Draw yourself back…and say in a cold nasal whine: “You think I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.”
—William S.Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk
The essays in this book attempt to identify those “critical vices” confining postmodern cultural theory and leading the best minds of our generation to miss their mark, betray their object, and institutionalize the tired mythology that “modern civilization” is at best an “irremediable mistake” before which “we can only retain our humanity in the degree to which we resist its pressures.”1 Adventurous investigations of contemporary culture should surely resist the perils of this “horrible old condition.”2
As Warren Burt observes in his commentary upon these essays, contemporary culture shock prompts two responses: the defeatism of those embracing “the philosophy of giving-up,” and the creative persistence of those giving themselves up to the challenge of understanding and implementing new creative possibilities.3 Eloquently commending this second aspiration in a manifesto of some half-century ago, the modernist avant-garde film-maker Germaine Dulac observed, “Occasionally, an idea with no precedent springs from a prophetic brain, with no preparation, and we are surprised. We do not understand it and we have difficulty accepting it. Should we not, then, contemplate this idea religiously, from the moment it appears to us in the light of its dawn, contemplate it with a fresh intelligence, stripped of all tradition, avoiding reducing it to our own level of understanding, in order, on the contrary, to raise ourselves up to it and expand our understanding with what it brings us?”4 But as Dulac also acknowledges, prescient understanding, “born of both the criticism of the present and the foreknowledge of the future,”5 invariably disquiets critics conditioned by tradition. Successive technological innovations increase such disquiet incrementally, as pre-institutionalized practices emerge more or less immaculately, not merely against but beyond the flow, “born technically, occasionally even aesthetically” (as Roland Barthes remarks), long before they are “born theoretically.”6
“Take the easy way! Go by the book! Don’t stick your neck out!”7 As Burroughs observes, institutional training may well prompt discrete distantiation from the new. But as Felix Guattari argues, the question of whether to be, or not to be, open to the slings and arrows of outrageous innovation should be both axiomatic and unproblematic: “This is the dilemma every artist has to confront: ‘to go with the flow,’ as advocated, for example, by the Trans-avant-garde and the apostles of postmodernism, or to work for the renewal of aesthetic practices relayed by other innovative segments of the Socius, at the risk of encountering incomprehension and of being isolated by the majority of people.”8 Guattari’s reference to “the apostles of postmodernism” principally targets those complacently over-institutionalized architects, artists and theorists whose work gives postmodernism a bad name, rather than those contemporaries whose innovation “engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.”9 Lambasting the worst minds of his generation, he grimly concludes that “The prostitution of architecture in postmodern buildings, the prostitution of art in trans-avant-garde painting, and the virtual ethical and aesthetic abdication of postmodernist thought leaves a kind of black stain upon history.”10
For many younger critics the apparent paucity of contemporary creativity makes theory far more attractive than practice, and as Hal Foster indicates, prompts the decision “to treat critical theory not only as a conceptual tool but as a symbolic, even symptomatic form.” Such an approach, Foster stipulates, “will not address art directly.” Rather, it attempts “to see how historical shifts may be registered in theoretical texts—which will thus serve as both objects and instruments of my history.”11
While Foster qualifies his enthusiasms as those of “a second-generation initiate” (as opposed to “the zeal of a first-generation convert”), his autobiographical sketch below typifies the susceptibility of his generation to the seductive bondage of what Guattari calls the “structuralist straitjacket”—or indeed, to what we might now think of as the “poststructuralist straightjacket.”12
Whereas Burt comments, “although I possess quite catholic tastes in artistic activity, I have quite narrow ones when looking at criticism,” Foster rather differently observes that, “Like others in my milieu, then, I have some distance on modernist art, but I have little on critical theory,” adding, “In particular I have little distance on the semiotic turn that refashioned much art and criticism on the model of the text in the middle to late 1970s…for I developed as a critic during this time, when theoretical production became as important as artistic production, (To many of us it was more provocative, innovative, urgent—but then there was no real contest between, say, the texts of Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida and new-image painting or post-historicist architecture.)”13
The ludic superficiality of new image painting and posthistoricist architecture may well pale before the poetic provocations of Barthes and Derrida. But it is hard to ignore the almost unfailing abstraction and imprecision of Barthes’s and Derrida’s key concepts (for example, Barthes’s evocation of “punctum” as an “effect” that seems “certain, but unlocatable…acute and yet muffled,” and Derrida’s enthusiasm for the “trace of the implacable,” or “something like that—not what I love, but what I would like to love, what makes me run or wait, bestows and withdraws my idiom”).14 Alluding to, and very generally rebounding from, prior discourse (rather than identifying specific instances of present intertextual and intermedia innovation), Barthes’s and Derrida’s text-based speculations and systems, and anti-systems, seem oblivious to what Foster terms the “new aesthetic experiences” of “ambitious art.”15
As Baudelaire suggests in his essay, “The Universal Exhibition of 1855,” cultural theory predicated upon previous cultural theory usually proves incom mensurate with the complexity of its object, and culminates in minuscule exercises in “backsliding” (rather than affording the kind of “fresh” understanding advocated by Dulac),16 leaving the user “imprisoned in the blinding fortress of his system”:
Like all my friends I have tried more than once to lock myself inside a system, so as to be able to pontificate as I liked. But a system is a kind of damnation that condemns us to perpetual backsliding; we are always having to invent another, and this form of fatigue is a cruel punishment.
And every time, my system was beautiful, big, spacious, convenient, tidy and polished above all; at least so it seemed to me. And every time, some spontaneous unexpected product of universal vitality would come and give the lie to my puerile and old-fashioned wisdom…. In vain did I shift or extend the criterion, it could not keep up with the universal man, and it was for ever chasing multiform and multicoloured beauty, which dwells in the infinite spirals of life.17
If Baudelaire’s references to the “infinite spirals of life” sound remarkably similar to Barthes’s and Derrida’s allusions to “unlocatable” and “implacable” sensation, his research differs from that of Barthes and Derrida in terms of its specific analysis of contemporaries such as Eugène Delacroix (whom Baudelaire finds “decidedly the most original painter of both ancient and modern times”), and Constantin Guys (whom he finds still more interesting perhaps, as an artist “looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’”).18 Put another way, Baudelaire is a cultural critic both willing and able to extricate himself from “systems,” in order to discuss “some spontaneous unexpected product of universal vitality.”19
As Foster remarks, much post-seventies cultural theory elaborates hypotheses based “on the model of the text,”20 and by the late eighties this mythology attained such epidemic impact that for Fredric Jameson, at least, it seemed indisputable that “the available conceptualities for analysing the enormous variety of objects of study with which ‘reality’ present us (now all in their various ways designated as so many ‘texts’) have become almost exclusively linguistic in orientation.”21
Arguing that “the older language of the ‘work’—the work of art, the masterwork—has everywhere largely been displaced by the rather different language of the ‘text,’ of texts and textuality,” Jameson still more chillingly advises that “the hegemony of theories of textuality and textualisation means, among other things, that your entry ticket to the public sphere in which these matters are debated is an agreement, tacit or otherwise, with the basic presuppositions of a general problem-field.”22 At best, such suppositions typify the inflexibility and intolerance of academia’s “public sphere”; a subculture patently at odds with the vitality of radical postmodern creativity.
For example, commenting upon this book’s critique of “the limits of intertextuality,”23 the poet, artist and Burroughsian sidekick, Brion Gysin, made it abundantly clear that he had very little sympathy for the alleged hegemony of theories of textuality and textualization. Remarking “how much I appreciated your article in the Review of Contemporary Fiction” Gysin’s letter continued: “I wish I knew of some way to have it printed here in French. It would cause quite a furore…if furore can still be caused. It sets straight in my mind the careerist opposition I and we get from the New Establishment…here in France…. Fuck the intertextualists!”24
Gysin’s conclusions offer a welcome riposte to the three articles of postructuralist/intertextual faith approvingly outlined by Jameson:
1. that “full postmodernism” is an era in which “the philosophical priority of language itself and of the various linguistic philosophies has become dominant and wellnigh universal.”
2. that “the older language of the ‘work’—the work of art, the master-work—has everywhere largely been displaced by the rather different language of the ‘text’”
3. that this mythology affords a legitimate “imperialising enlargement of the domain of language to include non-verbal—visual or musical, bodily, spatial—phenomena.”25
Interweaving verbal and nonverbal materials, and generating the distinctively post-linguistic register that Jameson himself diagnoses as postmodern culture’s “emergent mediatic conceptuality,” the finest works of the multimedia avant-garde consistently discredit such hypotheses.26 Reconsidered in the nineties, “full postmodernism” evinces both the self-evident submonumentality of its lower depths and the unexpected monumentality of innovative techno-arts commanding appraisal in the “older language of the ‘work’—the work of art, the masterwork.”
Once we look beyond the misleading presuppositions of what we may now warily regard as the quaintly “older language” of seventies and eighties intertexual dogma, the most significant examples of late-twentieth-century creativity begin to fall more clearly into focus as symptoms of the extraordinary multimedia renaissance brought about by those visionaries sharing William S. Burroughs’s sense that it is now “Time to leave the Word-God behind.”27 As Burroughs’s early novel, The Ticket That Exploded (1962), cryptically hints, new kinds of multimedia creativity require new kinds of multimedia consciousness acknowledging the mutation of word culture into new compounds of “Word,” “image track,” and “sound track”: “Now some words about the image track… whenever the sound track is run the image will literally come alive in your flesh—Word with heavy slow motion image track is flesh—You got it?—Put on any image at 35 frames per second and play the sound track back and see the image sharp and clear…. Play the sound track back and the image will rise out of the tape recorder—Slow motion sound track is flesh…. Subliminal slow flesh out of the tape recorder—Word with heavy track is flesh—”28
Perhaps this kind of multimedia sensibility will only really begin to inform cultural theory when theorists finally share the media of their subjects, by working digitally with word, image track, and soundtrack, rather than shuffling textual quotation in the manner of these pages. As Warren Burt concludes, it may well ultimately prove to be a mistake “to even use contemporary word-basedcritical theory” when addressing multimedia creativity meriting—but still awaiting—“a new criticism, one that is completely comfortable with the new technological tools and cultural expressions at hand.”
In this respect, these essays may well appear “mistaken” if (like Burt) the reader prefers their author to “tell us about those things he enjoys,” rather than “dealing with critics who fail to get to the point of those things he is enthusiastic about” But what can one do? Writing on the new arts, one inevitably questions those theoretical mythologies that obstruct illumination, in order to clear the way for more productive consideration of those creative initiatives that one most admires.
Ranging from the early eighties to the late nineties, these essays might initially appear to offer alternating currents of enthusiasm before visionary, “positively postmodern” creativity, and frustration before myopic, “negatively postmodern” theory. But gradually (and to some extent, to my own surprise) they increasingly reflect the pleasure of discovering new waves of more enlightened theoretical debate during the past decade, as theorists such as Baudrillard and Guattari advocate “a more subtle form of analysis,” sensitive to technology’s potential as “an instrument of magic,” and identify “aesthetic machines” as “the most advanced models—relatively speaking—for the blocks of sensation capable of extracting full meaning from all the empty signal systems that invest us from every side.”29
Nevertheless, one constantly hungers for discussion of specific examples of such “magic” alternatives to “empty signal systems “and more often than not one finds that even the most affirmative currents in contemporary cultural theory fail to exemplify their claims. Perhaps the essays in this book gesture in the right direction. Certainly they attempt to identify the most lucid currents in contemporary theory and practice, in order to identify those artists who, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms,” [pick] up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs…nticipating and avoiding the consequences of technological trauma.”30
This book begins by outlining the ways in which the electroacoustic postmodern avant-garde has realized and revolutionized the modernist avantgarde’s dream of an art “multiplied by the machine,”31 and by suggesting the ways in which avant-garde practices such as the cut-up experiments of William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin point to the limitations of Roland Barthes’s early intertextual theory.
Subsequent essays question three of the most prevalent mythologies of postmodern theory: Achille Bonito Oliva’s invention of the death of the avantgarde and discovery of its replacement by a trans-avant-garde; Jean Baudrillard’s invention of the “abyss” between European culture and the radical modernity of America; and Fredric Jameson’s invention of the supposedly post-monumental qualities of video art (in particular) and of postmodern media culture (as a dark whole).
Finally, discussion of Robert Wilson’s innovative multimedia collaborations with Heiner Müller prefaces reconsideration of the monodimensionality of most critiques of Baudrillard’s writings; of the unexpectedly lucidity of Baudrillard’s and Paul Virilio’s most recent writings on photography, video and technoculture; and of Baudrillard’s engagingly ambiguous accounts of radical illusion in The Perfect Crime.
According to William S.Burroughs’s essay “Remembering Jack Kerouac,” the writer has to have “been there” or “he can’t write about it”.32
It is surely equally imperative that contemporary cultural theorists resist the ranks of card-carrying cadres modestly monitoring parochial fluctuations within the microcosmic rhetoric of confined, predefined problem-fields, and be there, out there, as informed, ambitious, critical observers, familiar with unfamiliar practices within the macrocosmic reality of emergent multimedia, and prepared to evaluate the effectiveness of dominant theoretical presuppositions in terms of their capacity (or incapacity) to address radical cultural transformation.
“Be there or be square.” There is no other solution.