And the 'real' is what we are going to talk (retalk), recloak, culling a part of (some parts of) discussion from many years ago. Not because it was 'first' AKA the 'real' beginning, but because it lagged, like a lame wildebeest or gnu. The lagging gnu, the tardy then, is this a beginning.
[cert, one could say that "No, you have selected out of the archive of available streams of air and pictograms for streams of air a thing, which you claim beginning", you are just being as De'da when he says (knowing nothing of 'ghosting' here, too newly) that he is a ghost of himself, having been asked to play himself in "Ghost Dance" (see clip below) just playing it a little 'false' for convenience and effect]
The 'real' beginning would beg proof. The lagging new need not be the most lagging, it is just what was successfully captured, stopped, eaten (consumed). The lagging new recurs as a support. Not 'the' support, just 'a' support. There is (too? what the hell are you doing here) much emphasis on beginnings it seems more so from a point of consumability (digestibility) and technique, or really what is always the pedagogical vulgar 'shop talk' of 'insiders', ie. 'savages' in their 'tribe'.
Not that this pair(ing - they are not just this way, saying so made them 'be' together - ) is really all that separable. The pedagogy is constructed someway/how (and all the very important questions and impotent responses lie lying here) in a/some 'relation' {in the strong sense, the only real sense comes from back [begins?] here by what this is} to digestibility, sometimes mistakenly referred to as taste. But this is why every baked good made for sale, unless it is 'wrong' ('false') is too sweet. There is a consensus among practitioners of baking goods that these are the correct tastes {one wonders how these proportions and techniques and their corresponding 'tastes' (if that were attainable, communicable, communicate-able) have changed over 'time' [really, too entirely 'provable' to be believed}, this is not absolute, cert. The beauty of Asian pastry being often partly the other flavors that are allowed to intermingle, free of the too-sweet, too-creamy, too-rich, tout suite.
But taste. So we can begin to hook. To addict. To infect. The virology of an art. And to sell, to hook. Is the consensus of beginnings enough to engender their use in the future? Does this stand for 'realism'? or 'humanism'? These are the issues on the
Ok, so consensus isn't on the page/mind. But narrative and realism are. It tells us a story which she claims isn't about anything, and isn't real(ism). But before that, almost at the beginning there is:
"So understand this is simple and it's the beginning of something. You know, it's totally open rather than anything else."
But first, is this what beginning do? Do they open as doors/window/chest cavities? Or are they a pointing-trying-to-avoid-the-pointing-its-doing? Or... well it couldn't just be 'anything' right? But the two issues at this hand, then, were, apparently, Identity, and Millennialism (too put in a word, really it's the same neurotic bullshit everyone's always been on).
But so the page recounts a story, some facts, a dream. Then the claims on this narrative's lack, then some quotes from others, a form of proof(?) about the nature of 'realism'. Realism reduced real reality to the fictive reality of controllable efficiently caused space/time/things, and realism {both quotes mention 19th c. ladadada...} places things outside of the control of the characters. (Which is glossed there as "dehumanizing" which comes up a number of times, a little questionable but we'll pass over that for now.) There is the promise also, in a quote of Julio Cotesar (or Cortasar) about, about this realism being superseded (or attempted anyhow) in the spots where things fall outside the realm of the rule of (natural) law[s].
And then a shift, onto (logically) reality and chaos. Some stretching (play, as we will find out later) gives silences and slippages (to misplace words "this is all postmodernist shit" [circa 1993 San Fran, mind one]) and then a passing ref to Melville and reality is the slipping the interstices of reality and what is that if not chaos.
Then a structuralist(istic) attempt to codify the three times of narrative, well novel now, the subject keeps shifting... And then we finish with more laws. The phallocentric writer writes reality as it should be and his voice is the truth... But we need play, and we need to build things that... well:
The desire to play, to make literary structures which play into and in unknown or unknowable realms, those of chance and death and the lack of language, is the desire to live in a world that is open and dangerous, that is limitless. To play, then, both in structure and in content, is to desire to live in wonder.
The most sensible thing in the whole piece (I am really trying - and failing, I know - to suspend critique and critical method here, perhaps we'll touch on why...). Except for the unknown and unknowable. As a desire... No, as categories (hence known) of desire (as ochered, as already not the realm of desire, but if the dream realm given earlier here is taken seriously in its 'structure and content' then the realm of dream and most likely desire would be that of filmic ('hollywood'; or at least hi-budget) representation {which I'm still pretty sure isn't where ghosts are, but....]) that would be possible. But the unknown of a narrative structure is still a narrative structure. To play something edible/digestible, sayable/teachable/writable, would be play with all the trappings of realism, and it "centrism" and tracings of forces whose math works. Because in all of that lies the communicability of togethering by any means. So that pages seeks to distance the 'telling-how-it-is' of the 'told' and this page seeks to telling telling in its proximity to told and being told and the order of things that has inertia. And not to say that all these rules and norms are there and solid, like the story of the infinitesimal at the <up there> it is just to say that these rules and norms forget that they are just pedagogy of writing, that the reality of writing sits in a place very close to but not traced by what we call its effects and causes. Maybe this is what that page was saying. We haven't said anything about identity either.
Honesty seems to be a major part of your critique. To say something is a beginning is to lie, is to draw a curtain on everything else, to black-box all experience not directly engaged. This is to allow for consumability, and I think you're right. Rhetorical pre-digestion. I agree, but I'm interested in what you see as an alternative, or if there are any?
ReplyDeleteI was really excited to see this come out of a reading of Kathy Acker, as I had something of a different response. This was a talk, of course, and one given (performed) in an off-the-cuff manner. Her 'text'--indeed the ethos of the 'movement' responsible for the Narrativity journal, the so-called New Narrative movement--seems intent on drawing different patterns than the conventional. They're still making pastries, no doubt about that, but maybe they're filling them by semen and shocktarts. And maybe, and I think you're right in your suspicions, this is all stance and desire. The story that ranges through the talk--the association around the words "The Killers"--isn't the normal way to talk about literature. But, importantly, the discussion of realism very much is. Worse than that, it's a bad, name-cally version of academic.
As I understand her argument around realism it's that somewhere along the way (or, at a beginning point (i.e. 19th century)) the idea of the real became a description of abject circumstances and social ills and a form of art coalesced to describe it. It was characterized by flat, puppet characters (often little more than targets at which the world could practice its shooting). If it was a dehumanizing art it was not only because the characters had no human agency (and I agree with you, that's part of the argument), but also because readers of such an art have theirs sacked as well. There's only one way to feel about such "reality." It sucks. Then you die.
But I guess it's this miniature structuralist thumbnail of narrative time that was most interesting for me, interesting for the crude pirate's-map-on-a-napkin it draws of the subject. And it's that sort of thing that allows the talk to feel fuller with me. There's the time it takes to write the novel (time of making), the time of reading (time of consumption), and the fictive time (time inside the narrative). These are her categories, none of which she really goes into (though I think they're worth working through at some point in the future). Earlier I mentioned the New Narrative movement was all about re-drawing boundaries, and it's really the boundaries between these three times that they were trying to transcend. They did using some old tropes put to new purposes (cut-up, meta-fictional authorial interjections, extreme confessionalism in the middle of something fictional and unrelated, etc.)
I guess, for that reason, it seems worth pointing to the 'real' environment in which this talk would have been situated. It was what, 93? Kathy Acker had had a critically impressive career, but way outside of the mainstream (as is fitting given her introductory placement, she herself is treated as a sort of beginning, the zeus birthing the new narrative tribe from her forehead?). This was around the high-water mark (or shortly after) the heyday of kmart realism, or trailerpark realism. There was something against which she was speaking. So the talk of beginnings, the cheap introduction to realism, these things function almost militaristically, to get the troops together, to entrench and enforce an aesthetic view.
Maybe it's taken me to long to get down here, but I guess this must be something of your point. The piece we're looking at stakes out territory and dictates appropriate characteristics for those who would please the taste of the group.
Can you talk about art (or anything) without doing so? Is there some way Acker might have given her talk differently? Does the fact that her audience was no doubt full of 'believers' make this more okay?
[N.B. Comments "Must be at most 4,096 characters"]
ReplyDeleteYou are right on, as usual, and have pointed out the segments that in my bias I have glossed Acker's - yes, off-the-cuff, but also a - strong shot of the bow (to keep the pirate theme going). I don't know how intense I was trying to be about the preservation of honesty, and I think I (un)said that again in the more recent post.
And you are certainly correct that to talk about an Art, it must [perhaps, just usually, if you and I are working toward anything in the {hopefully} as-of-yet unformulated 'big' questions of what will have been 'our' 'work'] first be at least a little 'fixed'. And there will always be a good deal of reduction and working-it-out-as-one-goes that comes along with that. And if I spoke too strongly on that, it wasn't entirely my 'intention'... but perhaps this too (where the 'daimon also dwells') is an good example of the fuzzy (still fuzzy) 'point' I was trying to mark:
That in narrating another('s) piece (and the always incompleteness 'lies' here too) of writing, and in the, arguably - and I think this contention is part of what is at stake here in my ear(s) - 'not'-narrating of a 'critique' or a string of ideas and concepts there are still the same lies at work. The lie I would be more afraid of then, even at the benefit of coalescing a group of divers writers onto a slipstream (getting them aboard, by shanghai, if we're all still pirates here), is the lie that:
"Here there be monsters" OR; making an excuse to bend the rules, and then to not bend them, but leave them where they are and say, "well we'll just 'play' over here, where pirating (and talking about pirating) is easier" than to fight the tough waters of really stripping down the thing that beginning is. And yes in beginning we, as I have done here again, mis-ending miss ending, and mis-sending the message of completely encapsulated conceptual frameworks.
If that made any sense, which I'm sure it didn't, lets try a different bit; to talk about narrativity. To begin to talk about narrative(.) Will always be frought with and wrought by narrativity. To decide to play at narrative structure is what writing has always done, I mean seriously, Don Quixote, The Inferno, Tristam Shandy, The Punisher, The Good Soldier, there is so much going on 'within' the confines of any given arting-space-time (community/tribe) and through all of the weight and debt that 'we' (at least as much as Acker '93) have to wade, and wait, and eat our way through.
So yes. To pick a target 'Narrative as practiced in the most disgusting examples of excessive consumption and insufficient thinking one can find in a given state of (d)evolution of the 'novel' or the 'novella' (the 'tale' seems here to be an odd person out, with its obvs untruth, just as the 'epic' and again obvs 'poetry', but I think they all share in part of the narrative function, partly... [more needed there])' is a good way of assembling (ass resembling) a crowd. But done at the cost of a straw person (not an esp. unworthy one). But there are plenty of forces and procedures and techne to really hang (which, regarding violence, is always just -- injustly (Spring) -- a harangue; the dead letter, like the dead 'in us', 'our dead' (? yes, but without all the nationalistic overtones, or strictly blood-familial...), are always just there to haunt us {I know right! So why not chose to be haunted by the thing that actually effects your actions instead of making some grand ghoul out of something that didn't really shape your life before you turned it into the monster, there} (cf. also Hammacher ~Pleroma~ the shit is unbelievable, even for/e a book on Hegel), so [down here, the parenthetical is over]... so why hang something in effigy.
DeleteBut yes, and No, so YES... The feeling of satisfaction (labelled); I ended my beginning, is nothing but a closure that fails to encapsulate. I feel like I can end, I've cleared 'my' [plate/conscience or run [through?] to the end of my cognitive clearing house, up the standard, out the gangplank], so I can move on. But I've just left the shards of air and ideas that I am ending. To see these again, to be haunted by them, over and over is the place where they really get 'played'-out. We would just hope that we can say something that isn't already 'played-out' as soon as it is said, because it is an empty reiteration of the moves [yes we're all always repeating] but that we 'could' avoid.
But perhaps we can't (avoid, couldn't have avoided). Perhaps it does take everythin (all kinds, as they say), and it is the best of all possible worlds, so nothing happens fo naught. I mean we are using those words 'spoken' so long ago to generate many more words, and these, if just for the two of us will generate even more. All I'm trying to say {If I was smarter I would have said this earlier, so I could point out now that I had already said it, all super-slick Derridean-stylo, as if that isn't its own chauvinism (and twice)} is that this process/chain(markov/mail/binding/letter)/'play' that we are doing with all this words has ~A~ narrativity built into it. And not one that is unavoidable. [ie, We can't avoid the repeating, but we can avoid certain ways of repeating, but not by avoiding, but by actually just taking a different path {unprovable and L'niz can account for it (only by presupposing the perfection of god), but the 'why' we don't in the best of possible worlds} positively dug.]
So it don't harsh the mellow to have missed a better tack from here to the booty, but to keep taking the long way around, missing the new views, the new word-monster that may be there.
Delete2 thoughts:
Heid. sez: "To flee into the identical is not dangerous. To risk discord in order to say the Same is the danger. Ambiguity threatens,and mere quarreling." ("Letter," ~Basic Writing~. NY, Harper. p. 264)
And I had entirely forgotten until this very morning that I've read ~the Differend~ like four too many fucking times (to have forgotten); "Prose is the peopling of the anecdeote."
Heid.s truth is a bit scary, and Lyo will miss the landing, and I don't think Acker could have done anything better, then. We do this (I guess, everyone else wonders, or is sure there is no reason) to bounce new quarters of these words and see how much we can take our Friends for (hmmm?), that one got away from me....