Unthinkable Writing

Gregory Ulmer

English Department
University of Florida at Gainesville
glulmer@nervm.Nerdc.Ufl.Edu

 

Perforations 5 (1994): “Bodies, Dreams, Technologies.” Public Domain, Inc., POB 8899, Atlanta, GA. 31106-0899. INFO@PD.ORG

 

Described as a media-kit journal of theory, technology, and art, Perforations is just one facet of Public Domain’s activities. Jim Demmers, Robert Cheatham, and Chea Prince (PD’s coordinating committee) also sponsor “Working Papers”–“a series of presentations devoted to the various crises of legitimation, representation, and communication.” Held at various venues around Atlanta, recent sessions addressed “the new alien in science fiction,” “Madonna, Paglia, Camp, Queer Theory, and PoMo Feminism,” “mirror, myopia, modesty, weakness, failure, scandal.” Their Kiosk project-in-progress (demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 93) will be a series of interactive hypermedia stations as alternative public sites for displaying electronic arts. PD also engages in video and public access cable television production, and provides internet access for arts organizations.

 

In short, PD has learned one of the fundamental lessons of the information age: the goal is not to design only a product–a tape, a form, a performance–but also the institutional frame capable of receiving that product. They approach the electronic as an “apparatus” consisting not only of technology but also of institutional practices and individual behaviors (ideological subject formation). Functioning as a relay site (a booster switching node operating as an information wild card), PD represents a new kind of creative activity that challenges the old subject/object divisions separating criticism from art: you cannot study PD without having them study you back. For now, though, I am going to consider one of their products–number 5 in their series of media kits.

 

Perforations 5 is a collector’s item not only because it is a limited edition but because it constitutes an exhibition of the status of multimedia in this brief transitional moment of the convergence of media between the book and the computer: after the desire to write with sound, image and text together has spread to the general citizenry but before the technology capable of democratizing such writing is widely available. The kit comes in a large box, the receipt of which is better than getting a crate of Florida citrus and almost as good as Christmas. The contents: an oversize “adult comic” (black drawing on yellow paper)– “Brain-Dead Dog,” by Tom Zummer; a book-length loose-leaf anthology of writings by a diverse group of contributors, including PD members; an equally diverse tape anthology of video works; an audio cassette of music by Dick Robinson (side one) and Michael Century (side two); a computer disk with a hypertext (“Genetis”) authored in Story Space by Richard Smyth. The kit is a snapshot of this moment when the media are suspended in their separate technologies, yet brought into virtual contact with one another under the theme that heads the issue: “bodies, dreams, technologies.”

 

In the same way that some people watch “television” rather than any one particular program, one way to read Perforations is to scan or surf it as a whole: browse through the colored pages of the anthology with the cassette playing in the boombox, the tape going in the vcr, while flipping the screens of “Genetis” on your Mac. The natural medium for Perforations, in other words, might be cd-rom, with all the pieces hyperlinked to bring out the pattern that emerges from the wholistic reading. The title suggests the nature of this pattern (the interface of bodies-dreams- technologies) but not the specific quality–the feel or effect–of the collection. Rather than trying to name that effect, I want to follow a personal thread that forms the whole into a constellation for me.

 

My point of entry is Richard Smyth’s “Genetis.” Smyth, who just completed his Ph.D. in the cultural studies program at the University of Florida, has been testing the genre of mystory that I introduced in Teletheory as a support for electronic reasoning. To see how Smyth adapts mystory to his own purposes and how it looks in the context of Perforations clarified for me some of the outstanding questions about electronic style. “Genetis” (self-described as a “rhizography”) is arranged in five “plateaus” (alluding to Deleuze and Guattari)–myth, parable, allegory, legend, theory. The “legend” plateau refers to the “Florida School” experimental approach to cultural studies–the search for the institutional practices of schooling appropriate for an electronic apparatus. The shorthand code for these new practices is “dream logic,” extracted from psychoanalysis.

 

Smyth conceptualizes his dream logic with the help of Deleuze/Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, the vehicle of which is any kind of swarming animal or vegetable system (rat dens or crab grass). The basic point of the rhizome as an interface metaphor, however, is best seen in Deleuze’s use of the orchid/wasp relationship as an example for conceptualizing an alternative to representation. Instead of the semiotic idea of signs as icons, indexes, or symbols, the rhizographic notion of signifying relationships is that of the symbiotic interaction of two different species systems (orchids and wasps). Meaning circulates in the manner of the exchange between two systems which has to do with fertility and not with signs. The part of the vehicle activated in this metaphor is that of the passage from one system to another. Smyth organizes “Genetis” in terms of the co-presence in different dimensions of his experience of the psycho-dream theme. These dimensions include the major discourses of the “popcycle”–family, school, academic discipline, and entertainment or popular culture.

 

The dream-body-technology theme recurs throughout the kit, beginning with “Brain-Dead Dog,” which, having been brained by a flying brick, somehow obtains access to the electro-magnetic spectrum, where it fuses with a virtual robot. Descriptions of dreams appear in many of the texts, as in Chea Prince’s introduction (dumped like a tangled parachute into a tree by a pink cloud of energy, he finds many other people there discussing a similar experience). As in “Genetis,” the texts move freely through the different discourses of the popcycle. The legitimated theories of the academic disciplines are well represented throughout, but the peculiar quality of this kit is the emphasis it gives to various kinds of denigrated knowledge — pseudo-knowledge from the scientific point of view — such as everything having to do with para-psychology, the para-normal. Thus there is a piece by Mark Macy, “When Dimensions Cross,” about the astral body and making contact with the spirit world. The crucial element in this piece is the role that electronic technologies play in attempts to make contact with the dead. The spirit world makes use of the physics of radio, television, computers, to send messages into the world of the living. Another way this theme recurs is in the figure of the Golem, introduced in Michael Century’s “Quartet for a Solo Piano,” entitled “The Chela of Golem.” The program note refers to the ancient tales in Jewish mysticism about an “artificial person” (a kind of automaton) created by chanting various combinations of letters. Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a variant of this story.

 

At one level, the juxtaposition of academic theory with the discourses of denigrated knowledge has the effect (recalling surrealism) of separating out “research” as a formal activity, to feature “research” in terms of its own artistic properties. E. K. Huckaby, for example, authors “Two False Studies,'” concerning “some relationships B-tween Semen & Ectoplasm.” The cumulative result of the many readings dealing with the paranormal, linking technology with various spiritualisms, fantasies, legends, and dreams, is to establish an allegorical commentary effect. The allegory suggests that electronic equipment is the prosthesis not of the analytical mentality, in the way that print turned out to be, but of this wild desire for knowledge outside the logical, rational, empirical restrictions of the legitimate disciplines. The computer is the prosthesis of the body, capable of harnessing, managing, organizing, manipulating into a dream logic the desires that have sustained a fascination with the bodily mysteries of life, death, and the after-life. The implication of the electronic apparatus, with hypermedia writing, is that we now have equipment capable of fusing the analytical resources of print culture with the emotional resources of audio-visual entertainments.

 

Foregrounding the denigrated knowledge of mystical matters is a symptom of a boundary crisis (in this case, the boundary dividing what discourses and objects are “proper” for study). This territory of the boundary is in fact the one staked out for exploration and experimentation by this journal. The significance of the name for the journal– “Perforations“–is clarified in the interview with Prince and Cheatham about the PD project on “the Doll Universe.” “It is with the proliferation of ostensible boundary conditions that a condition of perforation sets in,” Cheatham observes. “Sort of like a hyper-dimensional cluster of interpenetrating soap bubbles. In Deleuze and Guattari’s term, more ‘lines of flight’ begin to appear just as a (virtual) function of these intersecting boundaries.” The doll universe concerns those two most problematic boundaries–the one separating the living and the dead (animate and inanimate) and identity (separating the inside from the outside of the person). “Technology seems to be developing certain chiasmatic qualities here.” The apparatus is a “social machine,” and this kit evokes the emerging cyborgization of experience, approached from the side of arts, letters, imagination, fantasy, desire.

 

The problematics of death and identity engage that part of the apparatus concerned with subject formation (subjectivation). To return to “Genetis,” Smyth structures the relationships or boundary crossings of the popcycle by analogy with the twin spirals of DNA. The fertilizing crossing that interests him in particular is between his disciplinary knowledge of poststructural psychoanalysis and his personal experience of a dysfunctional family that led to his breakdown. The structuralist principle embodied in Smyth’s use of the DNA spiral is that any two systems when juxtaposed create a commentary effect in which each explains the other. The effect is generative rather than representational: it is not that sound explains color, but that their correspondences create a pattern that produces intelligibility. Smyth helps clarify what is at stake in the kit as a whole–how to write the unconscious.

 

According to the theory there is such a thing as thinking with the unconscious, but by definition this thinking is not accessible to the thinker. Freud himself had no analyst, but through a process of self-analysis he devised a method for moving between dreams and theory. The mystorical genre that Smyth employs is more closely related to Freud’s self-analysis than to the institutionalized method that resulted from it. In “Genetis” Smyth shows something to himself, using not the talking cure but a written one. Nor is “cure” an appropriate term, since there is nothing clinical about this practice. Rather, this kit evokes what it is to write with the emerging “middle voice” theorized by the French, neither active nor passive (it is the boundary crisis of this distinction) but in which the writer receives what is addressed elsewhere. This boundary writing makes possible a new level of experience (just as alphabetic literacy made possible the experience of selfhood, as Eric Havelock has argued)–an experience that is not without risks.

 

The effect of the mystory is to set in motion a flow across boundaries (perforations), to write across the division separating inside from outside (personal from collective, private from public)–to bring into visibility the situation of the person within the social order (the imbrication of the imaginary in the symbolic). Gilles Deleuze theorized this interface zone between the heights of propositional discourse and the depths of the body in terms of the logic of sense. Deleuze learned from Nietzsche not to be “satisfied with either biography or bibliography; we must reach a secret point where the anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing” (The Logic of Sense 128). Later Deleuze phrases this convergence in terms of limit experiences, thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, with reference to the impossible experience of death:

 

Are we to speak about Fitzgerald’s and Lowry’s alcoholism, Nietzsche’s and Artaud’s madness while remaining on the shore? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla–just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? (157)

 

Here is the challenge of the new writing emerging in the electronic apparatus, somewhere between knowing and doing (the opposition and dilemma of creativity ever since the ancients split theory and practice into separate concepts). The destruction of the body and its social consequences, as in alcoholism, resonates with the dysfunctional family in Smyth’s mystory. This resonance in turn brings to mind perhaps the single most brilliant piece in the kit, “The Hidden World of the Visual Analogue,” an excerpt from The Iconography of Abuse, by Stevens Seaberg (Seaberg’s book is distributed as a Fort?/Da! book by Public Domain). The complete book is described as “over 100 pages of text and 200 illustrations showing the transformation of feelings resulting from child abuse into emblematic, metaphoric and allegorical forms as they appear in the works of artists like Michelangelo, Durer, Hogarth [etc] . . . .” Using the analogy of how the puppeteer’s gestures are repeated in the movements of the puppet, Seaberg traces a pattern linking the striking arm of the abuser and the defending arms of the abused to a series of images, scenes, designs, and works of all kinds.

 

What interests me in this thread that I have been following through the kit is the way it brings into focus something reported to me by several people who have experimented with mystory, which is that the experience can be very disturbing. The nature of the form/method is that it allows one to write without thinking–to write things that are precisely not thinkable. Each part of the whole is written separately (each plateau of the popcycle is entered into the data base). When the parts are arranged into a pattern (lining up the perforations, the way Alan Turing cracked the code of the Nazi enigma engine during the World War by lining up the holes punched in the tapes) the experience of the middle voice begins, for the authors recognize themselves in a portrait-without-resemblance (the wasp finds its orchid). Public Domain approaches this risk at a more collective level, having in mind the work of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s General Economy was designed to teach the capitalist world to shift from the individual point of view from which it made sense to accumulate wealth, to the general point of view of death (of being already dead) from which vantage point the waste of life could be appreciated, and the uselessness of accumulation.

 

At the core of “bodies, dreams, technologies,” then, is an ancient bit of wisdom, and an age-old desire. The shaman’s power, after all, was the ability to cross over into the realm of the dead (which anyone could do, of course); but the shaman could return again to the living and make use in this world of what had been learned from the dead. Perforations 5 suggests that this shamanistic method is still operative in the forces producing the electronic apparatus. What is the computer really for? For going into this zone between, this perforated region of crossings, which until now only a few special individuals were able to negotiate–shamans and artists and crackpots. The promise of the emerging electronic equipment–presuming the invention of the enabling institutionalpractices and individual behaviors and attitudes–is the massification, popularization, general availability to the ordinary citizen of writing death. The prosthetic shaman–that is one purpose, one possibility, of the computer.

 

Meanwhile, the “call for stuff” for Perforations 6 has been issued, under the title “the Uncanny Refutation of the Apocalyptic: Ghosts, Leaks, Stains.” The latter part of the title refers to that which may be overturning the traditional “human/nature/divinity” as we move to the technological era’s version of a millennium. Contact Public Domain for further information.