The Literal Hallucination

For the past year or so I have been making works with Photoshop software I have been calling literal hallucinations. While the term literal hallucination is taken from Louis Zukofsky’s *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, the actual works are indebted to my engagement with Susan Howe’s writing, as well as the art of Ed Rusha, the manuscript-texts of Hannah Weiner, the films of David Lynch and other sources. Something that has long interested me in Susan Howe’s work is the way she engages manuscript texts as visually based objects transforming them through diagrammatic and transcriptive forms. In the sense of these engagements I believe Howe hallucinates literally, or the literal: that is, she SEES radiantly printed objects in their object-hood, and translates this perceiving of objecthood from an “aural” (often) non-print based existence into a mechanically reproduced one—where her primary tools are the typewriter, photocopier, and (in more recent cases) computer/scanner. Such literal hallucinating is not only a vital way of subjecting textual-visual objects to mechanical transformation, but of expositing the original meanings of objects through description and diagram. Vision bears across in Howe’s use of the page where she often resorts to palimpsestual collages to display the noisy relationality of textual histories as well as in the poet’s significant inclusion of fascimiles; visions also of course come across in explosive uses of typographical and bibliographical elements. As literal hallucinations, Howe’s transcriptions themselves act as exercises allowing the poet both a closer identification (if not an invaluable *over*-identification) with her critical object, and a means of seeing that object more clearly in its information—whether “information” be penmenship, watermark, or illegibility (smudge, cross-out, ink-spill, etc.). In this latter respect Howe is not unlike Ed Ruscha who I’ve always found to have an uncanny way of laying bare the basic information of an object or objective relation to a point of revelatory estrangement; in the former, Howe is singular in her enthusiasm, and her determination to undergo the object of her perception and intelligence in order to convey that object’s actuality, therefore meaning. In this attempt to undergo there is a critical-aesthetic intelligence that trumps traditional literary scholarship in the latter’s neglect of alternative methods of study, and especially the investigation of visual-aural elements of meaningful emergence.

Non-Site

"Begin anywhere"
~ Louis Zukofsky

I've also kept falling in your lines
Wherefore elsewhere a *voice blown
From print* still pervades our singing
Scornful eyes still overlook Aton's
Light in the event horizon of our fears
For tears we always did a La Jetee

Like a corpse moved to its forgotten case
Sensitives discontinuously behold
The rap from the lock & mainly
Reprieve a love of eyes replaced
Smitten by construct your site goes here
A cite to see better the thought seized

By thinking itself kernel of all that eyes were
The subject dives to pitch-blend mixed down
Totalling totality again scrapping rates of labor
This must be the place of accelerated mistake
Making incommensurability an argosy of command
Or land a trace divided by irony flowered

To mental floss these trap doors in second
Reflection make video games all thumbs
In this Negativeland so-called the One
America facts bear witness against our dismissals
Their missiles want sites non-sensed
Cites sensed inwardly shuddering to felt

Cites sensed inwardly shuddering to felt
Their missiles want sites non-sensed
America facts bear witness against our dismissals
In this Negativeland so-called the One
Reflection makes video games all thumbs
To mental floss these trap doors in seconds

Or land a trace divided by irony flowered
Making incommensurability an argosy of command
This must be the place of accelerated mistake
Totalling totality scrapping rates of labor
The subject dives to pitch-blend mixed down
By thinking itself kernel of all that eyes were

A cite to see better the thought seized
Smitten by construct your site goes here
Reprieve a love of eyes replaced
The rap from the lock & mainly
Sensitives discontinuously behold
This corpse moved to its forgotten case

For tears we always did a La Jetee
Light in the event horizon of our fears
Scornful eyes still look on opposing Aton's
From print* still pervades our singing
Wherefore elsewhere a *voice blown
I've also kept falling in your lines

For Haskell Wexler

Look ma
I'm on TV!
Bleeding from
A truncheon please
Pay attention please
Stop these states
From themselves
Cameras seem to plead
Except when they're rubbernecking
A human interest story
Will not be interesting

Roll tape in the interstices
Of pityless flows
Number remains
To be crunched but
Multiplicity emerges.

from Laurel Harris (Correspondence)

If history, defined by its factuality, its extra-aesthetic relevance, imposes (or, perhaps, presupposes?) on the “mythopoetic” seal of Barney’s films, is this interruption a violent break? What kind of interpretation does it bring to the closed and total world of the films? Does it make the films, despite themselves, allegories of their world (to use Jameson’s language)? Furthermore, where is history’s interruption located--in the text, in the spectator, in a collision or collusion of cinematic and extra-cinematic histories and horizons?

I haven’t seen _Drawing Restraint_ yet, but I can’t help but wonder if the awkwardness of “appropriation” in the film is not only cultural, but might also lie in pointing to the problem of labor and work itself. In the preview I saw for the film, the Japanese ship captain comments on one of Barney’s more practically insane spectacles, only to shrug it off with a kind of helpless indulgence, adding that he knows nothing about art. In this film, it seems, you have the art works, the artist at work, and those whose labor is more “everyday,” the traditional worker, for lack of a better term, at work, and possibly this work coincides and does not coincide?

This representation of work itself might be a point of strange resemblance with Vertov’s Soviet film. What you have in these frames is a reflection, for Vertov in _Kino-Eye_, of cinema as a productive labor of socialist society. What is produced? A new way of seeing? Social and aesthetic possibility represented by the trope, as Annette Michelson says, of revolution as a literal revolving, as of machine parts, as of the camera itself? Is this the “total process” as, paradoxically, a means of reconstruction rather than an end in itself? And in the almost hypercapitalist counterpoint of Barney’s films, in which this “total process” might be cast as ends not means in this reduction I’m making, does the responsibility for reconstruction, an interpenetration of history and its reflection perhaps, then shift from the man with the movie camera to the spectator herself?

Siegfried Krakauer claims that film reveals through recording, but, because of what you could call an “ontology of images,” this revelation is also a dissimulation in relation to a lived world. Film becomes a self-justifying record defined by and outside of a precise identity between an image and its impressed object. What happens, I wonder, when the visual historical archive becomes film’s content, becomes aestheticized beyond its initial intent? I’m very interested in the Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci’s work with archival material from World War I in this regard. They’ve restored war images from archives throughout Europe and aestheticized this archive, so to speak, through hand tinting and an original score. Reference is made to the original location, but the images themselves are inscrutable. For example, we see prisoners in an Austrian camp at work--men sewing, baking bread, butchering, dancing together, building carts. The images form a semblance, a viewpoint which is ultimately an anti-war warning, or even parable, according to the filmmakers’ intent. Yet, where does this inscrutability, this illegibility even, come from? Is there something in every image that won’t be given up, and how might this affect an idea of “total process”? Would it depend on the angle of perspective as to whether such an inscrutable historical kernal were the justification or undoing of this self-becoming and self-making?
~ Laurel Harris

Out of Manes?

for Gregg Biglieri & Judith Goldman...
sleepy with democarcy
vigilant at 24 frames per second

"Horses: who will do it? out of manes?..."
~ Louis Zukofsky

The history of Spirit is a flicker-bird
Or rather, a flick
Whose shadow crosses this flimsy narrative framework
For a twenty-fourth of a second
Vanishing from all but your sight

Allll-right...
We were young Hegelians in an American dream
Past its priming
The pump of New World Orders

But your shadow shows
And nicklodeans
Take orders from no one
Waiving our right
To gaze so metapolitics
Must have eyes in the back of its head,
no?

Since as you say "information is not enough"
The poem must be tactical reality TV will be
Like a wall unmended
Rerunning our quilting points 24/7

W is both a wall
& a black box
Whose ears hath not seen
The war dead
But we hear
Better when you point there
(THERE, THERE)
Unpolitely at the crowned
& uncovered

Disaster richochets with thinking
Poetry's not childs play but insists
No child riddled with bullets
Or labored for surplus value

Your ears score the horse
Racing out of manes to tease frames
Like Truth they subtract tears
From the place of our waking

Your eyes like logical proofs
Double-cross us
If only to shoot
Straight into a literal night

Text marks the site
Of hope and critique.

Shut Not Your Doors (Susan Howe @ St. Mark's)

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
~ Walt Whitman

(Winds that enshroud us in their folds--
or no wind). So be it. Pull at the doors, of a hot
afternoon, doors that the wind holds, wrenches
from our arms--and hands. So be it. The Library
is sanctuary to our fears. So be it. So be it.
--the wind that has tripped us, pressed upon
us, prurient or upon the prurience of our fears
--laughter fading. So be it.
~ W.C. Williams

He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted
at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
giving me
what in the instant
I knew better of.
~ Charles Olson

Last week at St. Mark's Church Susan Howe read with Kamau Braithwaite. Howe read two pieces: the first revisiting her poems "Scattering as a Behavior Towards Risk" and "Hope Atherton's Wanderings" from her book *Singularities*; the second, a longer poem soliloquizing the short-lived "New Bohemia" of early 18th century Maryland.

Throughout Howe's books, of course, so much concerns textual histories, and how these histories shape relations of power within cultures and Culture at large. Insofar as Howe's ultimate concern may be for how textual history constructs and constitutes Power, she often privileges academic libraries as crucial institutional sites for textual authority. In *The Birthmark* (1993) and *Pierce Arrow* (1999), for instance, one is struck by Howe's descriptions of Harvard's Houghton library where much of Emily Dickinson's work is held, and practically occulted from all but a few editor's and scholar's eyes. For Howe, libraries are places of esoteric possession and initiatory transgressions; they are also places where the self is continually interpolated by cultural-institutional authority: janitors, police and hermeneutic highpriests. In the preface to *Pierce-Arrow*, the library/special collections of the Yale Sterling library is also like a crypt, a tomb (or womb) space where works of the past remain buried, mummified and deliberately hidden by encoded social behaviors. Rituals of sacralyzing repression constitute a dialect of inclusion and banishment at the heart of the American antinomian controversies grounding Howe's project. Libraries are also part of an ongoing work of mourning pervasive in Howe's work since the earliest books. A work of "working through," of scared and sacred distances, of mediations and memos from a beyond of actualities: facts and percepts near as they are distant.

And yet there is another library in Howe's work, and this library came across to me the other night in the poet's reading of a piece considering her work from the early 90's when she had first moved to Connecticut with her husband, David Von Schlegel, and their family, and, through her husband's position in the Yale Art department, gained access for the first time in her adult life to a major academic research library: the Yale Beinecke. Howe's description of her first visit to the library is poignant. For here the library is less a locus of cultural battles & evaluations, than one of an overwhelming creative clamor: a clamor of becoming, of a natural Univocalism. In her mystical encounter with the Beinecke, Howe appears to feel all the power of Creation itself, the books of the Beinecke stacks practically buzzing with a vital spirit of historical contingency. A dualism of chance and design are imperative for Howe in her descriptions. The books contained within the library stacks, Howe exposits, are the result of a cultural chance-operation, a becoming movement Gilles Deleuze called "disjunctive synthesis" after the philosopher's readings of Frederick Nietzsche's "dice throw". Like Whitman before her, or Emerson or Dickinson, the world is a text insofar as texts themselves are determined by the creative tendencies of all matter--that they are born from the same stock as it were, and extend into the world modally as such.

In the tradition of poets like Walt Whitman, Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams who highly valued the public and democratic spirit of libraries, I take Howe's natural mysticism to be a practical one turned towards actualities and social responsibility. In libraries exists Nature contracted from it's "total" freedom, born from the play of chance and necessity--from History with a capital "H". But the freedom implied by this creation is not enough. The turn in Howe's enthusiastic lyrical essay occurs where she imagines herself wanting to "free" texts from their imprisonment in material conditions of cold storage, and from the fray of confining interpretative permissions; to open them, to give texts back to their original condition of chance, chaos, potentiality. This sense of interpretive and existential opening--an anarchism not so much born from indetermination, as from extreme effort, rigor and sacrifice--I continue to cherish as a student and reader of Howe's.


A Behavior Towards Libraries

Red is a flavor
And blue a waste
That smothers sunlight
And converts us rivallingly

White like heat is not
Sighted or cited to
A blankety something
An everything as were

The words we're stuck with
They compose a library here
And not in the sky a system
Of numbers as arbitrary

As anything elsewhere
We care to call this "scattering towards"
What stacks recall us better
Delimiting Infinity in Fact.

Thought's Torsion

In the letter of March 1663 to Simon de Vries, Spinoza takes pains to declare that the word 'attribute' does not by itself constitute a naming of the 'there is' in any way essentially distinct from the naming of the latter by substance. Having reiterated the definition of substance he adds: 'I understand the same by attribute, except that it is called attribute in relation to (*respectu*) the intellect, which attributes such and such a definite nature to substance. Thus the attribute, as well as the multipliciity of attributes through which divine infinity is identified, is a function of the intellect. In the general arrangement of the 'there is', there exists --under the name 'God'--a singular localization, that of the intellect, upon whose point of view or operations depends thought's capacity for rational access to divine infinity, and hence to the 'there is' as such.

It is thus necessary to recogize that the intellect occupies the position of a fold--to take up the central concept in Deleuze's philosophy. Or, using my own terminology, that the intellect is an operation of torsion. It is localizable of an immanent production of God, but is also required to uphold the naming of the 'there is' as God. For only the singular operations of the intellect give meaning to God's existential singularization as *infinite* substance.*...
~ from Alan Badiou's "Spinoza's Closed Ontology"

Fortinbras

America comes in like Fortinbras, after the blood-letting is over, to take charge of affairs.
--Pat Buchanan