The following is the text I presented for the Leslie Scalapino "legacy" panel at AWP this year. In addition to my short essay, called "Waking Life," the panel included additional contributions from Alicia Cohen, Judith Goldman, Carla Harryman, and Maryrose Larkin. The following is a snippet from a much longer essay which will hopefully act as a preface to Leslie's work in an upcoming Wesleyan anthology...
§ Waking Life
For Leslie Scalapino, poetry is a site of rupture, a corrosive
stripping away cultural calcification (of text, image, sound, subject) from
what’s left of the living tissue of engagement, and through this process, we
come to see ourselves in a provisional “present” next to and as ourselves.
Her goal is to challenge the tyranny of word and image by using both as primary
tools to release imagination from the rigid grasp of exchange—making
both image and word inoperative through a complex dialectic ranging
between overamplification and underdetermination.
A careful reader of Walter Benjamin, Scalapino saw the image
embedded in cultural tensions and aporias that often figurally determine how we
come to know who we are and what we see. For Benjamin, “the place one
encounters [dialectical images] is language”[1]:
it is in and through language, because it is in and through thinking,
that we discover the veiled aporias that populate the representations we use to
historicize ourselves. As such, a clear picture of the cartography of
“now-time” depends on the acuity of our interactions with these dialectical
images, as they flash forth in fits and starts from lines of rupture marked by
the reader’s “awakening.”
The crepuscular is particularly fertile ground in
Scalapino’s writing—that zone between a dream state of hidden (but very real)
values and the “waking life” in which those values come to signify (or not)—(what
she calls an “antilandscape” through which the subject comes to question the
vice grip of the Absolute). In other words, Scalapino juxtaposes “disparate
images…so as to create an antilandscape that no longer ‘refers’ to a
recognizable world.”[2] By
insisting on the legibility of our images, we are drawn back into a comfortable
axiom in which what we see is really, truly what we get. Benjamin called this
over-codification “myth”; where the diurnal trumps the sur-real of dream, we
occupy the present in a dream-state we mistake for authentic experience.
Benjamin’s “myth time” is “unsplit,” “empty, homogenous time” or “critical
naiveté,””[3]
whereas the dialectical image “marks out a limit or blind spot in the visual
field of the present.”[4]
According to Benjamin, the dialectical or “thinking” image
“blasts” the object out of “the continuum of historical succession,”[5] so
that thinking stops “in a configuration pregnant with tensions.”[6]
Scalapino uses nearly identical language to frame the image in her first poems:
“I intended this work to be the repetition of historically real events the
writing of which punches a hole in reality. (As if to void them, but
actively).”[7]
“Blasting” means to rupture a string of over-codified “events” that frame the
content of our lives in a supposedly meaningful way (or at least in a manner
we’ve come to understand as meaningful), but what might it mean to write
a poetry in which seeing and seeing not seeing exist next to each
other as a kind of continuum?
This is Scalapino’s testing-space, where “one is seeing
constructing, and seeing ‘not seeing constructing’ by ‘seeing’ being ‘visual’
which is actually only-language”[8]—a typically
tortuous construction that sounds remarkably close to Benjamin’s notion of
awakening in dialectical images, or what he famously called “the dissolution of
‘mythology’ into the space of history.’”[9] Images
that retain the membra disjecta of cultural currency are subtracted from
fields of causality and reactivated in a plethora of signifying modes that
shake our faith in what we see (while further imbricating the movement between
prehension, apprehension and comprehension). Image no longer “illustrates” or
links meaning in causal chains or signifies a particular sign. Instead,
the image is a nomad, a variable, roaming aim-lessly (not “randomly,”
but “without taking aim”) through the work, signifying here, only to act as
syntactical shape, or visual fact of color, or sonic plateau of sound.
As a result, writing is the struggle to occupy a perpetual
state of awakening—even if being “awake” feels like dreaming—because to
occupy and produce this awakening is the dissolution of the real as
“myth.” She writes, “Yet for (Walter) Benjamin of course ‘idea’ was its
rupture: that is the action. That was the occurrence I wanted in hmmmm,
both.”[10]
However, she continues, “Now we’ve become inurned to either integration or
disruption as filmic illusion, one’s translation of film image as disruption
having become inurned to be only image again. That is, disruption of
image requires continual change as introduction of a new medium.”[11]
The act of writing has to be this shock, with the understanding that
“undoing the accepted ‘reality’ is continual as it is constantly being
reestablished”[12]—that
mystification is often an optical phenomena in the “real world,” so
rehabituation is most facile when images are the catalyst. As such, Scalapino
has “turn(ed) seeing up to an extreme in order to see it,” and as a result the
poetry feels “as if dreaming being suppressed were bursting out as luminous
seeing in the waking state.”[13]
She calls this the “extinction of images” after Danielle Collobert, “‘not
continuing’ the chain of images which constitutes being, and writing”[14]
by creating a new chain of images that deconstitute being as stasis.
In The Front Matter, Dead Souls “The writing is
scrutiny of our and ‘one’s’ image-making, to produce extreme and vivid images
in order for them to be real”[15]—which
means, of course, in order for them to have content. The writing’s
content is itself seeing seeing itself, and “The images are to be
bulbous, ‘extreme’ vivid in the sense of their being ‘of’ eyesight only, as if
existing apart from any ‘event’ that is written-meaning.”[16]
“The thin day with the
greyhound coagulating in it barely exists. Dead Souls on her way to the race
track the officer on the long slender limbs floats by the coagulating dog. His
slender black hands drifts in the air to open the car door for her.
He had been in the previous
day with the fleck emerging to him when the limousines wallowing in the air
with the sumos emerging coming in for the funeral grieving were rubbed by the crowd.
Dead Souls in the little high-heels comes to the
car when there’s only thin air with the
greyhound floating in it.[17]
The writing bears the characteristics of this “blasting” or
“punching out” of the myth of homogenous time, because the images are disassociated
from their context in such a way that they appear monstrously out of scale. As
images pass sequentially before the readers’ eyes, one begins habitually to
construct a scale or narrative to frame the percussive rupture of this
antilandscape. The result is an incredibly intense barrage of detail that
begins to visually shape the terrain of this antilandscape as a kind of musical
score. As the images pass by, they begin to act more as texture, rhythm,
percussive elements, synonymous with trees and rocks and bushes in a visual
landscape, and as the eyes pass over the ridge, the reader begins to watch
herself reading.
Each image is the rim of occurrence where reader meets the
antilandscape of visual texture. There she watches the self struggle to occupy
Benjamin’s “now-time,” in which the production of subjectivity is understood as
the very moment the present “attain(s) to legibility.”[18]
For Scalapino, to occupy the now of recognizability, one must understand the
“now” through what makes it legible.
Further, Leslie’s interest in the hand-painted movie posters
of Ghana is an interesting illustration of how the image works in her practice.
The “by product” of the short-lived but extremely popular “video clubs” of
Ghana, hand-painted movie posters were used to advertise nomadic sites of
Western popular culture, where VHS copies of American movies were shown in
impromptu “cinemas”—popular gathering sites similar to the domestic family
room.[19]
These posters, while ostensibly “advertising” the films at hand, speak less to
the particular fleeting moment of western culture and more to how that culture
attains legibility overseas. Drawn in incredibly vivid colors with details
verging on the grotesque, the posters detach themselves completely from
previewing their antecedents: rather than provide a mimetic representation,
artists often interpreted or modified the subject matter, mostly because they
had often yet to see the film. The image then becomes a misrecognition through
mistransmission, positively framing the cultural value of the signifiers themselves
rather than the content they purport to deliver. The grotesque figures signify
particular elements of American culture that are both attractive and
repulsive—violence and sex are amplified and in so doing draw our attention to
the codification process itself. While the movie poster is designed to deliver
content—a mimetic representation of a determinate thing—it is precisely in how
these posters rework their content that the images slip from overdetermination
into the nomadic life of polysemy. Emphasis on the “accuracy of representation”
seems less valuable than the artist’s ability to construct images that arrest
the viewer’s attention—that speak to how transmission of information
transculturally codifies power.
Scalapino’s writing is similarly very much about how it
transmits or mistransmits, depending on where you’re sitting. It skirts
mimesis or interpretation for misrecognition—“turning the volume up” serves to
detach images from cultural currency while signifying through difference. The
bulbous can only signify by what it is not (or can no longer be)
and in so doing marries “seeing” with social obsession and desire. The vivacity
of her writing draws our attention to how desire enters into our field of
disinhibition, allowing us to read and interpret “marks” as culturally
significant signs. For Scalapino, the act of misrecognition, coupled with
overamplification and underdetermination, creates a scenario by which writing
is reactivated as the very tool for understanding emergence.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999), 462.
[2] Leslie Scalapino, R-hu (Berkeley: Atelos,
2000), 93.
[3] Tom McCall, “‘The Dynamite of a Tenth of a Second’:
Benjamin’s Revolutionary Messianism in Silent
Film Comedy,” Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and
Cultural Theory, edited by Gerhard Richter (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 79.
[4] Ibid., 75.
[5] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press, 1999), 475.
[6] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York:
Schocken Books, 1976), 262.
[7] Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
(Elmwood: Potes & Poets Press, 1989), 21.
[8] Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 36.
[9] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999), 458.
[10] Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
(New York: Litmus Press, 2011), 205.
[11] Ibid., 205.
[12] Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense
Longing from Taking Place (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 26.
[13] Lyn
Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, Sight (Washington, DC: Edge Books, 1999),
Introduction.
[14] Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense
Longing from Taking Place (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 8.
[15] Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls
(Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 2.
[16] Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 36.
[17] Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls
(Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 40.
[18] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999), 462
[19] For
examples, see Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana (New
York: Dilettante Press, 2001), a book Scalapino owned in her personal library.
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