Symbolism 2019: Special Focus: Beyond Mind 9783110634952, 9783110667486

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor · Susan Bassnett · Daniela Carpi · Marc Chénetier · Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne · Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht · María Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon · Eva-Marie Kroeller · Francisco A. Lomelí · Susana Onega Frédéric Regard · Kiernan Ryan · Ronald Shusterman · Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya · Richard H. Weisberg · Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 19 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant Editor Marlena Tronicke

ISBN 978-3-11-066748-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063495-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063553-9 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944704 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors After almost two decades, Symbolism looks back on a tradition of interdisciplinary volumes exploring symbolic practices of signification across the arts and beyond. Still, the present volume is exceptional in that this year’s special focus, edited by Natasha Lushetich, takes the annual’s commitment to interdisciplinary explorations of critical aesthetics to new lengths. Already in the range of aesthetic work it discusses, in the artistic backgrounds of several contributors, and in the critical stance it takes towards received ideas in academia, ‘Beyond Mind’ stands out. However, it is most remarkable in the assault it undertakes, in its very conception, on symbolism as a practice of meaning-making: in the spirit of avant-garde and experimental aesthetics, ‘Beyond Mind’ explores artistic practices centred on the refusal to ‘make sense’. As the corresponding editor states, the essays discuss “a-rational forms of thinking and doing” in art as challenges to the reification and commodification of knowledge in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, mainly, but not exclusively, in the Western world. From Fluxus to digital disinformation, from Endgame and Prospero’s Books to Synecdoche, New York, from John Cage’s experimental music to Susan Sentler’s choreography, from Islamic calligraphy to photography, the special focus highlights how art has been and continues to be a thorn in the side of rationalist ideology and its grand narratives. Three stimulating essays in the General Section round off the volume: Sijie Wang’s discussion of the panopticon and pilgrimage as structural principles of Joseph Andrews; Mark William Brown’s reflections on an inadequate symbol in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”; and Jack Stewart’s expansion on his previous reflections on the pictorial arts and symbolism in the work of A.S. Byatt, this time addressing The Children’s Book. The editors are grateful to Natasha Lushetich for her original proposal, as well as her dedication and resourcefulness, as guest editor for this volume’s special focus, and to all contributors to this volume. As assistant editor, Marlena Tronicke has once again adroitly coordinated the volume’s production, aided as ever by Chris Wahlig and supported by Svea Türlings as well as Laura Schmitz-Justen; to them, thanks are due for their diligence and thoroughness in processing the manuscript. At De Gruyter, Stella Diedrich was an immense help in seeing the volume through the press. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Florian Klaeger University of Bayreuth

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-202

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the contributors to this special issue for being wonderful fellow travelers on this journey. I am also grateful to LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore, for the faculty grant that helped this particular segment of a two-year project entitled “Imaginations of Disorder,” see the light of day. Thank you also Pamela Quick of the MIT Press for the permission to reprint chapter 9 from Laura Marks’s Enfoldment and Infinity, “Heart 1487: Early Virtual Reality.” Last but certainly not least I would like to thank Florian Klaeger, Marlena Tronicke, Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer for all their help and support. Natasha Lushetich University of Dundee

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-203

Contents Foreword from the Editors Acknowledgements

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Special Focus: “Beyond Mind” Corresponding editor: Natasha Lushetich Natasha Lushetich Introduction 3

Part I: “Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals” Owen F. Smith The Fullness of Nothing, the Sense of the Nonsensical, and the Value of Being Unproductive 23 Craig J. Saper Automatic Writing: From Networked Art to Cyberwarfare

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Atėnė Mendelytė Cracking the Beckettian Profounds of Mind in Endgame with Game Theory 73

Part II: “Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds” Romén Reyes-Peschl “The End Is Built into the Beginning”: Charlie Kaufman and the Orderly Disorder of Neuroscience 95 Timothy O’Dwyer The Fold: Musical Monads and Baroque Assemblages Susan Sentler The Liquid Architecture of Bodily Folding

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Part III: “Immanent Transcendence” Laura U. Marks Herat 1487: Early Virtual Reality

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Todd Barnes “Aesthetic Borderlands” in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books

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Gilles Massot The White Space Conflict Theory: Understanding Photography as Energy 197

General Section Sijie Wang Panopticon and Pilgrimage: The Narrator-Reader Relationship in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews 223 Mark William Brown Language, Symbol, and “Non-Symbolic Fact” in D. G. Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” 243 Jack Stewart Art Nouveau and Interarts in A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book

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Book Reviews Felipe Espinoza Garrido Barbara Franchi, Elvan Mutlu, eds. Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires 295 Holly Jennifer Morgan Marion Gymnich, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz et. al. The Orphan in Fiction andComics since the 19th Century 301 David A. Katz Review Essay: Recent Studies in Renaissance Aesthetics

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Evelyn Koch Review Essay: World-Building in Literatureand Beyond List of Contributors Index

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Special Focus: “Beyond Mind” Corresponding editor: Natasha Lushetich

Natasha Lushetich

Introduction In Franz Kafka’s 1915 story “Before the Law,”1 the proverbial “man from the country” finds himself before the door of the Law, which, as he learns later, has been erected especially for him. Neither the door nor the doorkeeper prevents the man from passing through the door of the Law and entering the state of lawful existence. The door is open, however, it is open onto nothing. The Law prescribes nothing. There is no guidance, no suggestion, no direction and no protection. The Law is vacuous, but vacuous especially for the man from the country. The inherent disorientation is given to him in person. Such semantic and existential disorientation is the common reaction to non-sequiturs, paradox, and tautology, which short-circuit meaning and embroil the received logic of signification. Instead of branching onto avenues of concrete or metaphorical meaning – and, in this sense, acting as a connective tissue between here and there, now and then, you, me and it – the semantic operation performs a U-turn; it folds in on itself. It’s as if the world around us had ceased to exist and we are standing in the middle of the universe surrounded by a vast nothingness. At first blush, non-sequiturs, paradox, and tautology are the very antithesis of symbolism, primarily because symbolism creates fulcrums of shared experience and history. It “gathers” heterogeneity over time, across geological strata, fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Despite this first impression, non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being “is”; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as “The Eastern hill keeps running on the water” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”; at classical logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox, which shows that scientific evidence is, to an extent, based on unscientific procedures; at literary portrayals of idiocy in which the question of all questions thwarts the protagonist’s actions but remains forever beyond reach as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Idiot (Count Myshkin); at recursive strategies in conceptual art such as Song Dong’s durational writing with a calligraphic brush dipped in water whose trace evaporates within seconds; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording as in

1 Franz Kafka, Before the Law / Vor dem Gesetz (Berlin: Schocken, 1934). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-001

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Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; at pigment-based ascensions to iterative consciousness like Kazimir Malevich’s monochrome paintings; or at paradoxical games such as Larry Miller’s 220 Yard Candle Dash in which runners run with a lit candle but have to stop to light it if it goes out, or George Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with convex and concave paddles.2 In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s “other.” Invariably, they perform one of two operations: they catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, para-logical, and meta-experiential, or, they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations. There are many examples of both of these processes in religious philosophies and in philosophy proper. In the tradition of Zen Buddhism, one can enter the state of clear or absolute knowledge via principle or via practice.3 Entrance into understanding via principle is sudden; it is called subitism. Entrance via practice is gradual; it is called gradualism. But subitism and gradualism are not separate. They form a permanently oscillating dialectical tension between immediate and mediated understanding based on the two truths theory. Within this framework, sudden and gradual refer to whether absolute knowledge is regarded from the point of view of ultimate truth or of conventional truth. Conventional truth differentiates between the metaphorical structure of subitism and the metonymic structure of gradualism where “truth is seen as coextensive with objective reality and unfolds, as it were, horizontally, temporally.”4 The ultimate truth, by contrast, collapses subitism and gradualism; it claims that “even though we make fine distinctions between shallow and profound [. . .] nevertheless the provisional and the ultimate are universally coextensive.”5 This permanently oscillating tension is aptly summed up by the following dilemma:

2 Prepared Table Tennis is a paradoxical Flux-Sport named after John Cage’s Prepared Piano. For more information, see Natasha Lushetich, “Ludus Populi the Practice of Nonsense,” Theatre Journal 63.1 (2011): 23–41. 3 Clear and hazy knowledge are related to Shigenori Nagatomo’s notion of the hazy (bodily, interoceptive) and clear consciousness, which he views as a scale, not a definitive difference. For more information see Shigenori Nagatomo, Attunement Through the Body (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992). 4 Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Zen/Chan Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991): 32. 5 Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, 33.

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Is ultimate reality so distant from and yet so continuous with the mundane that one can have only a mediated and step by step access to it? Or, is it so proximate, and yet so autonomous and so utterly unlike our illusions or expectations of it, that one can reach it only all-at-once and only without any mediation whatsoever?6

Paradoxical articulation preserves the thesis and antithesis in tension creating a bi-conditional relation in place of an opposition. This dynamism implies that everything is correlative. For Kitaro Nishida, the main proponent of meontology,7 whose thinking, like that of Baruch Spinoza, is rooted in the “one world theory,”8 where there is no separation between immanence and transcendence: Creation does not mean that being arises from nonbeing. Creating in that sense would be merely accidental and arbitrary. Nor does it signify that being merely arises from being either. Creation in that sense would merely be a necessary result a form of causal determinism. Creation, real creativity, entails that the world [. . .] expresses itself within itself.9

The world, which, for Nishida, is “concrete” and immanent, has “the logical form of a self-transforming matrix.”10 It “expresses itself within itself” through the “interexpressive, mutual revealment of self and other,”11 where “other” refers to all things, beings and phenomena, big and small, animate and inanimate. Interexpression is a complex relational paradigm in which every existent cooriginates and co-exists interdependently with other existents without organizational gravity. It bypasses both the deterministic worldview, which prioritizes the past over the future and objectivity over subjectivity, and the teleological worldview, which prioritizes the future over the past and subjectivity over objectivity. The emphasis, instead, is on the present moment as a dynamically tensional structure inseparable from the “continuity of discontinuity.”12 Rooted in the idea that the world is action and perpetual transformation, time is here permanent change as well as constancy, as there has to be something unchanging in change for change to be change. The fact that the world is a ceaseless proliferation of reticular mutations, rather than a set of predetermined relationships, also means 6 Anonymous quoted in Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, 33. 7 The study of non-being. 8 In contrast to the two world theory, which is the cornerstone of the western metaphysical tradition, based on the definite difference between the world of essence and the world of appearance, Kitaro Nishida departs from the one-world theory. 9 Kitaro Nishida, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious View, trans. David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1993): 71. 10 Nishida, Last Writings, 73. 11 Nishida, Last Writings, 49. 12 Kitaro, Nishida, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Peter Brogren the Voyager’s P, 1970): 3.

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that the particular determines and is determined by other particulars – such as, say, grey determining and being determined by other colors in the spectrum, most notably black and white – as well as that the universal “color” is always and only determined by particulars. It doesn’t exist as an independent abstract entity. “Color” can only be conceived in terms of a particular color, which is why Nishida concludes that “the transcendent determines itself immanently.”13 This process is, in some respects, similar to the theories of indeterminacy and non-linear dynamics. Initially articulated by Edward Lorenz’s 1965 discovery of strange attractors, non-linear dynamics negates definite differences between order and disorder, stability and instability. It stands for the process by which order emerges spontaneously from chaotic systems, and for the process by which hidden order can be seen amidst chaos. Despite the fact that strange attractors are “confined within the finite space of a basin of attraction and display non-period patterns of behavior” – and that they never return to a previously occupied position or even shape – they are “nevertheless recognizable as strange attractors.”14 In the world around us, physical, chemical, and social existents organize themselves into patterns. Autopoietically, patterns create structures and systems through the exchange of energy and information. Most systems produce both negative feedback (which negates disturbances and creates stability) and positive feedback (which amplifies disturbances and causes turbulence). Neither state is durable of fixed, however, as autopoiesis operates through iteration, continuous mutation and paradoxical articulation. Influenced by non-linear dynamics, the collapse of causality and the orders of magnitude, many twentieth-century western systems of thought have sought to form concretely practicable philosophies of knowledge production and subjectivity. With the exception of Gilles Deleuze’s work and, more specifically, Félix Guattari’s ecosophy based on his work with Deleuze,15 few can be compared to Nishida’s koiteki chokkan,16 an auto-productive activity on a par with the autopoiesis of patterns, structures, and systems. Koiteki chokkan is situated at the interstice of the acting subject and the acted-upon-object where perception, action, cogitation (understood as gradual, deductive apprehension), and intuition (understood as sudden, non-deductive apprehension) intertwine to overcome the positionality of the actor. Incorporating the existential dimension of the world as action, it

13 Nishida, Fundamental Problems, 5. 14 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1990): 252. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) is in many ways indebted to Baruch Spinoza’s “one world” or monadic view of the world. 16 Nishida, Fundamental Problems, 92.

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creates a state of reciprocity with no positionality. In similar fashion, ecosophy creates “lines of flight” between different models of perception, cognition, and intuition making them “more open, more processual [and] more deterritorialized.”17 The world and all its eco-systems are here perceived as perpetual movement that produces a multitude of syntheses and dissolutions between parts that exist independently of any whole. Humans, nature, the planet, culture, are assigned neither a fixed role nor an order of importance in the production of knowledge. Rather, the world is apprehended as a constant re-articulation of things at the relational level of their interactions. Like koiteki chokkan, ecosophy is an “ethico-aesthetic” practice that incorporates an aesthetic order into everyday actions and behaviors. Guattari insists that the decision to engage the world on an aesthetic (although not necessarily professionally artistic) basis carries important ethical implications. It implicates the production of knowledge “in a dimension of processual creativity” which gives rise to the ability and the readiness to encounter each phenomenon in its heterogeneity.18

The necessity of beyond-mind-ness Interexpression, koiteki chokkan, and ecosophy offer concrete, experientially rich, epistemically exhilarating and ethically sensitive excursions into the territory that lies beyond mind, if mind is understood as positional consciousness that represents “objects of consciousness” to a remote center and manipulates symbolic representations bound by predetermined rules with the aid of causal logic. However, since the 1980s, such a conception of the mind has had limited traction in cognitive science. Instead, the study of mind has become increasingly linked to the study of the biological brain, the brain’s relation to the rest of the body, and the embodied organism’s relation to its environment. Cutting across the dichotomies of head|body, reason|passion, intellect|instinct and nurture|nature, the embodied approach, usually traced to Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson,19 suggests that the mind is in the entire organism as well as situated in the world. Influenced by the theories of

17 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains, Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995): 61. 18 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 128. 19 See Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991).

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indeterminacy, non-linear dynamics, and autopoiesis, according to which living organisms are self-organizing autonomous systems that actively generate and maintain their identities in the context of continuous interactions with their surroundings, cognition is here seen as enactive.20 It is constituted by the activity of the embodied organism as it inhabits and moves through its world. Today, the mind is also increasingly seen as extended and distributed given the growing use of technical prostheses, organizational apps and affective technologies. Instead of the cognitive mind that reasons, represents the world, and plans the autonomous agent’s actions in a rational manner, we are faced with an autopoietic, (technologically) extended, profoundly emotional mind.21 But if this is the case, it may seem unnecessary to discuss regions that lie “beyond mind,” or that such discussions are of a predominantly historical interest. Nothing could be further from the truth. The disembodied, autonomous, logic-locked, strictly rational conception of the mind is more relevant today than ever for a very different reason. Both economics, (which, in neoliberal times, has the power of religion), and computer science, (with its ceaseless proliferation of algorithmic logics that increasingly permeate daily life), rely on rationality, agency and the notion of the rational (human or algorithmic) agent making logical, self-serving decisions. “Beyond mind,” can, of course, be traced to Russian Futurism and the practice of linguistic indeterminacy or Zaum where “za” means “behind or beyond” and “um” means “mind.” But this issue is not concerned with zaum specifically. Its aims are, first, to provide a cross-disciplinary cartography of fractal and iterative processes of meaning and knowledge production whose forms and velocities operate across numerous sites, practices and disciplines: visual and media art, literature, art history, music, dance, film, intermedia, and photography. Secondly, it is to take stock of the state of beyond mind-ness today. Hegemonic pathways of meaning and knowledge production have always been vehemently contested at peak points of aggressive technologization and accelerated production of what Edward S. Reed has presciently termed “informational superhighways”; superhighways that relay “every conceivable kind of information except one,” the information termed “ecological” that “human beings acquire from their environment by looking, listening, feeling, sniffing, and tasting” as it is ecological, not “processed”

20 See Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980). 21 See, for example, Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010); Raymond W. Gibbs’s Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); and Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).

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information that “allows us to experience things for ourselves [. . .] crucial for understanding our place in the world.”22 The smooth – and often deadly – operation of informational superhighways has, since World War I, been the reason for searching beyond rationality at the root of homogenization, automation and technocracy. The Dadaist manifesto was thus a desperate call to break away from the logic-locked ways of making sense of the world at a time when increasing technologization meant increasingly efficient killing and annihilation of natural and social worlds. The Dadaists called for “the abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create,” “the abolition of every social hierarchy” and for “an interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions [. . .] inconsistencies: LIFE [emphasis in the original].”23 Similarly, the 1950s and 1960s abounded in indeterminate practices that rebelled against the increasingly uni-directional and automated processes of meaning production that went hand in hand with Taylorism, Fordism, and the industrialized carnage of World War II. Artists like John Cage and the Fluxus group sought to expand the field of perception and knowledge by circumventing meaning-making practices altogether, and by creating new intermedial fields of experience that lie between disciplines, cultural, and sensorial stratifications. Simultaneously, the Situationists International practiced détournement or the subversion of signifying process that make up the society of the spectacle which welds the overproduction of images to a linear, unilateral logic of signification. In the 1990s – the age of the simulacrum – The Yes Men, etoy, and Knowbotic Research resorted to culture jamming and (h)activism. They created fake corporate websites, such as the World Trade Organization, to “detourn” the course of political summits and global legal disputes. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Dirty New Media movement uses computing to disorder proprietary software production through databending. Helen Nissenbaum et al’s browser extension TrackMeNot sends randomly generated queries to search engines with the aim of obfuscating user information from corporate policies as well as overwhelming and disabling search engines.24 The problem in all these cases is that oversimplified formulaic thinking, based on sequence and linear logic, comparable to the metric system where millimeters fit neatly into centimeters, centimeters into meters, and meters in kilometers, creates a mental map

22 Edward S. Reed quoted in Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 2002): 33. 23 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: George Wittenborn, 1981): 81–82. 24 See Helen Nissenbaum, Finn Brunton, Obfuscation: A Use’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

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of malignantly irrational ideas, such as perpetual growth, which is endemic to capitalism. It also enables locked logics to act as conveyer belts for taken-for-granted nonsense. Amidst increasing automatization, acceleration, and symbolization, it is imperative to re-evaluate past and present processes of meaning and knowledge production based on the mutual co-determination of a multiplicity of factors for at least two reasons. First, we are moving further and further away from what Reed has termed ecological information. Second, knowledge is rapidly being turned into information. As Byung-Chul Han has argued, knowledge proper is a heterogeneous, deeply transformative, temporally intense force.25 Its inherent heterogeneity differs greatly from the homogeneity of additivity, characteristic of digitally distributed information, which does not require a complex process of transformation to take place, and which can be easily recorded, reproduced, and distributed; why it travels much faster than knowledge.26 The problem of the accelerated, smooth, and unhindered passage of knowledge-cum-information, where the emphasis is on distribution and speed, bears a striking similarity to the well-known irrationality of rationality, analyzed by George Ritzer a quarter of a century ago in his 1993 book The McDonaldization of Society. Focusing on the fast food industry, but, as the title suggests, implying society at large, Ritzer articulates a particular brand of irrational rationality – a mode of calculation that replaces thinking with a series of means-to-an-end, cost-benefit analyses whose sole parameters are efficiency, predictability, accelerated value production, and, ultimately, control. In Ritzer’s analysis, McDonald’s not only managed to sell nutritionally noxious food at a great profit, far more worryingly, it managed to exercise social control by substituting systematic, self-serving irrationality for rationality.27 The same principle is evident in the various forms of accelerated knowledge production that make the current situation paradoxical: one the one hand, we are living in the age of increasing simplification and commodification which goes hand in hand with the deluge of processed information. On the other, the mind is increasingly extended through apps and gadgets as well as increasingly malleable; the technological advances of the last two decades have made possible such questions as Catherine Malabou’s What should we do with

25 Byung-Chul Han, Le parfum de temps: essay philosophique sur l’art de s’attarder sur les choses, trans. Julie Stroz (Paris: Edition Circé, 2016): 17. 26 Han, Le parfum, 17. 27 See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Los Angeles: Pine Forge P, 1993).

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our brain?28 Rooted in phenomenology and the notion of the brain-world (as opposed to the brain-machine), for Malabou, the brain is a nexus of relations without any centrality: [T]he functional plasticity of the brain deconstructs its function as the central organ and generates the image of a fluid process, somehow present everywhere and nowhere, which places the outside and the inside in contact by developing an internal principle of cooperation, assistance, and repair, and an external principle of adaptation and evolution.29

Like the embodied mind, in which cognition occurs in the activity of the autopoietic embodied organism, and like the extended mind, which resides in objects in the environment, the brain is distributed. Its plasticity is related to “the processes of adaptation, learning, and memory” and to reparative plasticity, that is, the brain’s ability to compensate for “losses caused by lesions.”30 Plasticity has three dimensions: aesthetic, which implies sculpting; ethical, which includes help and repair; and political, which resides in the responsibility for the “double movement of the receiving and the giving of form.”31 All three of these dimensions are crucially important in view of the increasing incorporation of technological prostheses.32

28 This question is the title of Catherine Malabou’s 2006 book. The direct translation of the French title would be: What to do with our Brain? 29 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham UP, 2008): 35. 30 Malabou, What Should We Do, 23, 25. 31 Malabou, What Should We Do, 30. 32 Prostheses are sensorial extensions in space as well as time. When a blind person uses a stick the stick is the extension of his/her hand as well as a replacement for the sense of sight; it serves to feel and understand the lay of the territory ahead. The same happens with the baby phone, which, when placed in the adjacent room or on another floor, is an extension of the parents’ or carers’ hearing. However, as Bernard Stiegler suggests in Technics and Time, the originary relation between the human and the technological is profoundly temporal. Stiegler relates the story of Prometheus’ lesser-known brother, Epimetheus, whom Zeus had put in charge of distributing traits to animals and humans, but who had mistakenly used up the positive traits on animals and forgot to keep any in reserve for humans. In order to remedy this error, his brother Prometheus (“Prometheus” means foresight and is related to the future while “Epimetheus” means hindsight and is related to the past) stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans thus incurring the wrath of Zeus who chained him to a rock in the Caucasus for the rest of his eternal life. What Stiegler extrapolates from this myth is that the origin of technology resides in forgetting. Forgetting as a failure to actualize the planned, which, for this reason, remains permanently in the domain of the potential but does not cease to exist albeit latently. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).

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New prostheses and new communicational practices create and sediment new sensibilities. They also create common image, thought and affect banks, as well as, somewhat more mysteriously, new spatio-temporalities that elude epistemic capture yet bear on the inscription of the socio-political on the body, its assimilation and further reproduction in the form of habits and behavioral gestalts. For Norbert Wiener, the purpose of cybernetic organization was to save us from entropy.33 Today, cybernetic organization has caused an infrastructural revolution that has produced the technological unconscious. It’s worth noting here that unconscious thought is one of the tools the conscious mind relies on in order to overcome memory limitation. We can remember any fifteen unrelated things if they are organized into a structure as it is only that one structure that needs to be kept in conscious memory. The problem with harnessing parts of the unconscious mind is that conscious thought is increasingly forced to use shallow rather than deep structures, not least of all because of their quantity.34 The digital media have certainly ushered multiplicity, however, a multiplicity that, at times, lacks depth, and is often confusing rather than enriching not only because of acceleration but also because of its significant attendant problem – retroversion. The increasing instability of information (the latest is best syndrome) makes it necessary for the contemporary subject to consider the possibility of drastic reversals. In The Excessive Subject, Molly Rothenberg recounts Italo Calvino’s version of Caesar’s assassination in an attempt to explain retroversion. Rothenberg writes: Killing Caesar not only eliminates the tyrant, it changes the conditions by which that action acquires its meaning. The very world in which it made sense to get rid of Caesar also vanishes with those dagger strokes – not because Caesar held that world together, but because the assassins could not foresee that their act would also transform the way the act itself would later be judged, even by themselves.35

Unlike Caesar’s assassins, who could not take the retroversive effect of future interpretations into account – the effect by which a formerly beneficial act turns out not only to be utterly useless, but downright pernicious – the technologically

33 See Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1965). 34 An example of a deep structure is the game of chess where I have a number of possible moves, and where, for each of my moves, my opponent has a number of possible responses, for which I have a number of possible counter-responses. In a shallow structure, of which an ice cream menu is an example, there are few qualitatively different decisions to be made after the first one. 35 Molly Rotheberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity P, 2010): 1.

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extended subject can perhaps compute potential future permutations of a given situation, however, the volatility of values caused by acceleration make the interpretative canon difficult to predict to say the least. As Han suggests, on the level of sensory information, the vertiginous growth of informational mass caused by the proliferation of social networking sites, apps and gadgets has a palpably noxious effect:36 “[b]eyond a certain threshold, information no longer informs, it deforms.”37 This problem, as Bernard Stiegler suggests, is exacerbated by the fact that the technical prostheses, such as the ubiquitous camera, the telephone, and the computer, constitute an intergenerational support of memory, that, as material culture, determines learning, behavior, and mnesic activities. The current global techno-cultural practice over-writes the “affective activity of the nervous system”38 with great speed and efficaciousness leading to a general “proletarianization” – a word Stiegler uses for the vast process of “the loss of knowledge(s) as savoir-faire and savoir-vivre, in the absence of which all savour is lost.”39 Continuing Karl Marx’s debate on the exteriorization of memory and intelligence, Stiegler further points out that: [W]hen exteriorization of memory and knowledge becomes hyperindustrial, then it is a at once what extends without limit the power of hypomnesic milieus and allows them to be controlled by the cognitive industries which now formalize neurochemical activity and nucleotide sequences, and which thereby inscribe the neurobiological substrates of memory into history.40

The resultant problems are the increasing inability to engage with complexity and the automated inertness of the spirit, particularly prominent in the current stage of cognitive capitalism where creativity is incessantly hailed, but where very little of what is produced is actually creative. For Stiegler, to be creative means to engage with complex heterogeneity, to open up a work, since, in French, oeuvrer has the same etymology as ouvrir – it means to “produce negentropy.”41

36 The avalanche of contradictory information manifests as the Information Fatigue syndrome. First reported by David Lewis in 1996, IFS initially affected people working with huge quantities of information. Today, IFS affects everyone. One of its key symptoms is the numbing of perceptual and thinking capacities. 37 Byung-Chul Han, Dans la nuée: Réflexions sur le numérique, trans. Matthew Dumont (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015): 82. 38 Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross. (Cambridge: Polity, 2010): 33. 39 Stiegler, For a New Critique, 30. 40 Stiegler, For a New Critique, 30–31. 41 Stiegler, For a New Critique, 46.

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The structure and organization of this issue This issue engages with complex heterogeneity by exploring a-rational forms of thinking and doing. Every form of rationality, when taken to the extreme, is irrational, much like every form of irrationality, when systematized, is rational. A-rationality, on the other hand, is neither rational nor irrational. “Beyond Mind” is divided into three sections, each of which has a different aim. Part I: “Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals” focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. It traces the interpretative differences in arational modalities of composition in art and literature. This section opens with Owen F. Smith’s problematization of art history’s concerns with groups and movements, beginnings and ends. Departing from the idea that there is no stable ontology of the social world, Smith offers an overview of the practice of meaninglessness and in-between-ness as rooted in amodernism and intermedia. Adopting an assemblage approach to theorize historical formations, an approach that relies on transitory configurations, hybridity, fluidity, and collage, he draws parallels between pataphysics (Alfred Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions, based on convolution and contradiction), Dada, the work of the Situationists International, and the Fluxus group, all of which are “external to the domain of the mind,” seen as positional consciousness. Elucidating the connection between contradiction, doubt, ambiguity, illogical elements, and the emergent properties of an assemblage as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Smith proposes that amodernist thinking implies the ability to hold multiple and contradictory views and sketches a history of art that denies historicity, yet is recognizably a history of art. Arguing that there is no significant value in distinguishing between the micro and macro levels of considerations and that the constructed historical moment is made of complex heterogeneous parts, Smith foregrounds contingent historical combinatorics in which ideas, people, objects and practices can be extracted from their “place in history” and inserted into another creating complex, transitory and mutating histories, similar to Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s 1959 book Memories. In the following essay, “Automatic Writing: From Networked Art to Cyberwarfare,” Craig J. Saper offers a sociopoetic analysis of the development of experimental practices in networked art, such as Ray Johnson’s “onsendings.” On-sendings are incomplete, participatory artworks that play on the participants’ desire for involvement in a network. They operate like a structuring absence, which, in Lacanian parlance, denotes something that is missing but that nonetheless determines the meaning and parameters of a situation. Through George Bataille and Jacques Derrida’s theories of gift exchange, Victor

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Tausk’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of desire and his own sociopoetics – the use of social situations or networks as a canvas – Saper analyzes the unwitting development of experimental art into what Victor Tausk has termed “influencing machines.”42 Given networked art’s emphasis on the “scoring” of social situations to “project intimacy onto otherwise impersonal systems,”43 Saper makes a lucid comparison with bots that, too, depend on coding and impersonal systems. The on-sendings create a structure for a gift without donor, a message without a singular sender and a constellation of interactions beyond the intended meaning of a single mind. By hollowing-out the structure and process of social construction, they turn social construction into a grammatical constellation that resembles cyberipulation (the spreading of disinformation in a networked attack). Through an overwhelming amount of details, Ray Johnson's on-sendings employ circumstantiality (the speaker’s or writer’s inability to discern the relevant from the irrelevant) in order to make visible the effects of a social-aesthetic disruption while simultaneously creating a productive confusion between text and context, inside and outside. Ultimately, for Saper, the social game of art making cannot be separated from the structuring absence of non-event-hood and the sculpting of influence, which is why work like Johnson’s has to be displaced from cultural history and examined in light of the contemporary, cyborgian bot-induced “influencing machines.” The theme of re-interpretation of seemingly incoherent, random or futile cues and codes is further taken up by Atėnė Mendelytė in “Cracking the Beckettian Profounds of the Mind with Game Theory.” Continuing the decadelong debate about whether literature can be served by the mathematical model of game theory, which she, after, Peter Swirski, defines as a “theory of decision -making involving more than one agent (player), in which the results (outcomes and payoffs) of players” actions (moves), are interdependent,”44 Mendelyté explores the non-sequiturs inherent in Beckett’s Endgame. Focusing on the multiplicity of ludic forms Beckett resorts to, such as the play on words – the characters’ names are Hamm for hammer, Clov for “clou” (French for “nail”), Nagg for “nagel” (German for “nail”) and Nell, which rhymes with the “death knell’ – the different forms of intertextuality, interspersed with references to social and psychological games and toys, Mendelyté makes the following claim:

42 Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991): 185–220. 43 Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001): 24. 44 Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (London, New York: Routledge, 2007): 126.

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Endgame constitutes a paradoxical meta-game, that is, an existential game. It is paradoxical because its meta status is not derived from the function of inclusion, or, for that matter, sublation, but from a rhizomatic series of fragmented linguistic, etymological, social, psychological, idiosyncratic and performative games, all of which operate as discontinuous and partial enunciative assemblages – or vectors – rather than as wholes. Part II “Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds” focuses on the productive ways in which the Derridian destinerrance,45 labyrinths,46 and Gilles Deleuze’s Leibnitz-inspired notion of folding – a movement akin to autopoiesis that replaces linearity, circularity, and ex nihilo transcendent creation – operate as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production in literature, film, music and dance. This section opens with Romén Reyes-Peschl’s essay “The end is built into the Beginning: Charlie Kaufman and Neuroscience.” Here, Reyes-Peschl explores the highly aesthetically productive labyrinthine itineraries of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays and films. Using Carl Zimmer’s notion of “convolutions,”47 which views the brain as a network made of hundreds of billions of cells, joined by trillions of connections, Reyes-Peschl traces the reticular nexus of literature and neuroscience through Kaufman’s oeuvre. This includes Being John Malkovich (1999), a film about a puppeteer who enters a portal into John Malkovich’s brain; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which the external erasure of internal memory becomes an everyday reality, a plot device that is itself subjected to erasure; and Synecdoche, New York (2008) where the en-folded-ness of all life in the paradoxical continuity of discontinuity of all temporal experience (since the only time we live in, and access the past and the future from, is the present moment) is discussed as “the end [that is] is built into the beginning.” Combining Wendy B. Faris’s notion of literary labyrinths, which are, simultaneously, beyond the author’s as well as the reader’s reach, but which, paradoxically, trace the author’s and the reader’s investigation into the realm beyond their reach as well as Zimmer’s convolutions, Reyes-Peschl makes an argument for the entropic nature of the mind. In this scheme of things, the various attempts at representing the mind do not depict it accurately, or even inaccurately, but, instead, construct another labyrinth, moving further up in the order of complexity.

45 Destinerrance is a spatial figure of time that consists of wandering away from a predefined goal. 46 Labyrinths as extended destinerrant structures that embrace confusion and iteration. 47 Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind (New York: Scott and Nix, 2010): xi.

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In “The Fold: Musical Monads and Baroque Assemblages,” Timothy O’ Dwyer continues the theme of the paradoxical reversal of orders and complexity in the sphere of music. He juxtaposes the habitual fashioning of noise into organized sound, in which musical composition operates by way of emission from the singular center of an imposed, purely syntactic discourse,48 to improvisational-compositional methods based on permanent variation that destabilize the overarching musical syntax. Drawing on the long tradition of using chance operations and arbitrary rules in experimental music to upset the inherent power relations and such predecessors as John Cage, this reticular approach employs a structure entitled Present, Above, Below, Past and Future. The musicians navigate these five points that include the musicians’ lived, physical or phenomenal position in the moment or in the world. Like Cage’s use of I Ching (the ancient Chinese divination method), the purpose of this arbitrary structure is to determine the musicians’ participation in the complex and rapidly changing tempi, arabesques, pitch, timbres, progression, and tonality. O’ Dwyer argues that music thus produced is freed from its modal counterpoint. Further, he argues that music thus produced gains force by introducing ungraspable elements into the realization of the accord – delays, inter-weavings, appoggiaturas – from which new, fleeting counterpoints are born. The folding of individual musical personalities, cultures and bodies of experience into accords and dynamic counterpoints, embraces, O’Dwyer suggests, Deleuze’s idea that the (musical) rendition of the indeterminate is a function by means of which the fold “unfurls all the way to infinity.”49 In the following interview, dancer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist Susan Sentler delves into Deleuzian folding as a somatic practice. Here, folding is seen as a way into the inner body and kinesthetic consciousness. Indebted to effortless attention that characterizes the processes and practices of The Human Origami – an embodied study of the biological thrust of patternmaking – bodily folding is equally related to biology and to geology, responsive architecture, fashion design and consciousness studies. Emphasizing that folding is always already underway at the cellular level, Sentler elucidates its somatic functions: the movement away from the default of stability; the ability to access one’s entire embodiment as accrued experience, as physical, relational and affective inscriptions; and the perpetual collapsing of the micro and macro avenues of possibility – a continuous “what if” that opens up and iterates micro-possibilities, going backwards, forwards, up, down, left, right, pausing 48 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music [1985], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006): 6. 49 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007): 98.

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and resuming movement with varying velocities. Describing the importance of iteration to incorporation – a movement or experience are integrated only when they have become a constituent part of the body – Sentler suggests that somatic folding is both a sensibility and an archive of strategies that modify, expand and connect with other dynamics and strategies. Clarifying the difference between folding, enfolding and unfolding, as the state of being within the continuum of action, a fractal development of internal structure, and creative mobility respectively, she concludes that somatic folding is directly related to nature’s way of organizing patterns, evident in the indeterminancy of matter, waves and particles, as theorized by David Bohm. Part III “Immanent Transcendence” offers a glimpse into the reticular, iterative, immanent structuring of transcendence understood beyond the tradition of western metaphysics. In the first essay in this section, entitled “Herat 1487: Early Virtual Reality,” Laura U. Marks creates a multilogue between Islamic religious thought and sacred geometry, calligraphy, and contemporary art. While Islamic thought demonstrates the paradox that an individual is one with the infinitely large universe, contemporary art, and, in particular, early virtual reality, demonstrates the entwinement of each thing and being with all things and beings. Marks argues that while the western doctrine of the minimal part, whose smallest unit is the atom or point, makes it possible to conceive of the infinite but not of the infinitesimal, foliated and zoomorphic Islamic calligraphy (which suggests that the minimal parts of writing, such as the dot, have an inside) invoke the idea that the smallest unit of matter is not a point, but, as Deleuze suggests after Leibnitz, a fold, since, when unfolded, a point reveals an infinite surface, composed of infinitely small quantities of infinitesimals. Marks further argues that computer-based parallels to the infinitesimal world of floriated arabesques do, in fact, exist: media artworks articulate the teeming life of electrons inside the pixel. Analyzing such artifacts as early JODI’s works composed entirely of pixels, Marks makes an argument for the digital infinitesimal sublime, which extracts the actual from the virtual at extremely fine levels of resolution. Like Islamic calligraphy and geometry, the digital suggests the coming into being of a world that is unfathomable on a different order of unfathomability: not the extensive universe of the infinite, but the intensive universe of the infinitesimal. In the following essay, Todd Barnes introduces an immanent film theory in “‘Aesthetic Borderlands’ in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s differentiation between two crucial trajectories in contemporary French thought – the trajectory of transcendence, which includes Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida; and the trajectory of immanence, which includes Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Barnes’s essay revisits the tidy

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notions of self and structure in two fields: performance studies and film studies. Through a reading of Prospero’s Books, an intermedial 1991 film that used proto-HDTV technologies and bourgeoning CGI graphics software, he analyzes digital media’s ability to trouble film theory’s spatial understanding of filmic semiotics and the spectator’s relation to the (transcendent) filmic apparatus. Through a sustained focus on the blind spots that characterize this approach, Barnes draws attention to the moments where Greenaway’s cinema points to a dizzyingly recursive co-constitution of actors-images-spectators. This immanent understanding of filmic reception builds upon various notions of paradoxical “pseudo-presences” and theories of affective faciality and physiognomy (which refer to affectivity beyond signification) in order to rethink the interpenetration of presence, absence, effect and affect through a series of tracings and interlacings. In the last essay, “The White Space Conflict Theory: Understanding Photography as Energy,” Gilles Massot continues the discussion of reticular ontology of a medium whose function is, he claims, mistakenly thought to be a recording one. Speaking in three voices – that of a French historian of photography, a Chinese physicist and a Malay artist – and in this way formally engaging the multiperspectivism that underpins his argument, Massot proposes a reevaluation of the profoundly mysterious realm of photography. Rooted in the pinhole phenomenon that has always existed in nature, photography is what makes the world look real for us, suggests Massot. However, what we perceive as objective reality is an abstraction created by light akin to Plato’s allegory of the cave. By developing the pinhole image photography irreversibly turned the perpetual transmutation of time and space into a manipulable object. Drawing on John A. Wheeler’s discreteness of the quantum (an infinitely small amount of energy that replaced the particle as the building block of materiality),50 Massot makes a striking comparison between Wheeler’s U diagram – in which U stands for the universe and one of U’s arms looks at the other – and his own theory of constant self-recording mode. Interrogating the self-reflectiveness ushered by the digital technologies such as selfies, Massot proposes that photography’s function be dubbed “duplicording.” Duplicording marks a radical shift from the analogue, object-based mnemonic recording, found in fossils, to the fluid mnemonic abstraction of event recording in the digital-virtual world. Unlike objectbased recording where that which exists becomes the memory of that which existed, event recording makes a duplicate of the forces that enabled an event’s

50 John Archibald Wheeler, “World as System Self-synthesized by Quantum Networking,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 32.1 (1988): 4–15, 10.

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coming into being. It introduces a marked change in the existent state of things. Comparing this phenomenon to the ancient immanent-transcendent Chinese practice of recording or chronicles, Massot argues for the need to understand the profound effect of photography in the age of constantly proliferating “recording” technologies, such as big data. His playfully yet lucidly articulated theory is an urgent call to acknowledge the profound effect of the technologies we use on a daily basis. Despite the fact that a comprehensive scientific or theoretical account of these effects may, at present, be beyond the available parameters or methodologies of thought, it is nevertheless important to grasp that a vast territory lies beyond mind. Experimental artistic work and practical methodologies from a range of disciplines provide a means of navigating that territory.

Part I: “Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals”

Owen F. Smith

The Fullness of Nothing, the Sense of the Nonsensical, and the Value of Being Unproductive Assemblage Theory, Amodernist Art, and Ways to be in the World Abstract: In this essay, the author takes the basic idea that there is not a fixed and stable ontology for the social world (Deleuze) and applies it to a consideration of the history of art and to particular aspects of Modernism and the Avant-Garde. An assemblage approach suggests a different set of markers or metaphors for viewing history: field, transitory configurations, patchwork, hybridity, fluidity, heterogeneity, and collage. Ultimately, one might argue that this is a more “realistic” way of characterizing large extended historical formations such as movements. The author argues that amodernism is an assemblage of complex configurations, emphasizing multiplicity, interconnectedness, simultaneity, convolution and contradiction. Apart from exploring the twentieth-century artists’ challenges to traditional western aggregative thinking and challenging the rule-making process by which art historians have parsed the art of the twentieth century, this essay aims to provide an embedded, ground-up framework for the world’s seeming nonrationality, by determining heterogeneous relations and viewing the disparate events, physical objects, happenings, as well as signs and utterances, as potentials of an assemblage.

The nature and significance of meaninglessness [A]n assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of “consistency” or “coherence,” prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere?1

1 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, revised ed., ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007): 179. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-002

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The task is to determine coherence and consistency as emergent properties that do or do not arise from assemblage. Consistency and coherence are not about being without contradiction, but, rather, about how heterogeneous elements or objects hang together, or, as Gilles Deleuze calls them, hodgepodges of interpenetrating bodies. In 1960, the sculptor and musician Walter De Maria wrote a text titled Meaningless Work. Although it might at first seem to be a manifesto, upon close examination it is not a statement of the formation of a group or type of art, or even a call for direct action; rather, it is a call for a reconsideration of art in the face of the expanding art world, the influence of the art market, and its concomitant ever increasing monetary equivalencies for art. After stating that meaningless work is the “the most important and significant art form today,” De Maria goes on to say that it is “honest,” “will be hated and enjoyed by intellectuals,“ and is work that “does not make you money or accomplish a conventional purpose.”2 Further, meaningless work “can make you feel and think about yourself, the outside world, morality, unconsciousness, nature, history, time, philosophy, nothing at all, politic, without the limitations of the old art forms.”3 So, then, what qualifies, or what can one use to identify meaningless work? For De Maria, meaningless work is: Potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art action-experience one can undertake today. This concept is not a joke.4

Although at first the text might seem contradictory, leaving us with questions such as: “How can a work be both indeterminate and exactly determined? Or, how can it be both foolish and not a joke?”, the first step in responding to such questions is to understand that the seeming contradictions are not “givens” but rather the product of our value systems and learned behaviors. One of the key artistic groups to use jokes, gags and humor as a “serious” tool was the Fluxus group. Started in the early 1960s, Fluxus was a means to explore alternative directions in music and performance. It quickly expanded to become a publisher of multiples,5 a presenter of concerts and festivals, and, most importantly, an

2 Walter De Maria, “Meaningless Work” [1960], in An Anthology of Chance Operations, ed. La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low (1963): n. pag. 3 De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” n. pag. 4 De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” n. pag. 5 Although many histories of the artist multiple can be argued for, one historical node shared by most if not all of these histories is that the multiple came into existence as a response to the nature and forms of western art in the 20th century. If one is to look to multiples developed by artists such as Piero Manzoni, Robert Filliou, Joseph Beuys, and Alison Knowles and published

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attitude towards art and art making; to open up the possibilities of enactment without fixed goals or set characteristics, to create without a predetermined end, to play with possibilities.6 As the Fluxus group has demonstrated, one can be both foolish and thought provoking, for although a joke infers some level of insignificance, one can be deadly serious as one acts in seemingly foolish ways. Meaninglessness as significance? We might assume, given our cultural biases, that if something is meaningless it cannot be significant, but such an assumption misconstrues these words’ meanings. “Significant”, refers to effect and import, and both De Maria’s work and the works and ideas of like-minded artists have had a huge effect on the history of art, culture, and philosophy. Furthermore, the idea of meaninglessness does not mean that there is no meaning what-so-ever, but rather work, in De Maria’s own words, that cannot be “sold in art galleries or win prizes in museums [. . .] [or] work that does not make you money or accomplish a conventional purpose,”7 which of course leaves room for a huge amount of work done since 1960. It should be noted that De Maria, like many other artists in the 1950s and 1960s, was impacted by exposure to Zen and Zen-informed thinking, and thus a Zen-informed understanding is appropriate to what he is intending: “It’s not easy to understand the meaning of meaningless. It is significant to think about insignificance. Pointlessness still

through organizations such as Fluxus, Vice Versand, Multiples, Inc., and others, a set of core of ideas becomes evident. The development of the multiple should be seen as an attempt to reframe art as a forum for thought and creative activity that escapes the bounds of object centered, monetarily based, fine art practices. This critical tradition is not one exclusive to the multiple but is shared by a myriad of explorative forms in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, such as mail art, artists’ books, land art, video art, conceptual art, and others. Their work is an investigation of art world politics that necessitated new forms of artistic production and modes of distribution. By this time may artists had come to question and in turn reject both the philosophy and practice of the dominant art forms as problematic and in opposition to their basic aims and concerns as creative individuals. The production of multiples often utilized commercial technologies such as xerography and offset printing; they were made from inexpensive and readily available commercially produced materials, and they were designed to be produced in large numbers at low cost. These multiples intentionally utilized a low craft aesthetic; they downplayed individual expression and used humor and popular cultural references. In many cases they were intended to be shown and distributed outside of the traditional gallery system. 6 Owen F. Smith, “Play as Worldview: Amodernism and a Tradition of Exemplativism in the Arts from Marcel Duchamp to Dick Higgins,” in Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David Getsy (University Park: Penn State UP, 2011): 118–131. 7 De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” n. pag.

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points to something.”8 De Maria prioritizes a significant shift in the nature of “the work,” from one of object/subject that has so dominated the history of the visual arts to one that is drawn more from theater or music and emphasizes three elements in particular: variability, indeterminacy, and performativity. While growing up in the Bay Area of California and attending University of California, Berkley, De Maria had a deep interest in music, especially Jazz. While in college, he became friends with experimental composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley and even created and performed three happenings in 1959 and 1960 with Young.9 The essay Meaningless Work was published in An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963), edited by La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow and designed by George Maciunas. It included Henry Flynt’s essay Concept Art, experimental music and performance scores, experimental and visual poetry, and a number of event-type textual scores, such as those by George Brecht and La Monte Young.10 De Maria’s contributions started with a graphic designed contents page listing “Compositions Essays Meaningless Work Natural Disasters” and included several text-based performance scores, such as Beach Crawl and three what seem to be essays, including Meaningless Work. Rather than an essay, Meaningless Work should be seen as performance score. It is an open-ended instructional work that is a performative call for doing, or action;11 the last line in the essay being “Get to Work,” which is best understood as a call to put into practice meaningless work.

8 Peter Taylor, “More Meaning Less” [Blog Post] (18 January 2014), Zen Mister (acc. 8 December 2017). 9 “Oral History Interview with Walter De Maria” (4 October 1972), Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., (acc. 10 January 2018). 10 The Breadth of De Maria’s background and his familiarity with experimental music and art are important factors in understand his ideas in the early 1960s as part of a movement to reframe art as something other than object and performer centered “work.” 11 The term score in the visual arts was borrowed from music, reinterpreted and reintroduced into the performative arts with the development of performance art in the 1950s and 1960s. It is most often a set of reinterpretable, or a loose set of instructions for a series of physical, verbal, or acoustic actions. In the post–World War II period, the composer John Cage was a significant catalysts for the use of the score through his own work and teaching at the New School for Social Research. The performance score is significant for it allows indeterminate, open structured, and time-based performative works to exist beyond an ephemeral moment; the existence of a score allows for it to be re-created or reinterpreted by the originating artist, other artists or even the audience itself. The score is also significant for as a relatively flexible structure that allows for in fact requires a participatory engagement (reinterpretation), functions as a form of documentation and an open structure that is a means of preserving ephemeral artistic idea.

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Assemblage and a history of alternative art forms In Meaningless Work, De Maria clearly prioritizes direct experience over discursive meaning and suggests that this type of work is “individual in nature” and that “to be fully understood, it should be done alone.”12 To answer such questions as those above, what must be understood is that De Maria is speaking in 1960 as part of an almost 80-year-long stance in the arts that questions the primacy of cognitive understandings over other forms of “knowing.” They seek to re-balance the relationship between the intellectual and the physical and to introduce a variety of diverse practices that are engaged with directness, immediacy, and experience, including a range of people/elements, such as the French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, the creator of King Ubu and Pataphysics; the Romanian poet and one of the founders of Dada, Tristan Tzara; the ex-patriot Lithuanian George Maciunas, principal organizer of the Fluxus group; French theoretician and filmmaker, Guy Debord, and many others. The variety of this work is part of an ongoing attempt to establish a footing for communication that is human-centered but external to the domain of the mind. Contradiction, doubt, ambiguity are conjoined with illogical or nonsensical elements, and throughout the twentieth century we are repeatedly given works that seemingly offer no insight, no escape, and no values. But, this is both the point of the work and the answer to what, if anything, is to be found. Instead of this being seen as an alternative “tradition,” it is more appropriate to think of these artists and movements that share certain creative/conceptual points of view as what Deleuze has labeled an assemblage. In its most simple form, an assemblage is an arrangement of heterogeneous elements. More than this, for Deleuze, there is a logic in assemblage that includes two major aspects: an acceptance of multiplicity over unity and an engagement in events, as opposed to the concept of essences. In their formation, assemblages are defined by external relations; neither part, nor whole, for they have no unity, they can be recombined with one another and added to or subtracted from infinitely. For Deleuze, and I would argue for De Maria as well, the notion of multiplicity is not centered, as it often is today, on “the one and the many,” but it is a substantive designation that calls for distinguishing between types of multiples. At the same time, when treated as a substantive “multiplicity,” it becomes a distribution of a non-hierarchical being (univocity) that cannot be reduced to identifiable elements. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari state:

12 De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” n. pag.

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[Multiplicity] is reducible to neither the one or the multiple. [. . .] It is not composed of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle [milieu] from which it grows and which it overspills.13

In this process, what becomes of significance is similar to what the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins has labeled as intermedia in the arts. This is a key point, for assemblages are, in their nomadic form, intermedial. Deluze said, “in a multiplicity, what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what is ‘between’ them, the in-between, as a set of relations that are inseparable from each other.”14 In his essay “Intermedia” (1966), Higgins wrote: the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and theater. It is not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs. The concept itself is better understood by what it is not, rather than what it is.15

Although there are certainly a significant number of divergences, both Higgins and Deluze are conceptualizing a process by which things, ideas, events aggregate; ways that are not about unification in a traditional sense, that is seeking selective self-reinforcing core principles, but ways in which contingent processes of change can still be constructive process of arrangement (assemblage). In these processes, one element does not act to transcend any other. Rather, they both act to become mutually transformative. Although the topology of assemblages can be seen in at least four ways of arrangement, the one that is more relevant to the creative process, connected with intermedia and divergent artistic practices in the twentieth century is called nomadic assemblages.16 These are arranged in ways that allow for elements, agencies and conditions to constantly change without “hierarchical” limits. Again, what Deluze envisions was actualized by elements of a diverse group of artistic innovators, from Julian Levi, founder of the Incoherents (1882), to Marcel Duchamp, originator of the

13 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, second ed., trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987): 21 14 Gilles Deleuze, Claire Padgett, Dialogues II (European Perspectives), revised ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 2007): viii. 15 Dick Higgins, Horizons (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984): 25. 16 It has been correctly pointed out by this volume’s editor Natasha Lushetich that there is a political dimension of non-unification and both Higgins’ and Deleuze and Guatarri’s rendition of in-between-ness is politically tainted. For more on Deleuze and Politics see Thomas Nail, “Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution,” Theory & Event 16.1 (2013) and J. A. Bell, “Between Individualism and Socialism: Deleuze’s Micropolitics of Desire” (17 October 2003), Selected Writings, Jeffrey A. Bell (acc. 12 May 2018).

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readymade (1914), to John Cage, composer of 4’33” (1952), and to Robert Filliou, creator of The Eternal Network (1968). At the heart of these works/ideas was an embrace of indeterminacy, a rejection or questioning of hierarchies and a practice of creativity that was experimental in nature and expansive in implication.

The amodernist tradition Stretching from the end of the nineteenth century through most of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, there is a heterogeneous strain in the arts that has often been seen as part of the modernist avant-garde trajectory/tradition, but which I have alternatively labeled as a part of an amodernist tradition,17 or, more precisely, an amodernist assemblage. In traditional historical approaches, many of these artists and groups are often included in that part of modernism identified as the avant-garde, (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism), and the neo-avant-garde (Letterism, Happenings, Fluxus, Situationism, Neoism, and others). Yet, even within the domain of the avant-gardes, fitting all of the individuals and groups into this term or period becomes a procrustean process. In the act of constructing a generalized historical framework and a sequenced chronological time-frame for understanding the avant-garde and neo-avant gardes, the individuals who constitute the groups have been oversimplified, and our understanding of the historical relations of the groups themselves have thus ended up skewed and filled with misunderstandings. In an attempt to avoid such a problematic situation, as well as the many potential concomitant misunderstandings, I utilize the term amodernism to both indicate a connectedness to the traditions of modernisms, but also to stress that there are some things that are not wholly contained within modernism, the avant-garde, and that alternatively exist outside the competence of the rules of both such designations. Furthermore, I chose the word amodernism for several reasons. First, a core of amodernist thinking is the ability to hold or entertain multiple and contradictory views without seeing this as an indication of a failure or a problem. Second, the nature and operation of amodernism being thought of as similar to arational, so that as arational is both not rational and not irrational, amodernism is both not modern and not non-modern. In general, one can say that amodernism not only offers a set of counterexamples to modernism, but it also undercuts the theoretical bases of modernism itself. Amodernism is thus not another, or alternative period, but is part of modernism, the avant-garde and 17 Smith, “Play as Worldview,” 118.

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even postmodernism. However, it is simultaneously conceptually distinct from these movements in significant ways, thus warranting its own designation as an assemblage. What taking an amodernist view necessitates is that one flip the traditional manner of determining artistic intent and filiety, by not starting with a macro view of a predetermined group or movement and assigning artists to it by either association or aesthetic concerns, but starting with a micro level of concern with an artist or even a single artwork within an artist’s oeuvre. This way, artists and their works move in and out of amodernism, depending upon a particular moment of time and the nature of the work, as well as the intent and aesthetic stances formed by the connections between individual, groups, and ideas. As with all assemblages, the inclusion of each work, artist, thinker, or movement should not be seen to automatically include the entirety of each entity, but to draw out for inclusion only those elements which support the constancy of, not the reproduction of, and leaning to formation/transformation. Within these processes of change, it is the intermedial spaces, or connections that are paramount. Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus that “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both autonomy and a direction of its own.”18 Amodernism is connected to a diverse field of artists, groups, and philosophies that confronted social, artistic and moral expectations, espoused confusion, contradictions, and seeming gibberish, as well as called for the abandonment or destruction of both art and culture. The artists explored a range of new experimentalist practices and inventive strategies for replacing older, outmoded methods; they called for a reawaking of senses that would reshape human be-ing and lead to a revitalization of social and cultural forms.

Four amodernist challenges The artists and directions associated with this particular worldview, for that is fundamentally what amodernism is, can be connected to a number of fundamental challenges to art and meaning systems. These include, but are not limited to, first, the rejection of a belief in a world shaped by laws, fundamental certainties, and essences. Distinctions between elements or things, such as objective and subjective, clarity and ambiguity are rejected as being cultural-

18 Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 380.

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normative creations. Many ideas of amodernism are specifically aimed at questioning systems of laws or rules, most particularly the apogeal place held by reason in western values and philosophy. The College of Pataphysics was founded in 1948, and, by the 1960s, included writers such as Michael Leiris, Umberto Eco, Eugene Ionesco, and visual artists, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp, and is a clear example of the amodernist critique/satire of reason and institutions that rely on such beliefs. It was created with a nonsensical bureaucracy as its hallmark and a focus on conducting useless research, or, as Christian Bok described it, “a parodic academy of intellectuals, who propose absurd axioms and then use rigorous argument to explicate the logical outcomes of these absurdities.”19 The College drew on another earlier amodernist text, the satirical novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, for some of what might be called its foundational principles. The title is the name of a country discovered by the book’s protagonist (“nowhere” spelled backwards), where “illness of any sort was considered [. . .] to be highly criminal and immoral,”20 victims were punished for being sufferers, luck was “the only fit object of human veneration,”21 and students at “Colleges of Unreason” studied Unreason for its necessity in “developing those faculties [. . .] required for the daily conduct of affairs.”22 On the other side of preparing people for the necessities of daily life, Erewhonians believed that life would be intolerable if guided by reason and only reason: Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language – language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.23

Second, a critical focus of amodernism is on the nature of communication, its structure and processes (as opposed to enacting its operative functions). Rejecting a transmission model of message sending and receiving, amodernism raises questions concerning the functional nature of linear processes of

19 As quoted in David Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012): 142. 20 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: The Easton P, 1934): 55. 21 Butler, Erewhon, 78. 22 Butler, Erewhon, 155. 23 Butler, Erewhon, 155.

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communication and their grounding in instrumental values. With its base in linguistic theory, this is a shift to seeing language as matter. A shift from the semantic content of the words to their physical properties, their shapes and sounds, simultaneously destructive and creative, a critique of systems and a celebration of a new set of potentials for language freed from the mundane task of meaning. The Futurists, both Russian and Italian, sought means to make language more immediate and rejected both meditative functions of language as well as its inherent temporality. Russian Futurist works by Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexi Kruchenyckh, two of the main proponents of the new poetical form Zaum, pushed language into new areas of the aural and the oral, a language of sound. For the Italian Futurists, language experimentation, such as the Parole in Libertà, or Words in Freedom in Fillipo Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, or Giacomo Balla’s “Treisi [. . .] Trelno,” explored the realms of visual words and of the performative nature of language. In all cases, language is radicalized to the extent that it no longer serves normalized functions of control and/or unification. Cultural expression, “art,” becomes both more opaque and more open-ended; opaque in that it is shaped by shifting contextual influences, particularly socio-cultural ones, and open-ended in that the systems often used reflect a world of potentials, have no singular meaning output, and have built-in variability due to requisite viewer/receiver participation. The Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers thought that Stephane Mallarmé set the basis for the separation of the symbolic and communicative functions of language. In 1887, Mallarmé wrote the poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance); over twenty pages long, the words and phrases are laid out visually and structurally making use of blank spaces, different fonts and letter sizes. What is accomplished in this work, as in many other forms of concrete poetry, is a kind of de-veiling of language “transparency” and a placement of emphasis on the physicality of the materials of language, the text itself. Broodthaers himself then reshaped the poem further, highlighting the deconstruction of language by utilizing black bars or lines to replace the words in the original poem. By removing the “essence” of the words, that is, their nature/function as a signifier and signified, Broodthaers converts the text into an object or image, thereby both canceling and reinventing language. Throughout his short twelve years of work as a visual artist (he died in 1976), Broodthaers uses language to materialize semantic contradictions, raise questions about the nature of legibility and provoke a whole set of new possibilities of text-image relations. In 1964, his first “official” work as a visual artist consisted of taking a number of unsold copies of his last volume of poetry Pense-bête (Memory-Aid) into a sculptural object by partially embedding them in a sloppy pile of plaster and other materials, which can be

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seen as a self-criticism of both his “failed” work as a poet and his new work in the visual arts, transforming the words in the work into something preserved but unreadable. In Cercle de Moules (1966), he glued mussel shells onto a sixtythree inch diameter disk, connected to Belgium’s national identity, as well as to the slippages of language, with moules being translatable as both a shellfish (feminine) and as mold (masculine). Third, amodernism seeks an engagement with a multiplicity of systems or forms of meaning and the devaluation of specific meaning. This in turn leads to an acceptance of uncertainty, an employment of contradiction and the illogical as expressive tools, a recognition of ambiguity as a necessity of knowledge, and a celebration of paradoxical situations. Some of the most recognizable hallmarks of amodernism are self-contradictory and or self-canceling actions and statements and even illegibility: Duchamp supposedly retires from art-making and for two decades he secretly works on his final masterwork, Étant donnés (discovered only after his death); Jarry’s Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions and arbitrary exceptions, is founded on convolution and contradiction: “reality is never as it is, but always as if it is.”24 Poet Jackson Mac Low writes a series of poems in homage to Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, published in 1994 under the Merzgedichte in Memorium Kurt Schwitters, which many sympathetic readers found incomprehensible (one critic states that he is only finally able to read it after a decade of not really reading it).25 Fluxus positioned itself for years as anti-commercial, but it designed and produced hundreds of publications, multiples, and other items for sale, and even went on to develop its own distribution system and sales gallery; John Cage gave a Lecture on Nothingness, in which he states, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”26 These and other such moments of paradox in amodernism are intentional instants of arrest, in which the fissures in our rationalized worldviews grow larger. As paradoxes force us to reconsider our beliefs and assumptions, they give us a valuable insight that language, as well as ordinary perceptions and experiences, is shaped and limited by cultural or personal norms of simplification. Under the domination of habit and socio-cultural patterns of behavior, the arts as an expressive language never live up to their potentials, but the use of paradox, contradiction,

24 Christian Bok, Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001): 8. 25 Tyrus Miller, Singular Examples Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2009): 94. 26 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” Silence (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1994): 109.

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confusion, and even negation can reveal a realm of experience that lies beyond the given. Fourth, amodernism supports a denial of historicity, whether it is in regards to social, cultural or political change and distrust in moral and ethical arguments for determining value-based historical models or frames. Clearly following from the three prior points, the notion that there might exist some form of historical authenticity, or knowable determining facts, is not only unlikely but also impossible in any form other than as socio-cultural and even scientific fantasies. In this rejection of historical frames, and in the approach taken in this essay, there are several significant elements. First, there is no significant value in seeking to distinguish between the micro and macro levels of considerations; they all have equivalent standing in the fluidity of the assemblage. Second, historical constructions are never simple but complex; the constructed historical moment, the “whole,” is nonetheless made of heterogeneous independent parts. Third, the elements of the whole express properties qualitatively divergent from the given properties of the isolated, or individual parts and their emergent properties are often what causes us to think we see an entity or a whole where there is really only a shifting web or network of associations and interconnections. History as a social science has come to be seen, like science itself, as a discipline that seeks to gain an understanding not based in the vagaries of human actions, desires, and conceptions, but one that can be ontologically independent from such elements and thus quantifiable, deterministic, and knowable. Although many aspects of amodernism problematize the nature of history, particularly its functions to normalize or disempower oppositional voices, it was the participants in the Situationist International that most acutely feared the process of history, which would, they believed, act as a kind of counterrevolutionary force of a historical recuperation of their revolution. Guy-Ernest Debord and Asger Jorn created a book titled Memoires (published in 1959 but assembled between 1957 and 1958) that covers the Letterist International and the formation of Situationist International (hereafter SI). As the title suggests, the book is about memories, so it does not stress the actualities of events, but, rather, how people recalled what had occurred. What is key here, both on a theoretical level and on the level of direct personal experience, is that the relation between past and present is altered, to become one of coexistence, simultaneity, and fragmentation rather than succession or as a linear progression. The book, with its loose scrapbook-like structure of fragments drawn from daily life, newspapers, maps, cartoons, old etchings, and advertisements intermingled with photos of friends and compatriots, marked by splashes, drips, and blotches of color, presents three key moments in the formation of SI. It is clear that this is not a traditional historical narrative but a ragged gesture of incidents, moments,

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and suggested actions, both elucidating and obscuring the events it purports to recall. For Debord, “the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably incomplete.”27 Thus, the history that we are given is a fluid one, clearly suspicious of conventional histories but not unaware of their power, an attempt to construct a counter-form of experience. This book is to be “read” in the way that SI suggests one experiences the history of a place, to wander, to get lost and then find oneself, or to dérive (an unplanned journey through an urban environment or landscape). Debord defines the dérive as a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances; [in] a dérive one drop[s] [. . .] their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.28

In the case of Memoires, it can be seen as a chronological, event-based terrain that one can drift through thereby gaining an alternative view of a moment in time. What we are given underscores a primary concern of amodernism, that reality, or our experience of the work that we hold as “reality” can never be fully summarized.

Arts, discursivity, and value: Four areas of emphasis In general, amodernism is engaged in questioning and disrupting discursive practices; for if, as Michel Foucault states, these processes are the means through which dominant notions of reality come into being,29 then, in the amodernist view, they must be challenged and in most cases undermined or even destroyed. It is not so much discursivity itself that is the problem for amodernist thinkers, but that its function is one that comes to normalize specific behaviors over others and create normative codes of meaning and rules guiding

27 Guy-Ernest Debord, “Theory of the Derive,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006): 55–56. 28 Debord, “Theory of the Derive,” 55–56. 29 For more information on this, see Penny Powers, “The Philosophical Foundations of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis,” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 1.2 (2007): 18–34.

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social actions that are problematic as they become institutionalized. One of the fundamental elements of amodernism is its shifting relationship to the arts as a value system, or at least as reflective of the values of the social and political structures of a given time period. At first, amodernism seems to hold a position similar to that of the avant-garde, in that it questions both the nature and definitions of art, holding itself in opposition to current art forms and questioning both the materials and even the materiality of art. But, with a closer examination, the situation is more complex. Some of this comes from the fact that elements of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde are part of amodernism, yet, at the same time, they are not one and the same. In amodernism there is no concern for contradiction, given that it is seen as part of the “natural world.” In his pamphlet Chance Imagery, George Brecht commented on this in relation to Dada and quoted Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia’s statement of 1949: The ability of the unconscious to reconcile opposites is nowhere so evident as in Dada, for within a periphery of nonsense the ridiculous and the profound were made to evince each other: “Dada wished to destroy the reasonable frauds of men and recover the natural, unreasonable order. Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense. [. . .] Dada like nature is without meaning.”30

It is for this reason that, if we are to consider the relationship of art to values and, specifically, in terms of positives and negatives, there are at least four general sets of interconnected relationships that we can identify as part of amodernism. These four are areas of emphasis that can and do slip, overlap, and interpenetrate at the edges between one and the other. If we adapt and apply Henri Bergson’s notion of becoming to rethinking the underlying implications, we can see a new dynamic of world-making in our old system of opposites. In Bergson, duration is difference, for becoming is an aspect of a system that only emerges in duration; it is that which both makes as well as deconstructs and ultimately that which can bring forth the new.31 The first set is Art is a Positive and Amodernism is a Negative. Amodernism is a negative or nihilistic rejection of the positive notions of art, such as progress, beauty, and even transcendence. This form is closely aligned with traditional ideas and aesthetics of art, such as academic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also certain

30 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, “Some Memories of Pre-dada: Picabia and Duchamp” [1949], in Chance Imagery, ed. George Brecht (New York: Something Else P, 1966): 9 31 For a deeper exploration of Bergson and the relation between the concepts of becoming and difference, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming,” Parallax 11.2 (2005): 4–13.

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elements of high modern art, such as aspects of Fauvism and Cubism. Rejecting both the aggressive stance of the Futurists and the nihilistic stance of Dada, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner proclaimed in their Realist Manifesto of 1920 that a new potential of art exists in plastic forms of space: Today we proclaim our words to you people. In the squares and on the streets we are placing our work convinced that art must not remain a sanctuary for the idle, a consolation for the weary and a justification for the lazy. Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts [. . .] at the beach, at the table, at work, at rest, at play; on working days and holidays [. . .] at home and on the road [. . .] in order that the flame to live should not extinguish in mankind.32

The second set of interconnected relationships is Amodernism is a Positive and Art is a Negative. Art is a negative given its limitations/ traditions; it is a decadent and self-centered activity that was seen as increasingly disconnected from the realities of life and simultaneously culpable, given its connections with the failing social and political systems, whether it be the 1890s, 1910s, or 1950s. The anti-artworks of the Dadaists, Fluxus, or the Situationists all seek to both show the failings of society and the culpability of art. Tristan Tzara, in his Dada Manifesto of 1918, proclaimed: Sensibility is not constructed on the basis of a word; all constructions converge on perfection which is boring, the stagnant idea of a gilded swamp, a relative human product. A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual by serving him the cakes of sacred aureoles or the sweets of a vaulted race through the atmospheres.33

As opposed to old negative forms of art, amodernism recuperates and breathes new life into art through its critiques, ultimately correcting the narrowing tendencies of modern art with a broadening of aesthetic potentials. The third set is Amodernism is Positive and Art is a Positive – amodernism is ultimately a positive contribution to the idea or art as it expands both the materials of art and the methods and process through which art is produced. This in turn feeds back into the development of high modernism. Without rejecting art in its entirety, amodernism transforms the past works into new forms alive with current sensibilities. In the Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry (1942), Isidore Isou writes that

32 Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, “Realist Manifesto” [1920], reproduced in Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephan Bann (New York: Viking P, 1974): 10. 33 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” reproduced in Lucy Lippard, Dadas on Art (Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Publishing, 1971): 15.

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The role of the poet is to advance towards subversive sources. The obligation of the poet is to advance into the black and burdened depths of the unknown. The craft of the poet is to open one more treasure-room door for the common man.34

However, this is not a negative process of destruction or creation of anti-art but a new form of positive creations, for Letterism does not mean destroying words for other words [. . .] But it does mean TAKING ALL LETTERS AS A WHOLE; UNFOLDING BEFORE DAZZLED SPECTATORS MARVELS CREATED FROM LETTERS (DEBRIS FORM THE DESTRUCTION; CREATING AN ARCHITECTURE OF LETTRIC RHYTHMS; ACCUMULATING FLUCTUATING LETTERS IN A PRECISE FRAME; ELABORATING SPLENDIDLY THE CUSTOMARY COOLING; COAGULATING THE CRUMBS OF LETTERS INTO A REAL MEAL.35

The fourth and last set is Amodernism is Negative and Art is Negative. Amodernism does not look at art as a practice in need of realignment, or something to be salvaged, by applying new modes or practices. Art is for the amodernists intrinsically flawed, built on a foundation of lies and untruths, substantiated through dehumanizing and morally questionable systems that mirror and perpetuate their own bankrupt social or political structures and systems. Amodernists, from Dada through Fluxus and Situationism, are seeking to eradicate art altogether. No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.36

In order for the place held by art to become useful or significant again, both the foundational beliefs that held art in place and art itself must be undermined and ultimately destroyed. The strategic goal is what might be thought of as a negative one, the destruction of art, but this was seen as a prerequisite for its transformation into something better, something else. What was this other? Traditionally, historians have seen the means of amodernism, whether it be collage, montage or assemblage; readymades, appropriated junk, and found sounds; aleatoric processes; events and performances as methods and tools used to challenge existing art and ultimately make new art forms possible.

34 Isidore Isou, “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry” (1942), 391.org (acc. 4 November 2017). 35 Isou, “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry.” 36 Louis Aragon, “Manifesto of the Dada Movement” [1920], reproduced in The Dada Reader, ed. Dawn Ades (London: Tate, 2006): 18.

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I would argue that something else was going on; these were not tools or processes to make art. They were attempts to avoid the definitive, disrupt the procedural, and, ultimately, to not make art but to act creatively.

Amodernism, avant-garde, and neo-avant garde Amodernist artists operating in the late 1950s through the early 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “neo-avant-garde,” have been argued to be, by Peter Burger and others, failures, in that they largely represented a repetition of the works, achievements, and projects of the historical avant-garde. However, this point fails to hold upon closer inspection, for most of the artists associated with the term neo-avant-garde are not repetitions but are significantly different. Even on the most crucial point of this debate, the avant-gardist desire to merge art with life, and the neo-avant-garde’s adoption of this same motto, it is not an act of repetition to be judged by its successes or failures, but a part of an ongoing process that must be constantly repositioned and renewed. Just as some authors have suggested, projecting certain artists/thinkers such as Alfred Jarry, Henry Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche forward as kinds of “proto-postmodernists,”37 I am similarly arguing for a disregard for linear chronologies. However, I am taking one step further and arguing for a disregard for origin myths, such as who discovered what first, suggesting that we view our present and past as a series of diffuse ellipses that never fully repeats but always retains and/or refers to that which proceeded it. This is not a Nietzchean eternal recurrence but a more simple suggestion that there are patterns, elements, or approaches that result from various aspects of human cognition, behaviors, and instincts, an awareness of the power of traditions that are given elements of difference by the nature of any given point in time and the specific factors of that moment. One of the failings of the notion of the avant-garde from its very inception is to see its locus as being one of a chronological position: as being ahead of its own time. This notion locks the avantgarde into a moment of disconnect and ultimately disregard. For being ahead of its time, the avant-garde can never be understood or given a place in its own time. Accepting a position of contemporaneous disempowerment, in lieu of a potential of future recognition, is the fate of the traditionally conceived avant-

37 Joost Haan, “Postmodern Fiction, Author and Biography: The Avant-Garde Case of Alfred Jarry” (BA thesis, 2015), Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, (acc. 4 November 2017).

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garde. What seeing various elements of the avant-garde as part of amodernism does is shift its position from being bound in this linear view of history to one that is outside of it, and thus free to move from present to past, and then to future. In this way, time is not a measurement but aspects of a political and philosophical stance that one manipulates to achieve desired ends. It should be noted that, most often, the avant-garde and its correlatives in amodernism are seen as predominantly holding the fourth position, and thus the designation of their work as anti-art, but, in reality, it is much more complex than that. In amodernism’s four positions, or, better to not call them positions but instead to recognize their interconnectedness and their function as operands and see them in toto, the four-part system folds, so that opposites become conjoined and even merge edge-to-edge, or even more fully into a range of potential hybrids. They form a loop or Mobius strip, in which one shifts from one position to another, through an ever-changing set of correlatives, allowing for any number of sets of variations of negative-negative, negative-positive, positive-negative and positive-positive to come about. This set of relations and their interconnections are similar to that envisioned by Deluze in his concept of the fold, which suggests infinite connectivity, waves, and intertwinings and operates on the level of contingency, multiplicity, complexity, and becoming. For if, as is the case in amodernism, there is an acceptance of contradictions, there is no desire for a singularity over a multiplicity and no need for a set of cognitive methods that are based in a methodology, which aims to master and control nature, then all potentials become situationally possible. The genius becomes the fool and vice versa; the thing of value becomes inconsequential and vice versa. As Tristan Tzara states: Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it.38

The post-Enlightenment condition of art is one of multiplicities. To appropriate an idea of Henry Bergson’s: “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content.”39 Just as Deleuze has interpreted Bergsonism as an alternative to phenomenological thought, so has amodernism adopted a position taken from Bergson that is

38 Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” 17. 39 Henry Bergson, Time and Free Will (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001): 122.

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engaged in life itself, recognizing difference and contradiction as elements of life.40 It must be remembered that the groups and movements described as part of the avant-garde and neo-avant garde were never monoliths or even unified entities. This lack of stability is one of their very defining aspects. Never at any one moment did any of these groups ever fully embody what we have come to see them as historically containing/possessing. In fact, most of the groups and individuals, even the Surrealists, were opposed to sets of unchanging principles, seeking instead fluidity and even opportunistically employing contradiction as means to attempt to realize non-hierarchical heterogeneity, which was believed to be a base element itself and thus an aim of amodernist creative acts. Underlying most amodernist work/activities, whether they are publications, objects, music or performances, is a shift from art-based in notions of material production to one that is a conceptual act of designation (Arthur Danto’s is of artistic identification). The realization that the fundamental creative act is separate from any physical production is, of course, the fundamental understanding on which the Duchampian concept of the readymade becomes possible. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are less a call to sublate art to life than they are a provocation to question the nature of art. In Apropos of Readymades (1961), Duchamp refers to their initial use and function: “IT WAS AROUND THAT TIME THAT THE WORD READYMADE CAME TO MIND TO DESIGNATE THIS FORM OF MANIFESTATION.”41 Of particular interest is Duchamp’s use of the word manifestation. A manifestation is “an event, action, or object that clearly shows or embodies something, especially a theory or an abstract idea.”42 Duchamp does not say whether what is shown is art or not, for such a yes/art or no/not art answer would not lead to any form of conceptual engagement or discussion. In fact, he states the importance of the paradoxical nature of this relationship, saying he wanted to “TO EXPOSE THE BASIC ANTINOMY BETWEEN ART AND READYMADES.”43 Duchamp’s statement tells us that his functional intent is the presentation of a theory or abstract idea, and that he is interested in a relationship between the form and the idea, its embodiment.

40 For more on Deluze and Bergson see Elizabeth Grosz, “Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming,” Parallax 11.2 (2005): 4–13. 41 Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of Readymades” [1961], Monoskop (acc. 10 December 2017) 42 “Manifestation,” English Oxford Living Dictionaries (acc. 27 September 2017). 43 Duchamp, “Apropos of Readymades.”

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Amodernism and embodied practices Although Duchamp’s exploration of embodiment does not go much beyond the point of association in the readymade, it does set in motion an idea that many artists associated with amodernism. Embodiment becomes a primary feature of amodernism, as artists move from modes of making/production to those based in doing/action, as well as a central means of creative communal expression. Edmund Husserl argued that embodied experience is conjoined to the world as a communal nodal point of expressive gestures, significant situations, and practical activities. He additionally stressed that it is our recognition of embodied persons and, by extension, the immediacy of our intersubjectivity that is the foundation of community.44 So, as amodernist artists move increasingly into embodied practices, their work as, or in collectives and communities becomes increasingly evident. As with any amodernist practice, there are significant contradictions to this notion of collectivity with individuals, such as Duchamp, Cage, Breton, Higgins, Debord, and others, who tend to dominate our considerations as both members of groups and as individuals themselves. However, there is a general tendency of amodernist artists to engage in collective activities: Fluxus often referred to itself as collective, and many of their later activities (1970–1978) emphasized intersubjective experiences through group participatory events, such as their various food events; SI emphasized urban and collective experiences, with the aim to alter the social structures in an emancipatory social (group) process. Most of the groups that can be associated with amodernism presented their philosophies through collectively signed manifestos and collective exhibitions or performances. The act of embodiment in amodernism is part of the process that Dick Higgins labeled exemplativism. Exemplativist work was simply a work in which the form epitomizes at least a part of what it describes. A good example of exemplativist art is Higgins’ own graphic essay, The Five Traditions of Art History. Although he calls it an essay, it is more of a graphic poster; printed on a 17x24 page, it is a large star with text elements in each arm of the star, listing the five traditions (Mimetic Art, Pragmatic Art, Expressive Art, Objective Art, and Exemplificative Art). Rather than a description or argument, this work was intended as an exemplativist work, a work in which the form, in this case a graphic star, epitomizes at least a part of what it describes: the five traditions of the history of art, shaping them into the five arms of the star as a working

44 Elizabeth A. Behnke, Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology of Embodiment,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (acc. 22 February 2018).

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model. The aim of exemplativist art was, for Higgins, to indicate possibilities, without being overly proscriptive or evaluative. As seen in most Fluxus works, as well as the works of many others that can be affiliated with amodernism, the form of presentation and the specifics used are functional rather than demonstrable. For Higgins, the nature of exemplativist work and, by extension, much amodernist work is to neither defend nor describe in detail but to suggest and infer. Not only was embodiment explored in and through the materiality of things and artifacts, but, more significantly, it expanded to include the body itself and directions, such as interactivity, performance, authorship, identity, spectatorship, and gender. In this, Higgins can be seen as connected to Deleuze, who sees art both present in a physical sense and fundamentally concerned with experience; art is less involved in knowledge and making sense of the world than it is about experience, pushing ourselves into new realms of what can be experienced, and utilizing the body as a primary means of being or becoming in the world. To follow this line of consideration, many amodernist artists and works explored the body in a double sense: that of embodied materials, things and that of the embodied experience, whether it be artist or audience. I will even go one step further and propose that amodernism offers a fundamentally unique stance through its acceptance of contradictions. Traditionally, embodiment has been suggested to be one of a set of opposites that come and go through the history of art; on the one hand, artworks are seen as disembodied visual codes but, on the other hand, also as embodied experience. In Fluxus works, as in other amodernist works that use instructional scores, you find both of these modes in full operation. It is no coincidence that instructional scores come to have a dominant role in twentieth-century performative works, given their nature and function. The most direct way to see this comprehension of disembodied visual codes into embodied experience is to consider the duality of such instructional pieces. First, they are textual indicators, or scores, that suggest a multiplicity of visual and auditory operational code, and, second, there is the performance of these scores in which the potential of the score is embodied in either the actions of the performance, the audience, or both. In the 1950s through 1970s, much was made of the necessity of not performing, nor playing a part, but instead doing, being or living what was to be done, being in a lived body. In his 1986 essay “Art Which Can’t Be Art,” Alan Kaprow states: I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday

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life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it.45

The body is more than an object or flesh and bones, but the living, sentient, purposive, perceptive intelligent body through which one perceives and comes to know the world. Many, if not most, amodernist works can be said to operate on the level of actions or engagements that explore performativity and the body. Connecting these two aspects makes clear that amodernist artists make use of the body in order to model the use of bodily practices to enhance experience in daily life and thus not make art. Kaprow states: “the relationship of the act of toothbrushing to recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.”46More significant than a simple association of body and experience, amodernist works offer a hybridization of categories, materials, and processes in which the biological body is used, to offer fundamental challenges to thinking and acting. In reviewing a body of amodernist works in toto, they present a concept of intermediality as an integration of physical processes and thoughts, locating intermediality in/as the body at the intersections situated in between the performers, the observers, and the confluence of materials involved at a particular moment in time. The body becomes an intermedial playground and should be conceived of as a space where the boundaries soften, and we are in-between; and within a mixing of space, media, and realities, the event/work provides a staging space for attentiveness. If we think about the body’s place in “knowing,” what becomes clear is that in many ways bodily experiences are central in structuring consciousness. The body’s significance in non-linguistic knowledge is essential; it plays an essential role in both establishing non-discursive experiences as well as connecting but offsetting discursive and non-discursive practices.

Doing nothing: Not a conclusion In his influential text Teaching and Learning as a Performance Art, Fluxus artist Robert Filliou writes what might be seen as a manifesto for a new form of creativity:

45 Alan Kaprow, “Art Which Can’t Be Art” [1986], UbuWeb (acc. 28 September 2017). 46 Kaprow, “Art Which Can’t Be Art.”

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GOOD-FOR-NOTHING – GOOD AT EVERYTHING I create because I know how. I know how good-for-nothing I am, that is Art as communication is the contact between the good-for-nothing in one and the good-for-nothing in others.47 We are seemingly offered no insight, no escape, and no values; good-fornothingness seems to dominate all, but that is only if we do not look deeper into what is being presented and see that this is not a nihilistic abandonment but a recasting of uselessness as a productive value. What is being presented is an attack on a system of worth established through instrumental determinants, or one’s usefulness. Rejecting such measures sets in motion a non-hierarchical definition for creative processes, one of egalitarian ethics that offers a form of equivalency that opens the process of communication to all.48 Filliou ends the above statement by “concluding:” “The world of creation being the good for nothing world, it belongs to anyone with creativeness, that is to say anyone claiming his natural birth gift: good-for-nothingness.”49 Thus, by rejecting normative cultural values, we are able to take possession of our failures, our lack of value, accept our good-for-nothingness and come to understand that such an acceptance is a means by which we begin to become creative. On February 8th, 1965 at the Café au Go-Go in New York City, Robert Filliou sat cross-legged on the stage, motionless and silent, performing his self-described action poem LE FILLIOU IDEAL, the score for which is: Not deciding Not choosing Not wanting Not owning Aware of self Wide awake SITTING QUIETLY DOING NOTHING50

47 Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as a Performance Art (Cologne: Edition Kasper Koenig, 1970): 79. 48 Laurel Frederickson, “The Artist as Guide to Not Knowing: Robert Filliou’s Portraits NotMade” (2012), DB16 (acc. 14 October 2017). 49 Filliou, Teaching and Learning, 79. 50 Filliou, Teaching and Learning, 78.

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There are two keys in understanding this piece, and as a broad blanket inclusion, understanding the nature and intent of much of amodernism. First, although there is a repetitive use of not that draws our attention to an act of negation, what is much more significant are the two simple lines, “Aware of self, Wide awake,” as a call to attentiveness and a way of knowing that does not rely on cognition. Second is that very act of seeking an alternative way of experiencing the world. Filliou had studied Zen, and thus, to understand a more general implication of this work, it is helpful to draw a connection between this piece, and in fact much of his other work, and the concept of the Koan. The Zen Koan, like Filliou’s piece, is a kind of riddle, the intent of which is to shake one’s mind out of their ordinary thought patterns, creating nonrational connections in an attempt to produce a different state of mind. One such example, similar to what Filliou is attempting to do, is the story of a Zen master talking to a monk and who asks the following question: “If you call this a stick, you affirm; if you call it not a stick, you negate. Beyond affirmation and negation what would you call it?”51 What I have in part attempted to do in this essay is to take the basic idea that there is not a stable ontology for the social world and apply it to a consideration of the history of art. I have argued that what I have described as amodernism is an assemblage of complex configurations, emphasizing fluidity, multiplicity, interconnectedness, simultaneity, and even convolution and contradiction. These should not be seen as elements to be removed from our considerations of history but as elements to be recognized as part of its, and life’s, very nature. To some, it seems difficult to determine if Deleuze’s notion of assemblage has value, given its non-analytic nature with many qualities that remain seemingly elusive and suggestive. This is in part true, but what is gained is of great value: a fluidity and a non-chronological way of viewing art history and the evolution of the ideas central to its formations. Rather than seeing history as an inextricable, bound in place, combination of people, objects, places, and times, an approach such as I take in this essay allows for a contingent consideration of the parts (ideas, people, objects), where one idea, part, can be extracted from “its place in history” and inserted into another.52 From the violent and macabre acts of Maldoror, to the Sintesi of the Futurists and the manifestos of the Dadaists and Surrealists, through the event scores of Fluxus and text/ image, found in Situationism, punk, and other counter-culture zines of the 1970s 51 Tai-hui, qtd. in Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, ed. William Barrett (New York: Doubleday, 1996): 168. 52 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006): 10–11.

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and 1980s, there exists an attempt to establish a footing for communication that is human-centered but external to the domain of the mind. Contradiction, doubt, ambiguity are here conjoined with illogical or nonsensical elements, and we are given works that seemingly offer no insight, no escape, and no values. But, this is both the point of the work and the answer to what, if anything, is to be found.

Craig J. Saper

Automatic Writing: From Networked Art to Cyberwarfare Abstract: Ray Johnson’s artworks called “on-sendings” and other examples from the artists associated with Fluxus and Letterism, now serve as prototypes for cyberwarfare. The on-sendings’ sociopoetics include participants’ desire for involvement in a network, actions in sending on incomplete artworks, and bemusement at the content. Reading contemporary cyber-manipulation, or cyberipulation (that occurs simply by sending on memes, tweets, and snippets), in terms of the experimental and avant-garde arts of the twentieth century may prove uncannily instructive on how these manipulative structures operate. This type of analysis starts with Yuriko Saito’s application of aesthetic interpretations, usually confined to artworks, to broader realms and everyday life outside of museums, galleries, and studios. To appreciate how both on-sendings and bots manipulate participants, as the crucial aspect of the messages, this essay cites theories of gift exchange, including those by George Bataille and Jacques Derrida, theories of desire and identification from Victor Tausk to Jacques Lacan, and what this author calls sociopoetics (that builds on the work of artist-theorists such as Dick Higgins, Martha Rosler, John Heartfield, Barbara Kruger, Owen F. Smith, and others). The avant-garde and experimental artists dreamed of changing hearts and minds using automatism, but they would shudder to realize that cyberripulators used their sociopoetics.

From artist’s on-sendings to psy-ops bots In a time of the psychological operations’ bots influencing masses of citizens especially in the social-media inundated United States, the experimental and avantgarde arts of the twentieth century may prove uncannily instructive on how these new structures operate. Instead of looking exclusively at social psychological studies, which emphasize individual responses, one needs also to look at what my study of Networked Art called sociopoetics,1 (a term I define more completely below), or what Joseph Beuys called “social plastic art,” to more fully understand how networked psychological operations work as influencing machines in wide swaths of the population. Beuys argued that “[e]verything from the simplest

1 Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-003

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tearing of a piece of a paper to the total changeover of human society could be illustrated.”2 His work on the social, economic, and severe ecological problems of Ruhr-Gebiet in Germany included ecological initiatives “developed within the logic of art.”3 With these art-as-social practices in mind, it makes sense to use what Yuriko Saito calls “everyday aesthetics” to study processes that might help us understand the contemporary manipulative virality of “shares” and the spread of memes whose truth value resides solely in their velocity and reach.4 Within the context of my studies of international experimental and avant-garde practices, this essay traces experiments in networked art that now look like a surprisingly prescient model of the psychological manipulations in the use of viral bots. To understand them in the context of Saito’s “everyday aesthetics” allows us to use earlier art projects to illuminate the working of these new practices and to understand the earlier artworks’ boundary-crossing between manipulative interference in decision-making and frivolous artstunts. The term “sociopoetic” describes the use of social situations or networks as a canvas. However, it does not define my methodology here. Instead, the term describes the works under discussion: on-sendings or virality as an aesthetic strategy. My theoretical approach studies how situations function poetically (or sociopoetically). Although I do present contextual information (the art history, the participants in these projects, and the politics of the time) as entangled in the work, my focus remains on how these works manipulate and “score” situations. In much of the artworks I analyze, the artists “sought to project intimacy onto otherwise impersonal systems.”5 One might argue that this essay seeks to do the same for the use of bots, that depend on coding, systems, and other impersonal systems, but that nonetheless produce an intimacy and a shared laugh, sentiment, or a contingent truth. This essay does not exactly demythologize the power of Ray Johnson’s “On-Sendings,” or even psy-ops use of bots, but, instead, seeks to displace the frame to focus on the sociopoetic dimension of what we previously saw only as a mechanism of manipulation. Today there is a third meaning that recovers the aesthetic and absolutely particular

2 Joseph Beuys, “Discussion with Peter Monnig,” Daily Edition (New York: Daily Edition, 1981): n. pag. 3 Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Joseph Beuys to Jacques Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984): 240. See also Gotz Adriani, Winifred Konnetz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys: Life and Works, trans. Patricia Lech (Woodbury, NY: Barrons, 1979). 4 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). 5 Saper, Networked Art, 24.

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pleasures – what Roland Barthes calls the punctum – of the systems, mechanisms, and tests that we used to navigate our identity formation.6 To trace the progression of practices usually considered as art only to the of use of surprisingly similar cyber-manipulation of an individual’s sense of political identifications requires a combination of theories and histories including the history of Ray Johnson and his works, theories of psychic manipulation borrowed from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, and the cultural studies of fans and celebrities, all wrapped up with the Surrealist paranoid-critical method. Again, it might seem odd to study art outside of art history as a demonstration of political and spy-craft practices, but that was the intention of the avantgarde (an advance guard warning about future practices). So, for example, the German Dadaists used photomontage in the 1920s and 1930s to expose the political contradictions. With the rise of the Nazis, John Heartfield focused on the contradictions of the fascist ideology by making visual puns. In one famous photomontage, that appeared in the extremely popular and radical Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (usually known as AIZ), [translated as Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper], Heartfield’s 1932 cover is titled Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses: Kleiner Mann bittet um große Gaben with Hitler’s infamous motto: “Millionen stehen hinter mir!” (Translated: The Meaning Behind the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Donations. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!). The photomontage combines Hitler with his palm facing up in a salute to an imagined crowd; behind and above him looms a headless figure of a giant hefty man in a business suit with millions of German Marks in paper money. The image used aesthetic graffiti on the audience’s thoughts so that when they heard the slogan, and saw Hitler’s salute, they would imagine this photomontage giving new meaning to that phrase. They would see the capitalist funders behind Hitler’s rise. Again, the avant-garde used art strategies outside of the artworld and for purely political purposes signaling a warning clarion call to resist, refuse, and reject fascism. That said, to be an advance guard does not, in any way, depend on the intention of the artists involved, but on future analyses that wrest control of art away from the museumfication and toward a way to understand our future world in prescient art projects. One case in point is Ray Johnson’s “OnSendings.”

6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982): 146.

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Ray Johnson’s on-sendings and the proto-type to mindless repeatings The mythic art-world reputation of the artist Ray Johnson (who mail artists sometimes referred to by his moniker Sugar Dada), founded the New York Correspondence School (NYCS). In 1970, Marcia Tucker staged an exhibition on the NYCS at the Whitney Museum that included work from a hundred and six people, but none of Johnson’s own work, because he used only work sent to him rather than any of his own work. He put himself in the position of what Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of identity formation calls a structuring absence, something missing that nonetheless determines the affect and meaning of, in this case, an identity, scene, and situation. Although he announced the death of the NYCS in April 1973 by sending a letter to the obituaries department of The New York Times, he soon invented Buddha University as a replacement (reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s early mail-art series The University of AvantGarde Hinduism).7 Playing on his tendency to drop people from his list of participants, Johnson created a rubber stamp that read: “Ray Johnson has been dropped.” This stamp, and the appearance of rubber stamps of Johnson’s head throughout the mail-art networks, further fueled the star frenzy. The mail artist Honoria Starbuck mentions a project in which she placed images of herself and other mail artists in a picture of a tub. The caption reads: “taking a bath with Ray Johnson.”8 In his efforts to become invisible in the art markets, Johnson became a world-famous icon and name brand. He was so well known as a “name” rather than as a personality that, in 1973, he was mistakenly included in a biographical dictionary of Afro-American artists. He had finally reached the status

7 Nam June Paik is best known as a founder of video art experiments and as a core participant in Fluxus. His works also include mail art and other early efforts to create networked artworks. His later works connected more completely to the ideas of a massively networked global media scape. For more on Monthly Review of the University of Avant-Garde Hinduism see the entry 127. Nam June Paik. Monthly Review of the University of Avant-Garde Hinduism. Fluxus Edition, Cologne-Muelheim, West Germany, ca. April 30, 1963. Rubber-stamped envelope with blueprint positive label, containing one pfennig coin (missing), 11.2 x 16 cm., in Fluxus; selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, ed. Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988): 352. See also the biographical blurb on Paik: “In 1961 he founded the University of Avant-Garde Hinduism, of which he was the only member and for which he published a monthly review. The same year he met George Maciunas, through whom he became drawn into the Fluxus group, remaining associated with it throughout its existence.” 8 Honoria Starbuck, “Introducing Mail Art: A Karen Elliot Interview with Crackerjack Kid and Honoria,” Postmodern Culture 3.2 (1993).

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of Woody Allen’s character Zelig, who uncontrollably and unconsciously transformed his appearance and personality, depending on the situation in which he found himself. Johnson had staged performances at the Fluxus AG Gallery on “Nothing” instead of staging “Happenings.” As Owen F. Smith explains: Among the humorous performances at the AG Gallery was Ray Johnson’s “Nothing.” When the audience members arrived at the gallery, they first encountered the darkened stairway up to the second-floor gallery space. If they tried to mount the stairs, they would discover that Johnson had placed loose pieces of wooden doweling on the stair treads to impede the ascent. Finally, if they managed to make it up the stairs, they found the gallery door locked and nothing in the gallery.9

As one perverse twist on his highlighting of a fan’s logic, Johnson would often include prints of potato mashers in his work playing on that word’s other slang meaning: “a man who annoys women not acquainted with him, by attempting familiarities.” Fans are the ultimate mashers. Johnson initiated a practice called “on-sending” which involved sending an incomplete or unfinished artwork to another artist, critic, or even a stranger, who, in turn, helped to complete the work by making some additions and then sending it on to another participant in the network. For example, Johnson would mail a participant a set of nearly identical doodle-like line drawings of a bunny-head character. These nearly identical hand-drawn bunny-headed representations of famous people, each with a caption of their name, suggested that one could substitute any head as long as famous or personally significant names were included. The characteristic look of these bunny heads also suggested that portraiture represented an artist’s trademark as much, if not more than the subjects painted. Because these portraits are nearly identical, his name-dropping stands out. The readers inevitably associate the name under the picture with the identical image; they care about the big “names” even as they laugh at the absurdity of that interest considering the endless serial repetition. And, the participants are asked to “send to” with a name and address included. When you look at a series of these images and captions, or you are asked to function as the middle relay to send it on you laugh only if you recognize your own investment in this game. Otherwise, you simply discard the junk mail, fail to subscribe to the on-sendings, and focus your narcissistic fascinations on other stars. Personal desire can’t be disentangled from mass culture; there is no utopian “outside” for Johnson. These gift exchanges, begun in 1955, evolved into more elaborate networks of hundreds of participants, but at first they included a relatively small circle of

9 Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego, California: San Diego State UP, 1998): 36.

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fellow artists as well as influential literary and art critics. Each participant was asked to send the work back to Johnson after adding to the image. Much of Johnson’s mail art and on-sendings consisted of small, trivial objects not quite profound enough for art critics to consider “found objects.” His gift giving resembled the Lettrists’ earlier use of a type of potlatch (the name of one of their journals that was never sold; each issue’s print-run of fifty or so was given away as gifts),10 Fluxus Yam Festivals and Newspaper,11 and the work of intimate bureaucracies in general.12 The gift exchanges soon led Johnson to explore the fan’s logic in more depth.

Art world exchange systems and economies of desire On-sendings challenged the participants to resist participating by refusing to send the artwork on to a famous artist like Andy Warhol, someone that Johnson often included. The work points out just how difficult it is for an artist to avoid associating his or her scribbles with a work completed by a celebrity. Many contemporary (conceptual) artists share this interest in playing with the trappings of the art world. A partial list of artists who seek to expose the contexts and social dynamics of the art world scene includes Martha Rosler’s videos, installations, and photomontages about art, Sherrie Levine’s photographic work cropping in on male artists’ iconic works, Louise Lawler’s photographs of other artists’ work, Allan McCollum’s collaborative works about museum exhibits, and Jenny Holzer’s scrolling texts and aphorism-like sayings in museum settings. Hal Foster has examined the social and economic contexts and circumstances of the art world. He notes that, unlike the superstars of the art world, Johnson supposedly sought low visibility in the art world scenes and economies he investigated.13 That is why his on-sendings played such a crucial role in his 10 See for example Potlatch: information bulletin of the French Section of the Lettrist International published 27 issues, from June 22, 1954 to November 5, 1957; it was a weekly for the first 12 issues, then monthly. It was numbered from 1 to 29, with the bulletin dated August 17, 1954 being a triple issue (9, 10, 11). A weekly until this triple issue, Potlatch became a monthly upon its 12th issue. 11 See for example Robert Watts, George Brecht, Yam Festival Newspaper (Metuchen, NJ: Yam Festival P, 1962–1963). 12 Craig Saper, Intimate Bureaucracies (New York, London, Baltimore: Punctum Books with Minor Editions and AK Press, 2012). 13 Hal Foster, ReCodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay P, 1985): 157–179.

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absentartist artworks rather than simply serving as a vehicle for distributing his work. Bruce Connor, the influential experimental filmmaker, also produces anonymous works that play on the code of the receivable. He sends collages only to a circle of friends, but does not sign the works or include any indication of who produced them. If a friend calls to thank him for a collage, “he denies that he had anything to do with either producing the work or sending the work.”14 To explain this practice without legitimating the actual works in the art marketplace as authentic, Connor has produced a 12-step program for Anonymous Artists, which seeks to sober up collectors drunk on the value of an author’s name for authenticating a work as a (potential) masterpiece. Without a name, the work is about the friends’ relationships, the gift system, and the network as an art process. Although not discussing Johnson’s work, Gregory L. Ulmer, using Jacques Derrida’s and George Bataille’s theories of exchange, describes precisely the type of gift that this essay connects both to Johnson, and by extension to cybermanipulations, or what we might call cyberipulation, in my neologism that adds the idea of “rip” as in rip-into, rip-off, rip (copy), and RIP to the agency of a single author. These sociopoetic themes are generated through multiplying instantly ripped copies of viral and bot-generated dissemination of fragmentary and incomplete texts. Bataille, “one of the organizers of the College of Sociology that gathered some of the best-known public intellectuals of Europe in the later 1930s to confront the popularity of fascism at the time,” studied and advocated, as Ulmer explains, a “General Economy of waste [. . .] against the Restricted Economy of growth promoted by industrial capitalism.”15 Bataille used models from ethnography, economies of potlatch, gift exchange, to develop comparative studies of how civilizations expend resources. From these studies, his group proposed an overflowing economy of surplus enjoyment connected to wasteful gift exchange. Ulmer relates this notion of gift to Jacques Derrida’s theory of the trace “as the gift of meaning without communication”: What we encountered in our other theorists as surplus value or surplus enjoyment, or formally the effect of emergence in complex systems, Derrida addresses as effects of Trace, the movement of sense through the sheer capacity for constellation and configuration of any formal system, the possibility of sense to emerge without intention or will, without author: sending without sender, gift without donor.16

14 Amei Wallach, “The Favorite Word in His Vocabulary Is Undermine,” (New York) New York Times (October 1, 2000): 36. 15 Gregory L. Ulmer, Konsult: Theopraxesis (Anderson, SC: Parlor P, 2019): 149. 16 Ulmer, Konsult: Theopraxesis, 170.

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What Johnson sought was to send out a gift that would create a structure in which the inefficient form of participation, the line of participants sending some half-completed work, eventually creates a gift without donor, a message without a singular sender, and setting-up a “capacity for constellation” of participants beyond the will, intended meaning, or signification of one mind. The on-sendings, as gift exchange, signal, through participation, an outside or beside signification. The trace, a “nothing” experience outside of communication, uses the constellation of participants as the form or structure of the work. Similarly, cyber-manipulations use this same trace and seeming gift to create a viral sense.

Fan’s logic The last twist in Johnson’s efforts to play through this perverse fan’s logic – the logic that fuels the art markets as well as the society of the spectacle – involved his calling or writing to strangers. John Held describes the Johnson’s NYCS meetings, where seating lists were prepared beforehand inducing correspondents to meet one another in poetic environments of Johnson’s devising. The thematic meetings included [. . .] fan club meetings for Marcel Duchamp and Paloma Picasso.17

Although beyond the scope of this essay, most contemporary studies of fandom begin with applications of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological explanation, even though he does not mention that term and disparages those types of readers or spectators. Bourdieu’s work is useful because it examines the inextricable link between the role of the writer that requires a “social game” by the readers, reviewers, booksellers, publishers, and an entire cultural network. Bourdieu dismisses the jazz-freak or cinema-buff who carries to the extreme (i.e. to absurdity) what is implied in the legitimate definition of cultivated contemplation and replaces consumption of the work with the consumption of the circumstantial information,18

17 John Held Jr., Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J., London: The Scarecrow P, 1991): xvi. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1986): 330.

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but even that dismissive remark seeks to explain the social game and licensing of the fan’s fetishized objects and scraps of information. What Johnson does is to play this sociopoetic game not to communicate a singular and specific meaning, but to play-out the logic of the fan. Similarly, cyberipulation molds a fan’s desire into a grammar, a logic and an aesthetic. This sociopoetic game allowed Johnson to explore its networked manipulations. Once they appear as net-works, one can read on-sendings beyond the confines of the artworld as prototypes for the type of political and corporate covert manipulations now used to change behavior. I think I received one of Johnson’s calls in 1993 after I published an article on the potential use of Fluxus strategies in university education. I do not know how he got my number, but one day my answering machine had a message on it: “Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson.” I did not recognize the voice, and at first I was flattered. Then, when I could not figure out who had called me, it began bothering me. Who actually called? How did he find me? Why did he call? What does he want? And, if it actually was Johnson, then what should I do with the tape recording? Is this an artwork? Should I save the tape? What does this mean? Johnson (or some surrogate) had electronically mashed me. About two years later, in 1995, Ray Johnson committed suicide, which was somehow not very surprising, considering his “suicide” of the NYCS and the title of his (during his lifetime) unpublished manuscript A Book about Death.19 Just as he had sent a letter to the obituaries department of the New York Times announcing the school’s death, he had apparently turned the sad occasion of his actual death into a morbid joke and event. The New York Times ran a followup article to his obituary that included details indicating that Johnson had planned the suicide as an artwork or numerical puzzle. Among the evidence was a postcard sent to Johnson’s home address that arrived the day after his suicide; it read: “If you are reading this, then Ray Johnson is dead.”20 In 1989, a triangular death stamp appeared announcing Johnson’s death, and rumors spread throughout the artists’ networks that he was dead. Soon participants recognized that this was another ruse Johnson had perpetrated as part of his efforts to become a “living dead legend” and to continue his investigation of the fanstar dynamic. When Johnson actually did commit suicide on January 13, 1995, many friends and fellow mail artists initially greeted the news with skepticism

19 William S. Wilson, Ray Johnson, A Book About a Book About Death (Amsterdam: Kunstverein Publishing, 2009). Ray Johnson printed the thirteen, but at that time unbound, pages of A Book About Death in 1963–1965. 20 Peter Marks, “Friends of an Enigmatic Artist See a Riddle in His Death,” (New York) New York Times (February 12, 1995): Sec. 1, 37, 46; see also Carol Vogel, “Ray Johnson, 67, Pop Artist Known for His Work in Collage” (obituary), (New York) New York Times (January 19, 1995): B l1.

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rather than shock and sadness. In addition to the postcard sent to his own address, other letters bearing Johnson’s return address arrived at his friends’ homes. In his handwriting, the letters announced: “I Am Dead.” Playing into his friends’ and fans’ initial reaction to the announcement of his death as if it were another hoaxlike artwork, the details in the New York Times article seemed to confirm that Johnson had staged the event as an artwork. The Times reported a series of numerological clues: Johnson had committed suicide on January 13; the digits in his age, sixty-seven, add up to thirteen; the night before the suicide he checked into room 247 at the Baron’s Cove Inn, and those digits add up to thirteen; the last time he was seen alive was 7:15 PM, and again, those digits add up to thirteen. Added to these clues, he had parked his car at the local 7-Eleven, a hint about chance and a throw of the dice. His previous artworks add even more support for the theory that he staged his suicide as an artwork. As already mentioned, in 1961, he staged a “Nothing” at the Fluxus AG Gallery; in the 1970s he often said “I’m visiting from the land of silence” and had apparently finally found the invisibility and silence he sought in his efforts to avoid the gallery system’s artist-aspopstar marketing strategies.21 Suicide as art had already become a mythology about Dada activities, and this mail artist’s apparent suicide seemed to fit perfectly with Al Alvarez’s claim that “for the pure Dadaist suicide was inevitable, almost a duty, the ultimate work of art.”22 The sad twist to Johnson’s suicide is that it turned out to be part of a Johnson-like hoax instead of his last cavalier act, or, as suggested earlier, part of an out-of-body “structuring absence” of the artist. Apparently inspired by Johnson’s ruses, aliases, and other hoaxes, which he found documented among Johnson’s belongings and artwork, the Sag Harbor police chief investigating the suicide, Joseph J. Ialacci, decided to “gig” the Times.23 The coincidental numbers had no significance to the case but Johnson’s artwork had inspired the detective to play with the mechanisms of celebrity. Later, participants in artists’ networks associated with Johnson learned that California mail artist Johnny Tostada had mailed the fake letters as if from Ray Johnson in the Johnsonian spirit of playful parody and as an homage to his work. Instead of simply ignoring the dynamics among fans, reporters, and legends, Johnson sought to play with these mechanisms in his work in intimate bureaucracies. There are many unanswered questions surrounding his death, but the case now seems far less exotic than at first; many current events have a Johnsonian cast to them.

21 Judith Hoffberg, Interview with author, during EyeRhymes conference (13 June 1997). 22 Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1972): 228. 23 Harry Hurt III, “A Performance-Art Death,” New York Journal 28.3 (1995): 24.

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Celebrity and the evacuation of identity No discussion of celebrity would be complete without some mention of John Lennon, who became infamous for comparing his fame and celebrity status to Jesus Christ’s. A 1968 issue of Aspen includes a facsimile of Lennon’s diary for that year. Because of Lennon’s status as a star, one rushes to read it for new information, especially knowing that Yoko Ono has refused to release his diaries to the public. A parodic use of “everyday life” (and an aesthetization thereof) appears in “The Lennon Diary” where all the entries read: “Got up, went to work, came home, watched telly, went to bed”; the entries are increasingly scrawled, and the diary ends with one last “memorandum”: “Remember to buy Diary 1969.”24 In some ways, the repetition of the same everyday events plays a joke on the fan’s narcissistic identification with a star and the joke depends on that uncomfortable recognition and deflation of the payoff. Another reading of the diary is that it parodies the boredom of everyday life in the form of a Situationist send-up of the promise of change in the society of the spectacle. The Situationists would stage disruptive performances in the 1950s and 1960s, point out in slogans and graffiti the boredom of everyday life, and add subtitles to Kung-Fu movies or change the words in cartoon bubbles to parodically ascribe a critical analysis to the crushing routinization of work and everyday life. Their work became extremely influential among French college students during the rebellion of May 1968, and went on to directly influence Punk music especially the Sex Pistols. Later, much of the experimental art scene adopted the “culture jamming” attitude of detouring advertising to express the opposite of consumerist dreams. Like much of the work involved in creating intimate bureaucracies, this is at first just a joke of recognition: you get the joke and move on. Its other meanings seep in more slowly. Lennon’s and Johnson’s artworks highlight not just the art world’s production of celebrities as a marketing device, but also the way this marketing depends on the fantasies of other artists, including those in alternative art groups. Breaking the narcissistic link between the participant and the celebrity may in fact be impossible; Johnson’s jokes depend on the link remaining strong. Johnson became famous for his repetition of a bunny-head character; these identical hand-drawn representations of famous people suggest that one could substitute any head as long as one includes famous or personally significant names. Johnson’s earlier collage works, which included prints of James Dean and Elvis Presley, found him a small place in the history of early pop art, but his later work moved off the canvas and into conceptual work involving participants’ own desires.

24 John Lennon, “The Lennon Diary,” Aspen 1.7 (New York: Roaring Fork, 1968).

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The readers get a thrill of the few degrees of separation between themselves and the great “name” in a narcissistic identification in which the “name” becomes an idealized fantasy of a future better or ideal self, even as the participants laugh at the absurdity of that interest considering the endless serial repetition. Name-dropping in identical scribbles deflates the mythology of the artist’s absolute originality and his/her supposed transcendence of everyday life. Johnson’s fascination with celebrity also manifests itself in his mail from fan clubs such as the Shelley Duval Fan Club. Other clubs include the Marcel Duchamp Fan Club, the Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, the Paloma Picasso Fan Club, the Blue Eyes Club (and its Japanese division, Brue Eyes Club), and the Spam Radio Club. Johnson even advertised meetings in newspapers, much to the surprise of “genuine” fans. The kind of celebrity stalking that Johnson is examining here pokes fun at art world celebrity seeking, and highlights the participant’s fanlike identification. On-sendings are not benign. They insist on a sociopoetic interpretation and set up a bureaucratic procedure of mass mailings in order to investigate and engender the intimate relationships found among artist, patron, fan, and collaborator. By hollowing out the structure and process of the social construction or game of art-making, the on-sendings also turn the process into a grammatical constellation reminiscent of systems outside the artworld, in this case cyberipulation – the spreading of disinformation in a networked attack.

Spectators as participants and the surrealist paranoid-critical method In the on-sendings, the notion of authorship was not disrupted merely by implicit problems in determining the author’s intention, but by the explicit disruption of the category of authorial intention. These works depended on both reproducibility and on-sending. At the moment of the on-sending, everyone participated in authoring and reading. In the periodic compilations from artists’ networks, the individual works often have signatures and sometimes even include numbered prints or multimedia objects. Yet when the works appear together in a compiled package, they refer to each other and to other related assemblings and networks. It is not that authorship falls prey to a reader’s solipsism. The author changes into a more fluid notion of production and consumption. The distinction between artists and spectators blurs not because of the open-endedness of interpretation, but because of the effort to build in interactive gamelike structures of discovery and play. Compilers, for example, function both as readers and as writers when they assemble multiple works, package them, and send them

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back to the participants involved. Receiving the assembled package in the mail makes each participant join in the pleasures involved in discovery and relay. Once participants have joined in a number of assemblings, they often allude to other works in other assemblings. The networks distributing multimedia works via mail art, fanzines, and assemblings have an aspect of productive paranoia involved in their work. The Surrealist painter, impresario, and theorist Salvador Dalí developed, throughout the 1920s, the “paranoiac-critical method” that, at least intended to, reproduce a paranoid’s “delirium of interpretation” in both art research and in scholarship. He didn’t name and codify the method until 1933 with the publication of his essay “L’Âne pourri.”25 A social scientist would look to paranoia as a psychological state to explain various aesthetic activities. By reading paranoia as a code, I seek in my sociopoetic analysis to examine how it works to produce meaning, allusions, and other artistic and literary effects rather than merely functions as a symptom of a disturbed personality. Paranoia as an aesthetic code alludes to the peculiar social relationships established by the lists, mailings, and systems of collection and distribution as well as the play on cultural fears about art and poetry. Attempting to use social and societal forces as a canvas, these productions involve what scholars usually consider psychological or sociological traits, in this case paranoia, as aesthetic codes. Instead of studying how these works influence the psychological state of participants, we will examine how assemblings use the aesthetics of these phenomena as the codes to construct the meanings of a new genre. Allen Weiss makes a similar argument about certain experimental forms of modernism that incorporated “psychopathological symptomology into aesthetic production, broadening the range of aesthetic possibility.”26 Weiss explains that glossolalia which entails the enunciation of the pure signifier, the refusal of meaning, and the reduction of speech to pure voice, of language to the body manifests that foregrounding of the signifier that now seems to be a central tenet of modernism.27

Of course, this broadening of aesthetic categories allowed the “productions of the insane to be deemed art”; which in turn “permitted Dubuffet’s researches into Art Brut and Ecrits Bruts.”28 Intimate bureaucracies and on-sendings may, in fact, form the largest art brut and ecrits brut systems in the world. They not only reference paranoid codes, they also use private symbol systems and neologisms

25 Salvador Dalí, “L’Âne pourri,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 1.7 (1930). 26 Allen S. Weiss, Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992): 81. 27 Weiss, Shattered Forms, 81. 28 Weiss, Shattered Forms, 81.

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common in schizophrenics’ use of language. The apparent oxymoron, intimate bureaucracies, is a set of strategically subversive maneuvers and also the very basis for the new productive mythology surrounding the World Wide Web. Electronic networks combine a bureaucracy with its codes, passwords, links, and soon with niche marketing and intimate personal contacts creating a hybrid situation or performance. It’s a mix of cold impersonal systems and intimate social connections; it scales up whispering down the lane games. These new forms are not merely business or governmental performance masquerading as performance art. It is not even performance art mocking business procedures, but the emergence of an alternative politics. Intimate bureaucracies may exist on a different scale from the large systems that determine ideologies. In popular culture, the negative examples of “paranoid criticism” and “underground networks” usually appear under the rubric of “terrorists,” “stalkers,” or psy-ops bots that spread “disinformation” simply by sending on material massively, without human thought or invention. The negative moral appeal to the audience to avoid the intense influence of networks has a more neutral corollary in the great difficulty individuals have extracting themselves from Listservs, social media networks, and participation in the projects that Johnson explored half a century ago. The negative examples surround us with a moral appeal to avoid paranoid criticism and networks, but they are, now, unavoidable. One might demonstrate how psychoanalytic explanations of paranoia and its connections to those networks called “language” and “culture” function in ways similar to electronic and mail-art distribution networks. One might also look to Jacques Lacan’s work on paranoia as it relates to the emasculating power of these networks. Lacan’s insights illuminate particularities of the situation, but finally psychoanalysis speaks most eloquently about how networks affect the formation of individual subjectivities rather than the post- or paraaesthetics of the intangible network. One could extrapolate from this research a way to read the Big Other in terms of something like aesthetic codes; a reading would most closely resemble the goals of this project, and would perhaps continue to move analysis away from organic or psychological models. Lacan’s work on the dynamics of fans and his personal connection to, and encouragement of, networks of fans and followers are the key starting points for this type of analysis. For example, in an infamous restaurant rendezvous with Roman Polanski, Lacan examined the relationship between stars and fans, as I discuss more completely in my work on “scandalography.”29 Rumor has it that Lacan

29 Craig Saper, “Scandalography: From Fatty’s Demise to Lacan’s Rise,” Lusitania (1993): 87–100; see also Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero

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wanted to meet Polanski, and a third party arranged a meeting. Polanski arrived a bit late and sauntered into the dining room with a tall, beautiful woman. As he strutted to the table where Lacan was already seated, he attracted the attention of the other diners; he was a star. Polanski greeted Lacan and then began to sit down. Lacan started to sigh as an admiring groupie would sigh when his star appears, “Ah, ah, oh:” He sighed louder and louder, until the entire dining room silently stared at the embarrassed director. Lacan would not stop. If one reads Lacan’s actions in terms of prevailing decorum, he resembles a caricature of a lounge lizard. But there is something else going on here as well. Lacan’s sighs scandalized the looks of the diners. At first, they were gawking at the Hollywood star, but after Lacan’s parody of a groupie’s sighs, they looked at the star differently. This is the same situation that Johnson wanted to produce with his uncomfortable requests for participants to send artworks in progress on to celebrity artists. Both the fan and the star become self-consciously implicated in a parody of fandom. This allusion to fandom includes an allusion to the beginnings of assemblings in amateur press associations started by sci-fi fans and focused on the fans rather than on science-fiction. Assemblings are the fanzines of the art world focused on the “amateurs” rather than the stars. The term is only coincidentally related to the term assemblage. The former connotes the assembling of a group of people, whereas the latter connotes a particular type of collage. Of course, Johnson’s work can be seen as a disturbing parody, given that stalkers and obsessive fans have increasingly played a role in terrorizing celebrities. Lacan narrates the story of a scandal involving a star and an infatuated fan: On 10 April 1931[. . .] at eight o’clock in the evening, Mme Z., one of the most admired actresses of Paris, arrived at the theater where she was to perform that evening. She was approached, on the threshold of the actors’ entrance, by an unknown woman who asked her the following question: “Are you indeed Madame Z.?” The questioner was attired quite appropriately in a coat whose collar and sleeves were fur-lined; she wore gloves and a handbag; nothing in the tone of the question aroused the actress’s suspicion. Accustomed to the adulation of a public intent on approaching its idols, she answered in the affirmative. Eager to be done with the matter, she attempted to leave. The unknown woman at that point, according to the actress, changed her expression, quickly removed an open knife from her bag, and with a face glowing with hatred, raised her arm against her. In order to block the blow, Mme Z. seized the blade with her bare hand and cut

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983): 124–125; Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978); John Forrester, “Psychoanalysis: Telepathy, Gossip and/or Science?” in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. James Donald (London: Macmillan, 1991): 169–187.

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through two flexor tendons of her fingers. Already two assistants had gained control of the perpetrator of the attack.30

This story not only stresses the relationship between stars and fans it also illustrates Lacan’s interest in writing about the scandalous. Here again the contemporary post-pop artist shares a similar fascination with playing through the dynamics of fandom. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy would also fit into this schema. Lacan’s narrative exposition uses literary and cinematic devices. For example, the reader has access to the actress’s subjective thoughts; we learn that “nothing in the tone of the question aroused the actress’s suspicion.” Lacan heightens suspense: he waits to tell us why he is telling us the story. He surprises us: we learn about the knife at the same point in the narrative as the actress does. A less surprising narrative would begin by stating that the story chronicles the attempted stabbing of an actress. Lacan includes fashion details: the attacker “was attired quite appropriately in a coat whose collar and sleeves were fur-lined; she wore gloves and a handbag.” He even supplies a close-up of a “face glowing with hatred.” Rather than trying to avoid this obviously cinematic and suggestive language and narration, Lacan uses paranoid excesses strategically. Paranoia is no longer merely an object of scholarship; it also helps direct the research. In intimate bureaucracies, artists recognize the wonderful, annoying, frightful potential of a network’s framing of discourse. The types of analysis associated with literary studies seem equally limited when confronted with networks as texts. Studies of great authors make sense when the key component of a text depends on at least an arbitrary choice of an “author’s name” to focus the analysis. Studies of socioeconomic or cultural contexts explain the complicated relations between texts and contexts; they might not explain the specific codes of networked media. The aesthetic dimensions of networked media appear as significant factors when the less tangible power of the network structures the art and literature. The corresponding shift in aesthetic and cultural theories will make the unique approach developed in the humanities particularly valuable for helping us to understand that which will resist not just genre classification, but, more importantly, classifications according to media such as print, film, video, architecture, art, and photography. Introducing paranoia as a code shifts analysis away from both psychologistic explanations as well as formal text-based readings and cultural contextualizations. Instead, the analysis synthesizes these various approaches to examine the effects of intangible influences. Without falling too far into a

30 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Company: A History of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990): 118–119.

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paranoid reading of the future, it seems likely that these intangibles will function as the new texts for disciplinary formation in twenty-first century universities. Although idealist and materialist approaches have formed the very basis of modern thought in the arts, humanities, and sciences, the study of intangible orders has already appeared in experiments like on-sendings. Today, everyone knows it in terms of the bots-social-algorithmically trained influencing machines. In describing one common paranoid schizophrenic symptom, clinicians use the term “circumstantiality.” This refers to a person’s inability to edit out an overwhelming mass of trivial or irrelevant details that stymie any urge to stick to a topic or express a central idea. Read as an aesthetic strategy, circumstantiality appears in the comedy of Gilda Radner in the character of Roseanne Roseannadanna, who begins her meandering stories with the pretext of giving a news report on cultural events. She never quite gets to the point. Beginning a report about returning Christmas gifts, she discusses her surprise at finding Bo Derek in front of her in line; she noticed that the movie star had a hair sticking out of her nose, fantasized about pulling two more hairs out of her nose, making a braid, and putting a bead on it (a reference to Derek’s braided hairstyle in the movie 10). When the anchorman interrupts her absurdly irrelevant discussion, Roseanne quotes her uncle, Dan Roseannadanna, who always said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Circumstantiality as a joke allows for the realization that we usually edit out the morass of details when we want to “communicate” an idea or a story.

On-sendings as influencing machines The masses of details in Johnson’s on-sendings, like linguistic fetishes substituting for the loss of any central meaning, do not necessarily cohere around a central idea or theme. Readers cannot attend to everything. Quickly they learn that looking for a central idea is not only frustrating but not particularly productive as an interpretative method. Using the analogy of circumstantiality to guide an interpretation allows readers of these often daunting works to appreciate the function of effects in terms of a social-aesthetic disruption or change. The analogy highlights the significance of what appears explicitly and intentionally as a random compilation of many unrelated artists’ and poets’ works in these compilations. More importantly, the apparent inside of the assembling, its apparent content, is always linked to the framing system of exchange and the implications of that exchange. That is, the inside texts are part of the outside context. This productive confusion between text and context, inside and

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outside, self and other is what produces the fascination with paranoid codes. The fascination with the mail-art networks looks strangely similar to what Victor Tausk describes as an “influencing machine.” Tausk studied a group of schizophrenics who reported their fantasy of a cinematographic influencing machine directing their behavior. This phantasm of technology as an influencing machine is not limited to these paranoid characters. Many critics and scholars continue to characterize the mass media as an influencing machine. Rather, these paranoid delusions represent an extreme form of a common fantasy of media technologies as having strong influence over our minds. We find this metaphorization of media in most social scientific studies on media effects, as well as in recent condemnations of media violence and sexuality. The artists who form networks and construct on-sendings share this fantasy in their own unique way. Their fantasy of the influencing machine is neither that of rational social scientists nor that of irrational victims of paranoid delusions. In his exploration of the influencing machine experienced by schizophrenics, Tausk describes something that very closely resembles the cinematic apparatus. His 1933 article “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” has received little attention accept as a historical oddity. The traditional psychoanalytic community has ignored most of Tausk’s work because of his unique and tragic relationship with Sigmund Freud. He was Freud’s greatest fan and star student, and, following from that intense identification, he tended to work in areas very close to his hero’s research. Freud found Tausk both brilliant and too close for comfort. He finally advised Helene Deutsch to discontinue her training analysis with Tausk. Soon after Tausk learned of Freud’s rejection, he committed suicide. These unfortunate circumstances have relegated his writings to an embarrassing blemish on the history of psychoanalysis and his writings were not translated into English until 1991.31 Tausk describes how a group of schizophrenics conceived of a machine that “consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like.”32 This detailed technological description illustrates how schizophrenics use science and technology to explain a sense of persecution that, at first, appears beyond scientific explanation. In describing the mechanism, patients describe how the machine produces pictures similar to those made by “magic lanterns,” which are not hallucinations, but two-dimensional single-pane images projected onto walls. The image of these influential projections is the image of a multimedia network. 31 Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991): 185–220. Tausk’s paper was written in 1933. 32 Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine,’”186.

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Like the paranoid’s fantasy, the network promises an ephemeral connection to a huge and elastic world of semi-anonymous and potentially influential artists and poets. Once you become a member of the network, you feel compelled to respond, contribute, plagiarize, modulate, and project your fantasies and fetishes for the enjoyment of the semi-anonymous fellow travelers. The strange events surrounding Johnson’s death encouraged many to interpret his suicide as an uncanny addition to his work on celebrity. The lack of visibility of mail art, on-sendings, and assemblings in the mass media is “sometimes indicative of [their] tactics rather than [their] absence.”33 To include suicide as part of Johnson’s lifework is not in bad taste. It is simply part of his taste but it does not lessen the tragedy or assuage the sadness. It simply punctuates a life lived around the odd dynamics of celebrity culture, the constraints of a mercantile art world scene, and a sociopoetics that sought to play with the fan’s logic. That logic desires to see and watch everything about a star even when there is nothing to watch. Johnson’s work was a disappearing act, and his act taught the participants in networks and assemblings the poetic tactics of reversing, avoiding, and detouring surveillance.

Fluxus to fluxnet In the work of Nam June Paik, Fluxus artist and founder of video art, electronic networking becomes crucially important. The preoccupations and peculiar aesthetic codes of these underground art networks, with their emphasis on an explosion of information, appear as key components in the definition of an electronic cultural milieu of World Wide Web and Internet social media systems. It is commonplace to explain that Fluxus was not concerned with formal issues of an art medium. For example, the term intermedia (Dick Higgins’s term for much Fluxus activity) plays off of, but is not synonymous with, multimedia precisely because the stress is on works that resist formal categorization as belonging to any (or even many) media. Fluxus members specifically rallied against the notion that art should follow certain (modernist) rules of form.34 On

33 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (New York: Routledge, 1992): 176. 34 Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984): 20–21. Reprinted from Dick Higgins, A Dialectics of Centuries: Towards a Theory of the New Arts (New York: Printed Editions, 1978): 12–17; see also Stephen Foster, Hans Brader, Intermedia (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1979).

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his poster titled Some Poetry Intermedia, Higgins offers a number of definitions of intermedia: Intermedia differ from mixed media in that they represent a fusion of the elements [. . .] opera is a mixed medium since the spectator can readily perceive the separation of the musical from the visual aspects of the work, and these two from the literary aspect.35

For Higgins, it is “pointless to try and describe the work according to its resolvable older media,”36 the term intermedia describes “art works [that] lie conceptually between two or more established media or traditional art disciplines.”37 My definition of intermedia differs from Higgins’s with regard to formal innovation: “The intermedia appear whenever a movement involves innovative formal thinking of any kind, and may or may not characterize it”38; the last part of this sentence suggests the role I give to formal innovation in intermedia: formal innovation is irrelevant to an object’s or event’s status as intermedia. A 1971 work by Fluxus artist Ken Friedman suggests these intermedia qualities: “The distance from this page to your eye is my sculpture.”39 Not only does the work poke fun at the normal criteria for sculpture, it suggests a particularly important interaction with the spectator. It goes beyond a mere criticism of art to suggest a social network built on playing with and people, activities, and objects. Fluxus scholarship functions not only as a way to organize information, but as a way to organize social networks (e.g., people learning) based on interaction rather than on a sender-receiver communication model. In an issue of Edition Et, Fluxus participant Eric Anderson’s contribution consists of three cards, each with instructions on one side on how to mail the card and these instructions on the other side: “don’t do anything to this very nice card.”40 Typical of Fluxus work, these instructions put the participant in a humorous double bind and point to the social interaction involved in the work. In a letter to Tomas

35 Higgins, Horizons, 20–21. 36 Dick Higgins, Some Poetry Intermedia [1976], reproduced in Dick Higgins, Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, ed. Ken Friedman and Steve Clay (Catskills, NY: Siglio, 2018): 241. 37 Dick Higgins, “Theory and Reception,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, UK: Academy Editions, 1998): 217–236, 222. 38 Dick Higgins, Some Poetry Intermedia (New York: Unpublished Editions, 1976), reproduced in Dick Higgins Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, ed. Ken Friedman, Steve Clay (Catskills, NY: Siglio, 2018): 241. 39 Ken Friedman’s “sculpture” appears in various places signed by Friedman with the Fluxus copyright. 40 Eric Anderson, “Don’t do anything to this very nice card” (1966), Offset, 23 x 23 cm (Berlin: Verlag Griitzmacher, 1966).

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Schmit, George Maciunas argued that Fluxus’s objective was social, not aesthetic, and that it “could have temporarily the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art.”41 This social project specifically concerns the dissemination of knowledge – social pedagogy. Simone Forti suggests that in the context of this social (antiaesthetic) project, Fluxus work does not have any intrinsic value; the value of the work resides in the ideas it implies to the reader, spectator or participant. She goes on to explain that when the work has passed out of their [the producers’] possession, it is the responsibility of the new owner to restore it or possibly even to remake it. The idea of the work [. . .] has been transferred along with the ownership of the object that embodies it.42

Forti explains that the audience performs the piece in the process of transferring the ideas; the work is “interactive.”43 This term suggests a shift away from the notion of passing some unadulterated information from an author’s mind directly into the spectator’s eyes and ears. Instead, the participants interact with the ideas, playing through possibilities rather than deciding once and for all on the meaning. A description of Fluxus “art games” by Higgins can function as a coda for the particular type of playfulness employed in the Fluxus pedagogical situation. Higgins writes that in the art games, one “gives the rules without the exact details” and instead offers a “range of possibilities.”44 He goes on to list a series of crucial elements in these art games, including social implications, a community of participants conscious of other participants (what we might call “team spirit”), and the element of fascination about when rules will take effect. Again, the authors leave the details of the actual event open; as others have noted; these works resemble scientific laboratory experiments rather than finished artworks.45 In discussions about electronic texts, the term interaction has a special prominence. One of the defining features of hypermedia concerns building in the demands for response by the reader or participant. When a reader “clicks” on a highlighted or underlined term in a text, the program replaces the text with another page of text. A reader’s refusing to interact with these linked terms will limit a reading to one single page. The links allow the reader to navigate among pages from either one set of producers or throughout

41 Robert Pincus-Witten, “Introduction,” in Fluxus Codex, ed. Jon Hendricks (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988): 15–21, 37. 42 Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion, ed. Kasper Koenig, Emmett Williams (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974): 45. 43 Forti, Handbook, 58. 44 Higgins, Horizons, 20–21. 45 Richard Schechner, “Happenings,” Tulane Drama Review 10.2 (1965): 229–232.

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the World Wide Web. This ability to make links easily often encourages designers to structure Web sites into lists of lists. In that sense they replicate the earliest written texts of accountants’ lists. A number of commentators, including Walter Ong, have noted how written texts allow for the categorization essential to rational systems of logic. Electronic technology allows for an extreme version of something like Peter Ramus’s rational logic based on relational branching lists.46 The mail-art networks foreshadowed these media technologies’ peculiarities. Electronic technologies not only present these endless lists and lists of lists, they demand that the participant or reader “click” on terms to create new lists. This call for interaction changes the impact of the lists; no longer do they present a rational branching structure; the lists spread out in idiosyncratic routes according to any particular reading. The interactivity of these electronic texts also functions as the key factor in making electronic technology something other than an intensification of hierarchical branchings of organized information. Instead of imitating a singular rational thought, the links mimic the free association found in both brainstorming and psychoanalytic efforts to tap displaced sources of information. This type of eccentric reading practice has already found advocates in literary and cultural theories. George Landow has persuasively illustrated how literary theory offers a useful model for these hypertextual linkages.47 Although multimedia and literary artworks employ these codes, Web pages and e-mail often highlight, literally and figuratively, calls for response. Although it seems obvious that audiences play this crucial role, most literary and media analysis before mid-twentieth century examined only the construction of the texts or the historical context of the production process. The importance of an audience’s response has always had a central role in media theories, at least since the beginnings of media effects research during World War II. In those studies, researchers showed new inductees in the U.S. Army propaganda films such as the Why We Fight series directed by Frank Capra. The social psychologists wanted to determine what effects these films would have on the new soldiers. The films sought to convince U.S. soldiers that the war was indeed a “good cause” in spite of enormous opposition to the United States entering the war and significant proGerman sentiment. The researchers concluded that the soldiers did not understand the films; they contained too much historical contextualization for the audiences to understand. The researchers concluded that the messages needed to

46 See, for example, Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958). 47 See, for example, George P. Landow, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994). George P. Landow, Paul Delany, ed. Hypermedia and Literary Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994).

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be simplified. Before these studies, the role the spectator in the creation of meaning was considered secondary to the actual message. After these studies, the role and experience of spectators became a major concern of social scientists and many humanities disciplines as well. George Landow has argued persuasively for the importance of poststructuralist theories not merely as analytic tools, but, more importantly, as models of electronic hyperconstructions. Aside from his own scholarship, he has collected essays by scholars leading the effort to connect the seemingly disparate areas of literary theories and electronic media’s possibilities of presentation.

An aesthetic theory of automatic cyber weapons that endlessly send on messages Critics now routinely examine the contexts of reception, the possible aberrant readings, and the emotional impacts of particular texts. A growing number of media critics describe the watching of television as something interactive, rather than assuming the passivity often associated with popular images of the impact of mass entertainment. Similarly, scholars regularly read printed texts to highlight the importance of the interpretative interactions involved in reading even the most realistic novels. For example, Roland Barthes’s study of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Sarrasine copiously demonstrates how realism depends on the reader’s weaving the cultural and narrative codes together to both understand and follow the story and appreciate the diegetic space as natural. Through Barthes’s students’ own influential work, especially Christian Metz’s, this analysis led to the study of how media manipulate viewers by subtly calling them to respond to images and codes. Researchers examined how spectators participate in their subjugation to mass media’s ideological messages. Loosening the image’s power, therefore, depends on making audience members more aware of their role in partially creating media messages. In highlighting how media arts hide the production process and allow for a limited number of responses, the critics hoped to make audiences more likely to look for contradictions in mass-media messages. They also wanted to encourage audiences to become more open to experimental films that demanded more explicit interactions during the interpretative process. Much of literary and media theory now seeks to highlight the importance of a reader’s or spectator’s interactions. Because of that emphasis, one might forget that these theories of reading, or more generally of ideological interpolation, depend on a counterintuitive claim against the commonsense appreciation of reading and spectating. That

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is, when one considers literature or film one usually speaks of “following a story” rather than making a unique set of potentially infinite links among a potentially infinite set of linked texts. Critics and theorists make these links and associations precisely because these interactions defamiliarize habituated reading practices. The best critics will attempt to find unusual connections beyond the manifest reading. Manifest readings of obvious plots and themes have little place in advanced scholarship seeking not only to open individual texts to other contexts but to expand the definitions of reading. The calls for interaction exist in every text, even in those hiding these possibilities behind an invisible style of natural realism. The interaction exists implicitly in these texts; in networked media the call for response exists explicitly. Sculpting the social game around art making depends on recognizing, like a potter who looks inside the pot that they have just thrown, the structuring absence and negative space only available after the pot has been made. It depends on the “nothings” of the non-event-hood and their respective contours, as well as on the sculpting work of influence, suspended between fandom and paranoia. Contemporary art speaks to us about the processes and practices of content-less messages spread via auto-bot-on-sendings. To understand the importance of on-sendings, influencing machines, global-grooves, and intermedia, one must wrest these works away from art and cultural history as these networked art projects offer a way to understand our cyborgian botinduced influencing machine or cyberipulation, for short.

Atėnė Mendelytė

Cracking the Beckettian Profounds of Mind in Endgame with Game Theory Abstract: Samuel Beckett’s paradox-filled playfulness has puzzled readers and theatregoers for decades. Beckett’s penchant for paradox is (one of) the cause(s) for Martin Esslinʼs famous notion of the “theatre of the absurd,” which can be seen as an admittance of the failure to come to terms with the logic of Beckettʼs works. This essay explores the dramatic principles of Endgame with the aid of game theory. Game theory helps to show that the play’s plot and dialogues are not absurd but perfectly rational. Endgame contains a number of pointers, clues, and hermeneutic keys, the most significant of which are the play’s title and characterization. I argue that through the multiplicity of games and forms of play, such as wordplay, paradoxes, metatextuality, and references to games and toys, Endgame investigates the notion of an existential supergame. All other forms of play in Endgame, including the play’s seeming non-sequiturs, are but subgames – strategic, rational choices made in order to avoid non-existence.

Introduction: Game theory and literature The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly – like a poem. [. . .] [E]very chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first, the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing; second, the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboard. [. . .] I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists. – Marcel Duchamp (1952)1

Marcel Duchamp surprisingly abandoned art making to become a full-time chess player.2 He found that the highly abstract space-time created in a chess game was freer from commercialism than art. According to cultural historian Johan Huizinga, art and chess have a lot in common. Playing creates an interlude in our daily lives; it is “distinct from ‘ordinaryʼ life both as to locality and duration. [. . .] It is ‘played outʼ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own

1 Marcel Duchamp, qtd. in John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2003): 315–316. 2 See Francis Naumann, Bradley Bailey, Jennifer Shahade, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (New York: Readymade P, 2009). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-004

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course and meaning.”3 For Immanuel Kant, the free play of cognitive faculties is essential for creating and understanding beauty since “the aesthetic judgement [. . .] of the beautiful refers the imagination in its free play to the understanding.”4 Likewise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing suggests that that which is fruitful in any field of human endeavor “allows free play to the imagination.”5 Friedrich Schiller echoes this sentiment proclaiming that a “pot is beautiful if it resembles the free play of nature without contradicting its concept.”6 And Friedrich Schlegel rhetorically asks: “what can have a more fundamental value than those things which in some way stimulate or nourish the play of our inner makeup?”7 Samuel Beckett, an aficionado of chess, abstracts the fundamental principles of chess in his 1957 Endgame. He equates chess with the nature of human existence and its structuring of chaos. The play centers on Hamm, a blind man who cannot walk, and Clov, Hammʼs servant and adoptive son, who can move but only with difficulty. There are also Nagg and Nell, Hammʼs legless parents, who live in trash bins. The play consists of the verbal sparring between Hamm and Clov and (occasionally) Nagg and Nell. The overarching theme is the resentful codependency of the characters. I argue that the chess game is not just a metaphor. Chess does, of course, lend itself to metaphorical use and social commentary on account of its conflictual structure. However, I suggest that Endgame abstracts chess and presents the game from the perspective of human characters-cum-chess pieces where chess is no longer an escapist intermezzo but the generative principle of existence.8 If one takes chess structure to be primary, then literary analysis alone is not the best tool for analyzing Endgame. A more suitable framework is game theory. Game theory is an influential transdisciplinary theory that has been applied to a variety of fields. For example, law scholars Jon Hanson, Kathleen Hanson and Melissa Hart have applied it to law studies; they explain that game theory, known as the

3 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon P, 1955): 9. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2007): 86. 5 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1910): 16–17. 6 Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 145–184, 170. 7 Friedrich Schlegel, “Letter about the Novel,” trans. Ernst Behler, R. Struc, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 287–296, 288. 8 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9.

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“science of strategic thinking,” is [. . .] concerned with modeling and predicting strategic behavior [. . .] [which] arises when two or more individuals interact and each individual’s decision turns on what that individual expects the others to do.9

The theory has been “used to help predict or make sense of everything from chess to childrearing, from evolutionary dynamics to corporate takeovers, and from advertising to arms control.”10 However, the use of game theory for the analysis of literature is still debatable. Literary scholar Peter Swirski wishes to set the record straight: “What is game theory, then? It is a theory of decision-making involving more than one agent (player), where the results (outcomes and payoffs) of players’ actions (moves) are at least to a certain degree interdependent.”11 Consequently, this perspective can be applied to literary studies in the sense that one can “rationalize characters’” actions, the motivations for these actions, as well as their consequences. It can explain strategic choices by exploring links between agents’ moves and the structure of the plot [. . .] [or explain] whether the inner calculations of a Hamlet can account for his actions.12

In this essay, I argue that Endgameʼs actions and motivations are likewise rationalizable in terms of strategic thinking and payoffs. Like Georges Perec, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, Milorad Pavić, and Italo Calvino, Beckett is undeniably an author who has much to offer in terms of puzzles, games, and paradoxes. Literary critic Martin Esslin invented an entirely new label – the theatre of the absurd – to rationalize Beckettʼs formal ludicity.13 Granted, the “theatre of the absurd” includes other playwrights as well – Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, to name a few. And, with the exception of Beckett, this definition does capture the dramatic principles of these playwrights. However, I reject this designation because claiming that Endgameʼs action, plot and characters conform to game-theoretical (rational) principles leads to the conclusion that they are not absurd. Peter Hutchinson, the author of Games Authors Play, emphasizes the competitive aspect that structures the author-reader relationship, which manifests in “a sense of ‘vertigoʼ in works where the reader is subjected to constant attempts to surprise, puzzle or

9 Jon Hanson, Kathleen Hanson, Melissa Hart, “Law and Economics,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, ed. Dennis Patterson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 299–326, 306. 10 Hanson, et. al., “Law and Economics,” 306. 11 Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (London, New York: Routledge, 2007): 126. 12 Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge, 126. 13 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London, New York: Methuen Drama, 2001).

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confound him.”14 Astrid Ensslin points out that the techniques used for such purposes may, for instance, include “intrusions of characters into the [nonfictional] world of the narrator [. . .] [or] a simple pun [that] can cause temporary confusion or bemusement.”15 The author is a trickster gamemaster toying with his/her readers. Yet cooperation is also needed; for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses is appreciated (by the readers) despite the novel’s seeming non-sequiturs as the text provides many interpretative keys, such as the title. But Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has fewer fans because the text does not provide such clues. This agonic cooperation makes reading pleasurable and exciting. One senses an underlying logic and the process of figuring it out constitutes the pleasure of reading. Game theorist Nigel Howard proposes that the most exciting texts are penned by the authors that “conceal certain essential motivations of their characters in order to reproduce the mystery we often feel in real life as to why people behave the way they do.”16 Additionally, the sense of mystery arises from multiple cues, literary layering, and such stylistic techniques as drawing a parallel between Homer’s Odyssey and a trip around Dublin in Ulysses. This double process of concealment and unveiling unites literature with the aforementioned fields of game theory; one always tries to figure out how things operate to stay one step ahead of one’s co-players. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyleʼs Sherlock Holmes stories are beloved because they leave enough clues to enable the reader to solve the mystery together with Holmes. Consequently, Conan Doyle and the Joyce of Ulysses are cooperative authors. But the Joyce of Finnegans Wake is far less so. I suggest that there are enough clues in Beckettʼs Endgame to give an interpreter all that is needed to solve its puzzle. Notably, Hutchinsonʼs and Howardʼs focus on the author clashes with the postmodern thought that launches an attack on interpretation. For Roland Barthes, this cooperation would translate into a readerly text, a reading that tries to find the most adequate interpretation, as opposed to using the text as a prompt to invent new meanings (writerly text). Jacques Derrida similarly critiques the metaphysics of presence,17 the assumption of which is that there is an originary meaning. And Susan Sontag rejects interpretation for being a normative poison.18 These approaches advocate textual co-invention and interpretative

14 Peter Hutchinson, Games Authors Play (London: Methuen & Co., 1983): 6. 15 Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT P, 2014): 61–62. 16 Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behaviour (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971): 146. 17 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974). 18 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966).

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plurality where “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.”19 But explaining textual cues in terms of game theory can be deconstructive too if one prioritizes the text, not the authorial intention. The notion of a textual puzzle valorizes the distinction between “game” and “play”; the latter refers to spontaneous behavior while the former entails structured, rule-governed actions. Roger Caillois, building on the ideas of Huizinga, in Man, Games and Play, generalizes this distinction into the opposition between chaos and structure, between paidia, “an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety [that] manifests a kind of uncontrolled fantasy” and ludus,20 “representing calculation, contrivance, and subordination to rules.”21 Caillois argues that crossword puzzles, mathematical recreations, anagrams, [. . .] addiction to detective stories (trying to identify the culprit), and chess or bridge problems constitute, even in the absence of gadgets, many varieties of the most prevalent and pure forms of ludus.22

This distinction is relevant because only ludus can be productively analyzed in terms of game theory. Endgame has to be understood as ludic in a structured, rule-bound sense. The title already implies gaming since “endgame” refers to the final stage in a chess game when there are few pieces left on the chessboard and the end of the game is near. The play thus joins the ranks of other works, such as T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (cf. the section entitled “The Game of Chess”), that reference games in their titles. Also, as theatre scholar Freddie Rokem points out, such hints provide a hermeneutic key by “drawing attention to a particular movement pattern in a specific board game [. . .] [and so creating] a complex interaction between concrete situations involving human subjects and abstract ideas, between doing and thinking.”23 That is, the parallel should not be taken too literally, the characters do not move exactly like chessboard pieces. Instead, through a process of abstraction, they create a deep structural resonance.

19 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang,1974): 4. 20 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games [1963] (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 2001): 13. 21 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, x. 22 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 30. 23 Freddie Rokem, “Dramaturgies of Exile: Brecht and Benjamin ‘Playing’ Chess and Go,” Theatre Research International 37.1 (2012): 5–19, 10.

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Characters as chess pieces To use the hermeneutic key Endgame provides, we first need to define chess. For the classical game theory, chess is finite (each player has a finite number of moves), deterministic (the moves are not subject to chance), sequential (one player makes their move after the other), non-cooperative (the players compete with each other), and a game of perfect information (the players are privy to the entire history of their match and know the rules of the game). Chess is a game with ancient roots, modelled after two warring armies, each with a king, a queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. The player that captures the opponent’s king wins the game. A chess game is dramatic and narrative because it contains a classical three-act structure. The chess opening revolves around developing the pieces, allowing them to achieve their full potential for movement. The second act – the middlegame – is the main part of any game. It involves strategizing, attacking the opponent by finding/inducing his/her weaknesses and attempting to occupy the center position (the position that grants the player’s pieces the most control over the chessboard). If neither side is able to win during the middlegame, the game enters the endgame stage where very few pieces remain on the chessboard; the king and the pawns become central at this point and change their modus operandi. The opponent’s pawns are attacked and the passed pawns (pawns that reach the opponent’s far side) are promoted to more powerful pieces (usually queens). In addition, the previously (often) immobile king becomes an attacking piece and moves toward the chessboard’s center to gain more power. My analysis will articulate the space-time of the play in terms of such abstract endgame principles following the implicit and explicit hermeneutic keys of the play’s text. Beckett emphasized the agonic aspect of Endgame when he imparted these instructions to the play’s initial 1957 cast: “[t]here must be maximum aggression between them [Hamm and Clov] from the first exchange of words onward. Their war is the nucleus of the play.”24 The example Caillois gives of the game that combines agon and ludus is precisely chess.25 Hamm and Clov are hinted to be the two most central chess pieces in an endgame – a pawn and a king. A pawn advances only one square per move. It is a static piece with brief spurts of action. Before the dialogue even begins, stage directions indicate that Clov is a pawn by describing his extensive but restricted movements:

24 Qtd. in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director (New York: Riverrun, 1988): 205. 25 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 30.

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Clov goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left.26

Such emphasis on windows evokes a checkered board, the European Middle Ages addition to the game, where the “original oriental war game had been turned into a battle between two miniature feudal states.”27 This light/dark contrast resonates with what Beckett specialist Stan Gontarski sees as Beckettʼs Cartesian duality, “Manichean reluctance to mingle opposites.”28 Clovʼs dialogue exemplifies the strategizing of chess players, who abstract the board, cut it up into chunks of opening and closing possibilities: “I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me” (CW, 93). This mental diagramming is best illustrated by the long tradition of blindfold chess; in 1750, composer and chess player André Danican Philidor simultaneously played and won three games without a sight of a chessboard.29 The first words Hamm utters are “[m]e – to play” (CW, 93). This statement, in light of other (inter)textual hints, signals that Hamm should be seen as a chess king because the king usually only becomes active or “wakes up” during the endgame. Before entering this final phase, the king is the least useful piece; it can only move one square at a time and is always in danger of being captured. However, when the endgame begins, the king becomes the most powerful piece that takes center stage. Beckett once revealed that “Hamm is king in this chess game lost from the start” (TN, 49). Furthermore, when Nagg goes back into his trash bin, Hamm quotes king Prospero from William Shakespeare’s Tempest: “Our revels now have ended” (CW, 120).30 Interestingly, The Tempest contains two characters, Miranda and Ferdinand, playing chess in Act V. The game doubly symbolizes romantic courtship and Prosperoʼs and Alonsoʼs fight over Prosperoʼs dukedom. Hamm paraphrases another Shakespearean king, Richard III, by offering his “kingdom for a nightman” (CW, 103), which echoes the latter’s “[m]y kingdom for a horse.”31 Hammʼs blindness resonates with Sophoclesʼs Oedipus and connects Hamm with darkness (Black). The phrase “me – to play” also indicates

26 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 2006): 92; further references in the text abbreviated as “CW.” 27 Richard Eales, Chess – The History of a Game (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1985): 64. 28 Samuel Beckett, Stan E. Gontarski, James Knowlson, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1992): xix; further references in the text abbreviated as “TN.” 29 H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1913): 862. 30 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1999): 4.1.148. 31 William Shakespeare, Richard III (San Diego: Icon Classics, 2005): 5.4.13.

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that the play is an endgame puzzle as “White/Black to play and win/draw” tends to accompany endgame studies, chess exercises that present endgame positions with instructions on how to solve them. Gontarski thinks that Hammʼs phrase indicates the opening of a game (TN, 49), yet his interpretation is less convincing because the play’s characters/chess pieces do not comprise a full set and a chess opening may not lead to an endgame as many chess games end in the middlegame. For me, the phrase alludes to endgame puzzles, which often ask the puzzle solver to win/draw when it is nearly impossible to do so. Hamm sits in the center of the stage, immobile, and makes only two rounds during the play: when Clov first pushes his chair (drawing a semicircle) (TN, 97) from the center towards the back wall, then to a side wall and back to the center, and second (drawing another, larger semicircle) (TN, 141), from the center to a side wall, to the back wall, to another side wall and then back to the center: Take me for a little turn. (Clov goes behind the chair and pushes it forward.) Not too fast! (Clov pushes chair [to the back wall].) Right round the world! (Clov pushes chair.) Hug the walls, then back to the center again. (Clov pushes chair.) I was right in the center, wasn’t I? (CW, 104)

Significantly, when directing the play in Berlin at the Schiller Theater in 1967, Beckett specified that Clov should thump the chair each time he slightly moved it, “forming a crescendo of thumps” (TN, 55–56). Clovʼs staggering walk and this thumping invoke an echoic memory of chess games with their crescendo and diminuendo of thumps due to how many high-quality chess sets are weighted. Hammʼs obsession with being “right in the center” (CW, 104) is logical if one considers him a chess king: I feel a little too far to the left. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far to the right. (Clov moves chair slightly.) I feel a little too far forward. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far back (Clov moves chair slightly). (CW, 105)

Hammʼs dissatisfaction with his position illustrates the movements of a king since this piece can move one space in all directions and during an endgame it needs to stand in the center to achieve its full potential. Clov – the perfect pawn that he is – follows Hammʼs orders without much complaint and a chess dynamic emerges between these two characters. As soon as Clov utters the word “horse,” a white-faced Nagg shows up, suggesting that this character is an opposing knight. Literary scholar Laura Salisbury observes the opposition between the white faces of Nagg and Nell and Hamm and Clovʼs red faces, proposing that they allude to “those more modern standardized Staunton sets” that use red pieces for Black since, in chess, any dark and light

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color combination can serve as White and Black.32 The most widely used Staunton chess set was designed in the nineteenth century; it was adopted by the World Chess Federation in 1924. The Staunton knight is represented by a horse’s head and neck. Even though chess design has varied over the ages, the knight underwent practically no alterations; even the sixth century Indian chaturanga and Persian shatranj – commonly believed to be the oldest chess predecessors – contained ashva (“horse” in Sanskrit) and asp (“horse” in Persian), which moved in the same manner as the present-day knight does.33 The movement possibilities of a knight are the most unusual. The reason for this can only be conjectured – it may mimic the movement of cavalry in a battle (encircling and galloping). A knight can only move in an L-shape fashion, either “[t]wo squares forward then one to the left [or two] squares forward then one to the right [or one] square forward then two to the left [or one] square forward then two to the right.”34 It can jump over any piece that stands in its way by jumping from a white space to a black space and vice versa. This eccentricity is mirrored in Nagg and Nellʼs movements – they are sitting in trash bins throughout the play and only show their heads from time to time thus reenacting the knight’s movement from dark to light. Again, their seemingly nonsensical dialogue is easily explained with the aid of the chess logic. Nagg asks Nell: “Has he changed your sawdust?” (CW, 100). Nell protests that it is not sawdust but sand – both are used for horse bedding. When Nagg begs Nell to scratch his back she suggests: “Rub yourself against the rim” (CW, 101). Rubbing against a tree or a rim is a typical action of a horse in need of relieving an itch. Moreover, a knight standing at the edge of a chessboard (instead of in its center) is not a desirable position, illustrated by the mnemonic phrase “a knight on the rim is grim/dim,” which means that Nagg and Nell (White) are at a disadvantage. Beckett even stated that Hammʼs “my kingdom for a nightman” (TN, 54) is a pun on a knight taking a knight. The antagonism between these two sets of chess pieces – Clov-Hamm versus Nagg-Nell – can be seen in Hammʼs constant efforts to stop Nagg and Nell from moving. Hamm instructs Clov to nail their trash bins shut. At some point he asks Clov to check whether they are not dead. Nell appears to be dead in the middle of the play, which is interpreted positively by Hamm and Clov. Yet Hamm and Clovʼs relationship is tense as well. Clov fully understands that he is in the service of Hamm, which is made clear when Clov brings a toy dog to

32 Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012): 136. 33 Eales, Chess, 23. 34 Darren Bellas, Roger Proud, Play the Game – A Compendium of Rules (London: Straightforward Publishing, 2002): 68.

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Hamm and states: “Your dogs are here” (CW, 111). A pawn is a king’s dog, its protector, but a pawn can be easily taken. Clov keeps threatening to leave Hamm and a tense, unstable relationship of symbiotic codependency develops. Both pieces are separate; they have different values. Yet, their values and individual survival depend on each other. The text doubly signifies the characters as human and as chess pieces, the outcome of which is agonic symbiosis.

Stalemate: “The end is the beginning” This chess game is about to result in a looming stalemate. A stalemate occurs when a player who is obliged to move a piece cannot make a legitimate move; however, his/her king cannot be captured either. A stalemate marks the end of a game, the result being a draw. This situation is usually sought by the losing player so as to avoid losing altogether. In Endgame, a stalemate is hinted at in the play’s dialogue, monologues, and mise-en-scène. Clov implies an endgame and a stalemate when he says “Finished, itʼs finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (CW, 93). Hamm’s statement that the “end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (CW, 126) is especially revealing. The entire play is an elaboration on its own end – an endgame study. Caillois notes that a game is “separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”35 Huizinga similarly observes that games “are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns.”36 That is, every ludic space-time is cut off from the rest of the world. Hamm, touching the wall, remarks that behind the wall there is “the other hell” (CW, 104). Clov explores that “other hell” through a telescope, reporting back to Hamm that the waves are “lead” (no heat) and the sun is “zero” (CW, 107) (no sun). For Gontarski, this interest in the temperature says something important about the play’s temporality since the periodically reported meteorological data give the play a circular structure of “0–50–100, then back to 0, another end already in the beginning. The return to zero may foretell the play’s potential end [. . .], but at the same time, the return to zero suggests a loop, the possi-

35 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 9. 36 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.

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bility of a new cycle.”37 Endgameʼs time is a loop. A chess stalemate implies eternity; a draw has to be announced as otherwise the game would never end. Salisbury thinks that Endgame may be an allusion to a particular endgame composition discussed by Duchamp with whom Beckett engaged in many exciting chess battles in 1940.38 However, this assumption is not supported by the textual cues since the Lasker-Reichelm position Salisbury has in mind consists of a white king and four pawns versus a black king and three pawns. In other words, it is a “king and pawn” endgame. By contrast, the play’s endgame composition consists of two knights, a pawn, and a king which makes it a “two knights vs. pawn” endgame. Considering this impending stalemate, a question arises. Where is the second king? The “two knights vs. pawn” composition is possible only if both kings are still on the board since capturing the opponent’s king ends the game. Let us briefly suspend the mystery of the second king, to which I shall return below. The most famous endgame theoretician Alexey Troitzky describes such an endgame – two knights and a king against a king and a pawn – known as one of the most complex endgame puzzles.39 The eighteenth-century French player François Chapais was first to draw attention to this case calling it a true paradox40 because, counterintuitively, a king and two knights versus a lone king cannot force a mate, but two knights versus a king and a pawn might be able to win, albeit with great difficulty. Troitzky built on Chapaisʼs analysis and indicated how the knights and a king could win in 115 moves. But this configuration remains a theoretical possibility only as after 50 moves a draw is announced. Such a Troitzkian rational player is pondered upon by Hamm when he asks Clov to imagine “if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at!” (CW, 108). A rational being in game theory is a rational agent who

37 Stan E. Gontarski, “An End to Endings,” in Borderless Beckett/Beckett Sans Frontieres, ed. Minako Okamuro et. al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008): 419–443, 424. 38 Salisbury, Samuel Beckett, 136; Marcel Duchamp, Vitaly Halberstadt, Opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Brussels, Paris: L’Echiquier, 1932); James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996): 298–301. 39 Alexey Troitzky, Collection of Chess Studies (Bronx, NY: Ishi P, 1992). 40 François Chapais, Essais analytiques sur les échecs, avec figures [ca. 1780] (Rijswijk: RUEB, 2009).

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has well-determined goals and preferences, is capable of evaluating any set of alternatives, and always optimizes his [sic] profit. A rational agent is also assumed to be perfectly informed and able to process properly all data at his disposal.41

This is also how British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey defines42 the decision-making process of an ideal rational agent; the ideal rational agent has all the necessary information available to him/her, is able to evaluate it and make a decision that leads to the most desirable and profitable outcome. Needless to say, in reality, no one makes decisions in this fashion – humans are simply not ideal rational beings. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests that reason cannot be separated from emotion and feeling, which “are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.”43 Damasio goes on to say that irrationality possibly results not from a lack of knowledge but from a reduction in emotion.44 One may think that this refutes game theory’s basic assumptions but, as Tom Siegfried explains, game theory deals primarily with “what people would do if they were ‘rationallyʼ maximizing their utility” where “maximizing utility” may be emotional, not monetary.45 A rational agent, based on available knowledge, chooses the strategy that is most likely to lead to the achievement of the goal. Other players do not have to know or understand his/her choices and, according to behavioral game theory,46 the motivation does not have to be conscious to be rational. But even where such controlled situations as rule-bound games are concerned, things can go awry. Swirski points out that even if the players (rational agents) “knew all the rules of the game they were embedded in” the classical postulates of rationality may still not explain their behavior.47 Swirski adds that when “the rules become too vast or complicated for an individual to grasp in entirety, for practical purposes the situation becomes not unlike a freeform game [. . .] in essence giving them the power to make the rules up as they go.”48

41 Swirski, Of Literature, 136. 42 Frank P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers [1926] (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990): 52–109. 43 Antonio Damasio, Descartesʼ Error – Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994): xiii. 44 Damasio, Descartesʼ Error, 53. 45 Tom Siegfried, A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry P, 2006): 96. 46 Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Colin Camerer, “Progress in Behavioral Game Theory,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (1997): 167–188. 47 Swirski, Of Literature, 136. 48 Swirski, Of Literature, 136.

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That is, too much structural complexity leads to the transformation of the game into a chaotic structure. This insight resonates with chaos theory, for which “maximum disorder and maximum order are identical” (TN, 62–63). Gontarski invokes this postulate in order to explain the contrast between Clovʼs obsession with order and the play’s deteriorating characters and their entropic world signaled by the increasing cold felt by Nagg and Nell and “echoed later by Hammʼs call for a blanket” (TN, 176) as well as Clov’s enumeration of things they are running out of: painkillers, bicycle wheels, pap, nature, tide, navigators, rugs, and coffins. For game theory, irrationality means that what the player does contradicts what he/she seeks to do which further minimizes his/her chances of achieving the best possible outcome. As philosopher Paul Weirich puts it, “it is possible that an irrational agent pursues incentives endlessly. In this case relentless pursuit of incentives conflicts with choice. [. . .] That is, his [sic] actual choice is incoherent given one of his hypothetical choices.”49 Are the play’s characters such irrational agents pursuing pointless incentives endlessly? Or is there some rational reason to continue with this seemingly pointless stalemate situation? These questions bring me back to the unresolved issue of the missing white king. Endgame’s characters briefly mention a fifth character, Mother Pegg, who needed oil for her lamp, but Hamm refused to provide it. Clov insinuates that Hamm was indirectly responsible for her death because she “died of darkness” (CW, 129). This description connects Mother Pegg with light (White) as threatened by darkness (Black). However, the text does not provide any other clues characterizing Mother Pegg as a chess king (or queen). Still, for the game to go on, there must be two kings on the chessboard. In other words, there must be a game-theoretical reason to go on. The capture of a king entails the end of the game. If there is no second king in Endgame, the game must have ended already. The chess pieces no longer have any value. The space-time of the game is the space-time of death; the chess pieces/characters are already dead as can be seen from the following statements: “Hamm: You stink already. The whole place stinks of corpses” (CW, 114). Later in the play, Hamm asks Clov to describe the earth in one word. Clov answers, giving a pivotal clue as to the nature of this game: “What all is? In a word? [. . .] Just a moment. [. . .] Corpsed” (CW, 106). Yet the characters refuse to accept their end: “Clov (impatiently): Let’s stop playing! Hamm: Never!” (CW, 130), or “Hamm (angrily): To hell with the universe. (Pause.) Think of something!” (CW, 114). Thinking equals action, which protects them from non-existence, from the end of the existential game,

49 Paul Weirich, Equilibrium and Rationality: Game Theory Revised by Decision Rules (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007): 99.

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and so, in a Cartesian manner, thinking equals existing – a strategic move made to prolong the game. Game theory aims to describe and predict strategic thinking, to see which moves pay off and which do not. So why does Endgame go on when there is no chance of winning and when it is no longer even a game? Because the game is viewed from the perspective of the chess pieces; they have no independent existence outside the game. It is crucial for them to pretend that the game is not over as otherwise their existence is forfeit: “Clov: Why do you keep me? Hamm: There’s no one else. Clov: There’s nowhere else” (CW, 95), or “Hamm: Outside of here it’s death” (CW, 96). The verbal sparring the characters engage in is a strategy used to keep the game going. Jean-Jacques Lecercle provides an interesting example of a verbal battle in which opponents use language as a dialogic weapon and nonsense as a strategy that protects from losing but results in a stalemate. One wants to leave the game but cannot “because he who first expresses the desire to quit loses all. This is the kind of dilemma that game theory is interested in, and the only conceivable solution is of the cooperative type.”50 The play’s characters are not competing to win – this is not a zero-sum game – because the existential supergame demands that there be a game in the first place; the goal here is endless looping. The achievement of this goal requires coordination, which is related to the famous Nash equilibrium as none of the players can profit by changing their strategy because this would lead to nonexistence – a loss for everyone involved.51 On a related note, Beckett described Hamm as knowing very well “from the start that he is only making senseless moves. [. . .] Each of his motions is one of the last useless moves that delay the end” (TN, 49). Hammʼs strategy is to cooperate, to continue with the game and to convince the other chess pieces to go on coexisting.

Subgames: Paradoxes, wordplay, toys Endgame’s characters resort to subgames to coexist.52 The multiplicity of subgames is a strategy in itself. Simply put, “a proper subgame is a portion of a

50 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense (London, New York: Routledge, 2002): 78. 51 John Nash, “Equilibrium Points in N-person Games,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36.1 (1950): 48–49. 52 Adam M. Brandenburger, Barry J. Nalebuff, Co-Opetition: A Revolutionary Mindset that Combines Competition and Cooperation (New York: Crown Business, 1997).

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game that can be analyzed as a game in its own right.”53 Since “a perfect subgame equilibrium is always the Nash equilibrium,”54 the strategy one should be able to observe in Endgameʼs subgames consists of all kinds of stalling, looping or “dead-ending.” One modality of such looping is paradox. The play begins with Clov citing one of Zenoʼs paradoxes: “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (CW, 93). How does one move from a grain to a heap? The grain of sand must already contain the essence of a heap. This paradox also points to a well-known Arabic legend about the invention of chess.55 The inventor was asked by a grateful monarch to name a reward and the man asked for the quantity of grain that would be produced by placing one grain on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. The king agreed only to discover that the resultant quantity was impossibly large (about 18 trillion). Swirski notes that, for game theory, paradoxes, despite all appearances of illogic or madness, can be tactically perfectly sound. Let us remember that, far from being an inherent attribute, rationality is really a function of one’s ability to make decisions. As such it can be, to some extent at least, manipulated at will.56

Subsequently, “bargaining processes, including arms, border, or hostage negotiations, can serve as examples of such manipulation – in effect cheating at the rationality game.”57 Just as the monarch got cheated at the rationality game, Zenoʼs paradox has a clear strategic function in the play. Endgame revels in its ability to toy with rationality. Here is Hamm: “the bigger a man is the fuller he is. (Pause. Gloomily.) And the emptier” (CW, 93). Another paradox is related to a significant intertext of the play, the Bible. Based on Beckettʼs own admission of the origin of the characters’ names (TN, 48–49), Gontarski conjectures that Hamm etymologically stems from the English “hammer,”58 Clov comes from the French “clou,” Nagg from the German “Nagel” and Nell is a visual rhyme for the English “nail.” Additionally, the deceased Mother Pegg (a “peg”) is another nail. Gontarski is convinced that “in the symbolism of Beckett’s art, hammers and nails almost always echo Christʼs passion.”59 One

53 Drew Fudenberg, Jean Tirole, Game Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 91. 54 Hans Peters, Game Theory: A Multi-Leveled Approach (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2008): 49. 55 Eales, Chess, 27. 56 Swirski, Of Literature, 138. 57 Swirski, Of Literature, 138. 58 Gontarski, “An End to Endings,” 423. 59 Gontarski, “An End to Endings,” 423.

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thus encounters the most famous paradox of all – Christ, who is both human and God, dead and alive. Being “undead” is the state of being that characterizes the rational chess pieces in Endgame. Zenoʼs paradox, specifically, plays a structural role in conveying the sense of such an “undead” looping temporality. This paradox is stated, iterated and it returns again and again. The first iteration is created by Hamm: “I give you some corn, a pound, a pound and a half, you bring it back to your child and you make him – if he’s still alive – a nice pot of porridge” (CW, 118). Later, Hamm reiterates: “You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little . . . you begin to grieve” (CW, 125). Finally, Hamm concludes: babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three [. . .]. (Pause.) Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of. . . (he hesitates). . . that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life. (CW, 126)

The old Greek’s paradox is elaborated upon like a theme in an intricate fugue and a full circle is drawn. The first time Zenoʼs paradox is mentioned by Clov, it is already an echo of the above reflection made by Hamm at the end of the play. But how can Clov know what Hamm will say at the end? The only viable answer is that Clov heard it during a previous performance of Endgame. Literary scholar Erik Zillen thinks that such a metacommunicative (metatextual) signal is always part of playing.60 Anthropologist Gregory Bateson observed metacommunication even among apes: “this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘This is play’.”61 Without such signaling a mock-fight could spiral into a life-or-death situation at any moment. Endgame toys with the boundary separating play and real life by incorporating many metatextual signals. For instance, the play hints at the repetitiveness actors professionally deal with: “Clov: Why this farce, day after day? Hamm: Routine” (CW, 107). Before beginning his story, Hamm promises Nagg a sweet “[a]fter the audition” (CW, 116). Hamm retorts after Clov misunderstands him: “An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before? (Pause.) I’m warming up for my last soliloquy” (CW, 130). Or, Clov notices something on the horizon and prompts Hamm to think of the plot: “More complications! (Clov gets down.) Not an underplot, I trust!” (CW, 130). Hamm evaluates his own narration:

60 Erik Zillen, Den lekande Fröding (Lund: Nordic Academic P, 2001). 61 Gregory Bateson, A Theory of Play and Fantasy: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972): 177–193, 179.

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the sun was sinking down into the. . . down among the dead. (Normal voice.) Nicely put, that. (Narrative tone.) Come on now, come on, present your petition and let me resume my labors. (Pause. Normal tone.) There’s English for you! (CW, 117)

Similarly to paradoxes, such metatextuality counts as stalling since a double meaning lessens an expression’s informative value, inducing a constant looping between fiction and reality. Endgame is also rich in wordplay: “Hamm: We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something? Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!” (CW, 108). The phrase refers to having something in mind as well as to being meaningful, to counting – Hamm and Clov are struggling with both. Another play on words involves Hamm, Clov and a flea: “Hamm: Laying! Lying, you mean. Unless he’s laying doggo. Clov: Ah? One says lying? One doesn’t say laying? Hamm: Use your head, can’t you. If he was laying we’d be bitched” (CW, 108). The neutrality of language is playfully subverted, given its power to multiply, to turn one Endgame into a multitude of games, many discursive and performative strategic moves. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that profaning the sacred is often part of playing and games62; wordplay, in particular, decontextualizes, “effaces the [religious] rite and allows the myth to survive.”63 Endgame does focus on such profanations as, for instance, loving your neighbor becomes licking your neighbor: “Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!” (CW, 125). The interplay between the literal and the metaphorical meaning is profaning as well: You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes [. . .]. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more. (Pause.) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it. (CW, 109)

Clovʼs profaning response to these poetic musings on death is “It’s not certain” (CW, 110). Even death is alea, a game of chance. Such textual forms of play are the subgames of existence keeping death at bay since the characters would lose their being and their value if they accepted that the game is over. These subgames offer a means of interacting (of making moves), but they are self-referential deadends (senseless). Endgame is quite a game menagerie and, unsurprisingly, actual and pretend toys appear as well. The real toy is a stuffed dog without one leg and, as Hamm keenly observes, it lacks genitals and a ribbon. Hamm asks to put the dog on the ground and a farce is played out; Clov attempts to put the three-

62 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007): 75. 63 Agamben, Profanations, 76.

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legged dog on the ground, but it keeps falling down. Hamm wants to pet the dog; Clov places Hammʼs hand on the dog’s head. Hamm and Clov even imbue the toy with life through language: “Hamm: (He gropes for the dog.) The dog’s gone. Clov: He’s not a real dog, he can’t go. Hamm (groping): He’s not there. Clov: He’s lain down” (CW, 120). In game-theoretical terms, this anthropomorphic treatment of the toy means “a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.”64 A clock is likewise turned into a toy as if to stretch the boundaries of free unreality even further, subsuming real life under the ludic and the unreal: “Exit Clov. Brief ring of alarm offstage. Enter Clov with alarm-clock. He holds it against Hammʼs ear and releases alarm. They listen to it ringing to the end” (CW, 115). Eventually, Clov hangs the clock on the wall, replacing a painting, which may imply the clock’s and time’s purely decorative function. Yet it also calls to mind the prominent timestructuring role a chess clock has in a chess game. Later in the play, Hamm attempts to row using a gaff while sitting in his chair, not moving an inch. The room contains no water, fish, or boats and so the gaff is decontextualized; it is another example of free unreality. During his last soliloquy Hamm throws away his toys (gaff, dog, whistle) exclaiming “discard” (CW, 133), thus evoking card games. He covers his face with a handkerchief to mark the end of this loop – until the next performance.

Conclusions In essence, such board games as chess and go exemplify the principles of “doing” or drama in Greek (also meaning “action”) – how the pieces move or do not move after being placed on the board in order to gain control over a certain space – as well as principles of “thinking”, formulated on the basis of the deep structures governing the rules of the two games.65

If one abstracts such rules and principles and applies them to existence, imposing these principles onto the fabric of reality, one encounters the strange and isolated time-space of Endgame. The most interesting philosophical acumen of the play is that the ludic, rule-bound game structure is itself but a voluntary façade; a freeform game performed in order to fend off existential chaos. As such, it is a perfectly rational choice. The games the characters play, the stories they tell, the

64 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 10. 65 Rokem, “Dramaturgies of Exile,” 7.

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verbal jousting they engage in, the performances they put on are only pretexts for being together, for finding a structure to express that being-togetherness and avoiding the “other hell” of non-existence. In this sense, Endgame is a mirror of the human need to tame the universe by giving meaning to the incomprehensible and making it bearable. This is the emotional and existential payoff of the strategy used by Endgame’s characters. Consciously or unconsciously, Huizinga hinted at this ordering within and without chaos when he stated that the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. [. . .] [Play] creates order, is order.66

This play (or, in Cailloisʼs terms, ludus) and its structuring is not limited to such play-grounds but, as Endgame implies, extends to encompass the entirety of human society, its culture, and its form of Mitsein. The most relevant aspect of the play in relation to game theory is that Endgame is perfectly explainable and analyzable in terms of goals, strategy, and payoffs. What the characters do and say is in line with the best strategic choices available to them, considering the peculiar circumstances of their existential situation. But the play does not simply transform chess pieces and the “two knights vs. pawn” endgame puzzle into living human characters and real-life settings, albeit some clear correspondences, as I have argued, can be established. Endgame implicitly subverts the opposition between paidia and ludus, between chaotic free play and rule-governed gaming. Kant, Huizinga, Lessing, Schlegel, and Schiller all gave preference to paidia. They saw free play as the primary condition necessary for creativity and understanding to occur. Endgame suggests that without structure there is no meaning or value and no possibility of creation because it is the game that produces meaning and value in the first place. A chess king is nothing outside of the chessboard. Correspondingly, the human being is nothing outside of the (human) culture that values humanity. This abstract, ludic transformation is what most fascinated Duchamp in chess, since there “is a mental end implied when you look at the formation of the pieces on the board. The transformation of the visual aspect to the grey-matter is what always happens in chess and it is what should happen in art.”67 Such coalescing of chess pieces into a move or a constellation is the aesthetic power of chess. Endgame converts existence into a chess space-time, at the same time revealing that the former was always already the latter.

66 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. 67 Duchamp, qtd. in Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde, 316.

Part II: “Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds”

Romén Reyes-Peschl

“The End Is Built into the Beginning”: Charlie Kaufman and the Orderly Disorder of Neuroscience Abstract: Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman’s evident concern with “mind” is amply demonstrated in two consecutive screenplay titles: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). But what of the mind’s supposed material seat, the brain? While Being John Malkovich (1999) leaves the mind/body relationship ambiguous, later works Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Anomalisa (2015) are more neurologically-inflected, subtly referring to rare brain conditions to comment on broader existential issues of the human condition in general. This essay asks why Kaufman repeatedly mines this cognitive/neuro scientific vein in particular; it approaches the question via “convolutions,” a metaphorical nexus of literature and neuroscience ultimately revelatory of one’s own human, writerly, brain-bound self. The essay further assesses how such convolutionary ideas invite empathic readings of Kaufman’s work, and thus how his oeuvre as much colours as it is coloured by considerations of neurological order and disorder. “Periphery is an illusion of individual consciousness.”1

Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman clearly betrays his chief concern in two consecutive project titles: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Perhaps less evident is how far beyond “mind” he goes; just as the brain folds mental experience of life and time back into itself, Kaufman folds subtle neuro-commentaries back into his representation of time and lived experience.2 This is appreciable throughout Kaufman’s oeuvre,

1 Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket P, 2008): xi. 2 A brief terminological contextualization, to serve as a disclaimer of sorts: “mind” (and related words such as “mental”) and “brain” (and related words such as “neuronal” or “cerebral”) exist as different words, because, to many people, they refer to different concepts. However, longstanding philosophical positions hold the contrary (positions closely linked to the Cartesian question of how the immaterial mind can interact with the material body); they are “type physicalism,” “mind/brain identity theory,” or just “identity theory” (Cf. The Mind–Brain Identity Theory, ed. C.V. Borst [London: Macmillan, 1970]). These all essentially designate “mind” and “brain” as one and the same, reducing the mind to an epiphenomenon of brain function, or rendering the two identical. However, the “mind-brain dispute” continues unabated in philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-005

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beginning with his breakthrough script for Being John Malkovich (1999), which David LaRocca succinctly yet vividly summarizes as “his screenplay about a puppeteer who enters a portal into Malkovich’s brain.”3 Meanwhile, in Eternal Sunshine, external erasure of internal memory becomes an everyday reality – a consumer service provided by “Lacuna Inc, a company that specializes in erasing unwanted memories from its clients’ brains” by way of a murky, neurotechnological procedure.4 Later works Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Anomalisa (2015) are even more pointedly neurological, referring to brain conditions like the Cotard and Fregoli delusions respectively (both will be elucidated presently), and thematizing the entwinement of the neuropsychological and the personal. But what links Kaufman’s work to the cognitive/neuro sciences in such a repeatedly productive manner? My argument is that this fecundity stems from Kaufman’s labyrinthine, self-conscious approach to his work and so this essay addresses this question via “convolutions,” a metaphorical nexus of literature and neuroscience.5 As will be shown, Kaufman’s sensitivity to complexities of the “mind” always incorporates some embodied, temporal and autobiographical nuance – a concomitant concern for his own lifespan, body and brain, his dread of the inevitable dissipation of the “mind” into the extemporal ether and the intersubjective empathy this engenders. This is most evident in Synecdoche,

neuroscience and the humanities. Though, for some readers, I may sometimes play fast and loose with the terms “mind” and “brain” and use them interchangeably while also seeing them as separate entities, this is a conscious decision, based on my agreement with neurophenomenological literary scholar Paul Armstrong’s assertion that “productive dialogue between literary studies and neuroscience may be facilitated if the mind-brain dispute can be bypassed” (Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013]: 19). 3 David LaRocca, ed., The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 2011): 4. 4 Andrew M. Butler, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 7. 5 I use this deceptively complex term “neuroscience” as a catch-all for many convergent strands of medicine, science and other fields, and can only cursorily touch here on the currency of the “neuro” prefix, as seen in critical neologisms such as “neuromania” or “neuroculture” (for example, cf. Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity [Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011]; Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe, ed. Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal [Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011]). Additionally, neuroscience “can itself be considered a part of the continuous progress of neurology. Neurology is here largely used as a precursory but essentially analogous term to “neuroscience’” (Romén Reyes-Peschl, Convolutions: Writing the Mind and the Neurology of the Literary Brain, [electronically published dissertation: U of Kent, 2016]: 7, note 1).

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where the on-and-off love interest Hazel reminisces with the deteriorating protagonist Caden (who, like Kaufman, is a writer and director utterly preoccupied with his craft and his own mortality), and remarks that “the end is built into the beginning.”6 In what follows I briefly sketch “convolutions,” focusing particularly on their labyrinthine instantiations; I ask how convolutionary ideas invite readings of Kaufman’s work as a sprawling yet consistent attempt at a broadly construed concept of empathy, as well as how his oeuvre colours and is coloured by notions of neurological order and disorder.7 In doing so, I pose more questions than can be answered in order to open up a space for future discussions of Kaufman and science,8 and to avoid imposing artificial order where there is perhaps none, neurological or otherwise.

Convolutions: A brief history of mind, a brief history of mine In tribute to Kaufman’s penchant for deploying some overtly (if not infamously) autobiographical material in his work, I will briefly do so, too. This essay originates in my doctoral thesis, Convolutions: Writing the Mind and the Neurology of

6 Charlie Kaufman, “Film script for Synecdoche, New York (1st draft),” Being Charlie Kaufman: The Definitive Charlie Kaufman Information Resource Since 2001 (acc. 14 October 2018): 110. 7 A note here on definitions of “order” and “disorder”: as I am more concerned with problematization than definition (as a gesture towards the open questions posed by the neurodiversity movement), my suggestion is that, in physical systems, as in information theory, neurological diagnosis and quotidian usage, order and disorder can be seen as points on a spectrum rather than discrete concepts. For N. Katherine Hayles, “[s]cientific paradigms do not exist in some ideal space above or beyond culture. They are part of their culture, which they both replicate and reinforce. In my view, the more productive ways to think about the relation of these paradigms to literary theory and literature start with the premise that they are social constructions and ask how their assumptions reinforce other assumptions in the culture” (N. Katherine Hayles, “Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science,” New Literary History 20.2 [1989]: 305–322, 311). Though this is not the focal point of the present essay, I want to mobilize the spectral, non-definitive “order” and “disorder” of neurology as a provocation for future discussion of science, as this is what Kaufman does throughout his oeuvre. 8 To clarify, Kaufman does not necessarily deploy scientific content itself so much as ideas from the history of science, to talk instead about the people making, experiencing, being governed by scientific discourse.

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the Literary Brain,9 in a chapter on the importance of the labyrinth motif in neuroscientific endeavour – more on this later. However, I chose not to focus on Kaufman at that stage; instead, I return to him now. There are several ways the phrase “the end is built into the beginning” can be interpreted, but as a central tenet of Convolutions is the purposeful wandering away from one’s topic in order to more appositely tackle it later – a type of wilful, tactical digression rooted in what Jacques Derrida has described as destinerrance – for me, the phrase resonates with the double meaning of “end” as both purpose and finishing point. Destinerrance is a notoriously slippery term, itself seemingly without end or even origin, as J. Hillis Miller observes.10 Even so, nailing it down is unnecessary; temporarily refraining from doing so, is, indeed, congruent with its remit. Taking a purposefully evasive stance on the term informs my view of “wandering” and “labyrinths” – or, as I say in Convolutions, this is the modus operandi that [Derrida’s] concept prescribes – to stray in order to stay on track. Wandering as a concrete aim: this is a more orthodox and perhaps also softer (but easier to understand) description of destinerrance.11

Ever pithy, Miller summarizes like so: “Destinerrance is like a loose thread in a tangled skein that turns out to lead to the whole ball of yarn.”12 To return to Synecdoche, a convolutionary reading of Hazel’s line would be that I had to temporarily leave aside my initial encounter with Kaufman so that I could more properly address it now. Clearly, however, for this to cohere for the uninitiated reader (and I assume the majority of readers will be so), I will briefly explain the main premise of Convolutions. A convolution is a loop, or a fold, just as the folds of the brain are sometimes termed the cerebral convolutions. It is a loop in another sense; stories or narratives are often referred to as convolutions (or convoluted) if their plots and themes are complex and resist linear reading. To illustrate, MerriamWebster describes a “convolution” both as “a twist or curve” and also as “something that is very complicated and difficult to understand”; from this double definition of convolutions, both literal and figurative, one can appreciate how a twist in the tale might relate to that most complicated of organs, the brain. Both of these senses are well established, but my work proposes a new interpretation of convolution (or convolving), positing it as a metaphor for a process embedded in multiple texts, discourses and disciplines, primary 9 Cf. note 5 in the present essay. 10 J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham UP, 2009): 29, 31. 11 Reyes-Peschl, Convolutions, 211. 12 Hillis Miller, For Derrida, 29.

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among which are literature, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. Highlighting this looping, reflexive process means actively engaging in it, as I do, and promoting the phenomenon of convolution as a self-conscious practice (in a similar way to Kaufman). I have traced the overarching metaphor of convolution through a series of sub-metaphors, or instantiations of convolutions, which are potentially numerous. So far, I have unpicked four: quest, detective, labyrinth and ballistics. In this essay, I will focus on the labyrinth, as it pertains to Kaufman. A common description of Kaufman is exemplified by film critic Dana Stevens, that he is not just “the only major screenwriter with a distinctly literary voice,” but more saliently, that his works exhibit a “mix of labyrinthine imagination and absurdist wit”13; such descriptions provide the original impetus for my literarilyinflected investigation into all things Kaufmanesque and maze-like. The rest of my research on labyrinths departs from a similar point to those other convolutions listed above, foregrounding a particular metaphorical facet of neuroscience and its history. Thus, the brain’s convolutions resemble the meandering paths and doublings-back of mazes and labyrinths, while storytelling, science, and life itself can also be said to meander, double back, be labyrinthine. However, this stance shifts the consideration of convolutions as a relatively straightforward epistemological activity to a blurring of metaphorical boundaries between the convolutionary aspects of epistemology and ontology. That is to say, where a fairly simple assertion regarding convolutions had previously been made in another convolution traced through the metaphor of detection – namely, that neuroscience apes detective fiction whilst ironically masking this fact by using techniques borrowed from that genre – I make a more complicated move with labyrinths. Here, an activity or inquiry (such as science, or detection) is concretized as a material object or physical space. My aim, when looking into labyrinths and mazes, is to problematize such concretions, to question the logic that paints brain science (or movement through a labyrinth, or attempting to solve a puzzle) as the self-same object of that very science: the brain (or the labyrinthine structure, or the physical puzzle itself). The investigation of such a complex metaphorical and metaphysical interplay is an example of convolution as much as the interplay itself is. To discuss the labyrinth, one cannot help but enter it. However, rather than accepting what is undoubtedly a difficult state of affairs as I am trying (or risking) here, brain science disavows its labyrinthine complexities, foisting all mystery

13 Dana Stevens, “Everyone Sucks: Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York” (24 October 2008), Slate (acc. 14 October 2018).

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and difficulty onto the brain itself.14 The stability and security of the neuroscientific project is instead reinstated through the employment of cartographic metaphors to counter those derived from mazes, mapping the brain and colonizing the messy, labyrinthine coastlines of the mind. Author, physician and sometime neurosurgeon Gavin Francis writes frankly about just such a situation, and how his own experience led him to a cartographic interpretation of body and mind: As a child I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a geographer. Maps and atlases were a way of exploring the world through images [. . .]. As I grew older [. . .] I traded my geographical atlas for an atlas of anatomy. The two didn’t seem so different [. . .]: both books reduced the fabulous complexity of the natural world to something comprehensible – something that could be mastered.15

The geographer of gross anatomy, in this view, is its “master”; the same can be said of similarly reductive attempts to map the brain and master the mind, as evidenced by a wide range of cartographic neuroscience and psychology titles from The Mind Map Book and Mapping the Mind, to I-Brainmap and Brain Mapping: From Neural Basis of Cognition to Surgical Applications.16 This neurocartographic tendency has been noted, lamented and/or satirized by Charlie Kaufman as well, to some degree in the confluence of mental and physical categories of time and space in the life-size, life-long play central to Synecdoche,17 but more notably in Eternal Sunshine. As film scholar Chris Dzialo writes:

14 This actually renders mastery of the brain a distant yet achievable feat, such as in bold but common pronouncements claiming that an item from neuroscientific inquiry (if not the entire brain itself) is the “final” or the “last frontier” (for instance, Cf. Richard Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979]; Charles Nicholson, Sabina Hrabětová, “Brain Extracellular Space: The Final Frontier of Neuroscience,” Biophysical Journal 113.10 [2017]: 2133–2142. Like a far-flung, uncharted territory waiting to be explored and explained, the brain’s supposed hinterlands afford countless areas for such exploration and explanation, even if the whys and the hows of these endeavours are even more opaque, problematic, or indeed, labyrinthine than the hinterlands themselves. 15 Gavin Francis, Adventures in Human Being (London: Profile Books, Wellcome Collection, 2015): 1. 16 Cf. Tony Buzan, The Mind Map Book: Unlock Your Creativity, Boost Your Memory, Change Your Life, with Barry Buzan, James Harrison (Harlow: BBC Active/Pearson, 2010); Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998); Rita McInnes, I-Brainmap: Freeing Your Brain for Happiness (Daylesford, Victoria: Naughty Brain Ink, 2014); Brain Mapping: From Neural Basis of Cognition to Surgical Applications, ed. Hugues Duffau (Vienna: Springer Austria, 2011). 17 Cf. Richard Deming, “Living a Part: Synecdoche, New York, Metaphor, and the Problem of Skepticism,” in David LaRocca, ed., The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 2011): 193–207.

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Eternal Sunshine invites us to think about time in terms of space. However, space becomes not just a representation or signifier of time, but threatens to metastasize and replace time. [. . .] The most apparent spatial-temporal conflation in the script for Eternal Sunshine takes place through the constant referencing of [protagonist] Joel’s brain as a “map” of memories.18

Lacuna Inc, the aforementioned company that seeks to manipulate the memories in Joel’s brain, “views this map as an ideal representation of chronological time and memory, around which to pattern the actual chronology and memory [emphasis in the original].”19 The idea boils down to this: where a memory is in the brain, is essentially the same as what the contents of that particular memory happen to be. Regardless of the latter, mastery over the former is enough, and the spatial representation or the mapping of thought (or memory, or any other mental phenomenon) serves to tame its unruly, labyrinthine qualities. But whence and why do such notions of the brain and mind’s mappability arise? As historian Rebecca Lemov explains in her 2005 book World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, much of this tendency stems from the conflation of behaviour in the world with behaviour in a maze, which, for Lemov, is the product of the early-twentieth-century emergence of behaviourism. Behaviourism infamously asserted that the contents of the mind are essentially non-existent; all that counts is behaviour itself. These conclusions, drawn from physically labyrinthine experiments – on mice – continue to impact upon neuroscience and psychology in the present day. Experimental design – that way of mimicking the world in the lab – continues to be based on mice in mazes as stand-ins for people in the world.20 If the convolutions of the brain resemble a labyrinth, while the world is represented by a maze, and the world of the mind is mapped onto the brain in order to master it, it is clear that such a convoluted logic requires interrogation. Failing to do so risks smoothing over the age-old problematics of the labyrinthine, and assumes that a linear, positivistic progression in the history of psychology and neuroscience can readily replace the history of humanity’s interaction with mazes.

18 Chris Dzialo, “‘Frustrated Time’ Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland, (Malden, MA; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 107–128, 117–118. 19 Dzialo, “‘Frustrated Time’ Narration,” 118; emphasis in the original. 20 For instance, cf. Kerin K. Higa, Jared W. Young, Mark A. Geyer, “Wet or Dry: Translatable ‘Water Mazes’ for Mice and Humans,” J Clin Invest 126.2 (2016): 477–479; Isabelle Boutet et al., “Utility of the Hebb-Williams Maze Paradigm for Translational Research in Fragile X Syndrome: A Direct Comparison of Mice and Humans,” Front Mol Neurosci 11.99 (2018).

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In other words, instead of addressing the symbolic convolutions within and without the labyrinth, behaviourism looked at the labyrinth from the outside only. In effect, the symbolic aspect of the labyrinth is effaced and the labyrinth is taken for the real, concrete model for cognition, for mental function in the world, for the workings of the brain, and even for life. Of the uptake of labyrinths in experimental design, Lemov writes: Mazes won out because in a sense they were the most general, the most representative, and the most perfect models available of the original problem situation, life itself. [. . .] The maze had long stood for the struggle to find one’s way when the truth was elusive and the way fraught with monsters and despair. [. . .] The maze promised a great deal, for it provided the design for the new “human maze.”21

What was true for the mouse maze became true for the so-called “human maze,” mapped in a directly representational rather than symbolic manner. However, behaviourists, other flavours of contemporaneous psychologists, and other mind/brain researchers are also humans – and thus subject to similar conclusions.22

21 Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005): 37. 22 An example of the incongruity of assumptions about what happens in the world and what happens only in the lab is offered by neuroscientist-turned-humanist Laura Otis. Her careerlong concern for thinking about thought itself is evidenced by extended ruminations on “wired thought” and the history of increasingly technologized networks of human communication (Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, [Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2001]. In more recent conversational “experiments” such as Rethinking Thought, she claims: “Working in neuroscience labs, teaching literature, and writing novels, I have come to see literature and science as alternate, equally valid systems for building knowledge about human minds. [. . .] Neuroscience and narrative [. . .] interact as peers” (Laura Otis, Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015]: 13). However, such a laudable attempt to bring the human mouse out of the lab and into an alternative, literary maze, did not come without personal cost, as she attests at the beginning of the book. Elsewhere, she compares the neurophysiology of vision to the Sausurrean theory in which “we define concepts not based on what they are, but on what they are not. When defining something, we typically compare it to something similar and then, like the eye, focus on the way it differs from the concepts most closely related to it. Like our visual system, we create meaning only through the differences we perceive and the boundaries we believe are present” (Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics [Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000]: 1–2). While the comparison makes sense, Otis realized that what is smooth in controlled laboratory conditions, or neat scientific theories, becomes disorienting and alienating in the rest of “life itself,” to borrow Lemov’s phrase once more. Otis: “What had struck me in the lab as natural and quite reasonable devastated me in the classroom” (Otis, Membranes, 2).

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As Lemov puts it: The scientists were also, in a sense, lab animals and human subjects. Although they believed in a firm separation between themselves and those who ran their labyrinthine mazes, [. . .] in fact such separation never existed. The experimenter cannot be distinguished from the experiment.23

What I take from Lemov is that by relying on mazes in simplistic material terms, researchers failed to properly attend to the complexity inherent in labyrinthine metaphors, the abovementioned “struggle” for an “elusive truth” on paths “fraught with monsters and despair.” In conflating mazes and maps, a straight line is drawn over the history of the neuro-psychological sciences. A typical trajectory might look like this: from the early days of Paul Broca’s cerebral localization in the mid-nineteenth century, when he arguably updated the now discredited pseudoscience of phrenology and showed that what had theretofore been seen as mental functions (such as language production) could be traced to specific areas of the brain24; through various experimentalists like David Ferrier, who managed to “map” motor functions onto particular areas of animal brains by using techniques of electrical stimulation; to the abovementioned behaviourists, then through the cortical maps of human brains produced by figures such as Wilder Penfield and Edgar Adrian, who used electrical stimulation to propose ideas such as the somatosensory homunculus (representative of the larger human containing it); and finally the Human Connectome Project, which apparently “aims to create a first-of-its-kind map of the brain’s complex circuitry, detailing every connection linking thousands of different regions of the brain.”25 However, this straight line cannot completely obscure the convolving, looping historical line that lies beneath it, arguably reaching all the way back to the Ancient Greek myth of the minotaur in the labyrinth, and perhaps beyond.

23 Lemov, World as Laboratory, 247. 24 In what purports to be “the most rigorous evaluation of phrenological claims to date” (O. Parker Jones, F Alfaro-Almagro, S Jbabdi, “An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology,” Cortex 106 [2018]: 26–35, 26), research has recently tried to improve on the methodological inadequacies of the Victorian attempts to link scalp shape to mental faculties, rather than merely take phrenological discussion (and its poor reputation) for granted. However, the results of this thorough MRI-based research still lead to conclusions firmly denying ‘that local scalp curvature can be used to infer brain function in the healthy population” (Jones, Alfaro-Almagro, Jbabdi, “An Empirical Evaluation,” 32). 25 Cf. Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2000); Clay Dillow, “The Human Connectome Project Is a Firstof-its-Kind Map of the Brain’s Circuitry,” Popular Science 16 (2010).

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From mapping the twists and turns of the mind to testing mouse memory in mazes, neuroscience and its history form a complicated labyrinth which challenges stable notions of interiority and exteriority. As Stephan Besser puts it, “mappings of the extracerebral world onto the brain and vice versa are a central element of the poetics of contemporary neuroculture” that oscillates between the reductive simplification of cartography and its own incorporation of maze-like associations.26 Literature’s long-lasting association with and experience of the figure of the labyrinth – from the aforementioned Greek myth, through Jorge Luis Borges’s seminal, philosophical short stories in his Labyrinths (first published in English in 1962), to popular contemporary reconceptions in books and films such as Kate Mosse’s bestselling 2005 Labyrinth or the 2014–2018 Maze Runner franchise – can serve as an informative, even illuminating antidote to the soporific deficiencies of the notion of mapping, a positivistic, ever-finer-grained mapping which seeks greater degrees of representative resolution but ultimately fails to address the underlying complexities of labyrinthine thinking in neuroscience. The point I want to make about Charlie Kaufman, then, is that his artistic focus on extreme deviation from the neuropsychological norm offers a genuine insight into the labyrinthine complexities of phenomenal existence – not just his, but anyone’s27; not just an aesthetic gesture, exploiting rare conditions to tell curious stories, but a “full-on” treatment of the human condition in all its facets. As film critic David Edelstein writes of Eternal Sunshine: No one has ever used this fantastic a premise to chart the convolutions of the human brain in the throes of breakup and reconciliation. And no one has Kaufman’s radar for emotional truth at the farthest reaches of the absurdist galaxy.28

Edelstein explicitly links “convolutions of the human brain” with “breakup,” “reconciliation” and a wide-reaching “emotional truth.” This pithily demonstrates how Kaufman’s work could potentially give practitioners or indeed critics in and around the neurosciences a take on empathy unavailable or inexplicable 26 Stephan Besser, “How Patterns Meet: Tracing the Isomorphic Imagination in Contemporary Neuroculture,” Configurations 25.4 (2017): 415–445, 418. 27 This is in some way also a reflection of wider arguments for a recalibration of such norms regarding the supposedly “neurotypical” – what does and does not count as a typical brain – as exemplified by multiple branches of the neurodiversity movement; for a summary, cf. Francisco Ortega, “The Cerebral Subject and the Challenge of Neurodiversity,” BioSocieties 4.4 (2009). 28 David Edelstein, “Forget Me Not: The Genius of Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), Slate http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2004/03/forget_me_ not.html, or https://slate.com/culture/2004/03/eternal-sunshine-is-unforgettable.html (acc. 14 October 2018).

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elsewhere, because, in a manner of speaking, any neurological state, rare or otherwise, affects them – much like it affects me and you.

The Kaufmanesque: A maze with no periphery Science columnist and author Carl Zimmer writes that the brain is a mysterious network, made of hundreds of billions of cells joined by trillions of connections. Somehow it gives rise to our feelings, our memories, and our sense of ourselves. [. . .] It is the quirky result of billions of years of evolution, and its history is folded into its convolutions.29

The “quirkiness” of the brain’s evolutionary history is somehow tinted by the history of how the brain has been subject to quantification and categorization: it is a “mysterious network” enumerating an immense internal landscape of interpolated spatial and temporal items, combining “billions of years” with “hundreds of billions of cells” which are all “folded into its convolutions.” Conversely, “feelings” and “memories” and “sense of self” remain “somehow” less precise, unnumbered, mysterious and residual non-quantities serving as a lingering echo of the murky, unknown, yet still foundational labyrinthine pathways bequeathed from generation to generation in myths and metaphors. Writing of just such seductive, productive, literary labyrinths, Wendy B. Faris observes that: “The labyrinthine space is the realm [of] our investigation, and it is also, paradoxically, the trace of that very investigation. [It] represents both quest for knowledge and origin of life.”30 If one puts Faris and Zimmer’s observations together, the brain, the object of “investigation,” is also “the trace of that very investigation.” The “history” of the brain is also the history of neuroscience, where “both the quest for knowledge and origin of life,” the end and the beginning, are “folded into its convolutions.” This convolutionary juxtaposition of Zimmer and Faris is highly evocative of the abovementioned Hazel in Charlie Kaufman’s labyrinthine film Synecdoche, New York (2008), when she vaguely reminisces with the slowly deteriorating protagonist Caden, melancholically pontificating over lost time.31 The film is a sustained meditation on the inbuilt obsolescence of life, exemplified by her line that

29 Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind (New York: Scott & Nix, 2010): xi. 30 Wendy B. Faris, Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins P, 1988): 194–195. 31 Kaufman, “Film script for Synecdoche, New York (1st draft),” 110.

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the “end is built into the beginning.” Kaufman sets out to demonstrate how this morbid, fatalistic premise manifests in corporeal and/or mental spheres, or as film commentator Doreen Alexander Child puts it, “the mind-body problem is [. . .] one of Kaufman’s prevalent themes [especially because] the physical body is a hindrance.”32 For Kaufman, the body’s invariable fallibility distorts the perception of time and thus complicates its own authentic, faithful, artistic representation – after all, the artist is subject to the same mortal constraints, the same intrinsically entropic nature of mind, body and life. The film’s appeals to transparent meaning or reason continuously break down in metaphorical tandem with the physical and mental lives of its characters. Bodily function and dysfunction, with a particular emphasis on the mind and brain, suffuse the whole of Synecdoche. On the surface, it is a film about a theatre director who decides to stage a play about himself in as brutally honest a manner as possible, including every single detail of his being and a microscopic focus on his own inner life.33 In effect, this means the play becomes him, as he even eventually feels impelled to include the making of the play within the play, and then the correspondent making of the making of, and then the whole world, and so on ad infinitum et ad absurdum. His life and his play are written in advance, just as they paradoxically unfold (and eventually unravel) in parallel real time. Played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, this man is named Caden Cotard, a hint at the existential interplay of neurology, artistry and destiny: “Caden” is redolent of “cadence,” a word for a musical passage announcing in advance the imminent closure of a piece, while “Cotard” refers to a rare neuropsychological delusional condition named after the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jules Cotard.34 Besides hypochondria and depression, patients

32 Doreen Alexander Child, Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind (Santa Barbara, CA; Denver, CO; Oxford: Praeger, 2010): 36. 33 This might be considered as the opposite gesture to Sigmund Freud’s recurring selfanalysis in his writings, or Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reflections that investigated the contents of consciousness and experience. Caden Cotard’s mental panorama is externalized, made into the lived environment he then experiences and re-internalizes, ready for the process to begin again in a dizzying feedback loop. 34 Doreen Alexander Child claims that “the name ‘Cotard’ is also a reference to a character in Marcel Proust’s literary epic, In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s Dr. Cottard in volume one of Swann’s Way, displays some of Caden Cotard’s characteristics: ‘Dr Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest’” (Child, Charlie Kaufman, 133; 162, note 11). However, Child does not elaborate on how Proust’s description of Dr. Cottard tallies with Synecdoche’s Caden, nor how such social awkwardness might connect to the Cotard delusion, whether in Kaufman’s film or otherwise.

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with the Cotard syndrome report that they are actually dead, or putrefying, or they disown parts of their bodies, perceiving them as somehow alien. So, Caden Cotard is alive, but only in that he is destined to die; he is the walking dead, merely waiting for his body to fall apart and his mind to fail, as is written into the very nature of his existence. The astronomical pointlessness of this is what drives Caden to stage his play, a last outpost of hope on the road to his own predetermined doom. The backcover blurb of Synecdoche’s screenplay says: “Kaufman twists and subverts the form and language of film as he delves into the mind of a man who, obsessed with his own mortality, sets out to construct a massive artistic enterprise that could give some meaning to his life.”35 This turn of phrase is appropriate, given that in Kaufman’s career progression, the film marked his directorial debut after first having gained fame as a scriptwriter – so this “twisting and subversion of the form and language of film” is easily appreciable as Kaufman’s own “massive artistic enterprise.” If he “delves into the mind of a man,” it is as much himself as it is Caden Cotard, which is indicative of a general but distinct autobiographical streak in the self-aware reflexivity of his entire filmography, even prior to Synecdoche. Kaufman is rare in being as well known for writing hit movies as those who directed them, to the point where film theorist David LaRocca claims that “[a] sure sign of the deep, pervasive cultural resonance of his work is found in the neologism ‘Kaufmanesque.’ ”36 It is common for film directors to be known in this way for a particular style, or a particular set of concerns, or both, which makes it seem inevitable that Kaufman would end up directing, too. However, for Kaufman, the very act of writing, or making a film, or putting on a play, is the thing being dramatized, turned inside out and reconfigured to see the implications it has for everyone involved – including Kaufman himself.37

35 Kaufman, Synecdoche Shooting Script (Cf. note 1 in the present essay). 36 LaRocca, Philosophy, 2–3. 37 In this respect, Synecdoche has an important relationship with Kaufman’s oeuvre and style in general. There are really two (if not more) main threads on the craft of writing running through the film: there is Caden’s attitude to his career, to the appropriation of material from his life for his masterpiece, to his praxis and ever developing mise-en-scène, all of which might be summarized as writing-becoming-life (as opposed to writing for a living, or even living for writing). This writing-becoming-life has a forward progression, even if starkly marked by the body’s movement into entropy; it has a linear, chronological, generalizable nature, and reflects Kaufman’s most explicit attempt to date to portray his views on the act of writing. On the other hand, there is Kaufman’s own mise-en-scène in the film, which does not just show the central writing-becoming-life of Caden, but many other themes, characters, motifs, discourses and texts (including neurological ones). An in-depth discussion of the above would be too long for these pages, but suffice it to say that, at first glance, the difference between

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Thus, if in Synecdoche he can be said to “delve into Caden’s mind,” in Being John Malkovich (1999), he even more explicitly delves into neuropsychological terrain, in what film historian Marc Norman surreally describes as a neurovoyeurism plot “about a failed puppeteer and his girlfriend who [. . .] open a small business running tours through [John Malkovich’s] brain.”38 Though not overtly autobiographical, the role of the puppet-master in this bizarre film is no innocent afterthought; it demonstrates Kaufman’s desire for artistic control is such that he would enter, quite literally, into the head of another if he could, including the head of a famous actor.39 However surreal the central conceit, the privileged access to interiority in Being John Malkovich is mirrored in protagonist puppeteer Craig’s use of a marionette that looks uncannily like him; an equally privileged access to exteriority allows one to see and even control one’s life from the outside – the author is here also authored, the creator is simultaneously the creation. The puppet motif was further developed by Kaufman in his 2015 co-directed stop-motion animation feature Anomalisa. Interestingly, where Synecdoche’s Caden is himself called Cotard, Anomalisa’s

Synecdoche’s linear writing-becoming-life and the narrative leaps, distortions, segues and tangents that Kaufman employs to tell its story can be likened to the Russian formalist concepts of fabula and syuzhet, whereby the former constitutes the events or facts of a narrative, and the latter represents the way in which these events or facts are artfully rearranged, rhetorically deployed, or even outright concealed, to tell a story. However, due to Synecdoche’s imbrication in medical discourses and its tightrope walk along an intertextual line dividing autobiography from a knowing, writerly-ethnography, I prefer to consider the above in light of Annemarie Mol’s remarkable study The Body Multiple (2002). Here, Mol foregoes the standard, solely empirical way of relating her experience shadowing doctors and atherosclerosis patients at a hospital in the Netherlands. Instead, she chooses not only an intimate narratorial voice but actually doubles her voice, splitting the page into above and below and presenting two parallel texts, which, although obviously related, do not say the same things. Mol’s rationale is fascinating; she claims that there would always have been two texts anyway, one about her experience, field work or data, and one that relates this experience to the literature on the subject (Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice [Durham, NC; London: Duke UP, 2002]). It is my contention that in Synecdoche (and elsewhere to a lesser degree), Kaufman relates the “literature” (neurological or otherwise) to his writing-becoming-life in a similarly subtextual way. 38 Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (New York: Harmony Books, 2007): 465. 39 One might fruitfully contrast this with Sophie Barthes’s film Cold Souls (2009), where a well-respected Hollywood actor also plays a fictionalized version of himself undergoing some kind of undecidably mental/physical procedure to let others on the exterior access his interior life. The difference with Paul Giamatti, the protagonist of Cold Souls, is that he actively seeks the strange, invasive procedure which allows him to store his “soul” and instead choose another person’s loaned soul.

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protagonist puppet-character Michael Stone instead stays at a hotel called The Fregoli – another neuropsychiatric reference to a rare delusional state where patients misidentify total strangers all as one person, normally someone they know, only in a variety of unlikely (and even impossible) disguises. Here, the radical exteriority Kaufman seeks via the puppets is balanced by the delusion’s name, as Michael actually inhabits the Fregoli hotel.40 Both Michael and the viewer perceive all other puppet-characters as uncannily identical, even down to the ubiquitous voice work of Kaufman’s long-time collaborator Tom Noonan. Only Michael (voiced by David Thewlis) and the titular anomaly, a character called Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), appear and sound different (their puppets look different and are not voiced by Noonan). The viewer is multimodally thrust along with Michael (and presumably Kaufman) into the seemingly plush but paranoia-inducing environs of the Fregoli hotel experience. Still, if the extreme repetitiveness of Anomalisa’s puppets perhaps discourages the aforementioned autobiographical interpretation, Kaufman’s script for 2002’s Adaptation leaves no such room for doubt. Reminiscent of Ouroboros eating its own tail, Adaptation is a fictionalized account of its own creation. Kaufman here uses his own trials and tribulations in adapting a bestselling book about orchids to produce a strange screenplay about Kaufman trying to adapt a book into a screenplay. Thus, Kaufman himself features in the narrative as a central character, but so does his fictional twin brother Donald Kaufman. Both characters are played by Nicholas Cage. The result is an intensely self-conscious meditation on authorship doubly externalized – Charlie Kaufman truly writing Charlie Kaufman but still somehow critical and jealous of his crass but successful reflection Donald – who, inspired by his twin, is of course also a writer. If only a shadowy aspect of the “real” Kaufman, Donald still receives a “real” co-writing credit for Adaptation and is still a focal point for quite a public self-critique.41

40 This inhabitation of a neuropsychological syndrome as if it were a physical space is an idea that Kaufman had toyed with in Synecdoche, New York. The specific scenario in the film is summarized by Doreen Alexander Child: “Kaufman’s penchant for writing about psychotic syndromes crops up again when Caden finds himself at Adele’s apartment door in New York: the name on the door reads Capgras. Similar to the aforementioned Fregoli syndrome, Capgras delusion or syndrome is the belief that a loved one or close friend has been replaced by an exact duplicate or an identical-looking impostor. The Capgras delusion is classified as a syndrome that involves the misidentification of people, places, or objects, and it mostly occurs with schizophrenia but is also connected with brain injuries and dementia” (Child, Charlie Kaufman, 136). However, Child, like Kaufman, goes no further into what this fleeting mention might signify in the wider context of the film. 41 Cf. Charlie Kaufman, Donald Kaufman, Adaptation: The Shooting Script (London, New York: Nick Hern and Newmarket P, 2003).

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All this shows Kaufman’s overall preoccupation with the actual, embodied practice of authorship42; he pokes at it from all angles, from within and without. However, Kaufman keeps examining himself also because he is concerned with how the duration and content of his own life fits into a larger picture, how his own story, the story of his body and brain and their convolutions, is folded into history and historical time on a grander scale, and how, in turn, this is folded back into his own convolutions. In an interview conducted by screenwriter Rob Feld, this admittedly convoluted, large-scale overview of time can be clearly appreciated: Feld: [In] Adaptation, Charlie says, “To write about a flower [. . .] I have to show the flower’s arc. And the flower’s arc stretches back to the beginning of life. [. . .] That’s what I need to do: tie all of history together.” Kaufman: [It’s] true, if you look at any kind of written story. [. . .] I can’t tell my story without telling my parents’ story, and I can’t tell my parents’ story without telling their parents’ story. Pretty quickly you’re at the beginning of time [. . .]. Feld: There’s a line in [Synecdoche, New York] that “the end is built into the beginning.” That seems to play for so much. Kaufman: Well, yeah, but it’s true. [. . .] You have a relationship that starts; it’s going to end. You have a life that started; it’s going to end. [. . .] Of that you can be certain.43

“Tying all history together,” as Adaptation’s fictionalized Charlie Kaufman says, means realizing how one’s own “end is built into one’s own beginning,” and only as part of a sewn-up, almost looping historical sweep. For Kaufman, a personal, experiential view of time is inseparable from the greater expanse of time, just as one’s mind and body represent a particular microcosm of the wider macrocosm of the world. This is why it’s no great stretch to read Kaufman’s characters autobiographically whether or not they are based on him; in some sense, their existence fundamentally overlaps with his, as does anyone else’s, real or not. Nowhere is this idea more prevalent than in Synecdoche, New York, whose punning title begins with a metonymic term for parts standing for wholes, or individuals embodying entire cities, or a play representing all of history.44 Kaufman’s hyper-experiential prerogative seems overdetermined to film

42 That is to say, the lived, bodily experience of being an author in the world, rather than some lofty, ethereal notion of a writer represented solely by a name in the credits at the end of a film. 43 Kaufman, Synecdoche Shooting Script, 151. 44 The pun derives from one of the film’s locations, the city of Schenectady in the state of New York. Caden Cotard is part of the city, which is part of the state which is part of the

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critic Mark Kermode, who nevertheless employs an interrogative interview strategy to “try to get inside his head anyway.”45 Kermode admits to appreciating Kaufman as an idiosyncratic screenwriter but not Kaufman as a neophyte director, whom he sees as unrestrained compared to the previously supervised, directed writer. Despite this, Kermode recognizes that Kaufman goes to great lengths to understand and inhabit another’s perspective, and thus their conversation is couched in a seeming gesture of reciprocity, of entering the mind/brain of someone else. Kermode says to Kaufman: “All your scripts get the audience inside the head of somebody else and it’s very much about seeing the worldview within that head. Of course, in the case of Being John Malkovich, that is the central conceit.” Later, when asked about his creative process, Kaufman responds: My brain tends to go through permutations; [. . .] I try to write where I am, I want to write in the chaos of existence [. . .]; I think it’s impossible to not write autobiographically. [. . .] I choose to do that, and do it as much as I can, and reveal as much as I can, about myself, and my experience of the world in my work.

By his own explicit admission, Kaufman’s films “reveal as much as [they] can” about himself, which he wilfully “chooses to do.” Presumably this involves at the very least attempting to show his “brain permutations” amongst the “chaos of existence.” But perhaps most revealing of all is his choice of words in “I try to write where I am.” This seemingly simple idiomatic formulation encompasses much of the hidden nuances of convolutionary, and specifically labyrinthine thinking, where the “chaos of existence” is both a description of a place and of a person’s life. It is evocative of literature and science theorist N. Katherine Hayles’s words: The orderly disorder of chaos is all around us, from cream swirling in coffee to the rise and fall of the Nile River, from global weather patterns to outbreaks of measles epidemics. In fact, so extensive are chaotic systems that they dwarf the ordered systems which science has traditionally regarded as norms for the universe.46

Hayles posits the implausible-seeming contradiction of “the orderly disorder of chaos” as scientifically unavoidable, even a quotidian truth. It is uncannily similar to what Wendy B. Faris writes of the labyrinth’s great cultural import:

country, and so on, and so the film’s title plays on the aural similarity of the city’s name with the word “synecdoche,” as well as the latter’s meaning. 45 Cf. Mark Kermode, Interview with Charlie Kaufman, The Culture Show, BBC Two, 24 Mar 2009. All quoted transcriptions from this interview are my own. 46 Hayles, “Chaos as Orderly Disorder,” 306–307.

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The labyrinth pattern [. . .] expresses both our control over our environment and our bewilderment with it; it represents orderly disorder, the systematic creation of a mystery more powerful than the creator, who may subsequently become lost in it.47

For Kaufman to “write where he is” means not just to live tucked inside chaos and write from there, like postcards sent back from the abyss – it means to give shape to “the orderly disorder” of life by writing it – to cement one’s own ontological chaos within the overall flux of the universe. It is a gesture between the material and the immaterial, geographically and physically fixing the unfixable mind in time and space, and finding a communicable, shareable pattern in the messy pointillist business of existence.

The orderly disorder of the spotless mind It is no light matter fixing the unfixable, communicating the incommunicable, ordering the inherently disordered48 – endlessly rewriting the singular end built into the beginning while endlessly rerouting the singular path built into the labyrinth. Yet this is what Charlie Kaufman attempts time and again, as if to say that where the human body might fail, the human writer must nevertheless keep trying, and precisely by inspecting the order and disorder of the body in time. This is something with which Kaufman wrestles, which he has to question, to remind himself. This is appreciable in his hilarious yet eerie antiintroduction that addresses the reader of the published version of Being John Malkovich’s screenplay:

47 Faris, Labyrinths of Language, 1. 48 Or one might even consider an inversion of this, as suggested by Avital Ronell in her introductory note to Jacques Derrida’s “A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui)”: “Invention, Derrida argues, always presupposes a certain illegality; breaking an implicit contract, it introduces disorder into the implacable ordering of things. There is no such thing as a natural invention, and yet, invention is based on originality, originariness, generation, engenderment – values customarily ascribed to some notion of genius and therefore, to naturality” (Jacques Derrida, “A Number of Yes [Nombre de oui]”, trans. Brian Holmes, Qui Parle 2.2 [1988]: 118–133, 118). “Invention,” as in artistry or a scientific investigation or discovery, actually “introduces disorder” into an otherwise “implacable order.” This may be why Derrida writes: “one must – yes – uphold the ontological-transcendental exigency in order to uncover the dimensions of a yes which is neither empirical nor ontic, which does not fall within the province of any specific science, ontology or phenomenology, nor finally of any predicative discourse. Presupposed by every proposition, it cannot be confused with the position, thesis or theme of any discourse [emphasis in the original]” (Derrida, “A Number of Yes,” 130).

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A little question will slowly bore its way to the front of my brain. [. . .] Maybe you know [the] one thing I haven’t considered in my relentless, obsessive, circular thought process. Is there that one thing? Is it possible for one person to impart any transformative notion to another person?49

It is almost as if Gavin Francis is whispering into Kaufman’s ear in response to these persistent queries when he states: “My work has always brought me back to the body [. . .], as the place from which all of us start and end. [Working] with the body has an immediacy and transformational power that is unique.”50 Whether “transformative” or “transformational,” both doctor and screenwriter end up back in the body as a way to break out of that “relentless, obsessive, circular thought process.” Once again echoing Synecdoche’s Hazel, Francis claims the body is “the place from which all of us start and end.” He couches this spatially, but surely also means that temporality is written into the very flesh of the human,51 rather than suggesting an actual lifelong excursion away and then back to the body at death. As mentioned above, Chris Dzialo interprets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a similar invitation “to think about time in terms of space”52 – to see memories accrued over time in the mind as locatable parts of the brain – while “Adaptation, with its focus on evolutionary and literary adaptation, combats the seemingly ineluctable march toward disorder with a complex, shifting network of temporalities.”53 Time, in Dzialo’s view of Kaufman’s works, is “frustrated” in order to mirror and even “combat” the very frustration of all human goals represented by just such an “ineluctable march toward disorder.” According to Dzialo, that evolutionary adaptation will occur with or without one’s permission, but Kaufman suggests that one can at least participate by attempting a little literary adaptation, and perhaps a little self-fashioning. If not self-refashioning. After diagnosing that “Kaufman is an old-fashioned Modernist” because he exhibits “that grand twentieth-century preoccupation with the Self [original capitalization],”54 screenwriting expert Robert McKee turns 49 Charlie Kaufman, Being John Malkovich (London: Faber and Faber): viii–ix. 50 Francis, Adventures, 2. 51 Or as neurophenomenologist Dan Lloyd writes of his own work at the intersection of literature and cognitive science, “I swung the analytical tools for deciphering temporality around toward the brain, and found strong evidence that we are time in the flesh” (Dan Lloyd, Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness [Cambridge, MA; London: Bradford, MIT P, 2004]: 329). 52 Dzialo, “‘Frustrated Time’ Narration,” 117. 53 Dzialo, “‘Frustrated Time’ Narration,” 111–112. 54 Robert McKee, “Critical Commentary,” in Charlie Kaufman, Donald Kaufman, Adaptation Shooting Script (London, New York: Nick Hern and Newmarket P, 2003): 131–135, 131.

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his pen on himself. This seems unavoidable, given that Kaufman includes a fictionalized version of McKee in Adaptation, and furthermore, has him giving advice to the fictionalized, self-loathing version of himself (Kaufman). To follow suit, concludes the real McKee, a discussion of his own self is therefore necessary, casting himself as some small part of Kaufman’s artistic superego. Yet more interesting is McKee’s intertwined nosology of Kaufman’s filmic, textual and pseudo-neurological symptoms: Kaufman [. . .] wants to push the cinema against the grain into hidden humanity, to take it through the frayed synapses of the mind [. . .]. The danger, however, is that [. . .] the work may become so personal, so idiosyncratic that no one will know what the hell he’s talking about, and therefore, no audience will feel what he feels.55

As McKee’s wonderfully convoluted, psychosomatic phrasal portmanteau has it, Kaufman’s attempts to rewrite himself are not enough for a true, warts-andall voyage “through the frayed synapses of mind.” Self-critique is all well and good, but interrogation of a broader “hidden humanity” is necessary for even the vaguest understanding of others’ minds – and thus for an audience to reciprocally “feel what he feels.” Treating the brain as a maze-like object is risky, as is making labyrinthine movies. In both instances, there is a danger that the activity itself is the puzzle, not the object of that activity, and so the authority of a literary author, a scientific investigator or a maze architect is superseded by the labyrinth itself, producing fear and discomfort – or as cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter puts it (once more echoing Lemov’s abovementioned description of life as the “original problem situation”): “A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called ‘life.’”56 In response to Kaufman’s claims to “really believe that everything is really complicated and there is no answer and there’s no truth, and any truth can be argued and argued honestly,” Kermode somewhat harshly retorts: The complicated honest truth is that Kaufman’s labyrinthine scripts need the mediating influence of an accomplished director, something Synecdoche lacks. The result is like climbing inside Kaufman’s head and being Charlie Kaufman, not necessarily something we’d all want.57

Unmediated access to others’ inner lives, whilst tempting, might prove discomfiting given the undoubted claustrophobia of cramming oneself into someone

55 McKee, “Critical Commentary,” 133. 56 Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007): 339. 57 Kermode, Culture Show Interview.

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else’s head, as Kermode suggests. But Kermode’s desire for the steadying and “mediating influence of an accomplished director,” which could stand in for labyrinth builder or neuroscientific genius, need not be the only option. Getting lost in a maze offers an opportunity, for as Faris notes: “Often the wanderer in the labyrinth is also its creator, the prisoner of the labyrinth is also the liberated spirit, the potential victim also the potential victor.”58 It is this opportunity – the foregrounding of the labyrinthine rather than its dissimulation – that Kaufman so urgently takes up, and that, I would like to suggest, gives him a unique take on human empathy. As far as my research informs me, Kaufman does not suffer from a rare brain condition. He is essentially “neurotypical,” yet he chooses to risk cramming his head into another’s anyway, to inhabit their thoughts, to publicly investigate what it means to be himself, or another individual, or anybody subjected to the same vicissitudes of time and tide as anybody else. His films are not just about subjectivity, they are structured according to his subjectivity – as surprising, as fragile, as mortal as anyone else’s. If Kaufman semi-autobiographically claims to have the Fregoli or Cotard delusions, then he tacitly offers a way to connect with others regardless of neurological profile or persuasion, commenting on the true rarity of every individual’s condition. As one respondent to a review of Synecdoche in the London Review of Books writes: Synecdoche’s normalization of [delusional conditions] is deeply sympathetic, suggesting that the human tendency to worry, to be self-reflexive and to retreat inside one’s own head is merely part and parcel of life as a terminal condition. In this way, Kaufman effectively destroys the myth perpetuated by much mainstream cinema: that sufferers of (chronic or reactive) mental illness are childlike or innocent, cutting through the complexities of life and helping others to see truth or to find themselves. Far from marginalizing serious, or common, psychosocial disorders, or relegating them to the status of plot devices, Kaufman forces us to look at them head-on.59

Neurological order and disorder, rather than simply being new formats for entertainment (or indeed, clear-cut, categorizable diagnostic poles), are fundamentally coterminous and necessary for an understanding of the self, world, and the human being marooned in body and time. They are “part and parcel of life as a terminal condition.” Charlie Kaufman provocatively shows how the orderly disorder of neurology is built into the beginning together with the end, not just for his own sake, but for mine, and for yours.

58 Faris, Labyrinths of Language, 8–9. 59 Ealasaid Munro, “Life: A Terminal Condition” (25 Jun 2009), London Review of Books, Letters (acc. 14 October 2018).

Timothy O’Dwyer

The Fold: Musical Monads and Baroque Assemblages Abstract: The Fold is a collaborative composing project staged in Singapore (2013) and Cologne (2014) involving musicians from disparate stylistic and cultural backgrounds. The musicians come together to compose written scores that are subsequently used for improvisation during performances. This essay frames the project as a musical manifestation of conceptual trajectories articulated in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The first section contemplates Leibniz’s psychic geometry and the monad as a musical score. Following this, a machinic analysis of the music created during the project sparked by Deleuze’s notion of the refrain is offered. In the last section, I return to The Fold and situate its compositional, improvisational and performative practices within Deleuze’s geophilosophical and nomad thought.

Practicum: A psychic geometry I possess a clear and distinguished zone of expression because I have primitive singularities, ideal virtual events to which I am destined. From this moment deduction unwinds: I have a body because I have a clear and distinguished zone of expression. In fact, that which I express clearly, the moment having come, will concern my body, and will act most directly on my body, surroundings, circumstances and environment.1

The musicians gathered in The Fold express primitive singularities in the form of composed (written) documentations, or virtual (graphic) events. The method of collaboratively composing (in) The Fold enables them to engage the music with their body, instrument, and significant musical experience to reach thresholds of intensity, conscious and unconscious, ambiental and corporeal, folding forward into the written gesture of the compositional idea, which, in turn, acts directly on their bodies, surroundings, circumstances and environment, and, in particular, on the ensemble. The musicians, who are monads, enter the project with distinctive musical and cultural backgrounds as well as with a “number of unique, incorporeal, ideal events” that have yet to put bodies and instruments into play within the process where their past experiences are “primary predicates that constitute a

1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque [1988], trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: UMP, 2007): 98; further references in the text abbreviated as “FLB.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-006

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zone of clear expression, or subdivisions” (FLB, 86).2 These individuals express distinctive qualities through their interaction with their monad-instruments. However, whilst the individual and the instrument are subdivisions of the world, each has traces of expressive qualities of the entire world within each subdivision – the outward folding of the world within. The individual monads may not be aware of what makes them distinct because they are finite and closed off from one another. Simultaneously, they maintain elements that represent the world – which is infinite. These “worldly” elements exist as subliminal “perceptions” or “representatives” – as minute perspectives within each musician-monad; “a lapping of waves, a rumor, a fog, or a mass of dancing particles of dust” (FLB, 86). During the process of composing the music in The Fold, the musicians were given five preconceived thresholds to respond to with musical ideas, designed as geometric macroscopic points of reference that define a “spatiam of intensities” where “the macroscopic distinguishes perceptions and appetites that are the passage from one perception to another. Such is the great composite folds, or draped forms” (FLB, 87). The musicians navigate through this landscape creating motifs guided by points along an allegorical curve of qualities and thresholds represented by windows placed in the Present, Above, Below, Past and Future of a metaphorical axis.3 These points in themselves are not fixed as objects or even archetypes; they are maneuvered by the musicians and expressed from each of their inherent perspectives, which may include the musicians’ lived, physical or phenomenal position in the moment or in the world, his or her experienced or imagined past, present or future. The Present, Above, Below, Past and Future are Deleuzian events. They are conglomerates of differential relations, accumulative forces influenced by “tiny perceptions [that] are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception” (FLB, 87). This axis of qualities and thresholds projects a psychological geometry into the landscape of micro-perceptions within the individual musician-monads. It allows them to articulate their previous hallucinatory perceptions into (clear) zones of expression.4 For Deleuze, “[a]ll consciousness is a matter of threshold”; what is 2 In the Singapore Fold, the musicians came from Japanese, Serbian, Singapore Chinese and Australian lineage with Jazz, Balkan, Experimental, Classical, Electronic and Carnatic (South Indian) musical influences. In the Cologne Fold, the musicians came from Iran, Germany and Australia with classical, experimental, jazz, improvisation, and traditional Iranian music influences. 3 Bringing into play the microscopic relationships between the curve and the straight line in Leibniz’ geometry. A measuring of points and thresholds is taking place along this metaphorical curve but at a subliminal or psychic level. 4 Deleuze points out that “Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Our conscious perception has no object” (FLB, 93), or physical reality. It can only surmise an

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interesting is “why the threshold is marked where it is” (FLB, 89). The thresholds are “affective qualities, confused or even obscured perceptions that resemble something by virtue of Leibniz’ projective geometry.”5 They are “natural signs” resembling neither extension nor even movement, but “matter in extension, vibrations, elasticities [. . .] tendencies of efforts” in motion (FLB, 96). In the context of The Fold project, the responses of the musicians to the psychic geometry of Present, Above, Below, Past and Future are musical gestures in the form of melodies, harmony, rhythm or noise. The macro points of the Present, Above, Below, Past and Future framework are not ends in themselves; it is between these points of reference and the differential relationships created by them that certain thresholds of consciousness manifest from within each musician-monad. By traversing the “in between,” tiny perceptions are revealed, collected and expressed in written musical forms reflecting the function of Leibniz’ differential calculus as described by Deleuze: Differential relations always select minute perceptions that play a role in each case, and bring to light or clarify the conscious perception that comes forth. Thus differential calculus is the psychic mechanism of perception, the automatism that at once and inseparably plunges into obscurity and determines clarity: a selection of minute, obscure perceptions and a perception that moves in clarity. (FLB, 90)

The musicians navigate and respond to these spheres or thresholds, articulating their perceptions by composing Cantus Firmi6 or fixed melodies. Each note of their Cantus Firmus illustrates little foldings of disquiet, a “spiritualising of dust” (of the compositional process) manifested in perceptions that are not necessarily located in one of these “natural signs” represented by Present, Above, Below, Past and Future. They are sounds prehended in the passage from one “natural sign” to another that only come to be understood as a perception of the macro-point through the relationships constructed along micro-points on

idea of reality through the differential relations of these microperceptions intersecting and folding within the subconscious realms of the individual monad. 5 In comparison to Newton’s calculus, Leibniz posited that numbers could actually be infinite whilst, for Newton, the numbers remained “very small” but nevertheless finite. The results of the theoretical calculus in both cases were the same. However, by allowing there to be a possibility of the infinite in his version, Leibniz created the idea of a projective geometry, a vision of geometry as an abstract concept where the mind could “only” imagine or project what was potentially limitless, that which could not be defined by finite numbers and was therefore hallucinatory, a geometrical perspective that was subjective and transitory, not objectively represented in mathematical terms alone. 6 Cantus Firmus – the first series of notes composed from which all other permutations arise, especially in the composition of fugues and other early forms of Baroque music.

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the curve of each note’s phrase and the contra punctum (the musical relationship of one note to another) of the Cantus Firmus. The notes selected by each musician and their inter-relationships within contra punctum are “engaged in differential relations and produce the quality that issues forth at the given threshold of consciousness” (FLB, 89). For example, when a musician decides to compose the note “A,” “A” is in a differential relation to the musician – the selection of “A” in difference to deciding upon any other note – “B,” “F,” or “D#.” “A” is also in differential relation to all other notes in the Cantus Firmus in terms of its harmonic meaning – “A” is differentially related to “B,”, which is differentially related to “C” and so on.7 Moreover, the notes in the Cantus Firmus become contained musical gestures, a collection of points along a curve, tangents that vaguely measure an infinitesimal projection of the clear zone of expression of each musician. During this first stage, the musicians are encouraged to respond spontaneously in isolation to the thresholds of Present, Above, Below, Past and Future in composing their Cantus Firmi. Here, “each monad acts spontaneously, without prompting from without.”8 In the second stage of the composing process, where these melodies are collected and arranged into larger musical structures, these tiny perceptive refrains of Cantus Firmi are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the process of concertation. In addition to spontaneity, there is a “harmonious arrangement of all monads among one another,” a harmony Deleuze calls “concertation” (a harmony, he suggests, that may be seen as the analogue of Baroque music’s “concertant style”); concertation is, for Deleuze, “an accord of spontaneities themselves, an accord among accords.”9 In Fig. 1, below, is an example of a Cantus Firmus composed by the tuba player Carl Ludwig Hübsch from Cologne responding to The Future threshold. Accompanying the musical notation are some performance notes by the composer/performer. I will return to this particular Cantus Firmus later to show how it was integrated and arranged into the score.

7 Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaus, suggests a transformational process during the act of composition and the choices that composers make between writing one note or another, with the notes transcending themselves into “becoming” the composer. For example: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Berg’s B in Wozzeck, Schumann’s A.” A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004): 327; further references in the text abbreviated as “TP.” 8 Ronald Bogue, “The New Harmony,” in Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (London and New York: Continuum, 2009): 39. 9 Bogue, “The New Harmony,” 40.

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Fig. 1: The Fold Köln Project – “The Future.” Cantus Firmus composed by Carl Ludwig Hübsch. Courtesy of the artist.

In chapter nine of The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque entitled “The New Harmony” Deleuze cleverly plays with the words “concertation” and “concertante.” Concertante is a style of composition developed in the late Baroque with prominent solo parts for musicians that interact with the ensemble arrangement. The use of the word in this context describes the process of finding accords, that is, forms and relationships: For Leibniz, pre-established harmony has many formulas, each in respect to the spot through which the fold is passing: sometimes it is among principles, mechanisms, or finality, or even continuity and indiscernibles; at others, between the floors, between Nature and Grace, between the material universe and the soul, or between each soul and its organic body; and at others again, among substances, simple substances and corporeal or composite substances. (FLB, 132–133)

During the second phase of arranging, the Cantus Firmi offered by each musician are collected; they are deterritorialized/reterritorialized under the titles of each threshold, for example, the refrains composed by each musician in response to The Present macro point are arranged together into one composition as are the refrains created in response to The Above macro point. The musical function of each Cantus Firmus within the arrangement is approached from an infinite perspective and utilized without a priori. Each refrain is swiftly juxtaposed with the next – an individual refrain can emerge as a bass riff or within a chord sequence; the rhythmic elements of the refrain can be isolated into a drum part or as the main melody itself.10

10 This approach to composing is also analogous to Deleuze’s “multilinear system” of becoming, from A Thousand Plateaus: the process “draws a horizontal, melodic line, the bass line,

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Whilst rehearsing these arrangements in the third stage of the process, the Cantus Firmi are further developed collectively through negotiation and revision – to deal with “principles, mechanisms [and] indiscernibles.” The pieces are formed into quasi concertante style works which means that they are composed into tutti (everyone playing together) as well as solo sections featuring the players in the ensemble as improvising soloists whilst the rest of the ensemble performs an accompaniment. In Fig. 2 we see Hübsch’ Cantus Firmus integrated into the full score with the other musicians’ ideas. In this instance, Hübsch is actually performing (follow the Tuba line in the score and compare it to the hand-written line in Fig. 1) his own Cantus Firmus whilst the other musicians are sometimes doubling (playing the same music) his musical idea or providing accompaniment. This process of composition was so prevalent in and intrinsic to the Baroque era that “many musicologists prefer to speak of the ‘concertant’ style instead of Baroque music” (FLB, 132), when describing the music of the period. This style of composing, especially when the solo parts are improvised, has echoes in jazz music, along with many other folk musics around the world. Analogous to these traditions, the “pieces” are not fixed structures, as they became historically in the Classical period. They are realtime sites of negotiation between the performer-composers in the ensemble.

Fig. 2: Excerpt from the Full Score of “The Future.” Courtesy of the artist.

upon which other melodic lines are superposed; points are assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines . . . it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords” (TP, 325).

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As a form of music making The Fold project harks back to pre-classical ideas in western music, dissolving the importance and hierarchy of the score and the composer, and the divisions of labor amongst musicians. In the pre-classical era, performers were composers and improvisers in equal measure. However, the process initiates more than a revision of relationships between musicians performing in an ensemble. As Deleuze observes: The focal point of the distinction of “intrinsic singularities” (FLB, 15) articulated within a Leibnizian geometry of perspective in The Fold is that this is at the same time an outline of points of view of perceptions. Change along the path of curvature is read as a tendency of variation to infinity. This informs the abstract level of the problem of reading change: putting elements into play, thereby including the whole, is a form of the continuity of variation from a certain point of view.11

The maps or “scores” constructed from the abovementioned process are Baroque perspectives that create a temporary linear focus and variable relations throughout the structure. However, these maps are created in the process of arranging. There are no pre-conceived “forms” (or memory) that the melodies adhere to; the maps resemble written out “comprovisations” (composed improvisations). They are what Deleuze describes as “haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming” (TP, 326). The compositions are made up of a flow of disparate melodic ideas that have emerged from each of the musician’s singular perspectives, unveiling “in a single movement [their] unfathomable depths of tiny and moving folds” (FLB, 93). Moreover, the improvisations created by the musicians in performance, in the fourth stage of the project, are not only created as extended or quantified “stuff” – extensions of the written music. They act on, and become, variations of the “singularities” – between the geometric thresholds of Present, Above, Below, Past and Future.12Through improvisation, the subjective perspective or “point of view” of the musician’s position (as co-author – improv-iser) within this geometry, enables this “linear focus” to unfold from the materials within the compositions, initiating unique intensities. During the performance these singularities are obliterated into intensive linear relationships. The operative function of the score, in a Baroque sense, is a site of transformation and variation within the performance, that embodies the collective creativity of the group. The music “lives” in the moment of performance as the musicians are compelled to react to one another’s variable intensities. Moreover, what is heard is the intensive quantity

11 Keith Robinson, “Towards a Political Ontology of the Fold: Deleuze, Heidegger, Whitehead and the “Fourfold” Event,” in Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen, Niamh McDonnell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 15–l16. 12 Robinson, “Towards a Political Ontology,” 194.

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made up of the sum of infinitely small parts. But instead of the score prescribing and defining the curvature, and measuring the rate of change, improvisation enables the musicians to explore the infinite micro-perceptions and “singularities” between them and the music.

The monad as musical score In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze uses the allegory of a two-story house to architectonically expand upon Leibniz’s monad in the chapter entitled “The Pleats of Matter.” In The Fold project, during rehearsals, the musicians loudly warm up, on the second story of this house, in a windowless dark chamber, the din creating an impenetrable mesh, a tangle of sound, an unsettling anarchic noise “resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into sounds above” (FLB, 4). The Fold ensemble creates preclassical clamor, melody, dissonance, and harmony. This non-hierarchical collective music making is very different to the post-classical period of music making, where a conductor would customarily enter the room with a composer in toe, with their “specific tools” in order to fashion this noise (force) into a source of “purpose and power.”13 For Leibniz, “monads are limited, not as to their objects, but with respect to the modifications of their knowledge of them. Monads all go confusedly to infinity, to the whole; but they are limited and differentiated by the degrees of their distinct perception.”14 The monad, for Leibniz, is a closed, independent, distinctly individual self-contained object. Within the monad is a “world of infinite folds-within-folds, of monadic minds/spirits inter-folded with matter and topological folds of reversible insides and outsides.”15 However, from a Deleuzien perspective, “the harmony of that world can no longer be conceived as a unity, since our inter-folded universe is not circumscribed and complete.”16 For Leibniz, each monad is a world selected by God from all possible worlds, and their perspective on other worlds is limited as is a room without windows. The upper story of the Baroque house described above is dark and windowless and characterizes the Leibnizian monad – a space of infinite folds-within-folds,

13 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music [1985], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: UMP, 2006): 6. 14 G.W. Leibniz, “The Monadology,” in Discourses on Metaphysics and Other Essays [1646–1716], trans. Daniel Garber, Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991): 77. 15 Bogue, “New Harmony,” 65. 16 Bogue, “New Harmony,” 65.

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entangled sound, a journey to infinity. Deleuze adds another room to the house on the lower story, and by doing so opens the monad to perspectives outside itself. The musicians “translate the visible movements below (that have come from the outside through small openings) into sounds above”; here the monad can no longer include the entire world as if it were in a closed circle that can be modified by projection. Instead, the monad now opens itself on a trajectory or an expanding spiral that moves further and further from a centre. (FLB, 137)

The importance of the written scores – Beethoven’s 5th Symphony has commonly been cited as a “ground zero” of this concept in musicology – as an objective representation of music and as a Leibnizian monad. As Lydia Goehr suggests in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, it “came into being in the late eighteenth century, giving an ‘institutionalised centrality’ to music making, and contributed to the important historical idea of the ‘musical work’.”17 [P]rior to 1800 there were functioning concepts of composition, performance and notation in musical practice, just as there were after that time. This is the continuity. The discontinuity lies in the fact that their significance, and the conceptual relations in which these concepts stood to one another, differed across the two time periods [. . .] the work-concept had a regulative function in the latter, but not in the earlier period, despite the presence of continuity in both theory and practice.18

Musical score, prior to 1800 were generally incomplete maps with signposts to the general ideas of what the composition was about; they were “functioning concepts” approached with a fluidity of interpretation that allowed musicians to contribute more creatively during the performance. Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel would often bring ideas and sketches to a performance and lead the ensemble in performing variations and extemporizations on these themes. It was commonplace for the audience to be much more interactive in these performances and call out requests for the musicians to perform well-known melodies. The expectation was that the musicians would improvise with the material. The thrilling aspect of the performance lay in the virtuosity and inventiveness of the musicians’ improvisation, not in how exactly they reproduced pre-composed notation. Importantly, the rupture created by the score as the objective, absolute version of music itself, separated composers and performers into the divisions of labor we know today creating the inherent power structures that accompany it.

17 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music [1992] (New York: Oxford UP, 2007): 96. 18 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 108.

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Composers prior to the late eighteenth century created and performed their music simultaneously by using a form of notation that guided the performance, a broad outline to be filled in by improvising performers. The notion that the score and the performance could be mutually exclusive is something that developed with the invention of a universal notation of music and the proliferation of the printing press. Musicians found that they could earn more money by writing the music down and publishing it than by creating the music spontaneously through performances alone. This tendency also coincided with more musicians owning the copyright of their work as opposed to the copyright being owned by a nobleman who employed them, the church, or the state. When the musical score evolved into what Goehr describes as a “regulative function”; it became a fixed reference point that emerged “alongside the rise of ideals of accurate notation and perfect compliance. In this process, the work-concept achieved the most central position”19 within the paradigm of information communication between musicians. Goehr also points out that [i]n their normative function, regulative concepts determine, stabilize, and order the structure of practices. Within classical music practice we compose works, produce performances of works, appreciate, analyse, and evaluate works.20

The musical work as monad and a “regulative concept” also prescribes opposing rules; for instance, on the use of improvisation and transcription. From this point onwards, the use of improvisation as a form of music making became marginalized, devalued, and excluded from the so-called serious music making. According to Goehr, the idea of a score as a “work of art” in itself “has its roots in a peculiarly romantic conception of composition, performance, notation, and reception, a conception that was formed alongside the emergence of music as an autonomous fine art.”21 By narrowing the idea of music into products like scores, and latterly records, tapes, and CDs, the importance of the process of making music through performance, and, indeed, the importance of musicians who focus on this process as improvisers, has drastically diminished. Significantly, the Leibnizian monad as score evolved after the Baroque period, a period noted for its sensuality, exuberance, and intense taste of life. As Deleuze explains a propos Goehr:

19 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 103. 20 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 102. 21 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 113.

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The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds. [. . .] Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to an infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. (FLB, 3)

As the score monad evolved into a regulative functioning object during the Classical period, the infinitely unfurling folds of the Baroque became standardized into self-contained hierarchical forms. Deleuze suggests in A Thousand Plateaus that “[a]ll of Baroque lies brewing beneath Classicism: the task of the classical artist is God’s own, that of organizing chaos; and the artists only cry is Creation! Creation! The Tree of Creation!” (TP, 373). The classical composer becomes the gatekeeper between the chaosmos and the score-monad, the creator and controller of ideas and the author that claims ownership over these ideas in his exclamation; “Creation!” For Deleuze: Classicism refers to a form-matter relation, or rather a form-substance relation (substance is precisely a matter endowed with form). Matter is organized, and hierarchized in relation to one another, each of which takes charge of a greater or lesser amount of matter. (TP, 373)

In the Baroque, the process of creating music through improvisation that exulted in one of the primary forms of composition at the time, the fugue,22 which is at once the horizontal melody that endlessly develops all of its lines in extension, and the vertical harmony that establishes the inner spiritual unity or the summit, but it is impossible to know where the one ends and the other begins (FLB, 127),

22 Rather than adhering to a preconceived formula or fixed template like the classical Sonata Form where there are strict rules governing what happens melodically and harmonically at the beginning (Exposition), in the middle (Development), and at the end of a piece (Recapitulation), the Fugue is a form of composition that utilizes up to five themes (Cantus Firmi) that are used to create intricate polyphony in relation to a linear development that occurs whilst the composer is composing the music, aka “through – composition.” In the example of the fugue process, “matter” or for example the infinite trajectories of a melody, directs the development of the composition as opposed to the composer fitting a melody into a preordained form like Sonata that dictates more strictly, prescribing musical decisions for the composer. “But, precisely, Baroque music is what can extract harmony from melody, and can always restore the higher unity toward which the arts are moving as many melodic lines: this very same elevation of harmony makes up the most general definition of what can be called Baroque music” (FLB, 128).

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was replaced by the classical sonata form. Here, matter (melody and harmony) is tonally hierarchized, in subjugation of and in strict relation to a preconceived structure, stressing the importance of the form over the content or matter.

The assemblage In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari develop the neologism “machinic assemblage” to rethink ethics. Claire Colebrook, in Gilles Deleuze, sums up this project in the following way: We tend to begin our thinking from some presupposed whole: such as man, nature or an image of the universe as an interacting organism with a specific end. This allows our ethics to be reactive: we form our ethics on the basis of some pre-given unity. The machine by contrast allows for an active ethics, for we do not presuppose an intent, identity or end. Deleuze uses the machine to describe a production that is immanent: not the production of something by someone – but production for the sake of production itself, an ungrounded time and becoming.23

Analyzing the music of The Fold from this point of view enables an operativeactive perspective to develop. Thinking about the scores produced by the musicians opens up an ethical position that is not based on a pre-given unity – a conventional musical a priori. From this position, the musician’s offerings can be seen as not entirely subjective whilst responding to the conceptual framework. The individual as composer is subverted here as there is no wholeness and no overview. Their responses occur in “ungrounded time and becoming.” The score shifts from existing as a regulative system of preconceived ideas from a singular subjective position to functioning as an operative mechanism, a ticking over, that “has no subjectivity or organizing centre” and “is nothing more than the connections and productions it makes; it is what it does.”24 An assemblage describes “the play of contingency and structure, organization and change.”25 Intrinsic to the concept of assemblages, in this context, is the idea of scores being machinic. The scores in The Fold project are created by the multiplicity of interactions of each of the musicians’ Cantus Firmi at a molecular level. When the compositions are heard as a whole, the

23 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002): 55. 24 Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 55–56. 25 J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts [2005], ed. Charles J. Stivale (Durham: Acumen, 2011): 91.

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audience’s perception is challenged; they hear a work that has no (single) subjective perspective. The origins of the music within this multiplicity become hallucinatory; the mechanism, or the machinic component (music) is here revealed on its own terms. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze uses music as an exemplary metaphor for the assemblage, describing the molecular elements as sonic blocks of becoming.26 He divides music within this structure into two distinctive blocks of operation. The first is the content of the apparatus of music, the mechanism of cogs and levers made up of pitch, rhythm and harmony; in the context of The Fold project, the Cantus Firmi composed by each musician and the scores produced collectively from this material. This machinic block is what Deleuze describes as the refrain (ritournelle).27 “A musical ‘nome’ is a little tune, a melodic formula that seeks recognition and remains the bedrock or ground of polyphony (cantus firmus)” (TP, 344). The concept of the refrain encompasses the content of the music and also the connecting agents that bind this content together into an operative mechanism. Analogous to the refrain is the musical term Punctus Contra Punctum, or point on point, sounds relating to sounds, that make up the fundamentals of counterpoint. For Deleuze, “the refrain is properly musical content, the block of content proper to music” (TP, 330). The second block of the musical assemblage is concerned with the expressive elements of music, how it is perceived, how it affects. This block annunciates the refrain moving it outward into the

26 As opposed to defining “things” as “beings” with an ontology that refers to a stable origin, Deleuze in his concept of “becoming” purports that “all ‘beings’ are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life” (Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 125). “Things” are therefore, transitory impressions open to infinite variations of meaning – particularly dependent on their context. 27 Deleuze describes three aspects or states that exist simultaneously within the refrain. For example: (I) “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath . . . The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.” A refrain in this instance stabilizes a moment, creates a territory of stability within a personal inward chaos. (II) A refrain creates stability within an interpersonal space that encircles, for example within the home: “A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud).” (III) “Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself.” The refrain in this instance, simultaneously enables an outward movement, “hazarding an improvisation,” from the stability of the sheltered personal, and interpersonal space of the first two “states” (TP, 343).

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world. It is a “block of expression [. . .], a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain (TP, 331). The internal structure of music is deterritorialized through the affect that the internal musical combinations of elements create – incorporeal transformations – re-contextualizing music depending on diverse situations – in other words, how music is perceived as in sensorial terms. “Music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else” (TP, 331). The Cantus Firmi composed by the musicians in The Fold act as blocks of content proper to music – pitches, rhythms and harmonies. During the first and second stages of the process, the primary activity is to construct a scaffold and build frameworks. As the building of the work progresses, these Cantus Firmi or refrains are arranged – reterritorialized – into operative scores. Musicians maneuver within this machinic apparatus deterritorializing the notation annunciating it through the performative interpretation of the content. The notes begin as written, static, silent representatives of music in graphic form. As the players transform this information into sonic events through their instruments, they create perspectives on the arrangement of sounds (no longer just written objects), marking territories, expressivities, opening spaces for transformations within this distinctly pre-classical, stereotypical Baroque assemblage. Like other collaborative musical projects, The Fold deterritorializes the refrain, as the musicians reinterpret the fixed musical materials. The refrains become sites of exploration. However, they are also signifiers, personal statements within collective authorship. Conversations amongst the musicians after performances suggested a different quality of musical experience compared to situations where they were merely realizing a regulative score or performing completely improvised music. This particular interactional synchrony28 in the process of The Fold is achieved through the unique differential relationships between the musicians created by the interweaving of the machinic elements – their personal refrains – into the structure of the scores. The musicians had a heightened sense of involvement as the personal refrains enabled a unique synchrony creating “a plateau that is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity.”29

28 R. Keith Sawyer, Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003). 29 Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge MA and London: MIT P, 1992): 7.

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Deterritorialization and reterritorialization The refrains territorialized and created spheres of expression. “The territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization”; when the territorialization of the refrain occurs, “a possession is declared, and a dimensional space is established” (TP, 348). The musician territorializes and therefore possesses pitch “A” in combination with pitch “B,” that is, in the decision-making process of composition. The territory, which has dimensions or boundaries, becomes what Deleuze and Guattari have termed “property.” For Deleuze and Guattari, “property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard” (TP, 348). Territorialization is an act; an action that creates a metaphorical “poster” through which it advertises (creates) the boundaries of the territory in which it is placed. Importantly, a territory is both expressive and functional. A bird territorializes the boundaries of its nesting and feeding area through bird song. These boundaries cannot be seen; they are heard. The song can be perceived as an aesthetic object, but, for the bird and its genus, it has a clear function. It demarcates their literal, physical territory. Territorialization creates “posters” in the sense that the musicians territorialize the written notes in terms of their individual composition and arrangement of the notes and subsequent interpretation in performance. By fixing their musical ideas in response to the Present, Above, Below, Past and Future aspects, the musicians create territories and posters sending their subjective perspectives into the world. Making something relies on being decisive, using known elements, on acting upon these known elements and rearranging them differently. Composing is the poster, the placard, the announcement that a possession has taken place, that at this point a property has been personalized and subjectified. In this moment, the idea of territorialization or something that is fundamentally artistic occurs. The written ideas become what may be termed objectified subjectivity (a fixed object as opposed to creating music purely by improvising) where transitory and elusive territories are created and absorbed more readily into the chaosmos. Territories and territorialization pertain to the refrain; their interaction forms the nucleus of the machinic assemblage with the two aspects acting as the synthesizing components of music; the block of content and territories on one hand, and the block of expression, the poster or placard annunciating and affecting aspects of music, on the other. “Music is precisely the adventure of the refrain” (TP, 333); it is in its nature to journey outward to find new contexts of expression. The Fold is a mapping of a particular example of this journeying outwards – of taking the refrains of the Cantus Firmi composed by each member of the group out of their original context, arranging them into written scores, performing and improvising. The Fold deterritorializes and reterritorializes the refrain composed by each member of the ensemble. To deterritorialize, in a

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musical sense, is for the work or section of the work to shift out of its original context without changing the content. Music that is being listened to by a soldier preparing for battle on an iPod can also be experienced in the exact same form by an office worker going to work on the morning commute. Deterritorialization is concerned with the changing effect of music and with the transference of what is expressive in music without altering the internal structures. Reterritorialization, in the musical sense, is the transference of music from one context to another while also changing the content proper such as pitch, tempo, musical rhythm or intention. For example, within the context of The Fold project, arranging a melody intended to be performed on a melodic instrument, to a non-pitched instrument like a drum. The melody or pitch material can no longer be heard whilst the rhythmic structure is isolated and still intact. This type of transference is seen as a more absolute form of deterritorialization where the re-contextualized melody cannot be obviously linked back to the original source. Reterritorialization repositions music on a content level. The structure is altered in such a way as to create an entirely new set of materials. Deterritorialization is transitory. It is concerned with the transference of the effects of music within the annunciating assemblage. Deterritorialization can move back and forth between contexts. For example, the same piece of music can be experienced live, performed by an orchestra, or heard in an elevator. By contrast, reterritorialization destabilizes the refrain within the machinic assemblage more fundamentally. Once the music has been changed and reterritorialized to a new context, it builds new structures that have an organizational permanency and are less able to move back and forth between assemblages. The refrains gathered from the musicians in The Fold go through both processes. In most circumstances the melodies are deterritorialized in that they are used in their original form but have been re-contextualized and placed side by side with the other melodies. It would be a difficult proposition for the listener to discern the original melody composer within the ensemble. The overall effect is a multi-layering of ideas that push and pull against each other – a process of five individual voices coexisting together in a musical concertation working toward transitory accords in a luxurious counterpoint.

A new harmony As a practical methodology for collectively composing music The Fold is an application of Deleuze’s final chapter of The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque entitled “The New Harmony.” The counterpoint is created between the allegory of the

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text, between the relationships of the musicians, and the method of music making and the relationships between sound on sound with each of these aspects that provide points and counterpoints of accord and dis-chord (Punctus Contra Punctum – point on point). As already mentioned, The Fold does not begin with a pre-established form, harmony, or a set of aesthetics. For Deleuze, “Baroque music is what can extract harmony from melody” (FLB, 128). Likewise, The Fold project is the process of manifesting accords through extracting a new harmony from combining the different melodies (personalities) of each of the performers together. Malebranche’s occasionalism remains precisely a philosophical polyphony, in which occasion plays the role of counterpoint, in a perpetual miracle or a constant intervention of God. In the new system, on the contrary, melody, freed of [this] modal counterpoint, gains a force of variation that consists in introducing all kinds of foreign elements in the realization of the accord (delays, inter- weavings, appoggiaturas, etc., whence ensure a new tonal or “luxuriant” counterpoint), but also a force of continuity that will develop a unique motif, even across eventual tonal diversities (“continuo homophone”). (FLB, 135)

This new system or harmony transforms the monad, or at least severs the absolutism of the monad from Leibniz and Malebranche’s perspective of worlds (monads) that are selected by God above all other worlds. Private and individual monads become open to the perspectives of all other monads and allow all kinds of foreign elements in the realization of the accord from within and without the monad’s structure. In terms of the monad as musical score, the score, in this new harmony, is no longer a self-referencing regulative functioning entity composed by an individual, but a site of praxis inviting collaboration from different perspectives enabling a new luxuriant counterpoint. By allowing these different perspectives to intervene in the collaborative process of The Fold, it enables a force of continuity that develops a unique motif, even across eventual tonal diversities – or, for Deleuze, “continuo homophone.” This neologism, continuo homophone, refers to the process of inventing ideas through constant movement. Continuo homophone is a play on the meaning of the concept of basso continuo in Baroque music. The basso continuo (or “continuo” for short) was, as the name suggests, a continuous bass accompaniment, customarily played by a keyboard instrument (left hand) and a bass instrument that would follow a partially written out score – normally only the bass notes were placed in the music and the keyboardist would improvise the rest (with their right hand) following specific numbers written in the score (figured bass) that expressed the harmonic structure and interplay between voices and the continuo. The movement evolves through trial and error; it is a groping experimentation:

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In its turn harmony goes through a crisis that leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance or of unresolved accords, accords not brought back to a tonality. The musical model is most apt to make clear the rise of harmony in the Baroque, and then the dissipation of tonality in the neo-Baroque: from harmonic closure to an opening onto a polytonality or, as Boulez will say, a “polyphony of polyphonies.” (FLB, 82)

From monadology to nomadology In a geophilosophical sense, The Fold project invites discussion through dissonance. In the The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and in his subsequent book, What is Philosophy? (co-authored with Felix Guattari), Deleuze advocates a philosophical move toward what Tom Conley has called the collapse of national boundaries or a return to diversities of economic or ethnic worlds that the totalitarian aspect of liberal democracy has atomized, at least in one stage, by the labor of conceptual thinking [. . .]. Entailed is a revolution of “absolute deterritorialization.”30

With the emancipation of musical a priori to embrace the possibilities of atonalism (tonality being one of the most important regulative functions of the score), The Fold project is a simulacrum of this geophilosophy, a collaborative process that crosses borders of culture and musical siloism. As universal a language as music is perceived to be, professional musicians specialize very early on in their development. They maintain the focus on one particular tradition for their entire lives as the historical breadth, depth and complexity of repertoire is too demanding to master in each tradition alone. Very few musicians have successful careers in more than one genre or musical style. This tendency creates fixed borders between genres, pedagogies, musicians and audiences. For example, in the Cologne iteration of The Fold, musicians were selected from the contemporary classical, jazz/ improvised music and Iranian traditions. In Europe, where this musical siloism is arguably at its extreme, and in the current climate of immigration (in particular, the increase in the Muslim population in Cologne), musicians trained in western music collectively composing with musicians from other cultures is significant in terms of the implications it has for the cultural divides between the so-called established paradigms and minority groups. As a project, The Fold is an atomized version of society, emphasizing both the labor of composition and a particular

30 Tom Conley, “Translator’s Foreword: A Plea for Leibniz,” in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque [1988], trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: UMP, 2007): xiv–xv.

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community of practice.31 It is site-specific, reliant on local musicians from diverse cultural and stylistic backgrounds that come together at a specified time; it permits tradition- and practice-based melding both verbally and musically. For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race – the very ones that Kant excluded from the paths of the new Critique.32

This collision of personalities and cultures in a polyphony of polyphonies is both quintessentially Baroque and contemporaneous since the Baroque folds consists of “all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds” (FLB, 3). In this sense, The Fold project is fundamentally an iterative nomadic process where musicians interact, develop and collectively progress musical ideas from individual perspectives. The concepts [refrains] it [“Nomad thought”] creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject [regulative score], but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. Rather than reflecting the world, they are immersed in a changing state of things [. . .] [synthesizing] a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging.33

In The Fold, power structures, inherited from the state-sanctioned tonal structures implemented during the first Viennese School (Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven) that dictated the apparatus of musical forces in Classical forms, or the regulative score structures imposed by extremely constricting contractual obligations, are deterritorialized and reimagined in nomadic fashion. A nomadic Caesar who doesn’t cross the Rubicon or a vagabond Adam who resists temptation. A nomadology replaces a monadology when individuation becomes unlimited and decentred and when bifurcation and divergences of series cease to be genuine borders between incompossible worlds but form “intraworldly connections.”34

31 “In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy.” Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 6. 32 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1996): 109. 33 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 5–6. 34 Sjoerd van Tuinen, “A Transcendental Philosophy of the Event: Deleuze’s NonPhenomenological Reading of Leibniz,” in Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen, Niamh McDonnell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 173.

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From the psychic geometry delineating personal refrains to public performance; from refrains opening outward from a regulative function to operatively enabling collective synchronicities and collective plateaus of intensity, the monad of the score and of the musician shifting from a private personal space within the upper floor of the Baroque house, through the openings on the first floor out into the world; the distinctions between public and private are dissolved. They have “come to identify variation and trajectory, and overtake monadology with a ‘nomadology’” (FLB, 137). Through the process of collectively devising music in the above-described project, The Fold not only unfurls all the way to infinity but also all the way to the present, in a continuous unfolding, “discovering new ways of folding, akin to new envelopments [. . .] folding, unfolding, refolding” (FLB, 137).

Susan Sentler

The Liquid Architecture of Bodily Folding Abstract: Bodily folding, which includes enfolding and unfolding as points of entrance and departure or pathways that change spatial navigation through and with a particular material, matter or substance, could be seen as the baseline state of being within the continuum of action. Biologically, enfolding nurtures the self. It is a form of nest building, a fractal development of an internal structure, a deepening with the self. Unfolding, on the other hand, opens to the world. Unfolding is readiness, structural stability and creative mobility. It’s movement beyond the self. In this interview, Susan Sentler, dancer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist, discusses folding as a cellular, bodily and geological practice as well as a form of somatic intelligibility.

Natasha Lushetich: You’ve been using what you refer to as “folding” in dance improvisation and choreography for some time now. For G.W. Leibniz, the “fold” is not only the matter but also the grammar of the universe. It’s how the universe moves. Planes and surfaces that were once unimaginably distant in space and time are folded and re-folded together, until they come to form dense territorial, temporal and material configurations we refer to as “the world.” Writing three centuries later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari rearticulate the fold as an existential refrain.1 With its obvious reference to music as a form of temporal and affective organization, an existential refrain is an emplacement, an investment of energy, and a patterning. In the instructions for the folding sessions you do with Glenna Batson we read: Looking at the sheet draped over the chair Lying on the back Noticing the landscape underneath, folding and reverse folding of the landscape of your own being meeting the floor, the positive space of the contact, the negative space and the continuity of what is behind – what touches and what sequences from the touch to its reverse [. . .]. Noticing the river across the top of the foot, the flow into the depth of the eye so that each eye finds a deep inner curvature in which to rest the retina, taking the inner self, the part of the brain that sees the world, back into itself, into the gyri of the floating brain, soft, full of deep clefts and inner folding.

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004): 343. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634952-007

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[. . .] You’re a sheet that is shaping but not making shapes, the paradox of something flat and something curved, the emotional binding that speaks of continuity and discontinuity, that tailbone, that spine from its origins, liquid into substance, flat into fullness. Like a dream that finds you, a dream of your deepest unconscious, becoming conscious, surfacing into those folds of the upper part of you [. . .]. knowing that the fold of the floor is coming to meet you as you come away from it, knowing moments of poise, rest, suspension, ease, letting go, clarity, muddiness. Moments that make sense, moments that support lies in the depth of the crevice, so that at any point you can come into those microtextures of your skin, as if you were looking through a magnifying glass [. . .] The presence of every cell of the skin of you [. . .].

How and why do you work with folding in dance? Susan Sentler: Folding first arose from thoughts prompted by my colleague Glenna Batson. As an aging dancer (both of us, that is), it arose from the need to keep the action of folding alive and liquid, in a deep inner bodily sense. Equally, or even more importantly, virtuosity in dance is often misconstrued. It’s often seen through only one kind of lens. But virtuosity can be viewed as more open to detail and to deep subtlety. For me, to continue to discover more possibilities and nurture this sort of virtuosity in dancers I collaborate with choreographically is crucial. Folding is a way in – into the inner body, into kinesthetic consciousness and into the wider field of universal consciousness. It is a particular form of somatic exploration. The post-contemporary dance field is greatly rooted in improvisational practices as well as somatic techniques, such as releasing techniques, contact improvisation and experiential anatomy. What Glenna and I are playing with is a different approach to entering into the somatic-dance interface in new ways heretofore not codified. Our “purposeless purpose,” to use John Cage’s expression,2 is to expand not only more bodily possibilities but also to enhance a creative palette of how to negotiate and nest particular qualities for further choreographic use. It’s not a means to a choreographic end. Glenna speaks of the importance of exploring modes of “effortless attention.” By this is meant embodied attention free of tensions formed from the dancer’s life, experience and training. Effortless attention can give rise to deepened access to personal and artistic embodiment. The Human Origami processes (Human Origami is the study of bodily folding, of the biological thrust of pattern-making) find consilience with other disciplines such as biology and embryology, biomedicine, responsive architecture, fashion design, phenomenology and consciousness studies.3 This is because the folding is always already there at the cellular level. In order for our

2 John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961): 8. 3 Susan Sentler, “About,” Human Origami: The Art & Science of Folded Matter, Movement, Paper, Sound