisioning such prospects, the looming
shadow of the past legacy, coupled with the opacity inherent to literary
fabric, the relational nature of language complicates devising new narratives.
There are at least two aspects to this conundrum. One concerns the problem of
power; the other is related to the question of novelty. The former’s complexity
lies in the fact that the ruling class creates historiographies that accentuate
its power. Creating alternative narratives can be a NO to the fabricated scenarios. The latter (the question of
novelty) reflects Paul de Man’s ideas from Blindness
and Insight. Opacity of language is both an obstacle and an inspiration for
sustaining perpetual dialogue between modernity and historicity through
postfuturist storytelling. Thus, the
only thing postfuturist reader-writers can do is never stop naming: “Her
name is not important. She’s been called King Pussy, Pussycat, Ostracism, O,
Ange. Once she was called Antigone…” (Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates 163 ellipsis and emphasis in original).
[1] Rage Against
the Machine, “Take the Power Back”: “In the right light, study becomes insight”
(Rage Against the Machine. New
York
[2] See Kaplan’s analyses
of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a, David Lodge’s Nice Work, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and
the White, Fowels’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, and
particularly Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George.
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