McKenzie Wark on Sun, 12 Mar 2000 07:52:24 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Bill Seaman's Red Dice |
zczc *aus*edued* catchline:Wark-column-Adelaide Bill Seaman's multimedia poetics in Adelaide McKenzie Wark Sunday, 12 March 2000 Writers' Week at the Adelaide Festival is a bit like The Big Day Out for the bookish. Instead of rock bands cranking up the volume, there's writers, doing unintentional parodies of their greatest moments, trying to communicate in the heat and hubbub, the PA distorting every gesture. Retreating to the cool and quiet of the Contemporary Art Centre, out in Adelaide's parkland suburbs, I was surprised to find a moment of pensive and quivering literature. Literature, yes, literature -- the one thing that writers' festivals pursue to the point of extinction, was alive and well and breathing, in the shadows of an art gallery. A work like Manet's Olympia is now a commonplace in visual culture, but comparable and contemporary works of literature still occupy the margins. So perhaps its no surprise that the art gallery should play host to Manet's contemporary, Stephane Mallarme. "All thought utters dice thrown", writes Mallarme, in his late work, The Dice Thrown Will Never Annul Chance. The fleeting, passing, trajectory of thought, lighting that reveals in its passing the emptiness of the sky -- this was Mallarme's sole interest as a poet. Bill Seaman's homage to Mallarme, Red Dice, is installed as a video installation at the Contemporary Art Centre until 26th March. Seaman complements Mallarme's poem with video, audio and poetry of his own. If Mallarme's poetry is a machine for making pure nothingness, Seaman's is a machine that doubles Mallarme's and explores the machinery of meaning making itself. Mallarme was conscious of the means of production of sense within which his work moved. What is the place of the book in the age of the newspaper? "The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will." On the other hand. books "form in miniature a tomb for our souls." In the folds of its pages can be hidden the one thing the tidal press of newsprint cannot abide -- silence. In an era where most novels read like rather dull newspapers and where newspapers are daily novels, perhaps there's something to be said for stepping outside the tent. What one sees at the writers' festival is the extent to which writing and journalism prop each other up and present a unified product line to the consumer, one dedicated to the prevention of literature. Mallarme grasped what a book alone could do: step into rich silence and slow time. 'The Dice Thrown' exploits the white space of the page, dropping words and phrases like jazz notes across the white wave of the page, seemingly at random. Space and word interact, forming a network of possible lines along which sense can flow or be caught. A line from the poem might read like this: "An insinuation merely in the silence, rolled up in irony, or the mystery flung down (howled out) in some neighbouring whirlpool of hilarity and horror, hovers about the gulf, without strewing it nor fleeing, and of it cradles the virginal trace." Or it may not. Mallarme grounds postwar understandings of the indeterminacy of language -- that great ocean of possibilities of the word that conventions of writing limit, even repress, in the name of clarity. He is crucial to postwar French poetics. Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida write about him with as much enthusiasm as did Paul Valery or Paul Claudel before them. But Seaman takes Mallarme in yet another direction. He is not interested in the endless extension of this linguistic understanding of meaning, in which all the world is an endless text. "We must not see every media production as a text", he writes. Rather, he wants to look at how different media create different, and often non-linguistic, meaning. His is a media poetics, not one limited to writing. Postwar poetics took the basic diagram of communication and pointed out that the code mattered more than the sender and receiver in the transmission of meaning. Seaman looks at the diagram again and says its not the sender, or the receiver, or the code that needs attention, but the vector. The means by which meaning moves is as interesting as the way it encoded. When Mallarme draws attention to the white space of the page, he is not only saying that this silent whiteness is part of the code, he is also saying that the page is a vector, a means of getting meaning from one place to another, or one time to another. Living at a time when the production of pages was becoming industrialised, Mallarme knew only too well that writing was becoming a different process. The mass production of newsprint has consequences for the book. Seaman's video for Red Dice shows, with a shocking, astonishing beauty, the kind of machine age technology that shaped the awareness of Mallarme. Seaman's images are of spinning and weaving machines. These are not just an industrial parallel to the technologies of print, they point toward something more. The loom is the first computer. Seaman's video shows the punched tape that programs the patterns of the loom. As an artist of the computer era, Seaman doubles Mallarme's poem with images that both concord with the moment in which Mallarme wrote, but which also connect that moment to the present. If Mallarme wrote for the machinery of the typesetter, Seaman makes poetry for multimedia. Or rather, where Mallarme saw the typesetting machine as already a poetics, Seaman sees multimedia as already a poetics. Machines are always already equipped with a the potential to make sense of things and things of sense. "Each soul is a melody which must be picked up again, and the flute or the viola of everyone exists for that." In line with this Mallarmean ethics, Seaman repeats phrases from Mallarme's poem and adds his own. His isn't a representation or reflection on Mallarme, so much as an addition or extension. If writing is "some gesture, vehement and lost", perhaps it is not lost for ever. The void is meaning's refrain. Perhaps its not surprising that Mallarme's writing should be so at odds with, and peripheral to, that of a writers' festival. As he wrote: "The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilised by the shock of their difference; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels, restoring perceptible breath to the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence." What calls for celebration, for festival, is not writers, but writing, not literary celebrities, but language, not the consumption of books but the transformation of meaning. Writers' festivals have become a routine part of the culture, but at the expense of marginalising literature. They are a way of accommodating the reading classes to consumerism, celebrity, commodity -- all the things the bookishly inclined feign to despise. And yet, every now and then, something of aesthetic significance happens on the fringes, as if by accident, the roll of the dice. Just throwing a writers' festival cannot abolish writing -- although they always come close. McKenzie Wark lectures in media studies at Macquarie University mckenzie.wark@mq.edu.au nnnn __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold