The Present of the
Future Past: On What Can Be
“[T]he
trade sells itself on enjoyment, on not offending.”
Stewart Home, “Writing about Writing”
Navigating
the seas in which all stories meet in the communication flux demands devising
tools for expressing one’s voice without necessarily claiming newness in the
strict sense of the word. How then, one wonders, can the past narratives
acquire the voices in which to speak here and now from the recuperated future?
How can the communication channel be freed from contaminating noise, so the remix
can speak clearly in the intersections of the time axes? McKenzie Wark:
Hacker
history does not need to be invented from scratch, as a fresh hack expressed
out of nothing. It quite freely plagiarizes from the historical awareness of
all the productive classes of past and present. The history of the free is a
free history. It is the gift of the past struggles to the present, which
carries with it no obligation other than its implementation. It requires no
elaborate study. It need be known only in the abstract to be practiced in the
particular. (A Hacker Manifesto [097]
square brackets in original)
In
“Dead Doll Prophecy” Acker explicates her hacker tactics. She discloses
particulars of the legal battle fought over the four plagiarized pages from a
novel by Harold Robbins. How abstract
hacking needs to be in order to be practiced in the particular without legal
repercussions? How many generations need to pass on their gifts so that one day
today can be the history of the free? How does such history write itself?
Acker’s
story is a testimonial about the generation of a piece of writing that entailed
legal action and caused a series of disheartening, legally futile, defenses: “Understood
that she had lost. Lost more than a struggle about the appropriation of four
pages, about the definition of appropriation. Lost her belief that there can be
art in this culture. Lost spirit” (33). On the one hand, plagiarized pages
inspire the poet to question her own literary creed and, on the other, to
suspect the literary establishment’s doctrine. Both have a paralyzing effect on
her because The law is murky and kafkaesque experience precludes her inability
to understand of what she is guilty (30).
In
the story, the character Capitol makes dolls. The characters of the dolls
re-enact the protagonists of the allegedly actual events: the poet, the
publisher, the journalist, the dead doll. The characters of the dolls symbolize
various aspects of the life of a writer in the society colonized by commodity:
”HERE IT ALL STINKS […] ART IS MAKING ACCORDING TO THE IMAGINATION. HERE BUYING
AND SELLING ARE THE RULES: THE RULES OF COMMODITY HAVE DESTROYED IMAGINATION” (29).
The
poet sets out on a journey into the literary world. She practices her writing
according to the founding belief, instead of conforming to the founding fathers
of the trade. She believes that writing has nothing to do with the rules they
invented and everything to do with freedom: “Writing must be for and must be
freedom” (“Dead Doll Prophecy” 27). For
her to be free means to refuse the advice from the elders. In particular, the Black
Mountain bards inform her that a poet must find his own voice. She finds it to
be counterintuitive because such voice would define her in an excessively
dispiriting way--the way that would make her unable to recognize her own voice.
What
is more, she feels that determining such voice would affect her sense of
authority. Specifically, following the Old Masters’ sagacious suggestion would
be an act of succumbing to the patriarchal authority, against which she, in
fact, rebels. That would mean acknowledging god-like figures, and such
recognition offends her sense of power and divinity: “All these male poets want
to be the top poet, as if, since they can’t be a dictator in the political
realm, can be dictator of this world” (21). Approving of their quasi-godliness would be a
self-sacrificial act that she finds…well, just out of the question: “Deciding
to find her own voice would be negotiating against her own joy” (22).
Instead
of a demigod, she decides to be who she is—a writer: ”Wanted only to write […] To
hell with the Black Mountain poets, even though they had taught her a lot”
(22). The writer doll detects that the discussion is out of focus. Like the
grey law, the Black Mountain poets’ rhetoric disguises the narrative of a
different kind: “Knew that none of the above has anything to do with what
matters, writing” (34). She learns what
heritage is and what to do with it. She learns that those who do not
inherit—hack. McKenzie Wark: ”The hacker class is not what it is; the hacker
class is what it is not—but can become” (A
Hacker Manifesto [045] square
brackets in original).
: “Style can be a limitation and a burden” (William
S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding
Machine 39).
Yes,
if it is practiced in a calcified form. But, then, one wonders whether it can
be called style. In any event, in order to distance herself from the ossified
perception of writing, she centers her literary persona around negation. The
poet suspects that the criteria determining what good literature is correspond
to that what qualifies a book to win a literary prize (22). Pornography,
science fiction, and horror novels, according to the literary standards, cannot
be classified as good literature. In response, she opts for “both good
literature and schlock” (22).
The
writer doll does not trust the bards’ supposed cleverness. She feels that what
is commonly perceived as cleverness is blind to its own susceptibility to
social control and manipulation. For that reason, she redefines her literary
persona based on negation: ”Decided to use language stupidly. In order to use
and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other
texts. Copying them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn’t going to
stop playing in any playground. Because loved wildness” (23). Eventually,
Capitol decides not to make dolls any more”: “CAPITOL THOUGHT, THEY CAN’T KILL
THE SPIRIT” (34).
Before
that climatic moment, the writer doll realizes that part of her writing tactics
is multiple offence: “Offended everyone” (22). The dilemma remains how the
reader can respond to an offensive text. To that perplexity Robert Glück has an
answer. In “The Greatness of Kathy Acker”
(Lust for Life: on the Writings of
Kathy Acker), he writes about the first encounter with Acker’s text as a massively
confusing and unsettling reading experience. First, it didn’t reveal anything.
Nor did it bring consolation. It inhibited any typical response. It is small
wonder, because it aims at subverting literary conventions by destabilizing the
reader, “keep[ing] the reader off balance” (46). It disables identification
with the text (47). It suspends belief in the text.
Glück
first realizes that reading Acker’s fiction is an oneiric experience. He also
decides that in the story, it is repetition that has a dream-inducing effect. It
is the repeated description of a dream in Acker’s I Dreamed I Was a Nymphomaniac that makes the reader question one’s
perception. The passage that describes a dream Glück finds intriguing. The
doubling of words makes him feel anxious because he cannot understand the
reason for that discursive self-proliferation. He is not able to comprehend it
because he cannot identify a possible reason for the writer’s strategy. Her
intentions at that moment are completely beyond his imaginative and mental
capacities. That disruption of the communication between the reader and the
writer is a source of bewilderment and sadness. It arouses a feeling of
loneliness, of being “lost in strangeness” (46). In that instant, the reader sees
no sane way to respond to a psychotic text: “a text that hates itself, but
wants me to love it” (46). The intention of the writer might be forever beyond
the reader. But, what is experienced as the text’s invitation to be loved
despite it hating itself, can certainly reinforce the reader’s decision to
ignore such a wish. What the reader can do is endure in suspending disbelief in
one’s otherness. And to love the reading experience for reconfirming such an
insight.
Subjectivity,
authority, and identity seem to be pivotal to Glück’s analysis of that revelatory
encounter with the text:
When
I lost my purchase as a reader, I felt anguish exactly because I was deprived
of one identity-making machine of identification and recognition. I gained my
footing on a form of identification that was perhaps more seductive, a second
narrative about Acker manipulating text and disrupting identity. To treat a hot
subject in a cold way is the kind of revenge that Flaubert took. Acker’s second
narrative acts as a critical frame where I discover how to read the work: the
particular ways in which a marauding narrative continually shifts the ground of
authority, subverting faith in the “suspension of disbelief” or guided daydream
that describes most fiction. (47)
:”Does the writer play fair with the reader?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative
Reading,” The Adding Machine 42).
Yes.
The reader is inspired and patient enough to recall that discourse is a means
of social control and manipulation. Acker’s text in particular makes manifest the
ways in which authority can communicate its power and what possible responses
to it can be. Her work demonstrates how voices of resistance can be defined and
articulated. She delineates the social margins aware of their otherness. The
awareness of one’s marginalization defines the authority:
Acker
takes revenge on power by displaying what it has done; she speaks truth to
power by going where the power differential is greatness, to a community of
whores, adolescent girls, artists, and bums, the outcast and disregarded […] If
hegemony defines itself by what it tries to exclude, then the excluded merely
need to describe themselves in order to describe hegemony (48).
And they do. In voices.
In shadow talk. The self-abhorring text that wants the reader to love it is
also the text that wants the reader to know that it is fiction. It is the
authority that wants to be dethroned. That wish the reader can satisfy.
Postfuturist storytelling bears witness to the double blessing called language
that savagely, but generously, reveals its duplicity. On the one hand, it is a
source of confusion, control, oppression, and suffering; on the other hand, it
provides room for its own remixing. Through such eerie oscillations one finds libratory and redeeming powers of language. As
one reads, one recognizes text to be, by definition, in the service of the
sovereign—language. As one uses language to communicate, it occurs to the
interlocutors that the communication channel is polluted. That awareness
ensures resistance against contaminating noise. That subtonic ecorebellion is a
means of remixing the noise.
Language epitomizes the intensity of consumption and creation. Language
is threatening and friendly. In language, it is possible to argue.
Alternatively, one can also share in language. Language is elusive, like its
fluctuating laws, but it mercifully recuperates the right to the remix of the
self-inducing confusion. It teaches how to look at both sides of imperfection:
one’s own and everyone else’s. By showing its own limits, language indicates
the limits of the human grandeur and reaffirms human potentials. It does so by resisting
the belief in the possibility of replication. It shows that a replica is an
impossibility by reanimating the stigmatized belief in authenticity.
:”Does the writer have a distinctive style?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 39).
Yes.
It tells about the vision of reindividualized humans, engaged in creation and
activism, vitalized by and inspiring solidarity and creation—the rebirth of the
human face through alternating cycles of silence and noise defining resistance against
the cannibalist culture of competitors and nihilist greed, as described in
Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very
Short Introduction (2007):
As for wealth,
we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and
treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful
indictment of capitalism is that it
compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact
purely utilitarian. The means of life become an end. Life consists in laying
the material infrastructure for living. It is astonishing that in the
twenty-first century, the material organization of life should bulk as large as
it did in the Stone Age. The capital which might be devoted to releasing men
and women, at least to some degree, from the exigencies of labour is dedicated
instead to the task of amassing more capital. (155)
Acker’s
uncompromisingly disobedient voice is a NO to such culture. In that voice she
exemplifies a-proprietary writing of history. At the same time, in her shadow
talk, it is a YES to remixing it. To reclaim human dignity. In Leslie Asako
Gladsjø’s movie Stigmata: The Transfigured Body (1992), Acker expresses her
discontent: “If I had to spend all the time thinking what I cannot do, I
wouldn’t be able to live.” This statement encapsulates resistance to oppression,
reconstructing the axes of domination, refocusing the power relations narrative,
and redefining subjectivity. Acker’s stories show how it feels to be alive
today in the culture that is not exactly
a place that provides room for an impassioned immersion in play and creation.
But can be. As pieces of fiction, Acker’s stories might want to be read. Acker’s
metacritique is performative. The reader wants to reanimate it. The reader sees
Acker’s writing as an instance of storytelling from the dark lands that draws inspiration
from the transformative power of the world of letters, turning the temporarily
contaminated communicational tunnel into the green communication channel and
celebrating the greatness of the human spirit.
Off- Heritage Song(s): Avant-Garde Revisited
and Remixed
Epitaph/Epigraph: ye Roots of
Uprouting[1]
“Death is
the loss of love.”[2]
Dehumanizing. ”Exile whose other name is Delayed Death.”[3]
Disgust. “Robot fucking. Mechanical
fucking. Robot love. Mechanical love. Money cause. Money
cause. Mechanical causes. Possessiveness habits jealousy lack of privacy wanting wanting
wanting.”[4]
Has
New York/U.S. lost its hopeful appeal? Forgotten a possibility of rebirth from
the jazz era, the obscure countercultural charm of the Beats, fervor of the
civil rights movement, revolutionary NYC downtown noise of the 1970s…and the
magic of rock’n’roll? Suffered from the amnesia affecting the core ingredient
of life? ”If I knew how this society got so fucked up, maybe we’d have a way of
destroying hell.”[5] “Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom.”[6] Perhaps it’s not about knowing in the strict sense of the word. More likely, it's about the twist.Postfuturist at that. Methinks.
[1] Like the interludes,
sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 demonstrate inspired writing/writing through affect,
as explained in Chapter One.
No comments:
Post a Comment