DARK CARNIVAL

Back in 1875, ten years after the Civil War that had demolished half of the USA, and 25 years before the turn of the century that he so ardently seemed to strive towards, during the period in American history that brought us such issues as American self identity, reconstruction and "the role of the Negro", the "woman" question, the "Irish" question, the "Jewish" question, the "Indian" question, taxation, civilization and its emerging discontents, and so on, the American poet and theorist, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay that prefigures much of the discourse around "originality" in late 20th century culture. His essay was entitled "Of Quotation and Originality" and in it, Emerson was trying to come to grips with a kind of cultural inertia that he saw in the literature of his day. The central premise of his essay was that peoples' minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work, they only took elements from the past and reconfigured them to their own taste in their present day. But Emerson, being the creative individual that he was, tried to look beneath the surface that this kind of cultural saturation fostered. He wrote: "Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant - and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing - that in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands (170)..."

There are other zones of expression that manifested in physical performance, movements of the body as bearer of meaning, such as Marinetti's notion of a "Synthetic Theater" where human action and gestures "destroy the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in art with a capital A." His critique of art and identity mirrors that of two women: the African-American conceptual artist and philosopher, Adrian Piper, and one of the first multimedia performance artists: Valentine de Saint-Point. Saint-Point, the author of a multimedia "kinetic theater" entitled "Manifesto of Lust," performed on December 20, 1913, a "kinaesthetic incantation" at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees in Paris: Saint-Point professed words of love, fragmented "poems of atmosphere," love poems, hate poems, while projections of calculus equations and rotating colored lights bathed her disfigured shadow on the fabric behind her. Saint-Point's work is only prefigured, in terms of intensity and ability to communicate with the audience, by films of destruction, like the Lumiere Brothers' "Demolition of a Wall" (1896) and Edison's film of a time-lapse recording of a bullet ripping a lightbulb to shreds at the turn of the 20th century, or composers like Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling, whose compositions for cartoons like Bugs Bunny are etched, it seems, into the fabric of late 20th century culture like some strand of DNA sequence coding our collective memory for future mutations. On the other hand, in the field of philosophy, later in the same century, Piper in her essay "Xenophobia and Rationalism", critiques much of what Western society has viewed as "rational" through the agency of Kant and several other "Rationalists", and his notion of the "sublime" as a starting point for the recognition of both culture, perceptions, and what can be considered art. Kant's statement in his seminal essay, "Critique of Pure Reason" paves the way for much of what Piper herself critiques in Kant's work: "the transcendental concept of reason is none other than that of proceeding from a totality of conditions to a given condition. Now since only the unconditioned makes the totality of conditions possible, and conversely the totality of the conditions is itself always unconditioned; so a pure concept of reason in general can be explained through the concept of the unconditioned, so far as it contains a basis of the synthesis of the condition (A322/B379)... Concepts of pure reason... view all experiential knowledge as determined through an absolute totality of conditions..." What intrigues Piper so much about Kant's openness to "anomaly" is the sense that the "total" groundwork of knowledge is always in search for new aspects of information, her "remix" of Kant's idea of, as she puts it, "xenophilia": "So Kant is saying that built into the canons of rationality that structure our experience is an inherent disposition to seek out all the phenomena that demand an inclusive explanation. When applied specifically to the transcendent idea of personhood, this disposition to welcome anomaly as a means of extending our understanding amounts to a kind of xenophilia. That is, amounts to a positive valuation of human difference as intrinsically interesting..." Kant's notion of "the sublime" is extremely important for any critique of late 20th century culture. What we are seeing here with her critique of Kant's notions of "synthetic reason" and its relationship to what she calls "xenophilia" is a sense of configuring the known, recasting previous information, just as Emerson wrote of in his essay "Of Quotation and Originality."

In a strange way the juxtaposition of all of this information resembles the Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius, whose remix of Epicurus's notion of a "swerve," or "clinamen", which he advanced in his poem "On the Nature of the Universe" (written in 55 B.C.), holds humanity's perceptions of the dance of the atoms that compose the universe, and human beings' memories (meaning the corporeal sense of the body remembered, recalled, rewound, as a physical object in the universe), as the very fragments that hold our sense of existence together. "Fragment clings to fragment" Lucretius wrote, "thus the universe is born." Memory, the time of corporeal passage, the body's interaction with the universe, the body as a unified field of atomic interaction of fores regulating "mind and spirit"... More could be said on these topics and their relationship to electro-modernity. Other people have written books on stuff that for this essay alone, would be one phrase, one sentence, one word, perhaps. The way Edison viewed much of this kind of transmigration of memory patterns and their relationship to sound can be seen through his relationship with Emerson's work. In this regard, Edison subscribed to three figures for most of his "metaphysical" beliefs: Liebniz, Swedenbourg, and Emerson. Much of Leibniz's work was based on the belief that the universe was composed of an infinite number of spiritual forces or energies (monads, Greek for "units"), a kind of divine plan of ratios made of fragments ranging in size and importance from God to the hosts of angels that he used to guide his plans. Swedenbourg also borrowed heavily from Leibniz, with his idea that every being in the universe had a kind of harmony or correspondence with the "divine plan" or "heavenly sphere."

The blues impulse transferred containing a race, and its expression. Primal (mixtures...transfers and intimations). Through many changes, it remained the exact replication of The Black Man In The West... But evolution is not merely physical: yet if you understand what the physical alludes to, is reflective of, then it will be understood that each process in "life" is duplicated on all levels. The Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is even descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction...coming and going...Through whatever worlds. Environment as the social workers say...but Total Environment (including all levels, the spirtual). Identification is Sound Identification is Sight Identification is Touch, Feeling, Smell, Movement... Amiri Baraka, Leroi Jones, The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).

As to Edison's relationship to their writings, Baldwin posits: "...Thomas Edison was equally at home exploring possibilities in metaphysical "realms beyond" as he was in the absolutely grounded world of material phenomena.... It naturally followed that when he was in the last decade of his life, Edison returned with deep preoccupation to existence after death. In so doing he tapped once again into a long, speculative tradition, inaugurated by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), the Leipzig-born philosopher, mathematician, and statesman, and the foremost intellectual theologian of the seventeenth century..." We must not forget here, that "Rational" is derived from "ratio", and the notion of repetition is implicit in this worldview. Edison was fascinated with Emerson's essay "Representative Men" (1850) in which Emerson expounded a system of thoughts based on the idea that "every material thing has its celestial side, has its translation through humanity, in the spiritual and necessary sphere where it plays a part as indestructible as any other...." The inventor for Emerson, was someone who "began [his/her] lessons in the shipyards and dissecting rooms" and who could go from there, and derive notions that would move the inventor into "the dim spirit-realm." In this place, Emerson felt that the inventor would find that "nature is always self-similar repeating to herself in successive planes" of perception built upon aggregate "units" and "particles". Today, we are informed by a kind of textuality of what I like to call "the post-rational," or a milieu where the "text" of the natural has been displaced by its human derived interpretations, a place where Lautremont's description of beauty as "the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table" and Rimbaud's idea of poetry as a "systematic derangement of the senses" hold sway. Perhaps when we view the contemporary concept of text through the lens of a kind of camera obscura, we are shown a place where even Roland Barthes definition of text in his infamous essay "Text, Discourse, Ideology" as "the phenomenal surface of the literary work; [it is] the fabric of the words which make up the work and which are arranged in such a way as to impose a meaning which is stable and as far as possible is unique," is under serious doubt. Later on in the same essay, Barthes makes an argument that text is a kind of interplay between "signifiance" and "jouissance," and that text reflects human expression as a kind of transcendent engagement. "Text" he writes, "takes part of the spiritual glory of the work, of which it is the prosaic but necessary servant. Constitutively linked with writing (the text is what is written), perhaps because the very graphics of the letter - although remaining linear - suggest not speech, but the interweaving of a tissue (etymologically speaking,'text' means tissue)...the text is a weapon against time, oblivion and the trickery of speech, which is so easily taken back..." This, of course, reflects his infamous dictum in which he announced the end of the text as a stable object for linear reference: "that is the pleasure of the text: value shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signifier...", in his essay "The Pleasure of the Text."

"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travel. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon switchback - of a helpless head long motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash...Then in the intermittent darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through, her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue..." H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

In 1699 a tome entitled "Choreographie ou l'art de decrire la danse, par caract_res, figures et signes emonstratifs" (choreography, or the art of describing dance with demonstrative characters, figures and signs - "writing with chorus") appeared on the scene of the time. To choreograph is, originally, to trace or to make models for dance. This is what Feuillet, who invented to word, thought of when he invented it in 1699-1700. Choreography, for him, was a kind of glossary of rhythmic movements. It was the first codified system of rules and regulations for human movement in Western culture, and it became one of the standard methods of choreographing dance movement. According to the collective of authors who published the book "Traces of the Dance", this codification of signs and symbols describing human movement migrated into other areas of culture: Liebniz, Rousseau, etc. According to Foucault in his history of the imagination of the 1700's, this kind of movement is made into correspondences with the very "wheels of the universe" of that time. Invented by a courtesan to King Louis XIV, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, the drawings and glyphs that were its visual hallmark, resemble what we call today, graffiti. They also bear a strange resemblance to Jackson Pollock's action paintings. Better yet, Giocommi Balla's "kinetic paintings." Or Joseph Beuy's notion of social sculpture...

Today, the notion of movement and choreography find themselves re-inscribed into a zone of flux: dance, sound-texture, all find themselves in a place where James Snead's notion of "concealed repetition" underlies much of dance movement. This aesthetic inherits much of the premises of what art critic Lucy Lippard called "the dematerialized object." Sound and signification. Sound as social text. Sound as bearer of social memory. Who's there? Speed to the edge of perception.

The word: Flow. Say it. Roll it on your tongue. Spit it out. Swim in it. Caress it.

"No philosophy transcends its age..." Hegel

I begin my conclusion with an excerpt from Samuel Beckett's play, "Krapp's Last Tape." The essay unwinds, the tape spool rolls, reality takes on a shimmering tinge, a kind of fractal distortion at the edge of your perception.
"The tape rolls, Krapp's image appears on your mindscreen, an invocation of Nietzche's evaluation of the composer into "a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the "in-itself" of things, a telephone from the beyond (Geneology of Morals, III, 5)." An existential scenario unfolds before your eyes, a clash between the rational and 'post-rational' object of desire, love long lost, time-frozen, the lost voice of the desired one unwinds before your gaze.
Boo.

Theater directions: (abstract pain, frozen silence, torn ligaments embedded with Digital Audio Tape Ribbon, scenes from Alain Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman "Last Year at Marienbad" mixed with footage from LA riots in 1994, and Islamic Fundamentalists protesting in Pakistan in 1997, are projected on the walls of woven fabric behind the actor. The tape begins to play, the curtains rise: (pause) He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front.

TAPE: ...gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause). I asked her to look at me and after a few moments -(pause)- after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in. (Pause) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us, all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.... Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence...

Whether performance comes to you via the route of tribal ritual or Medieval Passion plays, or the experimental spectacles Leonardo Da Vinci staged in front of bemused spectators for his "river pageants", to more recent things like the Futurists notion of a "Synthetic Theater" a place where "synchronism" was the all pervading motif, to performance artists like Q*Bert, Joan Jonas, Stelarc (whose body was controlled for performance pieces by needles electronically connected to the World Wide Web), Robert Morris, Yves Klein, Wu Tang Clan, KRS-1, and Robert Wilson, there is one thing that you will probably notice immediately: there is a sense that all of these things can be and usually are, expressions operating on many levels, in many fashions. In a sense, the more recent development of "hypertext" is probably the first literary form to take on the approximation of textual inscription and reinscription as performance. But that's another essay. I write to you from a milieu in which creativity, rests for the most part, in how you recontextualize the previous expression of others, a place where there is no such thing as "an immaculate perception." Sampling as the digital equivalent of Feng Shui? Sampling as a kinesthetic theater of memory? Sampling as the structural inheritor of Mikhail Bakhtin's "chronotopic" literary explorations... In the ecology of narratives, recycling myths is a very old game, a dance between presence and absence. Perhaps this is what Claude Levi Strauss spoke of when he called the "primitive mindset" that of a "bricoleur..." Sociographic expression - sound writing - mirrors the sense of continuous inscription and re-inscription of text that occurs when the needle, the focal point of sound, electricity, and the refractive characteristics of crystalline structure (the diamond on the tip of the needle), is put into action when you press "play" on the cassette deck you use to make a mixed tape or ride the fader on the mixing board. Soniture. Ecriture. Sound and the electric imagination in youth culture as the manifestation of language as total text, or as Toni Morrison puts it in her essay "Playing in the Dark:" "The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings, as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language." Replication as differentiated from mere reproduction. Replication as it stands derived from "reply": the copies transcend the originals, the original is nothing but a collection of previous cultural movements. Flow... The turntable's needle in dj culture acts as a kind of mediator between self and the fictions of the external world. With the needle the dj weaves the sounds together. Do you get my drift?

<anansi@interport.net>