Head Dust


ERUCTED THOUGHTS, MIDDEN SIFTINGS, HETERONYMOUS DISJECTA.

SATED?

A review of REALITY HUNGER, A manifesto, by David Shields (Knopf/Hamish Hamilton)

When I was eighteen years old and thought that the world could be improved I kept an exercise book in which I wrote down passages that I found to be inspiring or at least inspired from authors I came across in my reading. Sometimes I even added a line or two of my own. People have always done this. Such things have even been published. Edifying compilations such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations were popular in Victorian times, but much earlier, before the idea of the ‘author’ became sacrosanct, and before the technologies of printing fixed texts as definitive, much of literature was generated in this way, snippets of diverse origin agglomerating perhaps around the name of the compiler or seeder of the work (we shall never know, for example, how many of Aesop’s Fables were composed by someone called Aesop). Ex-novelist David Shields has done much the same thing with his ‘manifesto’ Reality Hunger, 617 numbered shards of opinion and nice phrasing, many of which seem sort of familiar until you realise that Shields is not the first person to have expressed these thoughts in exactly these words; most of the book consists of quotations from anyone from Burroughs to Barthes, from Plutarch to Picasso, from Thoreau to Joyce, but without the attributions that would allow a reader to read further should anything take their fancy. It took the hard word of Shields’ publisher’s lawyers to persuade him to acknowledge the quotes (at the end of the book in tiny print on pages that Shields asks us to cut out and destroy) because, for Shields, anything that exists belongs to all of us: “Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

If Shields is correct and individual authorship and personal intellectual property are fallacious or at least outmoded concepts, and if all cultural expressions are the product and property of the whole swarm of us working together like a community of digitally interlinked insects (the internet perhaps providing the structure of the supra-organism), then the idea of the individual per se is a fallacious or outmoded concept also, and the name “David Shields” on the cover of the book is not only a joke on the idea of authorship but a joke on the idea of identity too (he would, presumably, be pleased if I were to reprint Reality Hunger verbatim with my name on the cover in place of his). There is something to be said for thinking of culture as the primary organism, pulsing and mutating, self-consuming and evolving, and us individuals as merely the monitors upon which culture fleetingly displays aspects of itself, but David Shields doesn’t seem to be the man to say it in any clear sort of way. In any case, it is the irresolvable tension between our communalising and individualising instincts that underlies and impels all cultural innovation.

Like Shields, I am excited by the possibility of taking existing works apart and putting them together in ways that produce new works that release some of the unseen potential dormant in the originals, but for all Shields’ celebration of collage as a hip creative enterprise in literature and other cultural production, his book is not like a collage at all, more like a scrapbook of discreet snippets, and he displays none of the hacking, blending and ‘mashing’ that can make the re-use of cultural flotsam so creative. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (a blending of Jane Austen with genre cliché), or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, or Ronald Johnson’s erasures of Milton in Radi os, or the rigors of the Oulipo or Kathy Acker provide examples that are altogether more innovative in their fiddling with literary genetics. What strikes me when I read these, and what struck me in my own involvement in a literary hacking project (see http://radicalediting.blogspot.com/), is their supple exploration and vitalisation of the basic elements of fiction (character, plot, narrative), elements that Shields, in the central but least consistently developed part of his thesis, vehemently dismisses.

Shields’ intent in Reality Hunger was “to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, though just what this ‘reality’ consists of and (more interestingly) what it excludes are ambiguously sketched at best. What are the key components of this ‘movement’ for which Shields is the wannabe Confucius? “A deliberate unartiness: ‘raw’ material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional”. Shields is bored with the novel, he is fed up with the made up, he wants more immediacy, less artifice, more pace, he wants to be a ‘wisdom junkie’, he wants to feel really alive, he longs to escape his jaded state in the arms of the lyric essay or the memoir. Shields is against fiction (at least in the way it is generally understood). Like some fuming Calvinist he preaches against the “veil of ‘let’s pretend’” and the “never-never lands of the imagination”, though he defends James Frey’s fabrications in A Million Little Pieces as “merely a device to get a point across”. “There are no facts, only art”, says Shields (channelling Emerson, rather confusedly). He spends half the time denigrating fiction in favour of non-fiction, and the other half blurring the distinction between them. The more I read of Reality Hunger, the more uninteresting and unconvincing it became.

“The world exists. Why recreate it?” asks Shields (or someone). “What I want is the real world, with all its hard edges, but the real world fully imagined and fully written, not merely reported”. I really don’t know what Shields means by ‘reality’, but certainly any attempt to gain a conceptual foothold on whatever actuality impresses itself upon us involves the making up of verbal models that we call ‘stories’, which may be fictional or non-fictional (if we want to draw the distinction). Narrative, which Shields rejects as irrelevant to something he calls ‘the human condition’, is just a verbal model of change. Well, yes, identity may be less certain than we think it is, and yes, our ideas of agency and time may be limited and limiting, but I would assert that fiction provides some of the best tools for exploring the possibility of more flexible models.

When Shields says “there is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows”, he fails to see that fiction (even ‘traditional’ fiction (whatever he means by that)) exists precisely to allow us to ponder such grain and texture. Fiction allows us to have a wider and more varied range of experiences than we could ever have or want to have in actuality, and to draw benefits from these surrogate experiences just as we draw them from actual experiences. Fiction allows us to be someone else temporarily, gaining us empathy, understanding and flexibility without commitment or risk. Fiction allows us to become both more individual and more connected, to share our differences, to gain understanding even where knowledge is impossible. Fiction enhances the diversity and viability of the cultural gene pool to meet circumstances that are challenging or changing.

Yes, there is a lot of uninspired and uninspiring fiction around, but there is a lot of uninspired and uninspiring memoir and lyric essay around too. If we see Reality Hunger as an impassioned if ultimately confused call for relevance, excitement and innovation in literature and the other arts, then David Shields has made a challenge that deserves to be met.
CORNELIUS MILK
(26 March 2010)

ON READING FICTION

"Ultimately, it does not matter whether the Suriv-Suriv exist or not; what matters is whether or not they are valid."
- Ludo Neizvestny (introduction to the second edition of Rachel Alter’s The Road Has No Shadow)

Of all the strange activities practised by humans, a species for whom the practice of strange activities is so characteristic as to be almost an identifying trait, the reading of fiction is perhaps the strangest.

What are we doing when we do it? What happens to us when we use the micromuscles of our eyes to drag our attention along line after line and page after page of permuted sequences of the same limited collection of marks (dark ink peppering pale paper, mutable crystals on a glass screen, black fire written on white fire, or whatever)? Someone has caused the artefact which assumes our attention to be inoculated with something that authorises the arrangement of the marks but cannot be isolated even with the aid of a mass spectrometer, an electron microscope or a pair of digital tweezers. But there is something we catch from text if we are susceptible to it, something that springs from somewhere, somehow, if we can read, some insidious thing, something that for convenience we could call story [1] .

It is a common error to think that something new can be put in to your mind by reading, to think that reading is just one of the many ways in which new information can enter the mind through the senses. Although it is true that we use our eyes to receive the stimuli necessary for reading, we are only able to read stimuli with which we are already familiar. Reading is possible only if we are seeing what we already know. If we come across something new, something we do not recognise, we are unable to read it.

Nothing new enters the mind when reading, and yet reading is the most profound way we have of having new experience. This new experience (new ideas, new feelings, new information, new understanding) can only come from elements that pre-exist in the reader’s mind [2] . Reading can only stimulate pre-existing elements into consciousness and combine these elements into new experience. Rather than providing input, reading provokes associations. The text passes over the reader’s mind like a harrow, snagging stuff from below the surface (stuff with verbal hooks corresponding to the verbal hooks of the harrow, or stuff sufficiently entangled with the stuff that has the verbal hooks), exposing new patterns in pre-existing material. The story is what lies exposed to consciousness after the text has passed over the mind.

Reading can provide nothing that, in theory, could not be achieved purely through imagination or reflection, though this realisation is less interesting than it may seem. There is an infinitude of possible ways in which pre-existing mental elements may be associated, almost all of them worthless, and our lives are too short to experience more than a tiny few of them. You could say that each of us has every possible story inside us in potentia, but this is no more profound than saying that every possible story exists in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (if only we could get the words in the right order). Reading allows the private contents of the reader’s mind to be selected and arranged from without. Nothing new enters through the eyes, the only external connection pertinent to reading [3] , and yet the reader’s mind is connected, by reading, to a putative other mind we speculatively call the author’s. The words are all we have, yet as we get the words in the right order we get so much more than the words. We get a specific experience induced by the author purely through the sequencing of these familiar patterns of contrasting tone. All the elements of text must be familiar to us for us to read them, but their sequence, and our cumulative response to them as we follow that sequence, is what enables the unfamiliar experience we have called story. Text is its own measure of time, and to read is to submit to a fixed supplementary external measure of time [4] . Reading requires that our experiential time be calibrated by another: the author.

The author is implied by the text. Someone has caused the text to be sequenced so that it selects and draws into consciousness (and thus into time) the elements of story. The same circuits in the brain are activated whether we do or perceive something, imagine (or remember) doing or perceiving it, or read about doing or perceiving it. The particularity (or otherwise) of that thing, and our consciousness of it, are neurologically the same in each case. When we perceive something, our sense organs receive a mass of stimuli from whatever it is we perceive. But the sense organs perceive no differentiated entities; they cannot be said to perceive at all: they receive indiscriminately the kinds of input for which they have evolved an aptitude. There are no differentiated entities in actuality: the thingness of things is merely an aspect of a story we tell ourselves, an instinctual grammatical construction prerequisite to conscious thought [5] . Before we receive it into consciousness, we automatically filter, separate, select, group, entify and label the input until it is small enough and tidy enough for us to perceive something of what we call actuality without being overwhelmed by what it is really like [6] . When we imagine (or remember) something, the details coalesce from the multifarious contents of our mind, selected by that function which bundles our awareness (intentionally or unintentionally, deliberately or helplessly), a function we may be fundamentally certain of even though we cannot be certain what (if anything) performs it [7] . When we read about something, the filtering, separating, selecting, grouping, entifying and labelling of the actual or fictive reality we are reading about has already been done for us by the author. The author has a unique position: the author uses the text to select the details of our awareness for us, the kind of thing that we usually like to think is very personal to ourselves. The author is the reader’s second self.

The reader surrenders to this surrogate self in order to achieve new experience from their own mind. The experience is one of the infinitude of possible inherent stories, but selected and given authority by another. The reader achieves an experience correlative with the experience of that other, the author. Authority is the quality an author provides to the story effected by their text. Text implies a commonality of experience among all possible readers (including all possible future readers): a potentially infinite corroboration.

Using text as a means of authorising experience is significantly more effective than other methods, such as film, which attempt to communicate through the senses. The images induced in reading come from the reader’s mind by personal response to the text and are more likely to provide the experience intended by the author than the supplementary actuality constructed by a film director and then subjected by the viewer to the same filtering, separating, selecting, grouping, entifying and labelling process as other external stimuli. Reading is an entirely internal process, so when, for instance, an author describes a character as “beautiful”, all possible readers experience the same pattern of neurological excitement, regardless of how different their individual ideas of “beautiful” may be. The film director cannot be sure that all viewers will find their chosen actor to be “beautiful”, and in desperation usually employs cliché [8] to attempt to invoke a similar response from as wide a swathe of similar viewers as possible [9] . As a means of authorising experience, film retains many of the impediments of unprocessed actuality because it still requires processing to attain the consciousness of the viewer, and because it necessarily includes an often vast amount of extraneous detail which the viewer may fix upon in unpredictable and unauthorised ways [10] .

The difference between actuality and text is primarily one of exclusion. All the details in text are clues to what the text is ‘about’ (the authorised experience). Actuality has an infinity of details that are not clues to what actuality is ‘about’ because actuality is not ‘about’ anything (actuality is unauthorised, though we are the authors of our experience of it). When we read a text we receive exactly and only the clues that provide us with the experience that the author wishes us to have. We may agglomerate more details to our experience of the text but this is beyond the business of reading. The question of whether or not Pip in Great Expectations has all the fingers on his left hand cannot be answered by reading. If we imagine him having all his fingers we are indulging in an act of projection just as unauthorised as if we imagine him not having all his fingers. This kind of projection is not reading, though we probably all indulge in it to some extent as we read. Really, the text is all we have.

If we read a text about matters of fact we may seek further details from actuality itself or from other texts or other authorities. A text about matters of fact can be endlessly supplemented, verified and doubted. It can be false. The ‘actual’ is inherently uncertain [11] . With fiction there is no actual referent to which the text refers. There is only the text. Fiction cannot be false because it does not pretend to be true. Fiction has a certainty that matters of fact can never achieve.

Fiction is a system of references without referents, a system of non-truths that aren’t lies, a mode of knowledge that is concerned neither with matters of fact nor with abstract and self-evident nonreferential truths (if there are indeed such things). Fiction is concerned with how our references relate to each other rather than with how they relate to supposed actual referents. Fiction calibrates and develops experiences and correlates them across a reading population, providing experiential consistency despite individual difference. By surrendering, temporarily, the patterning of our experience to a surrogate external authority, we can know what it is like to be someone else, and gain the empathy, understanding and flexibility which deepen and enhance our interactions with others, provide us with contexts for novel actual experiences, and allow us to project our intentions with subtlety and precision. Reading fiction multiplies possibilities and allows us to test them without commitment or risk. The surrogate experiences provided by reading fiction allow us to accrue many more, and more varied, experiences than we could ever have, or would ever want to have, in actuality [12] , and to draw benefits from these surrogate experiences just as we draw them from actual experiences. When we read fiction we ingrain patterns of comprehension which we apply to actuality as well, benefiting both the individual reader and the rest of the species with whom the individual is enmeshed by reading.

The reader’s experience is a shared experience in a way that other experiences are not. Fiction is an especially human faculty that allows both the individual and the species a fluid and opportunistic interplay with social and other environments that are new, changing or complex. Fiction has developed out of the need to not only quickly adapt to such environments but also adapt those environments to ourselves by narrating our possible interactions with them in precise and communicable ways. Fiction is an engine of narrative mutation that compresses aeons of divergent possibility between the pages of accessible supplementary time. When we read fiction we are enhancing the diversity of the cultural genome as it jigs about in the evolutionary mill. Reading fiction, perhaps the strangest of our strange practices but perhaps also one of our most central, allows us to absorb much of the impact of time upon our species. Fiction postpones our extinction.
SERAPHINE DUCASSE
(July 2009)

FOOTNOTES
[1] What I mean by story is the basic grammatical relation between our idea of things (space) and our idea of action (time).
[2] For the purposes of this essay we shall employ the standard ‘hamper’ model of conceptually extensive personal minds without assuming it to be anything other than a useful thinking-tool.
[3] For Braille readers this neutral connection is provided through the fingertips. Of course, something similar to all this occurs when we listen to spoken words, but spoken words are temporally and qualitatively bound to the actual in a way that ‘input-neutral’ text is not.
[4] We might call this ‘narrative’.
[5] If we reach out (or in) to our world in a grammatical way, what else could we end up with but story?
[6] You could say that we are the unconscious authors of whatever we are aware of, and the conscious readers. You could almost even also say that we perceive only entities that already lie within our minds, provoked into consciousness by recognised learned patterns of stimuli, but we will not pursue this because this essay is about how reading (particularly reading fiction) is different from other sorts of things, not about how it is in fact the same.
[7] Verbs are certain; nouns are always uncertain. Nouns are just convenient shorthand for commonly associated adjectives. The so-called ‘self’ cannot be a noun for it has no determining adjectives; it can only be a verb.
[8] More romantically called ‘archetype’.
[9] Is the assumption of a clichéed viewer a necessary condescension of film-making, or just a prevalent laziness? Designers of so-called ‘virtual realities’ in the so-called ‘new media’ seem even more dependent on the propagation of clichés in their attempt to evoke specific experiences in their receivers. Reading allows experience to be communicated without cliché because it does not depend on trying to force its way through the entifying and labelling filters with which a viewer processes sensory input. Reading’s reality is usefully pre-packaged. The author does not depend upon the (unpredictable, unreliable) reader to do this for them. Across a population, experience is likely to be more similar in readers than in viewers, where the extraneous particulars all come from outside the viewer’s mind and the viewer must make of them what they will.
[10] The authority of film lies primarily in its manipulation of experiential time.
[11] This essay concerns matters of fact (albeit in a conjectural way). In writing it I have struggled with different uncertainties, insecurities and vulnerabilities from the uncertainties, insecurities and vulnerabilities I struggle with when writing fiction. Who am I to assert matters of fact merely on my own authority? Matters of fact seem to require a certain degree of belief, which I am not sure I am capable of, whereas fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, which seems to me a far preferable approach (and not just to fiction).
[12] Fiction relieves us of exactly as much as it gives us.

LOST IN TRANSLATION?

Marduk spoke the word, and the garment was destroyed. Again he spoke the word, and the garment was re-made. When the gods beheld the power of his word, they all rejoiced.
(Enuma Elish)

There is a game I like to play, which I call Doublebabelfish. If you would like to try it, take a piece of text (any author will do) and paste it into the originating box at the automated translation site babelfish.altavista.com. Choose a language (any language will do; you don’t need to understand it), and instruct the site to translate the text. Copy the resultant and paste it into the originating box. Then instruct the site to translate the text into its original language and compare this final text with the original text. The texts will not be the same. They may be similar or wildly different. You will be amused (this is better than Facebook; you don’t even need any friends). You may be impressed by some of the ‘innovations’ in the new text. Just where, however, did the differences come from? Do they reveal something intrinsic about the conceptual topography of the intermediary language you chose (the medium through which the text passed)? Or about the interfaces between these two languages (their refractory indices, if you like)? Or merely about the limitations of automated translation, or of the dictionaries it uses, or of the compilers of the dictionaries it uses? Just what is revealed? Try another language. Compare the results.

LIKE: An experiment in interpretation* plays a very similar game. Curator Stella Chrysostomou has somehow persuaded one writer and nine makers to translate an original object not only between languages but between media: from object to words (by Bill Manhire); and from these words back into objects (by Fran Allison, Andrea Daly, Peter Deckers, Caroline Gore, Gavin Hitchings, Karl Fritsch, Erik Kuiper, Sean O’Connor and Lisa Walker). We can compare the nine resultants with the original and with each other. They are not the same. They are similar or wildly different. You will be amused. You may be impressed by some of the ‘innovations’ in the new objects. Just where, however, did the differences come from?

Chrysostomou’s version of the game is more dangerous than mine: the translators are not dispassionate machines (though they were instructed to attempt objectivity), but a writer and nine object makers whose professional identity is marked by distinctive personal innovation. How accurate can a translation be? What positive or negative value do we place on innovation? Is all innovation nothing but a willed or unwilled replicative error? As our continued organic and cultural persistence on this earth becomes increasingly uncertain, do artists become more and more desperately innovative (not an attribute positively valued in art until the modern era), attempting mutation after mutation of the cultural genome in the hopes of triggering the evolutionary quantum necessary for our survival? The percentage of genetic mutations that may be considered beneficial to an organism is infinitesimally small.

All art, and every act of memory and of communication, is a translation. Something is lost: the original, the experience, the past; and across the cultural synapse something is created: the replica, the replacement, the memory, the simulacrum simultaneously obliterating and recreating the original in the present. Actuality is translated into virtuality and, if rephysicalised, back into actuality. We expect the resultant to be an ‘accurate’ translation (even – particularly? – if we have no access to the original); but also, paradoxically, to be ‘innovative’. What is going on?

All art, from cave paintings to watercolour landscapes to minimalist abstraction, is an effacement of actual experience. The actual, the other, the unmediated threatens us, threatens our fragile identities, threatens the fragile illusory world of identities we think of ourselves as inhabiting, so we translate the other into our own language, into the nebulous system of conceptual resonances which is both as personal and as communal as we are ourselves. We create a replacement for the other, an ersatz entity or pseudo-entity which bears the indelible trace of the translator and manifests the cultural processes by which they attempted to translate unassimilable experience into assimilable pseudo-experience. Of course the so-called pseudo-experience is itself an experience of a kind, and we respond to it just as our bodies respond to pseudo-disease in the form of a vaccine. Art inoculates us against the threat inherent in the experience it replaces.

Of course, if the replacement is the result of translation into a system of cultural resonances (a ‘language’) foreign to us, or if willed or unwilled ‘innovations’ taint the objective perfection of the simulacrum, the replacement stimulates experience rather than pseudo-experience to the extent that the otherness or innovation is manifest. We experience unease because we experience. If what we call culture is largely a mechanism to efface experience and provide release from awareness of the actual, art which stimulates experience is a failure (in terms of the tradition) if the innovations are unwilled, or is subversive (hurrah!(?)) if the innovations are willed. Aesthetics assail us when our anaesthetics fail.

In these uneasy simulacra tainted by innovation, where do the innovations come from? We don’t know what the unconscious is. It is an unknowable unknown about which, by definition, nothing can be said. We cannot say either that it is personal or that it is universal. We cannot even say that it exists in the way we usually understand existence. We posit it as the source of ‘creative’ innovation, as a tohu-bohu of dissolved psychic elements oscillating between post-conscious and pre-conscious poles, as a sea of endless mutation which periodically throws forth a golden fish (or monster). The conscious mind of an artist is a translating valve, or a filter, which allows into the cultural genome only those mutations which are useful and viable, and suppresses the infinitude of the rest. Art fails when it allows useless and nonviable innovation, and also when it suppresses the useful and viable mutations necessary for cultural evolution.

So, what about the willed or unwilled ‘innovations’ evident in the work of this one writer and these nine makers? LIKE, like Doublebabelfish, asked its subjects to attempt ‘uncreative’ objective translations (as if such a thing were possible), but this is an experiment rather than a test. How ‘successful’ were the participants? What value do we place on ‘failure’ to conform, on ‘failure’ to translate experience into its replica? What value do we place on distinctive personal innovation, and how suppressible is it? What trace of ourselves do we leave in everything we do?

Look at LIKE. The resultant objects are not the same. Just where, however, did the differences come from?

AUGUSTA SZRAK
13 March 2008

*(This essay was first published as the introduction for the catalogue LIKE, an experiment in interpretation (Icebox, 2008). Visit the webpages for this exhibition at www.icebox.org.nz)

MAKING SENSE

The human mind is a restless thing, always seeking new contact with the world around it. This world - strange, familiar, alluring, repellent - both nourishes and threatens the mind with an apparently infinite flux of content. The mind, desperate to maintain itself by annexing its surroundings, cannot cease its attempts to make sense of whatever it is aware of, for only in sense can the mind find rest. Once sense has been made, the mind is relieved of the need to be aware of the particularities of its object, and, as the mind passes on to new morsels, the assimilated object is left somehow less actual, less immediate, less individual. The rational impulse is to move from aesthetic (sensory) stimuli to anaesthetic (non-sensory) ends. Art may enhance or subvert this process.

Within the great flux of content that constitutes its world, the mind supposes the existence of other minds, other minds with whom it seeks to make contact so as to share the rational systems which make sense of the world and relieve the itch of sensing. In its efforts to communicate, to make sense to other minds, the mind appropriates and manipulates the content of the flux in such a way that meaning is transmitted from one mind to another. The elements of the flux involved is such transmission, be they sound, mark or object, become the elements of a language.

AUGUSTA SZRAK
18 June 2002
(First published as the introductory essay to the catalogue 'Mekingsansa, an exhibition of conceptual jewellery' (Inkscape, 2002))