Christoph Girard is attending this course taught by Christina Mcphee in Fall 2009.
Confessional poetry underlines the necessity to perform an identity in order for the reader to avoid alienation and ostracism from the text; the identity formed by the authorial signifier becomes associated with the spectacle of representation fixed in its place within society.
The exhibition of writing connects to surveillance as others exhausted Sylvia Plath's existence to a multiplicity of actions previously observed and enacted by the reader. The subject-position of Plath becomes the focal point for constructing a dialogue between the text and what is implied and filled in by the multiplicity of biographical accounts and interpretations of how the author lived. The mirror of writing reflects the reader while it is a window to others; the reader is able to see constructs of intimacy in a way that the reader sees the spectacle of his or her own body under surveillance. The embodiment of multiple traits attributed to representation becomes interwoven, non-linear and fragmented; representation implies that gender is fabricated as individuals fall into distinct categories and subcategories with each performing different roles. Authorship is linked to the fragment as magazines and film perform the language of patriarchy that marginalizes identity and replaces it with a culture of reproducibility. The writing reflects that to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone which the reader is present.
The representation of Plath prescribed to normative roles of women in mass production reinforces and constructs the reader's perception of women. The reader's familiarity with Plath implies that the connection to the authorial identity is based on representation. Plath is first introduced as a female by the signifier of the authorial identity and is circumscribed to fit gender roles to strengthen historical and societal values of womanhood like that of a passive housewife and mother. The reader involuntarily fixes gender and representation to a hegemonic standard which paradoxically objectifies Plath to a performance of normative roles in order to reinforce her authorial subject-position as the passive embodiment of female whose fate is cast in madness and mental anguish. Plath is never able to speak for herself because she is not in control of her own body; the fate implied from mental suffering reinforces circumscribed roles to women like defenselessness and possession of the body.
Since normative representations of the female body are fixed to meet a set of standards and can only stay static, distress and disability beg to perform the otherwise passive female body. The purported mental illness of Plath implies that there is a shift in embodiment; the female body becomes the representation of illness. Deviant behavioral patterns like attempts at suicide justify the aberration of performance by encouraging the masquerade of illness to overpower the body. While the mechanism of rejection represents being cast off from society, the difference implied from the manifestation of illness and the female body suggest a subservience to hegemony. The rejection by normative representation is similar to the rejection of the body for whom it is presumed that Plath is thought of being out of control of her "true self" which is in itself a construct of the reader. Degradation and suffering that comes from internal difference lacks a clear representation and therefore the submissive role of women attributed to Plath's authorial identity reinforces internal difference.
Hegemony becomes an act of assimilation for the reader as the performance of Plath revolves around gender, illness and fame. The performance is an embodiment of norms that constructs womanhood to become the anomaly of the abject through ways of dying and being cast off. The authorial identity suggests Plath's ability to use her physical body to write and reflect about the abuse of the external body. The framework of abjection, which struggles with the gap between representation and embodiment, fits with the deconstruction of internal conflict cast off into poetics. The reader is imbued with the aftermath of representation; the external body of Plath is in tumult as the poems unfold tragedy through turmoil which dismantles forms of reference into an authorial code. Objectification complicates the construction of meaning for the reader who not only reinforces normative roles of sexual identity fixed to historical moments but the fetishization and spectacle of suffering.
Time is relentless and indicated by details that lead the reader to move by association because history overpowers the present like a memory which survives only in the moment. The construction of Plath runs away from the present and sways between polarities with text that fractures the meandering body to its dissolving point while the body transcends time like an anachronistic performance. Age is as deceptive as authorial to the reader and reinforces a catalogue of romantic codes with an impenetrable play on the absence of historical context. The reader invents judgments to induce authority and challenges the capacity of poetry by arranging the practice of thought with symbols as a reaction to the varied permutations of familiarity. Everything invented by the reader is a utopian anchor; the mirrored landscape is strewn with fuck buddies who come to life from a fictitious tradition. They meet in a large box of mirrors to visit their amours and show off their endowments. Codes of language reveal a field of a inverted connections and the significance of the reader's willful ignorance to act on instinct as guides.
The resolution is the bane of authorial intention in the poem; translations create often repetitive and familiar moments as they collide with the desire for conclusion. The author asks the reader if familiarity can be taken as the poem's sole content. Inevitably, the conclusion begins the performance of Plath.
1. Barthes, Roland. Image - Music - Text.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
2. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
3. Buckingham, Matthew. Play the Story.
London: Camden Arts Center, 2007.
4. Cohn, Jesse S. Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation.
Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006.
5. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
6. Dunn, Robert G. Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
7. Foucault, Michel. "What is An Author?"
in The Foucault Reader.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
8. Gaywood, James. "'yBa' as Critique."
Mercer, Kobena. "Looking for Trouble."
in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
9. Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Condition of Virtuality"
in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
10. Hopkins, David. After Modern Art.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
11. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Can Thought go on Without a Body?"
in The Inhuman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.
12. Perloff, Marjorie. "Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text."
Glazier, Loss Pequeno. "IO SONO AT SWOONS."
Poundstone, William. "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps."
Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event."
Golding, Alan. "Language Writing, Digital Poetics and Transitional Materialities."
Cayley, John. "Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification."
in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
13. Tomasulo, Frank P. “Historical Consciousness and the Viewer”
in The Persistence of History. London: Routledge, 1995.
14. Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism.
London: Routledge, 2001.
15. Zerzan, John. Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization.
Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008.
Verb Assignment: To breathe
The movement of confessional poetry is defined by its context rather than any innovative technical development or formal progress; an intimate biographical construction of the poet revealed in an explicit first-person narrative. The narrative is framed by the reader from his or her knowledge of the poet's autobiographical experience which suggests that the poem relies heavily on the agreement of the reader to have credence in the poet. While fabricated experiences are inevitably forged by the reader to create and shape the authorial persona in a poem, the authorial persona is an attempt by the reader to clarify the connection between the identified persona and the poet's lifestyle or actions. The authorial role of the poet shapes and influences the reader's interaction with the poem through external sources like historical narratives, marketing and media.
Determining the subject-position of confessional poet Sylvia Plath depends on the historical representation of her selfhood consumed by the reader. Since Plath has been dead for almost 50 years, she not only continues to play the role of a depressed poet but a repertoire of other roles constructed from historical representations of women in film and other mass publications from the 1950s and 1960s. The representation of the author's living situation and lifestyle inevitably becomes tied to the normative role of a woman as a meek housewife and mother during the time period she lived in. With credence in the subject-position of the author by the reader, the self becomes a projection of roles that constitutes normative representations to further fabricate the construction of an authorial identity. By breaking up and reassembling spoken word in BBC recordings of Plath's readings from the 1960s, the authorial identity is further cut up in Lady Applicant: The Lazarus while the fragmented voice of Plath subverts authorial intention and places the proliferation of meaning on the reader.
The construction and play of an authorial role is experimented with by artist Matthew Buckingham who ironically used early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's authorial identity to fit into a historically normative role but enabled her speech to reflect on contemporary issues. The setting of Buckingham's installation entitled Play the Story from 2007 reflects a stage set of Georgian style decorum with paneled white walls, a large dark and polished wooden door; and an exaggerated crystal chandelier to reinforce the historical representation and stereotype of a conventional upper-class lifestyle in the 1700s to conflict with her radical feminist beliefs. The performance of the death of the author begins with the voice of a performer who is dressed in a long white period gown and tied up hair presumably made to fit with the setting and introduces herself as Wollstonecraft as she reads assembled cutups directed from quotes by the eighteenth-century feminist writer, upside-down.
The anachronistic and exaggerated elements of Play the Story represent the struggle against authorial representation by dehistoricizing the speaker into a ghost who's standing on the ceiling at the opposite end of the room. The voice of the performer is constructed by cutups of documents published during Wollstonecraft's life and after her death as the reader makes associations to the narrative within the room. While the room serves as a visual critique of the fragility of authorship, a dialectical connection between the room and the narrative can be forged from the detached representation of history. The room serves a primary purpose of representing a historical moment and the authorial representation of Wollstonecraft is destabilized by the ghost-like figure who stands on the ceiling; the acknowledgement of the death of the author by the ghost and the reader ends the ties to her authority and meaning making further becomes unlimited by her presence. The spectator becomes the reader who is standing below (or above) her on the floor and the performance is liberated by the reader who is actively listening without the authorial constraint.
The connection of history and confessional poetry is marked by the reliance of the author's subject position and intention that is signified and constructed by the reader. The height of confessional poetry in the 1960s also saw the shift from a structuralist to poststructuralist ethos in literary theory which may have been the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to subsequent movements in poetry. The movement of language poetry placed complete emphasis on the language of the poem as the reader's interaction with language dictates meaning. For a reader to breathe in space between text is to inflect the semantics of poetry as it involves the reader in meaning making.
To breathe life and construct meaning into a poem or a narrative reflects its engagement with interaction; sounds and visuals require the reader to find a new way to approach the text. If a second neo-avant-garde poetry movement forms, language will be rooted from what lies outside the page. Language poetry was one reaction to the predominance of authorial intention; to take a series of printed words as far as they can go and splash them with ampersands along a lengthy and narrow stanza. The writing of anomalies breaks the barrier between language and the reader; it doesn't need the author to justify the publication of the written word but advises the reader that the experience presented may be entirely generated by collage and literary constraints. Within every utterance, there is a new utterance, a pause; the sound of silence which leaves a space for the speaker to breathe and the listener to further hear.
The cutups from Lady Applicant: The Lazarus will reflect the anarchic struggle of disembodiment and separation from the author and text. The conviction that the death of the author cast into light with intense poststructural study and praxis therefore proves that the death is already an old and well-received idea of literature for nearly forty years. The assertions and arguments put forth are mostly paraphrases from a pastiche of previous texts written by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and other poststructural critics. The major difference between serving as a translation and its own body of text without translation is the emphasis strives to be placed in disembodied voices and their inflection to the reader. The analysis hopes to present how readership intertwines with an anarchist aesthetic through public performance; and to show how a social anarchist aesthetic can effectively function by creating performance and participation art by not having spectators activate sensors to achieve a radical message against consumerism, but by collectively undermining the authorship role through readership.
The disembodied voices constitute fragmentation of the authorial role. The abolition of an authorial identity ceases to reference self-referential subjects or subjects referencing the author that allude to the author's historical identity to aid the reader's interpretation. Authorship hinders readership, as Barthes and Foucault argue, and becomes a hierarchical focal point to the written word. Readership is a function of social practice as the tag of the author becomes arbitrary. The role of the author must be subverted for the sustainability of the text in order for the reader to connect to the work through interpretation and public discourse.
Solutions to combatting authorship and the primacy of text are presented in the ideas set-forth in Foucault's What Is An Author? and Barthes' The Death of the Author. The two essays are major pinnacles in poststructural thinking that help stress how text could be disseminated and read by the public without the subservience to the author and his or her own book. Poststructural and postmodern discourse argues that the active reader resists central authorship and comes to a multifaceted and non-linear conclusion to his or her own interpretation. Poststructuralism is framed by the physical presence of writing, readerly embodiment and resistance to representation. The reader's plurality of truth is perceived as an army of metaphors that determines the semantics of meaning. The death of the author’s writing connects to readership through movements of the body that conditions its rhythm and cadence. Examples of ongoing discourse are 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 spectacle of writing reflects the existence of the active reader who engages in plural interpretations of the written text. The death of the author in imagery or performance outside of the written word abandons those self-governing representations of power and subjectivity. The authorial identity of public signs and messages rests in the public with a message from the police, state or private company from which the sign is produced. The subversion of these power structures in Lady Applicant: The Lazarus is the multiplicity of public authorial roles fragmented and collaged into a film; and sequenced into a poem. The act of subverting a power structure attracts the attention of others through a public spectacle of demonstration and criticizes politics by overthrowing the structure that is thwarting progress, and replacing its absurdity with better ways of finding a conclusion.
Readership is essential in acquiring knowledge and understanding a body of work. The reader is the source for literary and dialectic connections to meaning 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, their concept of the reader was different in oral societies because the reader and the book are both ideological constructs. 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.
In order to discuss authorship in relationship to public spectacle, readership becomes just as an important spectacle 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 broken text that depicts or represents three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional surfaces. From Barthes’ 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 can not be written.
The installation stresses to be one of the most visual interpretations of literary poststructuralism. Research questions revolve around the constitution of authorial identity and intention.
1. Why is postmodern identity relevant?
2. Is it self-defeating if Foucault and Barthes are cited as authors?
3. Is authorship the only relevant power structure in the project?
4. What if authorship is inherent in everything? What if power structures are inherent in everything?
5. Is the combat of authorship really subversive?
"The goal is no longer truth, but performativity." - Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition
I am so detached to everything and everyone, that my own undertaking as a radical queer vegan straight edge iconoclast is very conventional. The way I label myself within so many subcultures makes it ironic for me to take a stand against representation, but the fact that I am so disconnected allows me not to share a social identity but to embrace the systems as a dissident within labels. Anyone who meets me comprehends a fragmented part of myself and would have to conclude with a multifaceted interpretation of who I am because I am a contortionist in disguise. I have no soul.
I am a symbol of the fragment and yet I have a symbolic relationship with the exterior. In contrast to writers like William Burroughs who write about lives that revolve around drugs, I write about austere lives in chaos. Drugs are severely conformist because they alleviate social situations and create the illusion of belonging. I like the feeling of awkwardness around people, not talking, because thats more of a comfortable and genuine feeling. Like the poet Clark Coolidge, who is interested in geological rock patterns, absorbing the population is how I connect with nature. I am interested in the chaos of communication and choose to spend my free time as a recluse immersed in the bizarre psychodynamics of social interaction because I am better able to sort things out in my mind clearly while seeing how alive everything is. How identity works itself into poetics is hard to articulate yet I believe there is a parallel between postmodern identity and the poetics of fragmentation.
Collage generally reflects the inspiration of my surroundings in contrast to my lifestyle. I am interested in how the fragmentation of language can semantically transform into poetic artifice. The process of creating a public and performative poetry with collage explores poststructural readership with the appropriation of public texts. The texts which inspire my poems are read by a plural audience whom experience a feeling of homogenized familiarity like product information and advertisements. Disconnection and disembodiment resound and each have a feeling of similarity by evoking a thought or emotion that was once believed to be canonical but it is set in as false of pretenses as a text that is meant to influence readers in an ephemeral way.
The process of collage enables me to connect ephemeral paradoxes to a lyrical cadence of opposites. The transition from original source material to the realm of disembodiment presents how process can be subverted into literature as linguistically challenging as poetry while it undermines the original grammar and syntax that commodifies different environments and mood sets into the illusion of a uniform experience. A common thread in the process is to show how textual manipulation can transform semantics to occupy a space between the tangible and fantastic. The tightrope will be strung and falling may be inevitable. The tension and subsequent cadence of the tightrope will continue to resound in its rhythm and music.
Anarchism - The struggle against the limits of symbolic representation in literature parallels the anarchist critique of political representation. There are thematic links between anarchy and the historical influences of literature that divert from the fragment.
Conceptualism - The audible noise and visuals unrelated to text from storefront signs are necessary for conceptual interpretation. The questions include the physicality of public language presented simultaneously with the voice of Sylvia Plath.
Collage - Literary Collage is a technique in which a text is cut and rearranged to form a new text. A collage was performed in the process of recording found clips of storefront and instructional signs in London with a video camera and arranging them to create a poem.
Desecration - By abolishing the hierarchic role of the author, Sylvia Plath is stripped as the proliferator of meaning. The voice of Sylvia Plath is further subverted to perform as a phoneticist for Lady Applicant: The Lazarus.
Disembodiment - Disembodiment refers to the representation of Plath being freed from the authorial role. The inflection and tone of Sylvia Plath's voice helps reinterpret the poem when random words are emphasized in the resulting cutup.
Language Poetry - The movement emerged in the 1970s and is defined by disjunctive poetics wherein meaning making was placed solely in the language of the poem. The reader becomes an active participant in meaning making for Lady Applicant: The Lazarus and thus the poem is open to very widespread interpretation.
Lexical Anagrams - A lexical anagram is a term that is self-descriptive. If an anagram is the rearrangement of letters from a given word or phrase to another, then a lexical anagram is the rearrangement of a lexicon from a given body of text to another. Poet Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus and The Applicant are anagramatically rearranged and collaged into a new poem.
Literary Collage - Though collage is very self-evident in the explanation and presentation of Lady Applicant: The Lazarus, the importance of collage is held in its proliferation of meaning. Collage serves as the primary process of poetry making by assembling video and sound clips.
Literary Constraint - The cutups of Sylvia Plath's voice are formed by a method of collage in which all of the words of the original poem are used in the rearrangement of the new poem. A literary constraint could constitute a particular form of verse but is unlimited to other constrained forms of writing including anagrams, lipograms and alliteratives.
Performativity - Sylvia Plath's performs an identity that revolves around themes of suicide, depression and mental illness in her confessional poems. The authorial identity of Plath, an American living in London, is performed with an English accent. The subsequent documentation of place is performed through the filter of finding and filming public and instructional signs near Plath's former residence.
Postmodern Identity - Identity in postmodernism is described as fragmented and process-oriented. The fluidity of postmodern identity is explored through the cutups of Sylvia Plath's voice.
Poststructuralism - Poststructuralism is a major tenet in understanding Lady Applicant: The Lazarus as it visually and audibly reveals the fragmentation of the authorship role; and embraces the readerly qualities of the text by making the reader an active participant and meaning-maker in the poem.
The following is the proposal in its entirety. The proposal is structured as a full statement in a way that addresses the three basic queries per request of the professor. The queries are separated further in the bottom of the page.
Lady Applicant: The Lazarus is a multimedia installation and experiment in new media poetics that frees the poetry of renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath from her autobiographical identity. Plath is known for her personal life as much as her confessional poetry; almost all of her writing depicts her struggle with depression and mental illness before she notably committed suicide by placing her head in an oven full of gas. Plath established her poetics in such a performative way that the romantic elements of mental illness construct an authorial representation that continues to live for another fifty years after her death. References to Plath's poems foretell of an impending death of the author as attempts at suicide lay relevant to the author. The hope is to question the canonical representation of Plath as author by appropriating her performative poetry and further disembodying confessional references. The installation consists of both audio and video cutups that resist the primacy of text. Both iterations of these poems are fragmented, first through the writing of Plath that takes on a constructed identity and second through readership or the plurality of meaning from Plath's confessional poems.
The audio presents phonetic fragments of Plath’s voice from the BBC recordings of her poems Lady Lazarus and The Applicant during her stay in London and a few years before her death. These fragments are extracted, sliced and rearranged from individual words of her readings to produce a seamless collage of poetry. As the title Lady Lazarus suggests, it references Plath herself and a biblical figure named Lazarus of Bethany who was resurrected from the dead. Images of fantasy and spectacle help construct the poem. Plath uses vernacular language to describe her own torture and suffering perhaps a little more acutely to the listener with references to identity during the holocaust. Meanwhile The Applicant is critical of the insider who is depicted by the outsider who eggs him on to join more of a conventional role in society, for example marriage. The resulting hybrid is unintentionally referential to its original source due to repetitive words like marriage or death. Ideally, the poem would invoke confidence in the spectator whether it functions as a new poem or translation.
Filmic imagery that semantically corresponds to the sounds provides a visual representation parallel to that of the disembodied audio in its composition of visual language. Footage of Camden, London near Plath's former residence and place of death at 23 Fitzroy Road are shown as a streaming poem and form a dialectical element in relation to the overlap of sight and sound. These weaved clips are composed of texts on storefronts and instructional signs near Plath’s former residence in Camden, London and are collaged into a poem, arranged in a semiotic sequence subservient to its visual surroundings and inspired by the systematic structuralism of avant-garde and experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s film entitled Zorns Lemma.
Lady Applicant: The Lazarus mimics recordings of the disembodied and alienated that resound through its rhythm and cadence; and struggles to walk a tightrope between communication and meaning. While falling from the rope may be inevitable, the solution is its availability to be heard, played and read in a relatively short duration time to allow the participant to spend more time contemplating the installation and less time grappling with the assault of poetic artifice. The hope is for accessibility more than user interaction. Since the passive spectator or the active participant spends a limited amount of time on each new media installation, the constraint will be time and ability to loop the video every five minutes from a projector behind the spectator.
Although audience interaction allows participants to direct the articulation of the poem, interaction and participation will negate contemplation from the spectator. The physical engagement will not allow them to contemplate the poem as their focus is directed to technology and interactivity. Interactive poetics should be dependent on its spoken verse and not of a phonetic chain of poetry magnets because single words would unintentionally cause the viewer to shy away from the esoteric nature of poetics. If interactivity is necessary for the thesis exhibit, the solution would be to allow the user to interact with previously constructed verse on an interactive screen that will enable him or her to choose a direction in which the voice may move.
The poem is an exploration of poststructural practice and questions the nature of authorship in general and autobiographical authorial intention in particular. Plath, an American who lived in England for only a short time, oddly spoke with a fake English accent during these readings, which suggests a constructed identity related to her place of residence. Since the accent cannot change in the cutups, it leaves a semblance of Plath's constructed identity in the audio. The evolution of the sound not only represents how poems could be recreated, but also how the inflection of a disembodied voice reinterprets the poem when random words are emphasized. Thus, Plath’s canonical readings are stripped and transformed into a phonetic archive for the subversion of her own semantic form. The inclusion of public signage is a way to connect the surroundings where Plath wrote the two poems that constitute her book Ariel. The hope is to reflect the semiotics of place with video and collage it into a visual poem corresponding with the aural poem.
Poststructuralism reflects the cadence of sound and semantics of visual and auditory cutups in the installation. The death of the author in writing abolishes constructed identities by further fragmenting allusions to the author. Authorship, as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault argue, becomes a hierarchical focal point to the written word. The role of the author must subvert the text in order for the reader to connect to the work in a more meaningful way with public discourse. The reader, in turn, reflects the anarchic struggle of disembodiment and separation by transgressing the author.
Solutions to combatting authorship and the primacy of text are presented in the ideas set-forth by Foucault's What Is An Author? by and Barthes' Death of the Author. 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 and authorship. 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.
Cut-ups from public texts have always existed but specifically go as far back as early forms of Futurism when poets extracted words that were from headlines of local newspapers to talk about the effects of technology in an era that has seen monumental inventions of transportation and utilities. And nearly every avant-garde literary movement in the 20th century has direct correlations to cut-ups from Tristan Tzara to William S. Burroughs. The Language poets in the 1970s connected words in random order that have achieved the unification of sound through cadence to show the rhythm and process of language is poetry. Currently there are movements like Flarf poetry and Spoetry that appropriate source texts exclusively linked to the internet like spam email. Plath herself used the technique of cut-up in her poetry and notably made a series of political collages that represent a response to social and political discourse relevant to her poetry.
Lady Applicant: The Lazarus is a multimedia installation and experiment in new media poetics composed of audio and filmic cutups that is presented as a homage to renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath.
Lady Applicant: The Lazarus is a multimedia installation and experiment in new media poetics that frees the poetry of renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath from her autobiographical identity. Plath is known for her personal life as much as her confessional poetry; almost all of her writing depicts her struggle with depression and mental illness before she notably committed suicide by placing her head in the oven to inhale gas. The installation consists of both audio and video cutups that resist the primacy of text. Both iterations of these poems are fragmented, first through the writing of Plath that takes on a constructed identity and second through readership or the plurality of meaning from Plath's confessional poems.
The audio presents phonetic fragments of Plath’s voice from the BBC recordings of her poems Lady Lazarus and The Applicant during her stay in London and a few years before her death. These fragments are extracted, sliced and rearranged from individual words of her readings to produce a seamless collage of poetry.
Filmic imagery provides a visual representation parallel to that of the disembodied audio in its composition of visual language. Clips of signage within a five block proximity of Plath's former townhouse at 23 Fitzroy Road where she committed suicide are shown as a streaming poem. These weaved clips that are composed of texts on storefronts and instructional signs near Plath’s former residence in Camden, London are collaged into a poem and arranged into a semiotic sequence inspired by avant-garde and experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma.
The resulting six-part poem was completed through the method and constraint of a strict anagrammatic collage. The new poem was followed over as a voiceover script and the audio of each utterance was cut from her readings and rearranged with Soundtrack Pro. The bank of individual words was carefully stitched together to achieve a seamless collage that intentionally sounds fragmented by the cadence of varying utterances. Signs that were filmed in Camden, London were cut and arranged with Finalcut Pro into a linear sequence of video clips of words and symbols structured in a semiotic order. The resulting poem combines projector, a screen and speakers to be simultaneously read and heard by the active participant.
The poem struggles to walk a tightrope between cadence, communication and meaning; and falling from the rope may be inevitable. The solution is its availability to be heard, played and read in a relatively short duration time to allow the participant to spend more time contemplating the installation and less time grappling with an assault of poetic artifice. Since the passive spectator or the active participant spends a limited amount of time on each new media installation, the constraint will be time and ability to loop the installation every five minutes.
The installation is an exploration of poststructural practice and questions the nature of authorship in general and autobiographical authorial intention in particular. Plath, an American who lived in England for only a short time, oddly spoke with a fake English accent during these readings, which suggests a constructed identity related to her place of residence. Since the accent cannot change in the cutups, it leaves a semblance of Plath's constructed identity in the audio. The evolution of the sound not only represents how poems could be recreated, but also how the inflection of a disembodied voice reinterprets the poem when random words are emphasized. Thus, Plath’s canonical readings are stripped and transformed into a phonetic archive for the subversion of her own semantic form. The inclusion of public signage is a way to connect the surroundings where Plath wrote the two poems that constitute her book Ariel. The hope is to reflect the semiotics of place with video and collage it into a visual poem corresponding with the aural poem.
Poststructuralism reflects the cadence of sound and semantics of visual and auditory cutups in the installation. The death of the author in writing abolishes constructed identities by further fragmenting allusions to the author. Authorship, as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault argue, becomes a hierarchical focal point to the written word. The role of the author must subvert the text in order for the reader to connect to the work in a more meaningful way with public discourse. The reader, in turn, reflects the anarchic struggle of disembodiment and separation by transgressing the author.
Some solutions should be expanded to the ideas presented in Foucault's What Is An Author? by 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 own 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 and authorship. 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.
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