At least one scholar has deemed my work “digital lyric,” translating digital methodologies to the “anachronistic” poetic page, etc.;2 yet I simply see digital procedures as constitutive of whatever-you-want-to-call posthuman subjectivity today. I don’t see a need to set digital realities apart, even as prosthetic dildos, I mean devices. In fact, one could argue that I use digital techniques and numbers and code, among other languages, in ways writers in times gone by might have used orthographic irregularities, such as how Language poet Bruce Andrews used caps, or Joan Retallack used found textual errors, or even how the Dadaists used font size — as disjunctive gestures interrupting the smooth surface flow of received language and meaning. Or, as Juliana Spahr might say, as part of a poetry-makes-nothing-new-happen lineage of modernist “avant-garde techniques of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on” and so on, and so on.3
Now that we’ve got the digital age out of the way, I do have a particular desire to use form to generate what I call “mad affects” in the reading event, which could mean the reader gets mad at me while trying to decipher sometimes indecipherable language and/or gets mad at the world and/or goes a little mad.4 One could say that mad affects work in conversation with chips of Walter Benjamin’s messianic “now-time” — unarchived, effaced remembrances of suffering flash up, interrupt and reorient this time — and you.5 According to Shoshana Felman, “The more a text is ‘mad’ — the more, in other words, it resists interpretation — the more the specific modes of its resistance to reading constitute its ‘subject’ and its literariness.”6
Perhaps this is embarrassing to admit, but I am still much influenced by Russian formalist film montage “shock effects” — or maybe it’s more hip to say I’m with Deleuze on the image and time. Against all expressive intention, and fully cognizant that the spectator is always already emancipated,7 I still want to wake people up from their disavowals and foreclosures (not of their houses, of their knowledges); and I use disjunctive juxtapositions or “irrational cuts”8 to attempt to do that political work. And often the clashing texts/images are generated through some “impersonal”9 digital procedure, usually involving a search engine; because I do have defective, I mean detective, tendencies. I rub disparate rhetorics against each other, for sparks and attraction, like and unlike. And for stickiness. As Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion: “Stickiness is what objects do to other objects — it involves a transference of affect — but it is a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction between passive and active, even though the stickiness of one object might come before the stickiness of the other, such that the other seems to cling to it.”10 I want readers to cling to my work, willingly or unwillingly, through affect — disgust, anger, shame, frustration, perhaps even the surprise and release of laughter. Circulating affects as discursive relations can produce ec-stasy — subjects shifting beside and beyond themselves in spite of themselves. Responsibility requires responsiveness, as Derrida and Butler keep reminding us. Responsiveness to chips of objects lit up and stuck at the limits of knowledge.
The living-dead limit figure of the Muselmann, from the Nazi camps, was central to my fourth book, Neighbour Procedure, a book that enacts Israel’s misappropriation of Holocaust rhetoric for state colonial violence.11 Muselmann translates from German to English as “Muslim,” and in Neighbour Procedure, the hauntological Muselmann neighbour could also be the Palestinian suicide bomber. His/her infinitely vulnerable call, in the Lévinasian sense, is neither audible nor legible, but can only be felt as an unreasonable impress-ion on and in me, the reader, engendering a set of mad affects that I can’t turn away from, that stick to my bones. In the second of a two-book project I’m now writing on settler-colonialism in western Canada, early twentieth-century first-wave feminists, also known as “social hygienists,” who engaged in eugenics practices to “purify” the North American white race, are smeared with the sticky, dirty Alberta tar sands oil that is wreaking catastrophe on the body of the land. Clean body and dirty oil discourses rub against each other, and those bearing witness can’t wipe away the persistently errant stain of history and its consequences.
This new project on Canadian settler-colonialism is in some ways a response to my work on settler-colonial nationalism in Israel-Palestine, a transition from “not in my name” to “look into your own backyard.” As part of its trajectory through its own disavowals, the project traverses thresholds between translation and original creation, inhabiting liminal, intersubjective spaces that employ errors in translation as productive sites for ethical thinking. I work with scanned late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century settler books rendered into moveable text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, a technology that is prone to produce errors of recognition because of digital “glitches” that occur when OCR software cannot recognize certain words it scans. Over the past fifteen years, media artists have used the digital “glitch” to make a broad range of creative work that interrupts passive communication (transmitter-receiver) systems and engenders new kinds of signal/meaning reception and perception. “Glitch art” creates shock effects from digital error and “noise.” In a similar way that Glitch artists approach their work, I aim to make more noise rather than perform the “denoising” and “deskewing” procedures that OCR experts do to fix their error-riddled texts.12 This noise, or dirtying up of the text, disrupts traditional reading practices, linguistically materializing awkward, unsettling feelings in relation to the text. While psychoanalytic notions bubble up regarding misrecognition, and how parapraxis, malaproprism, and other seeming errancies can reveal disavowed unconscious readings, what’s perhaps most disconcerting is that the words on the page still roll onward. Something’s clearly very wrong, affectively and semantically, but the text continues to be readable enough. The text’s errors make their presence known not just on the material surface of the page, but within the syntactical and ideological structures its skewed narratives lay bare.
The two books in progress, Janey’s Arcadia and Pearlie Tar Play,13 enact these madly errant effects and affects through moments of charged encounter in the text. Mary Louise Pratt uses the term “contact zones” to refer to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”14 Janey’s Arcadia uses the poetic page as a social space to stage face-to-face contact zone encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canadian settler texts as revelatory moments of violence and misrecognition. The text brings to the surface disavowed colonial narratives about whiteness and Indigeneity that continue to haunt the Canadian nationalist mythos and identity.
Pearlie Tar Play also reaches across history to bring the discourses of tar sands mega-industrialism into contact with the discourses of social purity propagated by early-twentieth-century Christian moral reformers. Whereas Janey’s Arcadia focuses on racist violence by early white settlers, particularly Christian missionaries, Pearlie Tar Play focuses on white settlers gazing not only at the “Other,” but also at themselves, judging who fits into the nationalist discourse of pure, clean, unblemished, white “civility,” and who doesn’t, because of some deemed genetic impurity that must not be allowed to proliferate. In Pearlie Tar Play, the contact zones are 1) the body of the so-called “degenerate,” “feeble-minded,” “mentally defective” (or hysterically mad) citizen, who is sterilized to minimize her/his risk of “polluting” the social body;15 and 2) the ecological body of the land, ravaged and polluted for the purposes of dirty oil production. Indigenous peoples, disabled people, so-called sexual deviants, and working-class settler “foreigners” not hailing from the British Motherland were prime targets of Canadian eugenics practices. In Alberta, forced sterilization practices were government policy from 1928 until 1972. In Pearlie Tar Play, social purity and tar sands oil discourses act as toxic spectres haunting and polluting the clean, friendly, prosperous image of the Canadian multicultural nation, an image fueled by dirty oil economics.
Both books draw OCR errors of recognition to the surface, along with the errors of colonial racist, classist, and ableist thinking enacted in the settler texts I steal from. I use appropriative “poetic” techniques in highly self-conscious ways, to underscore, as a settler, the appropriative nature of settler-colonialism and its ideological appendages — such as the violent, biopolitical effects of unfettered capitalist occupation on people and environments — and to point to the racist voice-appropriative nature of much writing on cowboys and “Indians,” frontier life and such. I only appropriate from settler voices, but often these voices appropriate from others. In Janey’s Arcadia, punk pirate Kathy Acker’s antiheroine Janey Smith even gets it on with Famous Fiver Emily Murphy’s proto-feminist/settler-nationalist and casually white-supremacist Janey Canuck for a sticky-hot dose of re-re-appropriation.16 Their mutant (cyborg?) progeny, Janey Settler-Invader, is oh-so hot to trot Canada West with Jean Genet and the Persian “white slave” traders. A little later on, Pearlie Tar Play moulds her own New Woman selfie-golem from another Famous Five persona, Nellie McClung’s milk-spewing font of eugenic feminism, Pearlie Watson,17 mothercraftin’ the white race up in Calvary, I mean Calgary.
In Janey’s Arcadia, OCR “errors of recognition” act as contaminated expressions of settler misrecognition of responsibility for ongoing colonization in Canada, including misrecognition of Indigenous rights to the land and what lies beneath it. In Pearlie Tar Play, OCR errors dirty up the seemingly clean, clear surface of settler writing on social hygiene/engineering by Murphy, McClung, and others — while simultaneously smearing didactic texts on the lubricating mechanics of bitumen engineering. While the printed settler narratives I appropriate from may use correct grammar and spelling and seem transparent in meaning, they contain errors of recognition of Indigenous peoples, for example, through racist depictions of savagery, romanticization of a “vanishing race,” or simply via silencing of Indigenous voices in dialogue. The impure textual errors that emerge via OCR translation are ghostly, heterogeneous mis-representations of the violent misrecognitions on and just below the scarred surface of homogenous, nationalist, white “civility” — still, today, in now-time.
By drawing on theories of recognition, however, I am not suggesting that Indigenous peoples are looking for recognition from white people or state institutions. Glen Coulthard and other Indigenous scholars have nicely destroyed that colonialist narrative.18 I am looking at settlers looking at themselves, doing “our” own hard recognition work of our own responsibilities as dispossessors — and what it might entail to give back what we’ve stolen. In a complementary manner to how Glitch artists make visual and sound artwork from the noise inherent in communication systems — in order to shock audiences into new feeling perceptions — in Janey’s Arcadia and Pearlie Tar Play, the face-to-face ethical encounter so famously theorized by Lévinas is reconfigured via noisy digital and analogue processes into audience-artist con-frontations at torqued thresholds of knowledge, meaning. Encounters that could perhaps (to use a key messianic adverb of Derrida’s) help bring about a justice to come.
My writing is grounded in contemporary theories of witnessing, enacting, through a language practice, how “the relation to alterity [constitutively] interrupts identity.”19 Recognition is a central concept in the philosophy of witness, with recent theory shifting the Hegelian struggle for recognition into notions of proximity, hospitality, and love as forces for recognition across cultural barriers and violences. My own theoretical work has focused on questioning received notions of the “poetry of witness” as being limited to writing from a humanist stance of having “been there” first-hand in the trauma or writing about it as if the singular you had been there as a “proxy witness.”20 Drawing on Paul Celan’s well-known poetic statement, “Noone / bears witness for the / witness,”21 I have refigured the Noone as not-one-but-many, an impossibly plural figure who strives and fails and strives again to render testimony in the impersonal aporia of “No one’s voice.”22 Giorgio Agamben suggests that the complete witness to the catastrophe is always multiple, containing the voices of those who cannot speak and bear witness, such as the Muselmann. The “author,” whose Latin etymological origins include vendor, one who advises or persuades, one who completes an imperfect act, and witness, is always already co-author. Agamben writes, “The survivor and the Muselmann, like the . . . creator and his material are inseparable; their unity-difference alone constitutes testimony.”23 And yet, it is important to comprehend the Noone as a non-prosopopoeic figure — Noone has no face to restore, for writer or reader.
During a suicide bombing, the body, in an act of sublime necropolitics, becomes the ballistic weapon, and the primary target isn’t the victim/enemy, but the surviving witness who must attempt to make meaning from shards of bodies melding in a “precarious we.”24 Sticky affects, indeed. In Latin, the roots of testimony are not only the master’s low-hanging testes, but terstis, the one who is present as a third. Psychoanalysis and philosophy sometimes tell us that subjectivity is witnessing as response-ability, and the intersubjective third is a mental space where responsibility begins.25 The transcendental ethical two (me and you, reader-writer, reader-text, writer-text) tends to get stuck on the shoals of the spiralling-out political three or more. To be clear, I am not interested in the third as a “real,” present figure, or a third neoliberal way, or (heaven forbid) the three as daddy-mommy-me; I am interested in what’s possible at the thresholds of the tired dyad/triad. Misappropriating Lacan in kindergarten, “It is only because we can count to three that we can count to two.”26
For Agamben, “poets — witnesses — f[ind] language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking.”27 Perhaps this Noone, this seemingly impersonal,28 yet also infinitely unreasonable third-or-more voice in my work, a defaced voice at once singular and plural, and always already complicit and contaminated, belongs to the hysterico-hauntological digital realm (how’s that for an errant coinage). Noone can be certain, though, it seems. The unsaying is always present as a remnant in the saying, just as the just-as-hysterical analogue stickily haunts the digital, and “the human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being.”29
1 This is a slightly revised version of a talk I gave at the “Affect and Audience in the Digital Age” symposium at University of Washington, Seattle, on October 18, 2013. I have preserved the talk’s markers as an oral performance responding to specific questions on poetic, affective, and digital materialities.
2 See Holly Dupej, “A Digital Lyric: Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources,” in Open Letter No. 9 (2009): 143–152, and Brian M. Reed, Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2013), 16–26.
3 Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos, 2007), 49. For those readers non-conversant in 1980s television lore, this is a not-so-coded reference to a Fabergé Organics commercial for hair shampoo (with wheat germ and honey), which is so good that “I told two friends about it, and they told two friends, and so on and so on.”
4 See Rachel Zolf, “Noone Bears Witness,” Canadian Literature 210/211 (Autumn/Winter 2011): 261.
5 See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Shocken Books, 1969).
6 Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003), 254.
7 See Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2011).
8 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), 182.
9 A key focus of the symposium where I gave this paper was defining participant writing/artwork in relation to what the organizers called “impersonal” digital technologies.
10 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004), 91.
11 Rachel Zolf, Neighbour Procedure (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2010).
12 See Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Network Notebooks 04 (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011).
13 Rachel Zolf, Janey’s Arcadia (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014). Pearlie Tar Play is the working title of a project in its infancy.
14 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Profession 91 (New York: MLA, 1991): 33–40.
15 See Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990).
16 See Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove Press, 1978), and Emily F. Murphy, Janey Canuck in the West (London: Cassell and Co., 1910).
17 See Nellie McClung, Sowing Seeds in Danny (Toronto: Briggs, 1908).
18 See Glen Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory No. 6 (2007): 437–460.
19 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia UP, 2012), 5.
20 See Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton, 1993), and Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003).
21 Paul Celan, “Ashglory,” in Paul Celan: Selections, trans. Pierre Joris (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 105.
22 Paul Celan, “An eye, open,” in Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1972), 113.
23 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002), 150.
24 See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
25 See Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), and Jessica Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Vol. 17, No.1 (2006): 116–146.
26 Jacques Lacan, Les non dupes errant, 1973–74, in Espaces Lacan, Dec. 11, 1973, np.
27 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 161.
28 Here I’m thinking of Blanchot’s impersonal, anonymous, “neutered” literary voice.
29 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 134.