christoph /courses /201 /final
The Poetry of Readership
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Never get so close to a poem
that you forget truth which lacks lyricism
Joanna Newsom
To abolish the author's role in literature will in turn abolish self-referential subjects or, in other words, subjects referencing the author in literature by ceasing to reference specific excerpts that allude to the author for the reader's interpretation. Authorship, as Barthes and Foucault argue, becomes a hierarchical focal point to the written word that hinders readership. Readership, in turn, functions as a social practice with or without the tag of the author. The role of the author must be subverted for the sustainability of the text in order for the reader to connect to the work in a more meaningful way with public discourse.
Some solutions will be expanded from the ideas presented in Foucault's What Is An Author? and Barthes' Death of the Author by understanding how text could be disseminated and read by the public without the subservience of the author and his or her book. Examples of ongoing discourse is found in anarchy's role of the historical construction of the avant-garde that comes from the resistance to representation. The struggle against the limits of symbolic representation in literature is parallel to the anarchist critique of political representation. There are thematic links between anarchy and the historical influences of literature that divert from the fragment. The physical presence of writing reflects the existence of the active reader who engages in plural interpretations of the written text. The active reader's resistance to central authorship is put forth by the post-structural and postmodern movements. The reader's plurality of truth is perceived as an army of metaphors that determines the semantics of meaning (Sim, 336.) The death of writing's author connects to readership through movements of the body that conditions its rhythm and cadence.
The analysis and montage of critical theorists hopes to present how readership intertwines with an anarchist aesthetic and literature through direct action and public theatre; and to show how a social anarchist aesthetic can function by effectively creating performance art by not only achieving a radical message against consumerism but by collectively undermining the authorship role. The death of the author in imagery or performance abandons those self-governing representations of power and subjectivity (Gaywood, 96.) Demonstrators behind masks that subvert capitalism by attracting the attention of others through a public spectacle of demonstration, performance art and literature essentially criticize politics with the goal of finding what is thwarting progress, and replacing its absurdity with better ways of reaching a conclusion.
In order to talk about authorship in relationship to a public spectacle, readership becomes just as an important subject for discussion for the reader's being is the very space in which all the citations of writing are inscribed for. An example of readership is the participation and activity in a spectacle. The spectacle in reference to readership is the broken text; text that depicts or represents three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional surfaces (Barthes, 15.) From Barthe's analysis of textuality, the readerly structure of text is dependent on the reader to critique literary fragmentation and correspond to the metonymic qualities of the text. In other words, what can be read and not written (Barthes, 4.) For example, distinct words from a recent self-published Flash animation that shows a double-entendre of "no hard feelings" with a self-portrait of Girard's erection while he flips the bird to the camera enables analysis and criticism from a multiplicity of perspectives whether it is considered hypersexual, self-indulgent or ill.
The usage of syntax also relies heavily on the context. There is no absolute truths within the autonomous individual. The deconstructed quality of writing allows the collective reader to create a multifaceted interpretation of text as authorial intentions can never finally determine a true meaning or value of a text because readers play an interactive role in determining the range of meanings derived in a polyvocal and modernist text (Mercer, 364.) If the reader is dependent on the author to valorize his or her own confidence of this body of text by perhaps wishing to demystify and uncover the subject-position of Girard in order to possibly understand the text better, then Girard must proclaim himself to be a reader as much as a writer with regard to this reflection of authorship. The reader-writer also identifies himself facetiously as an artist-poet collagist in this treatment or more severely as an artist who is disguised as a scholar and wishes to collage and assemble an argument in this body of work. Part of the argument, as acknowledged earlier, is that the reading of this collaged text, in part, is presented in its form.
Readership is essential in acquiring knowledge and understanding about a body of work. The reader is the source for all literary and dialectic connections because the reader holds gathered information from all paths of a single body of text. The reader makes connections based on his or her own credence, value, ideology or connection to the written word. While classical criticism is concerned with the subject of man in literature as being the one who writes, it does not take into account the importance of the presence of the reader. The reader's presence is all-encompassing in the book, the text and all subtext including the annotation of the author's hand in the book. However, the reader, not the author, is the place where a text that consists of multiple writings is collected and united without annotation (Barthes, 147.)
The author is a privileged individual in the subject of the written text which makes the author's individuality problematic. The answer is unlikely whether everything the author wrote, said or left behind is part of his or her own work when an individual has been accepted as an author (Foucault, 102.) The importance of literature emphasized to the author's person is the result of capitalist ideology. The author plays the role of the regulator characteristic of industrial society (Foucault, 119.) Literature that is tyrannically centered on a need for an explanation of who writes what becomes necessitated in order to deliver confidence to the reader that the reader becomes conditioned to require yet does not really need (Barthes, 142.) The importance of writing is diverted to who writes what instead of the voice of the written word. The omnipresence of the reader has somehow been taken for granted by the physicality of the author's presence and served a subservient role in capitalist culture as a tool for marketing. A Google search for "readership" will show a dictionary definition and the statistics of marketing by way of results that serve an authorial entity. The place of prestige onto the individual author is created by society and this is proven by the author's precedence in literature found in contemporary culture (Barthes, 142.)
The author will not limit the text of writing if writing operates in a free state that puts it at the disposal of everyone, enabling it to develop without passing through a necessary or constraining figure (Foucault, 119.) The constraining figure is the precedence of the author's name and picture on novels and books. One example of this precedence of the author is an all-encompassing headshot clearly seen on the front cover of published books by Douglas Messerli of Green Integer, the head of a literary press based in Los Angeles. A large headshot of the author's smiling or contemplative face that encompasses the cover of the published book becomes the focal reference point for the reader. The reader then acknowledges that beneath the smiling author's head is the author's own book with his or her own writing bestowed upon the reader.
The point of writing is not the act in itself, the point of writing is rather a question of creating space in which the subject endlessly disappears (Foucault, 103.) Writing, not the author, should be the language which speaks because to write is to perform or enact language that takes precedence over the hegemonic entity of the author. Language only knows a subject, not a person, so the construct of the author, or simply the man or woman behind the writing, becomes the past embodiment of his or her own writing by pre-existing it. Their life, their being, and their genius encompasses the composition of written text. Many forget to recognize that the absence of the author is a historical fact, only in the recent past is the modern author simultaneously born with his or her text (Barthes, 143-144.) Texts have not always required attribution of authorship. There was a time when texts were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without the question about the identity of the author. Historically, there are numerous anonymous books published during and after the invention of the Gutenberg press from the fifteenth to eighteen centuries which proves the unimportance of the author in regard to early publications. The writer's anonymity caused no difficulties since their existence, whether real or imagined, was regarded as sufficient to their status (Foucault, 109.) As a side note, many of these published books and texts by anonymous writers can currently be found online at Project Gutenberg Consortia Center's Renascence Editions Collection.
Some of the problems that arise from the author's name are common to all proper names. The author's name, like a proper name, is equivalent to a description as it indicates a sign and a finger pointed at someone (Foucault, 105.) However, the author's name raises more concern than that of other proper names. The particular difficulty of the author's name arises in that the author's name is not just a proper name like other names in discourse (Foucault, 106.) The author's name, unlike proper names, characterizes a specific mode of existence in discourse. The name does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the exterior individual who produced it. The author's name becomes omnipresent, marking off the edges of the page, as the name reveals its manner of existence. The classification of the author's name establishes a relationship among the author's texts to others. An author's name assures the classification of texts by grouping them together in order to define and differentiate them in contrast to the other author's texts (Foucault, 107.)
Discourses of literature are only accepted when endowed with the author function. Questions often arise from where the writing comes from as if the answers is who really wrote it (Foucault, 109.) Historically, the empirical role of an author is synonymous with ownership of the book. Public graffiti that constitutes written text, for example, probably has a writer but not an author. The phrases written on a wall, presumably not the writer's wall, are anonymous and act as a tablet of written text but that still begs the question of who wrote or spray-painted "oh, fuck." Writing should avoid all references to the author because the function of authorship is not concerned with the act of writing nor the sign of the expression and meaning in writing. This notion of writing prevents the reader from taking full measure of the author's disappearance (Foucault, 104.)
The role of the author can function like a discourse within society that acts as an object of appropriation. The discourse can be transgressive when an author, the form of ownership, becomes subject to punishment as well as accolade. The beginning of authorship was created when a hierarchical system of ownership for texts came into being. Strict rules and strict punishments concerning the relations and rights of the author and reproduction were enacted (Foucault, 108.) Authorship also plays an important role with regard to literary works in society. The meaning and value bestowed upon a written text depends on who the author is. Literary critics use methods similar to proving the value of the text by the author's saintliness in order to determine authorship in the body of text. When a text is discovered in a state of anonymity by the reader, there becomes a need for reassurance to know who the author is and, if the author is anonymous, to find him or her as if the presence of the author will validate his or her written text. Since anonymity is not tolerable, the reader can accept anonymity only the semblance of an enigma like the representation of God (Foucault, 110.) Therefore, when in doubt, God becomes a function of the author.
The point of writing is reading, meaning nobody utters the source of the voice and yet it is perfectly read. To impose authorship on a text creates a subsection. The division of a section of text distinguishes the writing with a signification of its difference. The structure of writing can be followed in its repetition and rhythm without suffering from the refusal of an underlying label to indicate the ingenuity of the author. The reader becomes the explorer who searches for meaning by traversing the space of writing and advances its meaning in order to dissolve it or to understand it (Barthes, 146.) The writing evolves as it will inevitably continue to be critiqued and edited in the future by readers for whom the writing plunges into a field of phrases. When the reader changes pages or puts his or her book down, the reading is only suspending its exploration for a moment, never unaware of when it will stop (Lyotard, 17.)
The linguistics of language shows that spoken word in its entirety is a void process because the writer can only imitate his or her own gestures with language. The expressions enacted by a reader, whom succeeds the author, in writing and discourse are themselves a translation from a lexicon whose words can be explained only by other words in the reader's lexicon (Barthes, 145.) The power of writing lives in its ability to combine various kinds of writing. The fusion of writing does not create original writing. Therefore, the text of writing combined from a multitude of sources results in a tissue of citation. The text of writing, in turn, strengthens the notion that the text exists as a space of multiple dimensions and rules out the existence of a single omnipresent existence of the author. The writer contains a lexicon within his or her own psyche as a source for writing that is what references his or her passions, humors, sentiments and impressions. Life can only imitate the writer's book which is a collection of signs from an infinitely distant imitation of writers (Barthes, 146.) Despite the imitation, modern literary critics define the author as the basis for explaining the relative location and presence of events in the written text and their various alterations when it is not concerned with questions of authentication (Foucault, 111.)
The authorial voice in writing consists of several imperceptible voices by several different sources and therefore the omnipresence of the author becomes an indistinguishable and inauthentic presence. The process of writing begins when the author enters his own death and the origin of the voice is lost. How the process of writing is linked with the loss of the voice can be found in history by way of primitive societies whose narrative is undertaken from a performance and not by a person which proves the notion of authorship is not just limited by writing (Barthes, 142.) It is also well known by readers that in a first-person narrative, the pronoun of "I" and the present indicative do not refer to the writer nor to the event he or she writes for but rather to an alias whose distance from the author wavers throughout the course of the text (Foucault, 112.) The position of the author in the body of text can be occupied by different classes of individuals. Text therefore does not refer to a representation of an author since it can give simultaneous rise to several selves and to several subjects (Foucault, 113.) The author obstructs the production of literary meaning. As a result, the traditional idea of the author must be entirely reversed which in order for it to proliferate meaning. Society believes the author is so incomparable to all other individuals and languages that, as soon as he or she speaks, meaning endlessly burgeons and yet, in paradoxical way, the opposite is true. (Foucault, 118.)
Several writers, artists and groups have attempted to topple the author's empire with artwork, writing and demonstrations. The life of the author has been experimented with by internationally acclaimed figures such as the French artist Sophie Calle. Calle explored postmodern themes by relating authorial positioning to investigating human vulnerability and isolation in the public space by photographing the private lives of unwitting participants around her. Calle recomplicated these authorial switches by asking a relative to hire a private detective to follow her in hopes that she would be photographed as proof of her existence (Hopkins, 242.) The "i" behind Calle's authorial positioning becomes shown at the representational level of art. Postmodernism looks similarly at the death of the author as it is regarded to be disproportionate to the essential motivational aspects in the individual consciousness. There is no criteria for truth in ideology which is seen as false consciousness in postmodernism (Gaywood, 96.)
Art that creates the struggle for revolution depicts the reader as representation for change because communication comes within the communication of reading. Art, represented as the fragment, ceases to exist in the spectrum of most anarchist ideology. An anarchist aesthetic, defined as realism with an idealistic aim, will be considered to exist in relationship to the reader as a spectator and listener in the treatment of anarchist discussion (Cohn, 167.) Almost all anarchists, with a few exceptions, are supportive of music and books. An anarcho-primitivist like John Zerzan for example would argue for the abolition of representation in all its forms including language (Zerzan, ix.) Aesthetics in writing and art in anarchism diverge from ideas of art as an idealistic or symbolic form come from the early theories of implementing art. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the first anarchist thinkers in the mid 19th century, lived during the popular realist movement in art which embraced objective versus exaggerated reality. Gustave Courbet, a painter who is considered at the forefront of the realist movement, painted a portrait of Proudhon and his children and was considered to be friends with the early anarchist thinker. Proudhon's friendship with Courbet perhaps influenced his favorable opinions about art. Similar to the realist movement, Proudhon believed art that reproduces reality fails to tell the truth. Furthermore, he believed the artist should not reproduce existence but criticize it with intention to represent what should exist (Cohn, 167.) In other words, Proudhon believes art devoid of a dialectic relationship to an idealistic ambition is not an adequate concept of art.
Readership is simply an arm of communication for the anarchist aesthetic. Peter Kropotkin, one of the first advocates of anarcho-communism, called for writers and artists to implement their pens toward the service of the revolution by showing the heroic struggles of the people against their oppressors (Cohn, 168.) Anarchism that undermines the establishment through revolution or a canvas of pavement in turn calls for readership in the ways of seeing corruption. In order to explain readership in terms of writing for social change, writing that is performed, sung and drawn for the revolution allows for the the thrill of living for change. Social art is an accomplished dialectic between the assertions of realism and symbolism. To construct mental ideas versus the physical object is a plausible definition of social art. The dialectic between two polar opposites provides a stimulus to revolt by engaging the spectator and artist in a process of change (Cohn, 166-167.) Anarchism is not one single radical definition; the ideology of an end to government is shared with the connecting thread in working towards the elimination of representation (Cohn, 11.)
Anarchism is a challenging force like reading. The social anarchist aesthetic can be seen today as art through forms of literature, posters and punk music with an idealistic intention similar to demonstrations dependent on readership. Demonstrations that serve as a performative act of persuasion represents an anarchist aesthetic alienated by authorship and decorated or created in a way that brings new attention to revolution as an unfamiliar sound that hasn't reverberated in a while (Cohn, 25-26.) This kind of social anarchist aesthetic functions as critical idealism and ultimately brings attention to readership (Cohn, 162.) Music with an emotional charge through hardcore and thrash music allows for a dialectical element for listeners to make their own conclusion in a more conventional settings like a music venue, bedroom or subway.
Gay Shame is an example of a group that enhances a social anarchist ideology with demonstrations that rely on readership to spread a message. Gay Shame is a group of radicals formed by the loosely defined term of queer who challenge activities that affect the greater queer community. What unifies Gay Shame as a group is similar to most other groups and that is their desire to raise public awareness. The international group, with members ranging in age and cities including San Francisco, struggle to show that queer pride is synonymous with liberation, not a marketing scheme for corporations that sponsor queer events within the Castro Street Fair, for example. The ideas behind Gay Shame did not happen overnight; activists and demonstrators associated with the group have continuously developed and evolved complex political critiques for decades. Since it is counterintuitive to cite specific names of demonstrators or activists associated with radical activity, all citations, credit and references to activists will be undisclosed or given their public alias "Mary."
As participants during demonstrations, their voice resonates in their dress. What Mary declares as a call for "terrifying, ragged and devastating excess" creates a space of dissidence to foster and encourage open dialogue. Frizzy wigs, excessive make up, hairy legs and exaggerated mini-skirts intentionally addresses the reader to participate in the struggle. Since the first Gay Shame event in Brooklyn during 1998, demonstrations, performances and discussions evolved to a more widespread readership. A reader is able to interpret the message behind the over-the-top clothing, sardonic banners and the public theatre on the streets. The way the members refuse to explain their message in journalistic or direct communicative terms makes the message even more effective. The effect of Gay Shame’s readership in San Francisco, for example, is proven by the greater community’s general knowledge of the small group. Readers are aware of their struggles and conceptually understand what they are fighting for. The actions of Gay Shame are effective in spreading a message of plurality across the engaged public.
In ten years of struggle and performance, the group has consistently and unsurprisingly created such an alluring spectacle one can only stare at it. This form of impact though public performance helps aid the reader's psyche that there is as much struggle between radical queers in the queer community as respective groups in other communities. Members in the group will likely continue to war with other demonstrators in the streets with perhaps a large "Queer Mutiny Not Consumer Unity" sign to counter future corporate-sponsored queer events while dressed in bubble-gum pink bunny suits, curly wigs, neon sunglasses and long black tube socks to allow the reader to associate their performance and the queer community with struggle. The proof that readership also exists is in the criticism of Gay Shame. Besides altercations and heckles during demonstrations, the few readers who attack their emphasis on dressing too self-righteously make the assumption that the excessive crudeness of dress is a mockery of poverty. The association of dress to poverty is a presumptuous, if not infantile, example yet it serves as an example of the reader who attributes meaning to aesthetic. A more thoughtful attribution, however, would be found in their performance and not just in their appearance. To say, "don't judge a book by its cover" may be a relevant response to a reader's attribution but the reader should be encouraged and given space to ponder without the author which is perhaps why Gay Shame doesn't defend their outrageous demonstrations.
Finally, Gay Shame is a group willing to challenge the problem of complacency through other methods of public discourse like graffiti. The message "End Marriage" with pink wedding bells stenciled across the sidewalks in San Francisco clearly gets its message across to the reader as graffiti. The placement of the message as an advertisement on a billboard, for example, would contradict the message because capitalism, like marriage, reflects an institution that sustains gender, class and racial hierarchies. The issue of gay marriage, like military service or adoption, in the gay community is seen as symbolic of conforming to the straight majority whom marry and serve in the military. The message must exist in a setting where the setting of its existence advocates the message and therefore triggers the reader's synesthesia and induces sentiment for social change. The setting and placement of demonstrations, graffiti and other public interaction becomes a necessary space to undermine capitalism and its complacency and empower public discourse.
The modulation of writing on its medium, whether it is from spoken word, performance or a publication will affect the tone of how the reader interprets the writing. The tone of the writing on the reader is an example of how it changes the way readers associate the writing process. Another example of writing in a similar vein to Gay Shame's public performance is virtual writing. Print text is distinctively different to that of virtual writing because of its inherent difference in accessibility, appearance and structure of the medium. While the reader will find that all writing is layered writing, electronic texts make a reader's experience distinctively different from that of print text (Hayles, 88.) Two primary examples of how electronic texts make a reader's experience distinctively different are the use of file names and action from the movement and adjusting of the computer screen. File names serve an authorship function in a way that they similarly imply that the writing is recognized as assumption as the crux of the written text. The adjusting of the computer screen implants and reinforces cognitive preconceptions of the reader through physical actions and habitual motions (Hayles, 89.) The quality of the computer or book affects the quality of the reading, also. A faster computer leads to a faster clock rate as similar to the quality of the paper and condition of the text will in turn affect the readability of the book (Hayles, 90.)
N. Katherine Hayles, a postmodern literary critic in the field of electronic literature, suggests that literature will not remain unchanged and that literature has always not remain unchanged. The manifestation of literature from book to digital is highly significant for it to change (Hayles, 93.) Literature evolves constantly but not necessarily does the older reader. A contemporary example of this is the awareness in the decline of traditional readership of print text over dead trees among the latter or younger generations of readers in contrast to older ones who read with more traditional mediums. Some older and more experienced readers have a preference of reading text from paper versus a screen. This is possibly because of the inherent difficulty to adjust and move the lit computer screen or the inaccessibility of online text while reading. Paul Vangelisti, a noted poet and translator for almost 40 years, argues that he prefers to read text on paper versus a screen because it enables "oldtimers like myself" to concentrate better on "things we are truly interested in." Whereas students in the Digital Arts and New Media program at University of California, Santa Cruz turn in assignments from courses by logging in and posting the written text onto the course wiki page for the professors and students' cohort, whom are all presumably younger than Vangelisti, to read.
The advent of readership on the internet or subversively in public may well predict the death of the author. The author function disappears at the moment when it is in the process of transition from page to different mediums for the reader. Polysemous or layered writing functions according to an undetermined mode which no longer comes from the author. If we present the author as a genius or original, it is because we make him or her function in exactly the opposite way. The author functions as an ideological product since he or she represents the opposite of the historical function of writing (Foucault, 119.) The omnipresence of the internet enables the reader to continuously discover new text and imagery without the necessary signification of authorship. The death of the author, with the reader in constant transition for new information, entails a reconsideration of his or her subject-position in readership when it requires a move towards a relational outlook of new discoveries when the reader's interaction with mediums arises his or her own connection between the social and the emotional (Mercer, 364.) The author is not a clear source of representation. The reader follows the writing and overlooks what hinders the circulation, manipulation, composition, decomposition, and recomposition of writing (Foucault, 120.)
The earth keeps revolving and all of a sudden poetry resounds in the revolution of the reader. The volatile shifting from the reference to the phrases will become what is to be the greatest dialogue ever captured by the reader. The burden of the author's inauthenticity and unoriginality will cease to exist when there is no difference to be made who is speaking and to whom is listening. The poetry of readership is disembodied as the eye of the reader is taken to the streets and rolled through the city and what is given to the reader is just that.
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