I am a treacherous consciousness, a precarious resolution of what I am, betraying everything, including myself,

                                                 Reid Matko, from A Popular Tale

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Three voiced periods is included in Christmastown

by Reid Matko

and is available in PDF

Three voiced periods, Trauma, and Repetition

We know from psychoanalysis that trauma results in repetitive behaviors;
What is the relationship between the repetition employed in Three voiced periods and trauma?

"Repetition is the general characteristic of the signifying chain,
the manifestation of the unconscious in every subject."

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 167
Dylan Evans

    Subjectivity is born in trauma (it most certainly does not pre-exist) and such trauma is repeated over and over again as effect in both thought and action. Traumatic events are recreated in various forms in attempts to master and control them; reproduced not as memory (the traumatic event is effaced from memory), but inscribed as action or behavior: a compulsion to repeat is how we 'remember' such trauma. Reid Matko inscribes this fact in the very act of reading. Three voiced periods, as dramatic fiction, attempts to inscribe the minimal constituting events of subjectivity, which are experienced as trauma. He uses the trauma of the constituting events to power the repetition, which is employed as the major mode of assemblage of the text, each traumatic event inscribed in the fact of the text:

    1 · The first 'period' employs line breaks and the cut of the page to represent the experience of the interdiction, the presence of another, breaking the mother-child dyad;

    2 · The second 'period' employs the white page to represent the experience of the (mirror) image as gestalt, as the body of light, which produces wholeness out of a body of parts;
   
    3 · The third 'period' employs the signifier (the signifier is the phonological element of the sign, not the actual sound itself but the mental image of such a sound) to represent the experience of the ever-shifting, pulsating body of language (which constitutes our access to the symbolic), of your being literally taken by and with words and images, situated and occurring outside of you, of which you are an effect;

    The ·, the 'voiced period', represents the 'quilting points', the 'points de capiton', literally the points which allow for a 'normal (neurotic) subjectivity'. Of course, all three 'periods' share or reference one another, they do not stand alone. It's as though the texts are a series of openings and closings.

"…the points de capiton are points at which 'signified and signifier are knotted together'
(S3, 268). Lacan introduces the term in his 1955-56 seminar on the psychoses to account for the fact that despite the continual slippage of the signified under the signifier, there are nevertheless in the normal (neurotic) subject certain fundamental 'attachment points' between the signified and the signifier where this slippage is temporarily halted. A certain minimum number of these points are 'necessary for a person to be called normal', and 'when they are not established, or when they give way' the result is psychosis."

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 151
Dylan Evans

    Matko has in the past referred to Three voiced periods as, ostensibly, a meditation on the Trinity. It's easy to see a correspondence with Lacan's trinity of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as well.

    Such is the logic underlying Three voiced periods. In his fictive inscription of the minimal events that constitute subjectivity in the form of fictions based on shattering personal experiences, mental events overwhelming and disrupting consciousness that he has referred to as both 'visions' and 'psychotic episodes', Matko has employed the very physical fact of the page and what it contains as metaphors for these experiences which are eruptions of the originary events in the form of 'visions', or 'psychotic episodes', eruptions into the measured space of consciousness. His use of repetition as the major mode of assemblage serves to inscribe our need to re-stage trauma compulsively as our very subjectivization, and to inscribe to what extent our worlds are shaped by traumatic fixations. This is what Three voiced periods is 'about', it is a fiction without character, plot, narrative or theme, but a dramatic fiction nonetheless.

–Annette Descantes

*"For Lacan the link between signifier and signified is so precarious that whereas Saussure saw the whole system as more or less grounded (though the possibility of slippage constituted his great contribution to twentieth-century linguistics), Lacan sees only occasional points of stability. These points of stability are referred to as points de capiton, or "quilting points," points "by which the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement (glissement) of the signification" (Ecrits 303) to produce "the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning" (Evans 149). Perhaps the most important feature of the point de capiton is that the stability it provides is, however necessary, an illusion, as is the semblance of deep meaning produced by metaphor and on a larger scale all imaginary identification. Indeed, one precise and readily-comprehensible way to conceive of both metaphor and the point de capiton is as instances of imaginary identification disrupting the integrity and rationality of the symbolic order itself. Though these disruptions are strictly speaking inimical to the symbolic order, they are also vital to its existence as a field for producing meaning, for such disruptions serve to anchor the signifying chain and keep it from devolving into a psychotic process of pure linguistic self-referentiality without even the illusion of external reference."

A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan, 12
Stephen Ross

Money and Art...

And what can we call that "very narrow line of commercialism"?

The Supreme Court is concerned with compelled speech...
We are determined by compelled behavior which results in compelled forms—

"...with the coming of empires and monotheism, one's social or divine debt becomes effectively unpayable. Christianity perfected this mechanism: its all-powerful God meant a debt that was infinite; at the same time, one's guilt for non-payment was internalized. The only way one could possibly repay in any way was through obedience: to the will of God, to the church. Debt, with its grip on post and future behaviours and with its moral reach, was a formidable governmental tool. All that remained was for it to be secularized. 
     "This constellation gives rise to a type of subjectivity characterized by moralization and specific temporalization. The indebted subject practises two kinds of work: salaried labour, and the work upon the self that is needed to produce a subject who is able to promise, to repay debts, and who is ready to assume guilt for being an indebted subject. A particular set of temporalities are associated with indebtedness: to be able to repay (to remember one's promise), one has to make one's behaviour predictable, regular and calculating. This not only mitigates against any future revolt, with its inevitable disruption of the capacity to repay; it also implies an erasure of the memory of past rebellions and acts of collective resistance which disrupted the normal flow of time and led to unpredictable behaviours. This indebted subject is constantly opened up to the evaluating inspection of others: individualized appraisals and targets at work, credit ratings, individual interviews for those in receipt of benefits or public credits. The subject is thus compelled not only to show that he or she will be able to repay debt (and to repay society through the right behaviours), but also to show the right attitudes and assumed individual guilt for any failings."

Slavoj Zizek, Trouble In Paradise, pp 50-1

I ♥ Klebnikov

Deterritorialization

..."What Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called deterritorialization...A text which uses conventional forms in a conventional way is territorialized, it embodies the majority discourse and reflects the obtaining ideology of the society from which it springs. This is the case with most forms of popular narrative even though they may reflect that ideology from an oppositional standpoint."

from: Marie Maclean, Narrative Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment, Routledge, New York, 1988, p 45. 

     Is the idea of Capitalist Realism a commentary of the concept of territorialization, or is territorialization a means of approaching Capitalist Realism?

Capitalist Realism: Narrative Structure and "The Frame of Fantasy"

by Annette Descantes and Jean-Pierre Goric
(As usual, interventionist quotations and notes by A.D.)

     "The properly philosophical dimension of the study of the post-traumatic subject resides in this recognition that what appears as the brutal destruction of the subject's very (narrative) substantial identity is the moment of its birth. The post-traumatic autistic subject is 'living proof' that the subject cannot be identified (or does not fully overlap) with 'stories it is telling itself about itself,' with the narrative symbolic texture of its life: when we take all this away, something (or, rather, nothing, but a form of nothing) remains, and this something is the pure subject."

Slavoj Zizek, Event, Melville House, Brooklyn, 2014, p 86

1. Narrative, Determinism, and The Primary or Original Cause

–What can be said to structure, to frame the way we perceive and relate to reality? We have to bear in mind that there is no opposition fantasy/reality: reality is not to be seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively produced.
–So both fantasy and reality are produced in the same way, they are produced discursively,– they are products of human relations founded on language.

–They have different functions: Fantasy is the imaginary scenario that, by means of its fascinating presence, veils the lack or inconsistency in the Other (as symbolic agency); it serves to hide the inconsistency of the symbolic order, and marks the fundamental impossibility in the very act of symbolization; it is the ultimate support of our 'sense of reality' (using an analogy from film, the blank space between the frames of a film is analogous to the ever-threatening Real over which we project our narcissistic fantasy of 'reality'); it constitutes our desires, indeed, teaching us how to desire. It is a structure that we, as subjects of lack, are trapped in.

    "The crucial point here is that fantasy does not dissimulate reality: rather, fantasy serves as the screen which enables us to confront the Real, as such, fantasy is on the side of reality, it guarantees the distance between (symbolically structured) reality and the horrifying Real."

Slavoj Zizek, 'From Desire to Drive–Why Lacan is Not Lacanian' 

Zizek.livejournal.com 

–'Fantasy,' as a way of defending oneself against symbolic castration, that is, against the lack or inconsistency in the Other (as symbolic agency, hence it is tacitly related to the primary/original cause-God),  is always 'an image set to work in a signifying structure.' And we can understand symbolic castration by understanding that we desire not because we are programmed to do so but because the objects that satisfy are continually lost, taken away (just as there can be no full identity because we are structured as lack, not in relation to an object but in relation to a lack): the Real cuts into imaginary illusions of wholeness, consistency, etc.  

    "The distortion evident in the fantasy marks it as a compromise formation; the fantasy is thus both that which enables the subject to sustain his desire, and 'that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."

Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, (available online), p 61

–'Reality' denotes subjective representations which are a product of symbolic and imaginary articulations, a 'grimace of the (unknowable and unassimilable) Real,' which it stands in opposition to. Ideology is not an escape from reality but offers us social reality as an escape from some traumatic Real.
    
–If the Real is complete and undifferentiated (homogeneous, 'without fissure'), it is the symbolic which cuts this up in the process of signification–it is thus the symbolic, the process of signification which produces 'reality' for us, from these bits, these morsels of the Real.

    

     "As soon as we take into account that it is precisely and only in dreams that we encounter the real of our desire, the whole accent radically shifts: our common everyday reality, the reality of the social universe in which we assume our usual roles of kind-hearted, decent people, turns out to be an illusion that rests on a certain "repression," an overlooking the real of our desire. This social reality is then nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb that can at any moment be torn aside by an intrusion of the real."

Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991, p 17

–Reality is a 'story we tell ourselves about ourselves,' and is constructed in order to protect ourselves from our desires, it is made of ideological fantasies and is merely a semblance of the Real. It originates in 'reality testing,' when the child, the subject, differentiates between the hallucinatory object and the real object.

–The stories that you tell yourself (and everytime you tell yourself these stories you create the traces which allow you to believe them)– this is how you produce your reality, these stories made out of social conventions– the template you use, the meaning you take as your own you actually get from others: it circulates freely, you have to take it as your own– this is Capitalist Realism. It's the job of literature to stand in front of you everyday and tell you that you are not the stories you tell yourself (about yourself).

–This is how you produce your reality, and you do so by, in fact, using a template or templates provided by the society you live in, which make up the societal reality/mythos; this template that you employ to produce your reality is not, in short, unique to you but is borrowed (this can be referred to as social conventions or ideological fantasies): you take your meaning from others, from the world.

–In our case this production of our realities can be referred to as Capitalist Realism– the conventions, the templates you employ reflect the structures and needs of our Western, U.S. society; in this sense 'the stories you tell yourself about yourself' are a fundamental version of what your society requires of you, in our case what we refer to as Capitalist Realism. They (these realities) are created using the conventions provided by your society. Capitalist Realism is a compelled form, not an original one; it is a form compelled by social and economic forces. You copy reality with and for the likes of Capitalist Reality.

–Reality is based on pleasure, "we make reality out of pleasure."

     

     "The substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safe-guarding of it." 

Freud SE XII, 223/ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p 164

–As desire is sustained by fantasy, logic dictates that desire is as well produced discursively, by the symbolic: desire is not a relation to an object, but to a lack, and derives from the unconscious. Nevertheless, desire is a social product.

–In this way we can say that desire is constructed and produced in and through the symbolic, through language, is indeed sustained by it, as it is sustained by fantasy, and that the laws of language, metonymy and metaphor, determine what you choose to represent yourself; you are being taught how (not what) to desire by this discursive structure. For instance you are being taught how to desire by a narrative structure which posits a narrator as ego-ideal (and, as with God, represents the desire to speak, to be unary), you are being taught how to desire to be an I in relation to such an ego-ideal, which anticipates your secondary identifications as ideal-ego, not to be or think of yourself as a de-centered or fragmented subject but as an illusory, unified subject, not a subject of the unconscious (desire always originates in the unconscious) but an egocentric subject desiring mirrored and mirroring objects/persons-positions that are representations of your ego. Desire is a social product, desire is not the private affair it appears to be but is always constituted in a dialectical relationship with the perceived desires of other subjects. Likewise, narrative structure is a representation of psycho-social structure.

    "…the grounding of being or identity in a place–or a where–is an illusory exercise. We are grounded, rather…in the spurious Imaginary consistency of an unconscious ideal ego; in the fixity of traumatic inscriptions; in the language upon which we draw to represent ourselves as (desiring) subjects to others."

Ellie Ragland, "Lacan's Topological Unit And The Structure Of Mind" (found in Lacan: Topologically Speaking, Other Press, New York, 2004, p 53)

–Bear in mind that your socio-economic order (in our case, capitalism) needs and, in part, requires this.

–This results in your inability to see a text if there are no representations for/of your ego.

–If you can only see what represents you, you are blind to the text; this constitutes a kind of autism.

–Traversing the fantasy means to mutate your desire, to reset your fantasies, which more than likely will involve anxiety.

–So prose, narrative prose, as it is practiced in our society, in our social practice (all aspects of narrative are artificial, discursive) is wittingly or unwittingly in league with a social order (founded discursively on comprehension and continuity) to maintain a particular conception of subjectivity and a certain imaginary consistency, along with illusions of continuity, a linear logic reflecting the assumptive belief that this socio-economic order will continue to expand and grow indefinitely; just as reality is a repressing of desire in a network or cradle of continuity and consistency, this reality of continuity and consistency is a screen which functions to keep the Real of our desire at bay: it can be rent at any moment, and the Real that rends it is the source of trauma when it does.

   "Most people protect themselves from the Real by identifying with what is predominantly valued by the Symbolic/Imaginary knowledge of their local (universal) cultural context. In their way individuals need not address the specificity of their symptoms. They merely "mouth" the conventions of the masquerade in play."

Ellie Ragland, "Lacan's Topological Unit And The Structure Of Mind", p 63

–The stories that we tell ourselves, personally and socially: memories, those stories that we tell ourselves and each other over and over again don't exist to be accurate records or accounts of the past, it's more like the telephone game with yourself, but exist to allow you to enjoy the illusion of coherence and continuity, to enjoy a consistent identity, and hence to be a part of society, which, based on comprehension, needs coherence and continuity, and consistent identities (hence the importance of hysteria as a radical questioning of the symbolic mandate, of symbolic identity). And again, everytime you recite these stories, telling them to yourself and/or others, you create the traces that allow you to believe them.

2. Narrative And The Frame Of Fantasy

–How is the frame of fantasy constituted? Does narrative structure constitute and function as a frame of fantasy? As a way of organizing fantasy and desire?

–If narrative is an imaginary means for relating events, actors and actions, in time, the narrator is that symbolic agency which facilitates this.

–So, in an analogous manner, we can associate the narrator (whether it is trustworthy or not) with the ego-ideal, as Other (whether it lacks or not); this is the signifier operating as ideal, as an internalized plan of the law, a symbolic interjection, the guide governing the subject's position in the symbolic order, and hence it anticipates secondary (Oedipal) identification. It is the fantasized Other's gaze, the point of symbolic identification– this has to be presupposed– an ideal structure of differences, like a superposition in the quantum sense. This is to be related to God, the Other, as symbolic agency, and as such represents the desire to speak, to accede to language: God is the primary or original cause.

–In an equally analogous manner, we can associate the character or characters with the ideal-ego, as other, as mirror images, as the point and figures of imaginary identification. It originates in the specular image of the mirror stage, it is a promise of future synthesis towards which the ego tends, the illusion of unity on which the ego is built. The ideal-ego always accompanies the ego, as an ever-present attempt to regain the omnipotence of the pre-oedipal dual relation prior to loss/lack, that is, prior to symbolic castration.

–The fantasies of coherence, continuity, consistency, these illusions are what narrative is based on and inscribe, these are all based on causality/determinism. Determinism is a representation of coherence, consistency, and continuity: these are illusions, and the novels which employ such a conception of reality are like pamphlets from a society invoking a flat earth.

–Keep in mind that nature is not continuous but exists in discrete packets or quanta.

–Narrative invariably implies and implicates you in determinism– this illusion can be avoided by using alternate modes of assemblage (narrative is just a mode of assemblage), such as repetition, serial form, contingency, and chance.

–Consider how your life is structured and is played out on a daily basis–repetition is the dominant characteristic.

–Consider how you perceive the world as you move through it–contingency is the dominant characteristic/mode.

–Narrative involves pattern-finding, which can and will be accomplished no matter what, and has to do with identity.

–Open up any best-seller, any example of standard prose, from romance to literary fiction, and what do you encounter? You encounter a discourse of action(s), a verb-based universe, and verbs unlike nouns, are time inclusive and sensitive, and involve causality). Dialogue is deterministic as well.

–So as a result you are implicated, by and through narrative, in a universe of causality, a deterministic universe, false as it is, with God as original cause. This is no longer an adequate way of thinking–physicists now are as a rule indeterministic. We live in a universe founded on chance (probability) and contingency, and it is easy to see that our lives are structured first and foremost by repetition.

–Descriptive prose in the sense of describing actions (and to describe, to represent what a person does or says is to implicate determinism) is to be contrasted with attempts to describe subjective states (for instance, stream of consciousness is associative, based on contingency), and subjective development (to describe, to represent subjective growth or the ability to speak), that is, with any attempt to represent how we come about as sexed, speaking subjects. for us and our way of thinking the only interesting story is the story of the enunciation.

–This is an inescapable conceptual implication, this is the conceptual framework of standard prose–We must traverse the fantasy that it is– (Capitalist Realism as fantasy based on the concept of the subject as unary, unitary, i.e. ego-centric, as a 'full identity,' an identity not structured by lack. Keep in mind that any identity or self that is believed to be true or authentic only ever functions as a representation of authority).

–Capitalist Realism as a template, as a compelled form, one you are compelled (by social, economic forces, by the need to avoid the Real) to copy, this is the frame of fantasy, the very form of the prose functions as the frame of fantasy; it is how ideology produces a conceptual template. This is why such prose always has a paint-by-the-numbers quality about it; it pre-exists, you merely color it in, trying to stay inside the lines.

–Capitalist Realism, as the frame of fantasy, structures the way we conceive and relate to that product of discourse, reality.

    

     "Fantasy is not the opposite of reality: it is what plugs the void in our being so that the set of fictions we call reality are able to emerge."

Terry Eagleton, Enjoy!, London Review of Books, 27 November 1997

  

–Which serves to structure desire, to give it shape in the social and cultural context of capitalism.

–So what is the ideology of Capitalist Realism? It can be said to consist of determinism, a universe of continuity, consistency, and coherence; a unary, self-identical subject, ego-centrism (no multi-faceted subject of the unconscious), linear time (based on duration, the time of manufacturing). When in fact you are a de-centered subject of the unconscious possessing multiple characteristics in an indeterministic universe, defined by repetition, and how such repetition is broken up by the symbolic, or signification.

–What is the illusion or fantasy of Capitalist Realism? It has to do with the ego, that you are this I and the stories and memories it tells and identifies with, this ego, this unary, unified, unitary, self-identical, self-aware and full subject and not a de-centered, fragmented, multiplicity. As though you were spoken by and created whole by God or based on an image of God, an ego-ideal.

–With that in mind, what are the hallmarks of Capitalist Realist Style? Essentially a descriptive, journalistic style, consisting of stripped-down, spoken language, 'the voice' of the author expressed through the narrator-character, the story (remember that journalists tell stories), plot, narrative, continuity. When in fact you are not the stories you tell yourself (about yourself).

–Think of "the voice" as a characteristic quality of Capitalist Realism; here it is rewarding to recall the beginnings of such a quality in American literature. This has its beginnings in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; as Hemingway famously remarked, this is the beginning of American literature. Just as Tolstoy and his realism are considered to be the father of Socialist Realism, Twain and his journalistic-realist style is the father of Capitalist Realism. Keep in mind that this journalistic style is assumed to be natural and 'realistic', and has evolved into the present-day memoir form.

–Let's use Three voiced periods by Reid Matko as a counterpoint to contrast with the journalistic style generally employed. Matko uses repetition as his general mode of assemblage, but it's what he does to this repetition that is interesting. He uses the physical reality of the line and the page to cut this repetition up into morsels–"each line is an equation" as he has remarked. In this way he represents what the symbolic does to the real, cutting it up in the process of signification–this process is what produces reality for us, out of morsels of the Real.

–Three voiced periods is the record of, to quote Matko, the minimal (symbolic) events which act to constitute subjectivity; that is, the dramatic representation of these events, which Matko has referred to as either visions or psychotic episodes, as experienced.

–The first 'period' represents the breaking, the cleaving of the mother-child dyad: lying in a bed hypnotized by the full moon, a presence appears from the right and breaks this attachment-relation. This is repeated with every line just as it is repeated in myriad ways throughout the life of the subject, and has a tacit association with the gaze.

–The second is the experience of what Matko refers to as 'the body of light,' clearly standing for the gestalt encountered by the child in the mirror, making a whole out of a body of pulsing and unconnected parts. This is how bodily sense and control begins, it is also a primordial representation of the ego (also with a tacit relation to the gaze).

–The third is the experience of language (and images) as being of an order other than nature, as being Other, as taking place outside, and having its own force.

–Now how does an attempt at such a fundamental drama compare with the journalistic story-telling style preferred by nearly all writers today? It attempts to use language and literature as an explorative means for examining our fundamental constitution as sexed, speaking subjects. It's not describing events and characters in a causal field. I don't think the contrast could be any clearer. There isn't even one single I in Three voiced periods; it is pre-I, so It is invoked and speaks. Three voiced periods attempts to pry apart and reveal the inner fundamental workings constitutive of (symbolic) subjectivity.

–Journalistic-memoir style tells the stories that the subject takes herself to be but is never identical with. But by telling them over and over again is created the ability to believe them. It is imaginary in character and contents itself with a non-discursive conception of reality, one which mirrors the Real. It is based on a concept of the signifier as referring to a signified, an imaginary conception, and purports to represent reality, in the form of 'realism.' It is a frame of fantasy, a template based on misconceptions, in short consciousness based and ego-centric. The voice, the character, the plot, the ego are all emphasized and highlighted. Three voiced periods is a record of another scene behind consciousness but which is necessary to conscious subjectivity.

–We want to envisage and produce the quantization of the human subject, describing subjective states and experiences with serial form, chance, contingent relations and events; where each individual occupies a 'superposition,' possessing multiple characteristics, multiple genders even. And we envision this project, a hysterization of the subject, being carried out by literature.

–The ego resists literature, which resists the illusory qualities of consistency, etc. The ego resists that which threatens its (imaginary) consistency, i.e. its pleasure, which creates its reality.

3. Traversing The Fantasy

–You are not just an I constituted in relation to an ego-ideal or an Other: this identification is how you protect yourself from lack–you are all of the grammatical figures at once, you are all of the figures you could identify with; it's your unconscious determinations, your 'traumatic fixations', which choose and reject for you. The gateway to start to traverse the fantasy is to start considering yourself to be all of the figures presented at once, and not just the one that you believe or want yourself to be.

   

 "…the grounding of being or identity in a place–or a where–is an illusory exercise. We are grounded, rather, Lacan teaches, in the spurious Imaginary consistency of an unconscious ideal ego; in the fixity of traumatic inscriptions; in the language upon which we draw to represent ourselves as (desiring) subjects to others."

Ellie Ragland, "Lacan's Topological Unit And The Structure Of Mind" , p 53)

–This is how you traverse the fantasy:

–Don't see yourself as a single figure (a mirror-image, representation of your ego) but see yourself as all of them at once, you just censor the fact because it threatens your consistency, because it undoubtably is the source of anxiety; fluidity, it has to be remembered, creates anxiety: we seek stability for something that is inherently unstable, your identity. Any identity that is believed to be authentic or true only ever functions as a representation of authority, and is always an attempt to stabilize that which is inherently unstable. It is an attempt to produce a 'full' identity, one not structured by lack; as an escape from, or denial of, symbolic castration. Your identity is always inherently unstable, and defined in relation to a fundamental void.

–The next time you read a novel, or better yet, watch some porn, try to realize (grasp and accept) that you are all of the agents in all of the roles. This is why people hate porn, they get to see repressed desires acted out– they cannot not see themselves in all of the roles, if only unconsciously–this creates anxiety; our sexual identities are formed by the unconscious in the form of chains of signifiers, "in the fixity of traumatic inscriptions"– It's not a 'choice' but it's not natural; our identities are produced discursively– desire always threatens the consistency of the ego.

–The frame of fantasy, that is, narrative structure, its fantasy/illusion of coherence and consistency, is like memory (little narratives that memories are), and its coherence and consistency.

 –When a frame of fantasy structures desire this constitutes an ideology of desire.

"…traversing the fantasy does not mean going outside fantasy, but shattering its foundations, accepting its inconsistency. In our daily existence, we are immersed in 'reality,' structured and supported by the fantasy, but this very immersion makes us blind to the fantasy frame which sustains our access to reality. To 'traverse the fantasy' therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify oneself with the fantasy, to bring the fantasy out–…"

Slavoj Zizek, Event, Melville House, Brooklyn, 2014, p 27

"…we can see what traversing the fantasy can mean: not to see through it and perceive the reality obfuscated by it, but to directly confront the fantasy as such. Once we do this, its hold over us is suspended–– why? Because fantasy remains operative only insofar as it functions as the transparent background of our experience––fantasy is like a dirty, intimate secret which cannot survive public exposure."

Slavoj Zizek, Event, p 29
 

Announcement:

Reid Matko's seven-text collection entitled Christmastown was recently selected as a short-list finalist for the "FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest" of 2015. Not a winner but it's nice to be noticed! It can be found in its entirety here:

http://letternetpress.com/christmastown/ 

Announcement:

Innovative Fiction Magazine  

(http://www.innovative-fiction-magazine.com/2015/04/from-christmastown-by-reid-matko.html)

recently (April 13, 2015) published an excerpt from Three voiced periods, the first text in Reid Matko's collection of seven fictions entitled Christmastown. Although appreciative of the interest in his work, a correction is in order. The excerpt as it appears in Innovative Fiction Magazine is as follows:

However, the text was designed to appear thus:

Three voiced periods is comprised of 99 pages of 27 lines each; in this sense the text is not merely Dantesque, but is indeed a form of meditation on the Catholic Trinity, precisely as an image of the mind. Each line utilizes line breaks and the cut of the page to break up the repetition which is its mode of assemblage. This mimics the breaking up of the real by signification, by the symbolic.

Three voiced periods, indeed Christmastown in its entirety can be found here:

(http://letternetpress.com/christmastown/ )

Not approved by the New York Times!

It seemed fairly innocuous to me...

Democratizing Patronage

A conversation among the editorial group
of LetternetPress/OpenDrawerPublications and SCHISM
(Reid Matko, Annette Decantes, Jean-Pierre Goric, Hans Heinrich-Herber; Interventionist quotations and notes by A.D.)

RM · Let’s start by stating an objective: to begin to address the difficulty of being a writer or artist in this Capitalist society, and most particularly the difficulty of funding your work as a writer or artist. We have to begin with the following statement: any revolution in literature will first of all be a revolution in form.

                           

     “Artistic events are great mutations that almost always bear on the question of what counts, or doesn’t count, as form. The history of art, particularly the history of Western art, is the history of the progressive incorporation within the domain of form of things that were, up until then, considered as unformed, deformed, or foreign to the world of form. The shifts toward abstraction in painting or towards modifications of tonality in music are cases in point. An artistic event is always the accession to form, or the formal promotion of a domain that had been considered extraneous to art. There really is creation of a formal domain that was unperceived or denied up until then. ...The artistic event is signalled by the advent of new forms.”

                                                ––Alain Badiou Philosophy and the Event p 69

     This is important to consider because of the fact that literary form is presently ossified; there is a style that is chosen over all others, that is the ‘style of the realm,’ so-to-speak, because the readers of this society are accustomed to it and it requires no need to determine how meaning is produced in the text, hence it’s easy to market and to consume; readers are not required to question, language is based on communication and its flat reduction to meaning or sense, to its flat reduction of signifier to signified; you might as well be reading journalism, hence the justification in referring to it as ‘plodding reportage.’ This is the prose style we can refer to as Capitalist Realism.

JPG · And we have to add that it’s taken to be perfectly natural, you don’t even question its legitimacy at this point...and, as it’s assumed to be natural, it opens the door for mystifications. Of course, if it’s assumed to be natural it’s already an expression of an ideology. When convention is so firmly entrenched that it seems natural, mystification comes into play. Let me digress momentarily and introduce what I like to refer to as topological analysis. It’s a way of viewing texts that deemphasizes interpretation and seeks to recognize a similar geometrical structuring. For instance a slew of recent films, Aliens, Centurion, and Predators, among others, are in effect the same movie just dressed up differently. They all involve seven principals, one an outsider, another a half-outsider, being chased by a superhuman someone or something. Beginning with the main character in the wilderness, at certain times in both movies the principals are forced to jump or fall from a height into a body of water, encounter someone or something chained or attached to a stele or monolith, are helped by a hermit, the element of betrayal is introduced, all slowly die except for the couple who represent the reconstitution of the family at the end. In my opinion you have to think in terms of topological geometry, for instance they are all the same ‘geometric’ figure, just like a torus is a coffee cup and a doughnut. When I mentioned this to someone he suggested that perhaps seven is a psychological limit, that people can’t hold any more than that in their minds. I consider that to be a form of mystification, an example of how entrenched convention is or can be. These movies are based on the convention begun by Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, which is based on the seven virtues in the Bushido code. So now the question is how do people mystify Capitalist Realism? Would this involve the metaphysics of presence? Assuming that Capitalist Realism is natural is a form of mystification. And this is projected onto what is at stake, what is represented: the ego, or rather the reductive conception of the subject as ego. The convention becomes so natural that you’re willing to entertain notions that it’s somehow part of your make-up, part of your genes or your DNA or “we’re born this way,” which is a representation of the sovereign ego.

“(I use) ideology in the traditional sense of illusory, wrong way of thinking and perceiving reality. Why? Ideology is not simply dreaming about false ideas and so on. Ideology addresses very real problems but it mystifies them. One of the elementary ideological mechanisms I claim is what I call the temptation of meaning.”

                                                                                   ––Salvoj Zizek, from Examined Life

  

AD · Just like a King is “born this way!” It’s like a contemporary version of divine right. What could be more natural! Sovereign ego indeed!

     “Lacan states the issue like this: what is needed is a way of transmitting the knowledge produced in the space of psychoanalysis that will avoid or prevent any effet de colle, a typically punning formula that rhymes école with colle, “glue,” and the school effect with a coagulation, a stickiness, with fixation (effects Lacan identified with the register or axis of the imaginary)....[He attempts to] stir up any sediments of “sense” or meaning (sens)–– a privileged target of Lacan’s, a term he associates at once with religion, philosophy, and hierarchical organization such as the Church or school–– produced in the process of transmitting knowledge... ...Lacan predicts,...that the near future will witness a religious “boom,” a warning that appears directed at those who would want to turn psychoanalysis into either a religion or, implicitly, a philosophy. What philosophy and religion share, Lacan suggests, is a commitment to interpretation. Where psychoanalysis operates only with “the signifier as such,” in its materiality, interpretation moves in the element of“sense.” It is on the basis of this implicit identification of philosophy and religion–in which the real movement of the signifier as such gets stuck in the glue of sense–..."

                                         –– Jason E. Smith, forward to Jacques Lacan, Past and Present

JPG · So the prose that we can refer to as Capitalist Realism could be seen to function as a guarantor of the imaginary consistency of the human subject under Capitalism. All stuck in the glue of sense and interpretation. Capitalist Realism is part of the norming of the subject by mass culture. This ‘standard prose’ is the shape of the meaning that you in essence borrow, the shape you give to meaning, all you have to do is shade or color in the shapes. It’s a way of ‘contracting’ meaning, you lease the space, the form, like renting an empty room you then fill. It’s a way of contracting meaning, a way of leasing meaning or the way that meaning is inscribed.

  Contract–
–to reduce, distill;
–to catch (contract an illness);
–to enter into an legally binding agreement.

You call it standard prose, I call it social conditioning. It’s not prose, it’s a form of social conditioning, it teaches you how to think of yourself and of others, or it conditions you as to how to think of yourself and of others, and relations between the same. I call it social conditioning, the droning that it is, the way it asks nothing of you, it doesn’t ask you to be involved in determining how the text means.

HHH · Literature exists to undo social codes and conventions and it cannot accomplish this if it is codified itself. K-R-A-F-T® teaches this ideological codification. And codification is a kind of nostalgia for an ideal.

AD · And convention, as has been stated, is always already a form of social conditioning. It’s clearly the case that new forms are called for or required, and since almost no one will embrace new forms, there needs to be new ways to fund literature, which it must be said, Capitalist society has turned its back on.

RM · Well then, let’s see if we can address the main problem facing not only writers but artists in general, and that’s the impossibility of funding your labor. When you seek to embody the promise and assertions of literature, that is, if you are dedicated to literature as an active force in the world, not just as a means of entertainment or escape, you’re confronted with a myriad of problems– unwilling publishers, unwilling readers, the blinding ideology of literary forms, etc.

JPG · Right now the vast majority of writers and artists live in a state of economic internal exile; that’s why samizdat is a viable model, a viable starting point for us, self-publishing refuseniks that we are! Living the life of internal exile, hawking our texts, our art from the trunks of our cars!

HHH · At least it seems that the art world is a little different; there’s more materiality and less of the signified, of sense. This seems to allow for looser, or lesser, expectations.

AD · This is important because the vast majority of those involved in the social practice and business of literature clearly adhere to a common model. And that model is sacrosanct because it implicates your sense of your self, it implicates the very way you conceive of yourself.

RM · And that model is a common form, embodying a common conception of the subject and of human subjectivity, in other words, a convention: as presence, as internal presence, as is the legacy of psychology/phenomenology, defined by and as consciousness. Indeed to implicate unconscious word-play the materiality of language is needed. We are presented with an imaginary unity which is left unthought, the center of a thinking, feeling being; in short, ego-centric, pre-Freudian, 19th c model. Keep in mind Ronald Sukenick stating that...

The form of traditional fiction is a metaphor for a society that no longer exists: “Its present function is to sustain a series of comforting illusions, among which might include the feeling that the individual is the significant focus among the phenomena of “reality”(characterization); the sense that clock, or public time is finally the reigning form of duration for consciousness (historical narrative); the notion that the locus of “reality” may be determined by empirical observation (description); the conviction that the world is logical and comprehensible (causal sequence, plot).”

AD · And it’s finally a model and a form of literature related to the commodity, an object of consumption. Literature as an event involves the free play of collaborative reading, the reader is required to become a collaborative party in the text to determine how the text means. This is because of the paradoxical or subversive force of the literary event, subverting how the common, assumed and conventional literary work means. The human subject becomes a kind of subjectivity modeled on its own commodified representation.

JPG · In fact, it’s often been said that the very purpose of literature as event is to undo conventions and codes, not to be based on them. Every form of realism is first and foremost founded on convention, and again, convention is always already a form of social conditioning. Think of Burroughs asking “How do you short-circuit control?” Isn’t he asking, in part, how do you undo code and convention?

HHH · And it goes without saying that there is no support for this approach and practice of literature: the MFA programs that produce so many of the authors embraced by the publishing industry, the writing centers that teach you how to produce the type of prose that editors and publishers want to see, those very editors and publishers themselves all have vested interests in the conventions that they promote; it sells. And the more they can advertise the success of their programs, the more people and hence the more money they can garner.

JPG · All ‘effets de colle’. They’re speaking and acting in defense of convention, I just wish they would admit it.

RM · We need to begin to think of new ways for writers and artists in this society to support themselves. Clearly the model that proved useful in the past was patronage: without patrons would Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, would they have been able to produce what they did? The answer is their patrons made it possible for them to produce the revolutions in literature that they did. The idea I’ve been toying with for some time now, and which the internet seems to be threatening to enable, is to democratize patronage, make it possible for small patrons to help support writers and artists. For instance, if I could find one hundred people who would be willing to each pay me ten dollars a month, that would be one thousand dollars per month that would go a long way towards supporting my efforts. What is needed it seems, is something akin to a ‘dating site’ for potential patrons and writers/artists to get acquainted.

JPG · An interesting idea, considering that publication is no longer a viable option, even if you’re published there’s no money in it. Publishers seem intent and content to publish names, because names sell. There are maybe 5,000-6,000 readers of serious literature in this society, a society which, as the American way of life is being globalized, is spreading. We need new options– self-publishing, performance, micro-patronage, use of new technologies, like writers of samizdat needed mimeograph machines!

RM · And drawers!

HHH · Or something like a subscription service. Even some kind of ‘art co-op’ where everyone is paid a certain amount of money and the work is funded and then presented, not edited and shaped by the pressures and demands of Capitalism, of the market.

RM · If freedom is to mean anything it must mean freedom from the immense weight and pressure of Capitalist influence, the way it distorts everything by shaping it according to the marketplace and its demands.

AD · Of course, you still have to first establish your name to make yourself attractive to potential patrons.

JPG · Just as Malcolm McLaren stated: First establish the name!

RM · My ideal would be the ability to never sell anything, to give the work away, to subvert the Capitalist economy which, for all intents and purposes, is anti-literature. There’s just no money in it. So I would like to see patronage reinvented, rendered in a micro-manner.

AD · Like Kickstarter, or Indiegogo, or Rocket Hub, or StartSomeGood, or Pozible...

RM · Yes and no. This would have to be somewhat different than, say, Kickstarter, or the other services like it, because it would involve an ongoing commitment, not just a one-time investment. You could reward your patrons with exclusive access to your work, your manuscripts, and other artifacts of your process. Yes, to smaller donors, but not a one-time donation or investment, although I wouldn’t turn it down, but an ongoing commitment to supporting a writer. I could see providing exclusive publications to my donors, special work, etc. By-passing completely the marketplace as it exists today. As well as for the most part the grant scene, with its emphasis on writing programs which are in my opinion part of the problem, they work hand in hand with publishers to produce stunted, morbid prose that serves certain purposes, helping you to produce marketable prose when the marketplace needs to be subverted, if not destroyed. I say we should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and in the meantime we must create an alternate or many alternate, economies, recognizing that the Capitalist marketplace is the place of the money-changers, and that it inherently involves limitations. Revolution is always excised, the Capitalist marketplace is always reactionary. always dealing in established form and received thought. We can say that education exists in learning existing practices, the rest, the remainder, the leftover part is transgressive creativity. We haven’t even mentioned the phenomenon of the ‘bestseller’ and the marketing of the author as ‘voice’ or presence. It’s funny, Will Self talks about the novel as a dying form, no longer with the social charge or impact that it once had, but why continue to write novels, why not create new reading experiences? Why cling to this morbid form as though there were nothing beyond it? Is it a fetish object? A representation of the ego? What do you have invested in this form? An identity and a need to identify? If the novel is an antiquated form then why write novels? What’s your attachment to this form? Personally I suspect that it’s narcissistic in nature and functions as a form of defense against the shock or upsetting blow that the literary event can, and indeed, should be.

HHH · Because publishers know how to market novels and people know how to read them, so no real thinking is involved.

JPG · An identity and a sense of self are invested in this antiquated form that is the novel.

RM · Why not create a new experience, ask the reader to go along with a new experience, to be open, to be Barthesian. Of course you have to find readers willing to undergo new experiences. I remember hearing a seemingly intelligent and cultured person say that he didn’t want to read another Ulysses, that he had had enough earth-shaking experiences. And there seems to be a general resistance, a kind of concretization, to the literary experience, the kind that can shake your symbolic unity and imaginary stability. Keep in mind that fluidity creates anxiety and that Capitalism doesn’t want psychotic subjects; psychosis might possess a logic but it is discontinuous and incoherent in a social context.

AD · That is an important aspect to consider. Hopefully such attempts at true literary events can begin to destabilize the ‘rotting’ marketplace, the market place that celebrates ‘processed literature’ that the writing programs help design; an ideology of literature has been produced based on sense and interpretation. Prose is an ideology as well, isn’t convention always ideology, and most people can’t see beyond their ideological blinders–they need to see persons, they need to see something for their ego to identify with. And the expression of that ideology is called convention. You’re ideologically incapable of seeing anything else, you have to have a character in the text or you just can’t see it, you just don’t get it (you need this empty place holder, that character, this grammatical position/figure to represent your (bourgeois) ego, or someplace to put your ego). You have to have something for your ego to identify with or you just can’t comprehend it.

HHH · When you engage in a true literary event, not just some identificatory game to shore up your ego, you can be shocked. In fact, it should rock you out of the safe world of your ego-identifications. It’s just too traumatic for most people in this society, with the demands that it makes upon you. Your life can be totally ruined, turned upside-down. People in this society are too narcissistic to risk any kind of shock to the illusory stability of their egos and their ego-identifications. In fact, we can say that we live in such a narcissistic social economy that we need educators, editors, writers and critics to protect us from the trauma and the scandal that is literature. People look to strengthen their egos, not to shock them. So naturally they’re going to turn to books that do just that, in effect, literature-lite, just like alcohol-free beer or decaffeinated coffee. The literary event is seen as a threat to the stability of the self in our narcissistic, solipsistic culture. To undergo disruptions to your symbolic identity is to undergo a visionary or even psychotic experience. In a sense, you have to be a professional artist to typically and repeatedly undergo the trauma of art. Art it seems, is not for the masses, it threatens their precarious stability which they must maintain in order to remain productive members of the economy. Hence the preponderance of popular forms. This has to change.

JPG · It may be for another conversation, but can we use the concept of suture as it is used in film studies here? Is there any comparable concept here, the way the reader or consumer sutures himself to the text, to grammatical figures? Using identification to fill a 0 in, the lack that we all are as desiring subjects structured by the signifier, becoming a 1?

http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic235120.files/HeathSutureScreen.pdf

HHH · I think that there is a comparable intersection available to us here. We have to become aware of how the reader uses his or her identifications to establish or to stabilize an inherently unstable identity. The grammatical figures given to the reader for identification are standard and standardized and are used to fill in an emptiness or lack inherent to the desiring subject. I think that, at the very least, can be stated. The illusory identity that is thought to be stabilized is nothing more nor less than the ego.

JPG · This country is run on egotism, on ego-centrism, Capitalism is run on ego-centrism. this is one way that Capitalism twists and perverts everything. And of course processed literature, literature that has gone through the corridors of power presents a stultifying and ossified image and conception of the mind and of human subjectivity– you can say, as does Matko, that it’s an image and conception of the mind useful to Capitalism. There is another way of being and thinking than that offered by the merchants of K-R-A-F-T® processed literature, the style they produce is like food that’s pre-digested or pre-chewed for you. I mean, most people can recognize processed food but can they recognize processed literature? Literary expression in this society has become incredibly codified, indicating a severe conformity of consciousness. People think of themselves in a way that’s modeled on what we can call, with Matko, Capitalist Realism. A way that’s modeled on the shapes of fiction and is understood conventionally or ideologically. It doesn’t matter if it’s queer, feminist, etc, identarian of any stripe, it’s still all the same codified expression of the sovereign ego and literally involves opening Capitalism to more markets, creating markets and marketing possibilities. Let’s look at it head on–how can we advance literature in this our neo-liberal Capitalist culture? Is there a next step beyond the dramatic form given the subject by narrative? Is it to be an awareness of emptiness? Of the nothingness behind the subject? Right now we have a bunch of ideologically blind ego-maniacs teaching ego-based fiction in a society that demands the inscription of your ego. The ego, the form of the ego necessitated by the lived exigencies of the reality of Capitalist America. The American experiment has consisted of the creation of a certain kind of subjectivity, just ask Ayn Rand! And has produced an ideology to go along with it.

HHH · The sovereign ego and the metaphysics of presence, is it nothingness, that fundamental nothingness, that 0, our being as lack, behind subjectivity, that combats this?

JPG · So perhaps we need a new place where writers and prospective patrons can meet, like you say, a kind of dating site.

RM · That would be one solution, each writer would still need to establish themselves, which means their name. It’s been said that writers live on their legends, that means we bank on the scandal of our existence. We need a new way of funding literature that allows for the creation of new forms, things that may not be economically viable but are important to the species and its social and subjective future. Artists, writers, are always a scandal in this puritanical culture, their work is considered to be non-productive expenditures, which is another example of the norming of the subject by mass society. This norming is what Capitalist Realism seeks or attempts to achieve, and what literature seeks to combat.

JPG · So let’s let a thousand scandals bloom!

 

 

Contact Schism/LetternetPress:

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“Ideological Effects Of The Basic Literary-Narrative Apparatus*”

by Hans Heinrich-Herber

(Hans Heinrich-Herber is a member of the editorial committee of Schism and the author of The Only Living Novel, to be published by LetternetPress/OpenDrawerPublications.)

               “Fantasy is both that which covers up inconsistencies within the symbolic order   
          and that which ideological interpellation works today in our seemingly ‘post-
          ideological’ times: it is through our apparent distance from ideology (non-ideological 
          enjoyment, fantasy, cynicism) that ideology captures us.” 
                                                                     
                                                      (Slavoj Zizek, Interrogating The Real, continuum, 2005. p 364)

              

      Let me begin with a borrowing, a pastiche of sorts:
 
     “In this seminal article, Reid Matko, like many others, uses an analogy to develop the implications of his argument. Matko claims that the masking of self-contradiction, otherness, and difference in narrative literature resembles the masking of our perception of the physical experience of language and the text. He elaborates on the basic concept of apparent physicality to construct an imposing theoretical argument. He draws from Louis Althusser the idea that relations to real conditions which do not help us to realize how those relations were constructed are ipso facto ideological. They lack the "knowledge effect" that a realization of their production would entail. This idea allows Matko to posit that narrative-literature (especially as it exists in our Capitalist society), based on an illusory unity, is based on a fundamentally ideological effect.
 
     “Matko turns to Jacques Lacan to demonstrate that this ideological effect involves constituting the reader as a transcendental subject or imaginary unity. The continuous unfurling of a universe before our eyes/through the image in the text confirms our own centrality: when our vision (our visual imagination) roams freely, liberated from the body/word, the world exists for it; our sight/ego is the world's point of origin and its source of coherence. Matko summarizes Lacan's notion of the mirror-stage, likening it to our experience in narrative, where we identify not only with characters but also with the implied narrator’s ego ideal as the surrogate for our desire for order, organization, and unity. We want a narrative that makes sense of disparate experiences, that confirms the self as the transcendent, all-knowing center of the world.
 
     “This turn toward Lacan and the psychoanalytic approach also turns us toward ideology, but ideology here remains at some remove from specific instances in the political, economic, or social arenas. It is an ideology of the subject and of subjectivity, which certainly underpins specific ideologies of class, gender, race, and nationality but which in isolation leads to an idealist conception of the subject or ego apart from specific historical conditions.
 
     “Some argue that such generalized effects fail to account for patterns of varied and conflictual ideological effects at particular levels of textual analysis. If this is right, Matko's thesis...constructs an imaginary coherence for narrative-literature by positing an attractive analogy in which narrative-literature masks difference in a way that resembles the masking of difference in the mirror-stage. Thus, Matko's argument may be compelling and satisfying precisely because of its own effect, which is one of producing an imaginary unity for narrative-literature. But, even if his analogy is overextended, Matko may also be right: The potential of narrative-literature for the production of knowledge may be severely constrained by the nature of the ‘apparatus’. That this ‘apparatus’ renders the production of knowledge completely impossible, as Matko seems to imply, remains very much in doubt.”

 (The preceeding is an adapted version of an introduction to Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects Of The Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” from Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Volume 2 by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1985, p 531.)
 

http://books.google.com/books/about/Movies_and_Methods.html?id=NfGoW1XysX4C
 

Link to Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects Of The Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”

     Of course, far from being simply a canard or a pleasantry, this is a proposition, a proposition that there is an analogy at work here: Matko’s thesis bears an analogical relation to Baudry’s and indeed, uses Baudry’s thesis to elucidate his own. There is a similarity between the approaches of Baudry and of Matko, both of which have a common goal in mind: freeing cinema and literature from their ideological shackles. According to Matko, the image masks the material experience of language and, by extension, of literature, in the same way that the transcendental subject, the imaginary unity, masks our experience as full human subjectivities, which would incorporate contradiction, antagonism, and self-difference. This imaginary unity is a way of stabilizing that which is inherently unstable. As all human identity is structured as fiction, it must be repeated over and over that any identity that is taken to be authentic or true only ever functions as a representation of authority, and that this is a way of stabilizing that which is inherently unstable, i.e. human identity.
 
     Narrative-literature is a ‘subjectivity apparatus’, and the primary function of this apparatus is not to represent (physical reality), rather it produces a subject or simulates a psychological conditioning. This conditioning is evoked through identification. The primary and invisible identification is with the narrator as transcendental or as a form of omniscient vision (which is inherently ideological, the reader remains blind to how it is produced, as well as to its effects), secondary identification is with the characters, and you identify with all of them despite what you repress or censor.
     The text is a medium defined not as a capacity for representation (‘realism’), but as a (philosophical) system of component parts wherein the reader is simultaneously a part of the text and its product, a ‘subject effect’. Prose, its styles, are not neutral or value-free, rather they are both socially conditioned and socially conditioning.
     Realism, realist prose has these ideological objectives:
     ––a repression of the work of signification giving the false impression that the prose represents reality transparently, i.e. without transforming it (or enframing it with meaning)...[When in actuality] the world is framed and made intentionally meaningful for the reader.
     ––it positions the reader as an ideal or transcendental perspective, the master of a meaningful world (based on the image).
 
     Literature does not simulate reality, it simulates the condition of the subject. The ‘reality’ mimed is thus first of all that of a ‘self’. Thus with a little imagination we can apply the concept of the dispositif to the act of reading, and perhaps see that indeed, reading is the model for further technological elaborations:
  

               Such is the advantage of the concept of the dispositiv in that it pertains to both    
          hypothetical subject position and to the actual person (the one to whom the projection is   
          addressed), or to the (imaginary) spectator and to the (real) viewer. Exactly because of these 
          features the concept of the dispositiv provides the means of conceiving communication 
          technology within its use as a situation and as a setting, locational and relational at the same 
          time, which both constitutes and includes the subject. Constituted is an imaginary subject 
          position, a simulated point of view which one must take in order to recognize representations 
          and which all spectators share. Included is the individual, the concrete, living person, and 
          every single cinema-goer to whom the dispositiv assigns a distinct place within the setting. 
          Baudry wants to prove that reading/cinema technology is not neutral, that it is not a natural 
          but a social phenomena with certain social effects. The way he proves this social dimension of 
          technology is by theorizing the fact that communication technology works on, that it affects, 
          individuals. 

                        

(Melita Zajc, The Concept of Dispositiv:  Studying Technology in Terms of its Use 

Because of the All Yet-To-Be-Written User Manuals, in: A Decade of Transformation, 

IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 8: Vienna 1999)

     Literature is more than mere knowledge, it is where the social contract and its codes are destroyed and renewed. It is a question of new forms for literature (as Roland Barthes stated, “in order to expand rationality and readability”) but the problem encountered is that Americanized readers are (ideologically) incapable of apprehending any such new forms, generally speaking their egos need something to identify with (be it ‘voice’ and its illusion of transparent self-presence, ‘characters’ and figures possessing imaginary consistency and illusory continuity, et al). They need representations of transcendental subjects, of imaginary unities, representations of and for their egos because they have been ideologically programmed to think in such terms, to see and to think themselves in such ways. In fact, this Capitalist society requires a certain conception and vision of human subjectivity and its possibilities. These representations serve social policing functions, they allow you to connect, to fit into this Capitalist social universe. It’s like the model for and of an adaptive ego-psychology, a psychology, as practiced in this society with its emphasis on the ego and on pharmaceutic ‘cures’, that adapts egos to function in the prevailing society.  

          “The true nature of the media system seems to me to lie in consensus itself, in the sense that 
           it’s because consensus rules that the media is what they are. I don’t think the media constructs 
           consensus. Rather, it’s consensus that makes people put up with the media’s repetitive   
           mediocrity and paucity of information. People thrive on this moreover, they revel in it; they 
           chip in their contribution and go play their part. You have to see the way the media summon 
           people and how people adore this. They are thrilled to go and announce that they are part of 
           the process. They’re ready to do all it takes to keep the media show going.” 
                                 
                                                                                      (Alain Badiou, Philosophy And The Event, Polity Press, 2013 p 9)

     This is fiction, narrative-literature, as an adaptive model, presenting an ego ideal in the form of an imaginary unity, a transcendental subject. The transcendental subject is the one that’s “born this way”, coming ready-made into the world, not the result of any process.This is how fiction as presently manifested represents us and how it wants us to think ourselves, and we have something to gain from doing so: there is a consensus at work in this dynamic. There is a consensus of what prose should be and how it should represent us, there is a consensus at work in how we think ourselves and how we seek out representations of ourselves in our fictions.
 
     This adaptive model, along with the models of human subjectivity that it promotes, are in the service of Capitalism; Capitalism is implicated because this adaptive model represents and promotes a form of subjectivity conducive to Capitalism, and the public is implicated because it allows for representations of the ego and for the inscription of desire, desire that is frustrated, if not created, by the necessitudes of life under Capitalism and its constraints. It can’t be said enough, Capitalism wants certain types, certain models of subjectivity.
 
     All we need is to ask is why it is that the vast majority of prose fiction, and all of mainstream prose fiction, from pulp to literary fiction, looks the same, reads the same, and means the same way, why does it adhere to the conventions that it does? The answer can only be consensus,and precisely consensus because this type of prose fiction provides or allows for something. It allows for the expressions of (ego) desire and for a socially compatible and productive subject for Capitalism: it keeps the edifice running. Capitalism promotes the types of subjectivity that it desires and needs for its smooth operation and continuance. This is an operation of ideology in that these representations do not help us in any way understand how they are produced, but in fact hide such knowledge behind the representation of subjectivity as imaginary unity or transcendental, their production remaining hidden. People tend to take up such conditioned subjectivities and adhere to them because they allow for the illusion of stability and because they are rewarded by Capitalism by doing so; they can be functioning members of its system.
 
     New forms, and new modes of representing the human subject, who and what we are, this is what Matko is advocating. And doing so precisely in order “to expand rationality and readability”. This begs another question underlying Matko’s thesis: what is transgressive creativity, and how it is possible? How does it come about and, perhaps more importantly, how can it be cultivated? First we must understand convention and social code and what they do and do not allow for before we can understand how to undo them, for, if it does anything, transgressive creativity undoes and subverts convention. Only such action allows for the renewal of social codes and of the social contract in general.
 
     So the task remains, how do we remove the deleterious effects of Capitalism from literature, how do we remove literature from the corroding influences of Capitalism? Capitalism has shaped literature, especially narrative-literature, in its present forms, from pulp to literary fiction and everything in-between, forcing it to exist within a narrow scope of conventions simply because it serves a consensual purpose to have it do so. Literature should have a function that is transgressive in character and purpose, hence a function that is necessarily going to be co-opted if not submerged by Capitalism, which desires nothing more than a status quo: this is the force that shapes literature and gives us its present forms, and against which Matko foments and instigates.


[* “Apparatus”, is a non-precise translation of the French term ‘dispositif’. It in no way refers to a mechanical device, but rather. “a network or structure comprised of heterogenous elements that give rise to certain effects of subjectivization...” For a succinct discussion of this see Fabien Tarby’s Preface to his collection of conversations with Alain Badiou “Philosophy And The Event” (Polity Press, 2013).]