Page-->words-->phone exist simultaneously
Their connection is one built entirely on language, on words, on neologisms and metaphors; language is given an extended material presence, becoming, much like the language of the chatroom, an extension of the body
Jenny Sunden’s Material Virtualities refers to this process (in chatrooms) as textual embodiment and, indeed, by the time we reach the inevitable building climax, both voices have become embodied
Upon reaching climax, this embodiment subsides, and all they are left with is the telling hum of fibre optic phone line
Similarly, one might also say that this conversation is, in many ways, a co-authoring in the truest sense of the word; much like an emergent, web-based story, the components of the narrative are exchanged between the participants; a co-authoring enabled by technology (at least in theory, this sounds quite familiar)
In the end, though, for all the talk about the “pornographic” dimensions of this novel, we have to remember that we’re removed by several degrees from the actual act—word represents deed, deed is transmitted through the page of the codex, codex remediates the phone, Jim and Abby transmit the spoken word through electronic approximations in a phone line
Once sexual tension is released, all that is left is the technology, the medium of the phone, and the time to “absorb the strangeness” (165) of the newness of electronic embodiment
Posted by marcusrp at 9:10 PM
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Twain, Mark. Puddn'head Wilson (1894)
Characters:
David Wilson
Tom Driscoll (aka Thomas a Becket)
Valet a Chambers (aka Chambers)
Roxana (aka Roxy)
Judge Driscoll
Luigi and Angelo
“She gathered up her baby once more; but when her eye fell upon its miserably short little gray tow-linen shirt and noted the contrast between its pauper shabbiness and her own volcanic irruption of infernal splendors, her mother-heart was touched, and she was ashamed.” (314) [see also: McLuhan, clothing as the extension of the skin]
“A person who is ignorant of legal mattes is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision corrected by a trained barrister—if that is what they are called.” (299) [contrast between the seeming plasticity of print, its authority scorched by the advent of the photographic image]
“’Why, a man’s own hand is his deadliest enemy! Just think of that—a man’s own hand keeps a record of the deepest and fatalest secrets of his life, and is treacherously ready to expose him to any black magic stranger that comes along. But what do you let a person look at your hand for, with that awful thing printed in it?” (362) [print has little or no authority in this novel; we can witness the ways in which print is made subservient and dishonest in comparison to other media—the fingerprint glass, the palm, the photograph, the pantograph (?)]
“Tom forged a bill of sale and sold his mother to an Arkansas cotton-planter for a trifle over six-hundred dollars.” (398)
“She was panting with excitement, and there was a disky glow in her eyes that Tom could not translate with certainty, but there seemed to be something threatening about it. The handbill had the usual rude woodcut of a turbaned negro woman running, with the customary bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and the heading in bold type, ‘$100 REWARD’. Tom read the bill aloud—at least the part that described Roxana and maed the master his St. Louis address and the address of the Fourth-street agency; but he left out the item that applicants for the reward might also apply to Mr. Thomas Driscoll.” (409) [literacy‡ ignorance, even in Twain’s era of reduced print dominance; woodcut as example of distributed, mass-produced prints as a metaphor for the reduction and depersonalization of slaves as fugitives]
“He made fine and accurate reproductions of a number of his ‘records’, and then enlarged them on a scale of ten to one with his pantograph. He did these pantograph enlargements on sheets of white cardboard and made each individual line of the bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which constituted the ‘pattern’ of a ‘record’ stand out bold and black by reinforcing it with ink.” (428) [not only does this once again display the various media assembled against the printed word, but it also shows a large degree of understanding of textual materiality—the blank space of the white cardboard is used in conjunction with the black ink whose whorls and loops constitutes an aesthetics of authority. The fingerprint-as-image is granted power through its manipulation on the cardboard page—so it’s not only biometrics that gain authority, but also, importantly, the manipulated and scalar image]
“To the untrained eye the collection of delicate originals made by the human finger on glass plates looked about alike; but when enlarged ten times they resembled the markings of a block of wood that has been sawed across the grain, and the dullest eye could detect at a glance, and at a distance of many feet, that no two patterns were alike.” (428) [not only are we talking about print/page materiality here but also, crucially, pattern recognition]
Fingerprints as autograph (432)
Archetypal, Algerian story of rags to riches
Posted by marcusrp at 9:02 PM
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Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons (1914)
An example of the attempt of Stein to remediate Cubist aesthetics in print
A complete detachment of the sign from the signified; words are reduced to their basest syllabic and phonetic rhythm
The resulting text is one that is both a staunch refusal to adhere to contemporary trends as well as a an attempt to create a meaning-less consciousness where the totality of the sign is irrevocably brought to bear in the present—no prior meanings are entirely attached to the signs, and the effect is more of an instinctual feeling rather than a continuous, discrete set of alphabetic phonemes (i.e. continuity is maintained, but only through cadence and oral/aural means and not direct pragmatic inference)
The consciousness of the present; a Cubist work tries to unfurl the unfettered whole across the canvas, to demarcate the three dimensional across a two dimensional plane
"Indeed, cyberspace is in many ways the logical end to an extensive project which Stein-- amongst others--began at the turn of the century; a project in which a coherent sense of time, memory and history are rejected in favour of non-narrative modes of representation. The early modernists were instrumental in developing an art of the pure sign, or an art in which the concrete materials--words, paint--become the artist's subject matter. Stein famously favoured verbs rather than nouns, because verbs can be 'mistaken', and shifters (linking words), because their meanings change depending on the context in which they are used. In her famous essay Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose, Mabel Dodge praised the intuitive way in which Stein: "[chose] words for their inherent quality, rather than for their accepted meaning," a prescient observation in light of the work of Jacques Derrida, who recently proposed a science of the concrete written sign called grammatology." (Annette Rubery, The Mother of Postmodernism?)
Stein's declaration of cubist intentions:
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
Spreading, as in moving across the page, morphing, detaching language from its semiotic roots. Words become phonetic space in Stein, just as colors become subconscious blends in Cubist paintings.
Posted by marcusrp at 8:26 PM
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Schuyler, George. Black No More (1931)
A wholly successful, and entirely relevant, satire in the tradition of Swift and Locke which plays with notions of race, Nation, capitalism and aesthetic identity.
Max Discher, aka Matthew Fisher: protagonist who uses the system to subvert the system once undergoing the Black-No-More, Inc. electrocution treatment to turn his skin white.
Finds white culture to be dry and dull, their liquor bland and their conversation superficial and deceptive
Heads home to Atlanta to chase after the girl who chastised him, calling him a nigger, at the club on New Year’s Eve 1933.
Decides to use his knowledge (and possibly his self-hatred) as a means through which he can make money
Finds an ad in the local newspaper drawing attention to the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist organization dedicated to dealing with the coming threat of BNM Inc.
Assumes the identity of a New York Anthropologist who has studied and published on issues of white superiority and bloodline weakening
Has a son with Helen, schemes to avert disaster when son is black
Bunny Brown: Max’s friend who also undergoes the BNM treatment; comes to work for Max in the Knights and acts as his secretary and spy, even going so far as burning down the Givens’ house in order to protect Max from his sure-to-be Black offspring
Comes to keep and marry a Black woman (a “Race” woman, as he calls them)
Henry Givens: Grand Admiral of the Knights; former KKK head who doesn’t even know what the word Anthropology means
Is manipulated by Max into building the org. into a massive, counter-BNM movement that appeals to the working classes
Wife is ornery, daughter, Helen
Runs for President on the bought Democratic ticket backed by the money and people of the Knights
Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard/ Santrop Licorice/ Dr. Buggerie (Anglo-Saxon agency, data collection, proves that “unemployment and poverty are principally a state of mind” [157]): All members of the NSEL—The National Social Equality League, dedicated to obtaining equal rights for Blacks (“they were never so happy and excited as when a Negro was barred from a theater or burnt to a crisp” [88]); all undergo BNM procedure, Buggerie, the statistician, is burned at the stake with Snobbcraft after concocting the Ancestry surveys to prove those who have pure ancestry
Dr. Junius Crookman: scientist and founder of BNM, only character in the text to not ever discuss, or have, the BNM procedure; wife might is white, children are mulatto; backs the Republican party and becomes the Surgeon General
Announces that the whiter the person, the better chance that they are formerly Black skinned
Simeon Snobbcraft: Head of the Anglo-Saxon Association, nominee for VP; mastermind behind the ancestry ploy which backfires, proving that no man or woman in America can say that, past 5 generations, there is no Black in them
Burned at the stake with Buggerie after trying to paint themselves Black with shoe polish
Quotes:
“They were all in evening dress and in their midst was a tall, slim, titian-haired girl who had seemingly stepped from heaven or the cover of a magazine.” (20)
“…either get out, get white or get along.”—Crookman (27)
“There is no such thing as Negro dialect, except in literature and drama. It is a well-known fact among informed persons that a Negro from a given section speaks in the same dialect as his white neighbors.”—Crookman (31) [except, of course, this is not true in the text—Bunny and Max talk in a heavily slanged dialect throughout the book when together]
“He quailed as he saw the formidable apparatus of sparkling nickel. It resembled a cross between a dentist’s chair and an electric chair.” (34)
“He was annoyed and a little angered. What did they want to put his picture all over the front of the paper for? Now everybody would know who he was.” (39)
“Everything that looks white ain’t white in this man’s country.”—Foster (56)
“…for the more intellectual magazines, in which he sought to prove conclusively that the plantation scouts of Southern Negro poems were superior to any of Beethoven’s symphonies and that the city of Benin was the original site of the Garden of Eden.”—Beard (93)
“He was engaged in the most vital and necessary work: i.e., collecting bales of data to prove satisfactorily that more money was needed to collect more data.” (97)
Posted by marcusrp at 8:13 PM
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