(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

Earlier in the year I taught a first year writing and cultural studies subject, Text and Context. In a week’s lesson titled ‘Subject/ivity,’ I had a hard time explicating why ‘we’ (we being the highly problematic collective ‘lens’ of the cultural studies discipline, as though culture is something outside to be observed from inside the classroom – that is, something apart from ourselves) might say ‘subject’ rather than, for example, ‘you,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘women,’ or ‘salmon’. After class, disturbed by the lack of resolution, I asked my friend Ben to help me come up with a useful metaphor, something that I could send to my students as an afterthought. It’s worth mentioning that my back-and-forth with Ben occurred entirely via Twitter, in a sequence of ‘@’ replies to each other. Ben’s desk is next to mine at UTS, but he always works from home, so we largely perform our friendship via ultra-nerdy one-liners during the day while we’re working on our theses. It’s as if the gassy excess of our studies – common in their lust for pseudo-science – discharge as small offerings, items of exchange, links or citations, attempts at a chaotic synthesis, a kind of live-action indexing of thinking-and-writing.

Ben began by saying, “Tell your students that some abstractions are really ways of being more specific, in ways that pointing to objects can’t be,” followed by an example: “‘Capital’ is an abstract model that arises from specific material relationships. It’s not simply money, or bosses.” Three minutes later, he added this: “Subjectivity is the emergent effect of experiencing the world, arising from complex storms in the cultural landscape.” From here, his response bloomed and vectored. The metonymic relationship (pathogenic, contiguous, parasitic) of his ideas-in-language, occurring in and as an event of thinking, was traceable.

Caught in the storm-trope, Ben composed an improvised, partly tongue-in-cheek prose poetic of the storm-as-subject. I have collated the offerings in one passage, even though each has its own self-contained attractiveness.

“Storms are not sovereign. Their complexity and consistency are indebted to (and can’t be separated from) all kinds of flow. Meteorologists probably have some abstract model of “autonomic stormness” that can’t be achieved by pointing at Katrina. Aspects of storm autonomy can be located in ocean temperature. The ocean is not a storm. We can also describe stormness via the wreckage that storms leave behind. But the wreckage isn’t the storm.”

Tuning and framing. The mercurial scholarship of weather patterns. Probability that a storm will crack open any particular night, during sleep. The ‘ness’ of Ben’s ‘stormness’ is the kind of prepositional ontology I’m attempting. Here and in other places.

*

In my first few days in Philadelphia, I walked up a cobbled sidestreet in Mt Airy to get to the food co-op. It was dusk, and the first day I had needed to wear a jumper. Late summer was becoming early autumn, the same impossible transition that Guy Davenport describes when a ripening capsicum moves its green into reds. During my walk, I saw a baby snake and a firefly. Later, I looked up fireflies on Wikipedia. The entry referred to their ‘crepuscular bioluminescence’ that attracts mates during the highly-sexed summer courtship period. What a seductive combination of erotics and chemistry! I reported my sighting and my research findings to a friend in an email, who replied, “When I was in Virginia there were so many that the trees looked like they were reflecting the sky. I remembering looking up at them moving around above my head like those bugs that skim over water and thinking they were tracing the constellations.”

There is a curious glitch here. My friend thinks of stars by remembering one insect by another; on seeing the fireflies in the sunset-ish sky he thinks of patterns traced on water, and how these patterns cite constellations. He gets from the sky to the sky via water, from stars to stars via insects. He uses a sequence of self-similar metaphors to compose an analogue for light. It’s as if he has layered a series of transparencies on top of each other, each referring to the others, and has projected a composite image of sameness and alterity.

In imagining a cosmos, we must also imagine ourselves; we are of the cosmos at the same time that we actively produce and reproduce its conditions. When my friend looks to a sequence of metaphors in order to understand seeing fireflies, he is writing himself in the sequence, he is the attentive aperture placing the experience in the event of becoming or being meaningful. Through his language, a firefly indexes other things in order to be a thing. To paraphrase Isabelle Stengers paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, it is not that there is a relativity of truth, but a truth of the relative. Steven Shaviro says, “the practices and processes that produce truth involve such “actors” as animals, viruses, rocks, weather systems, and neutrinos, as well as human beings.” My friend as attentive aperture is an example of one perceptive and cognitive event. The complex geometries of romancing fireflies is another. The imaginative histories of the constellations—narratives of sex, harvest or war—is another.

*

Constellations are things seen from earth. The appearance of flatness and cluster is a matter of positioning. Elaborate cartographies of the stars emerge from the collaborative impulses of poesis. To map a centaur drawing a bow, to map a saucepan, scorpion, willow, to map narratives of genesis. This is a poetics of fantastic eccentricity. From another position, the stars comprising a constellation move away from each other. Flatness turns into unthinkable topologies: elastic band, wrinkled handkerchief. Saucepans mutate. Stargazing is a pleasant time-travel. How relaxing to look into unfathomable histories and to have no genealogy. Lemon pie, warm with tea. Patterns of milk. Long-exposure shots reveal perfect curvatures. All the astronomers at the observatory in Coonabarrabran were divorced, my brother decided he’d become an astrophysicist instead. Years later, at a public lecture in Sydney, I sat in an auditorium full of astrophysicists to hear about dark matter. Wedding rings glinted in constellations.

*

In Lyn Hejinian’s book-length poem, My Life, she writes:

“Overhead a small plane drags a banner, it is summer, its engines revving and whining – for years I suffered nightmares in which just such a plane would lose control and plunge spinning through the roof of the schoolroom, blazing the cobalt, red, green, and yellow of the Hammond World Atlas. I in my chronic ideas return. Stalin medallions dangle at the windshield in trucks throughout the republics – why do they do this. The language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry. One doesn’t want to be seduced by the sheer wonder of it all, whereby everything is transformed by beauty. There is a bulging lake and sunlight juts from it like a rock, as laughter for its practitioners. Past midnight, exhausted, fainting, and very old, the gray ice – Halley’s beaver – was swimming in the sky toward the deep forest on the distant ridge, its tail partially submerged. The flow of thoughts – impossible!”

Heraclitus was a process philosopher, all things in flow. Christian mythology imagines two Euclidean points, Genesis and Apocalypse. Coastlines are fractal. Alfred North Whitehead says, “no language can be anything other than elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience.” Coastlines are immeasurable. Map a coastline. Find the centre of a melody. The story goes like this: sitting on a cliff, it was noticed that air touching the surface of the ocean produced ripples. Air is thingly. Atomism refers to the smallest data of experience. On a car trip with my father, he told me that since atoms are mostly empty space, we are mostly empty space. This idea pleases me, it makes the sensations of intimacy and encounter seem like impossible accidents. Over summer, in Camperdown park, I read Lucretius’s epic poem, De rerum natura. At the beginning of the poem, he says: “I will reveal those atoms from which nature creates all things and increases and feeds them and into which, when they perish, nature again resolves them. To these in my discourse I commonly give such names as ‘raw material’, or ‘generative bodies’, or ‘seeds’ of things. Or I may call them ‘primary particles’, because they come first and everything else is composed of them.” Lucretius was writing some time before 54 BC. Bread, cheese, a tomato. The raw materials of lunch. A single James Squire stubbie, cracked on a rug in the slanted angle sun of late afternoon. Dust motes. Jean-Luc Nancy gestures towards Lucretius. “[I]t is necessary to reread,” he says, “in the work of the Democriteans, the fall of the atoms into the void and the clinamen: as the distance, contact, assembling, separation, tangency, interval, and the interference of the singular, diffracted there is.”

*

At a conference in Canberra, my friend Duncan said, “poetry is our dirty ontology.” While reading my paper, the day before, I overheated. I was producing excess heat. The kinetics of nervousness and highly engaged attention. During question time, I spoke of the erotic circumstances of language. I feverishly tore off my duffel coat as I said the word “intercourse.” I was temporarily deeply embarrassed. One event overlapped another. The durational overlap was meaningful in a way I had not intended. In Greek mythology, Eros orders cosmos from chaos. Cosmos refers to a process of ornamentation, a meaningful composition of things alongside other things.

*

Earlier in the year I was involved in the re-enactment of Allan Kaprow’s 1965 work ‘Push and Pull’ at the Locksmith gallery in Alexandria. Kaprow set out the basic conditions for the event to take place. To take up these conditions is to both produce and reproduce the work. All things happening. Basic frame for the event of an artwork being, existing. Here is a frame, use it. In ‘Push and Pull’, a room is made available and things are brought to the space. Loosely speaking, these things are domestic miscellany. Furniture, etc. Participants are invited to engage with the space in whatever manner they choose. Rearrange, tidy, destroy, tinker, sleep, draw, stretch. Patterns emerge and are erased. Social complexes form. Networks arrange themselves. Nick wrote an essay about the eventhood, relationality and complexity of Push and Pull. He says: “Complexity is not chaos or anarchy in the usually (and wrongly) understood sense of the terms. Chaos and anarchy are not total disorder, complete lack of relations, but are rather the order of relations themselves, just as in ecological systems. And Push and Pull is an ecological system. Ecological systems are not just what happens in the wilderness, untouched by the evil hands of humans, they are everywhere, where humans and non-humans exist side-by-side, in complex relations.” In a series of notes taken during this time, I wrote: “Nonmetric concepts of neighbourhood, like ‘infinitesimal closeness’.” I was reading Manuel DeLanda. Last week, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I walked through the Duchamp collection, and was reminded of his wonderful trope, infra thin. “The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin” Duchamp says, in one of countless definitions.
“Velvet trousers–/ their whistling sound (in walking) by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an/ infra thin separation signalled /by sound. (it is not an infra thin sound) … When the tobacco smoke smells also of the /mouth which exhales it, the 2 odors / marry by infra thin (olfactory / in thin) … Difference between the contact / of water and that of/ molten lead for ex,/or of cream./ with the walls of its / own container moved around the liquid …. This difference between two contacts is infra thin.”

*

On September 5 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched. As of June this year, it is about 16.555 billion kilometres from the sun. If it is still functioning when it moves through the heliopause—the known limits of our solar system—it will be the first human-made object to leave the Milky Way. Inside the spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, an offering to any extraterrestrial life forms (or to humans in an inconceivable future). The record’s content, compiled by Carl Sagan and a group of researchers, includes sound recordings of animals, surf, wind and storms, tractors, tools, music, greetings in 55 languages and a message from President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s statement begins: “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Also included on the record is an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, one of the researchers and selectors of the project. At the time of recording, Druyan and Carl Sagan were experiencing the intense shared event of falling in love. She says: “I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound. I had a one-hour mental itinerary of the information I wished to convey. I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.”

*

Mulled wine and lentil soup. Sydney winter. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, co-written with Druyan. Projected onto the living room wall, Sagan speaks of primordial earthly life forms, including the upsetting sounding ‘hollow living tube’. We didn’t evolve from the hollow living tube, but from another complex of data.

*

In the opening to his wonderful book, The Parasite, Michel Serres says: “[W]hat is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations … The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations. Let us try to face it head-on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked, together.” In the beginning there was the fall, inclination, the difference of all things. “Reciprocal alterity,” is what Joan Retallack calls it. Gertrude Stein says, “the difference is spreading.” Muzzy ontology. Constellating is a method of inquiry. Attuned to the drift. The fall as generative mode, producing all things. I am serious about playtime.

*

Serres will remind us that in French, temps is time as well as temperature and weather. This is useful to remember

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one is can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Stein, Composition as Explanation)

In July 2008, over slick croissants and pats of butter on Lygon Street, Stein 09 was brainstormed. Two thousand and nine will be a year-long festival of Gertrude Stein. All acts, encounters, products of dumb banalities and intimacies; every word written and word effaced; all the grammars of consciousness and imagination; every plump chook roasted and omelette fried and sock darned and poodle groomed … all perceptive, cognitive and creative events of experience will contribute to a prolonged duration of engaged Steinian thinking-and-writing, writing-and-playing, playing-and-thinking.

From this improvised working bee, ideas about what kind of contemporary Australian poetic might emerge from strategic saturation of neo-Steinian activity were imagined. How might Stein intervene the lineages and chronologies of national poetic narratives? In re-imagining Australian experimentalism in terms of a Steinian poetic, could we somehow mobilise ideas about our own local circumstances that were not tied up with discourses of historical and cultural character? The very fact of our coming together over Stein in a fracas of mid-conference, post-booze, croissant-and-jam skill-share was meaningful. Yet Stein has always done well to elude the logics of her own biography, so her presence in wintry Carlton on this morning was no surprise. She is our contemporary in the sense that her ideas about language and experience, writing and thinking, composition, grammar and time are utterly relevant to our own various praxes. More than that, Stein’s oeuvre is, in so many ways, anticipatory of contemporary preoccupations. She seems to gesture towards key moments of late-twentieth century cultural, critical and philosophical thought.

In a literal sense, this paper is a Stein 09 event, a piece of writing with the project in mind. But more importantly, this paper suggests that the very living and thinking of my being-in-time, my sensing time and living with my own time-sense, as well as the living and thinking of my own sense of a poetics, is a Stein 09 event. To say that this paper is a composition, I must also say that there are other compositions at play, that to compose is to take note, to be aware, to keep moving, to find a way — as Stein would say, to make living a thing that I am doing.

There is a certain sense of playfulness, an admission of silliness in framing these conceptual-creative preoccupations, collective or singular, within a year and naming it a festival. Yes, I admit to being silly about this gestural act. But it is not a silliness that recourses to coolish irony or cynicism. It’s a serious silliness; there are serious concerns at play for me here. Whatever claims I make about the processual or durational events of Stein-induced attentiveness to poetics are claims that actively contribute to my sense of being-in-the-world, claims that demand the ongoing interrogation of my intellectual and creative practices.

Stein is always plural. She says, “Act so that there is no use in a centre.” In her work the potentials for more-than-oneness and decentred meaningfulness are unending. Her language is a field of potential, an index. It is cartographically Brownian, stochastic. A Steinian poetic urges language experience into sensate processes of multiplication, novelty, concrescence, assemblage. It is fluid yet not homogenous, continuous yet not smooth. It is repetitive where repetition is always emphatically differential, where emphasis shifts to produce all difference and where difference makes all things of the world. A Steinian poetic is anti-Oedipal, always Other. It queers. It is an erogenous zone, a site of pleasure. Its linkages are metonymic, perhaps proto-hypertextual, certainly non-Euclidean. She is difficult to locate, like a single film-frame. She is fractal.

Michael Farrell, one of the key brainstormers and spearheader of the Stein 09 impulse, says that Stein is an “image machine,” and that her poetry attempts to “contain everything.” But he also points out that the images are always other to symbolic analogues. “Her flowers appear in rivers,” says Farrell, who adds: “This outrages readers who want their flowers served on tea trays.” Her images are like Michel Serres’s ‘quasi-objects,’ they are charged with meaning when they are taken up in play. Serres offers his theory of the quasi-object in the context of the children’s game, ‘button button, who’s got the button?’ where the marker – a button or slipper or ball or some other small thing – is passed between players. Not knowing this game, I immediately thought of its brutish, rugby-inspired cousin, played ecstatically by older boys at family events and community barbeques, ‘kill the dill with the pill’.

So, we’re now playing ‘kill the dill with the pill’. In ‘kill the dill with the pill,’ a ball is thrown between a group of players. Anyone holding the ball is ‘it,’ and the aim is to somehow dislodge the ball from its possessor so that it can move between the group again. The thrill is twofold. Of course, the sudden shock of having the ball is seductive, in becoming ‘it,’ you are no longer one of a group of relations but you are, momentarily, the focus of intense energy. If you play wisely, you experience this energy as no more than Baudrillard’s scintillation or “flash of wit,” and you pass the ball swiftly. But if you allow yourself to be overcome, if you are dumbed by the shock of it all, you will be tackled by the group and your body will become the object of rough, downward play. The game emerges from the twin pleasures of having and not-having the ball, of moving and not-moving the action, of being collective and being singular.

As soon as I have the ball in my hands, the ball comes into being. It is the agent of intense sensation: I am swooning. Until the ball leaves my hands it is saturated with meanings. It is not a ball in any singular noun-sense. It is a nonsense ball, a ball that both precedes and proceeds sense. It is a post-symbolic, post-narrative, quasi-object of varied signification. In Stein’s Tender Buttons, her portraiture of domestic miscellany is similarly quasi-objective. The poem, ‘APPLE’ reads:

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake,
potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change
sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count
out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

Like in ‘kill the dill with the pill,’ when this poem is in the durational event of being read, it becomes charged with meanings. I am reading and I am experiencing the seductive hum of her language. I don’t quite know what to do with it: whether to keep moving and let the charge intensify until the duration is over and I can let it go, pass across; or whether to be shocked into stasis, to attempt possession, and risk being tackled into non-movement or submersion. The apple of the poem’s title is not an anchored referent; it does not exist to establish an analogue for the reflection of some poetic appleness. The apple-as-title is indexical; what follows in the poem is an event of variable apple-things, metonymically linked, relational by closeness, open to swerve or glitch. Things are related in this poem by hinges of ‘is’, “a green seen is called bake and change,” “sweet is bready,” “this is use,” – setting up relationships of resemblance and equivalence – or held in motion by commas, as tho listing a set of synaesthetic-experiential entities, “apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, coloured wine.”

*

I’d like to talk now about Michael Farrell’s poetry, and it how it gestures towards Stein. To be clear: I am not attempting to set up a comparative analysis of Farrell against, alongside or superimposed onto Stein. My interest is not forensic in the sense that I am not searching for evidence of Stein’s biology in the style or form of Farrell. If I am tracing a Steinian impulse it is also my own impulse; an act of continual return to what I sense as the perceptive, cognitive and imaginative objects of a certain poetic. My interest in Stein is always doubling: it is epistemological and it is phenomenological. Stein says of her own work: “if you enjoy it you understand it.” Understanding is an embodied pleasure, a sense of something happening to the self. It is a kind of critical eros. American poet and critic Joan Retallack asks, in her introduction to a recent selection of Stein: “What does an eros of language mean? In part, it’s about pleasure in the words as fondled objects of poesis, radiant in their everyday connotations, not needing to point to transcendental meaning.”

Michael Farrell is a collector and tuner of words. His poems have the serendipitous chanciness of a search engine, and the exactness of a pixel. In Farrell’s work, the anarchy of everyday language – encountered, uttered, transmitted, gleaned from decades of memorised pop and cinema – is tuned into the fine material of poetry. His latest collection of poems, a raiders guide, according to its jacket blurb, uses “principles familiar from contemporary music – sampling and remixing, repetition and substitution, permutation and chance.” The poems are composed by ‘raiding,’ not only the material of everyday language encounters, but the material of his own poetry, the raw data of his practice. This is what Charles Olson might call ‘composition by field,’ a poetic produced by process: a phase-transition where the actual entities of lived experience sublimate as actual entities of language. Olson says, “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader … the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.”

What strikes me about the experience of reading Farrell’s work is the sense of a Steinian continuous present, the sense that the poetry is creating its own time, is happening. As Retallack says of Stein, it is not that her poetry ‘talks about’ time, but that the kinetics of the grammar and the movement of the language enact a temporal event. The poem is ‘of its own time,’ it is an event rather than an artefact, souvenir or gadget, rather than a reflection or symbolic analogue of worldly things. What both Stein and Farrell demand for their work is that the focus is on how the durational experience of reading a poem that was composed in a different durational experience might come together to share the state of being-an-event. There is an overlay of durations, the feeling of these two time-senses moving with each other, encountering and affecting each other. When I use this word, ‘event,’ I am thinking of Alfred North Whitehead, for whom the event is a basic unit of experience with duration and extension. This experience is able to be sensed, in other words, is aware of its own sensual happening. Deleuze says of the Whiteheadian event, “The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration.”

Now, to look at one of Farrell’s poems closely: it seems silly not to choose the one called ‘;gertrude stein:’ tho I won’t try to argue that this wonderful poem from a raiders guide is ‘about’ Stein. The poem’s title is actually ‘semi-colon gertrude stein colon’, with gertrude stein written in lower-case. This must be a joke. Stein made damning assertions about the character-types of punctuation, accusing commas, in her lecture ‘Poetry and Grammar’, of being “servile”. Here, Stein is not title-case Stein, the Stein of biography or history. This is lower-case stein, the stein of Farrell’s own archival miscellany. This is Farrell’s stein, composed from so many readings.

The poem is formatted in three stanzas, the first preceded by a line of dashes, and the third comprised almost entirely of dashes, except for the conjunctions ‘a’, ‘to’ and ‘of’, which appear in lieu of dashes occasionally and in single quotations. Attentiveness to the connectives of language – the prepositions, conjunctions and articles – was key to Stein. In ‘Poetry and Grammar’ she says connectives are useful in their tendency to be mistaken: “[They] can live one long life being really being nothing but absolutely nothing but mistaken … That makes them irritating if you feel that way about mistakes but certainly something that you can be continuously using and everlastingly enjoying.” We know that Stein’s teacher, William James, spoke of there being a “direct feeling” of relations like ‘if,’ ‘then,’ ‘and,’ ‘from,’ ‘but,’ ‘with.’ For James, all these experiences of relations, these relational experiences, are as real, as meaningful and as sensate as anything else.

Stein wanted to use language in a way that did not favour the noun; that did not simply point to things by using names. She was interested in the hinges and linkages of language, how language happens in its own processes, how consciousness ‘becomes’ in transition. And to a certain extent, perhaps how these grammatical joiners allow the language of consciousness to move quickly, deftly, without the need to stop or the risk of becoming inert. Michel Serres talks about the conjunction as a mode of intuitive methodological inquiry that he argues is a primary condition for philosophical and poetical inventiveness. “The space between,” he says, “—that of conjunctions, the interdisciplinary ground—is still very much unexplored. One must travel quickly when the thing to be thought about is complex.”

In Farrell’s poem, there is a ‘him,’ a ‘her,’ a ‘they,’ and a ‘you,’ tho there is no indication that any two pronouns exist in relation to each other or one to its previous iteration. Almost all the nouns double as verbs, and vice versa: ‘fear,’ ‘fate,’ ‘drink,’ ‘colour,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘work,’ ‘beach,’ ‘circle,’ ‘point,’ ‘stick’ and ‘gun.’ The use of ambiguous noun-verbs was attractive to Stein too, in their tendency to efface singular semantic interpretation and so become active, locating and dislocating subjects/objects from static taxonomies. The activity suggested by non-specific pronouns and ambiguous noun-verbs mobilises an open-set topology of potential readings and processes of signification. We can’t locate the exact co-ordinates of where and how meaningful connections will be made, but we can say that the potential for meaningfulness is there, is present, abuzz.

*

In a sense, one of the most obvious connections between Stein and Farrell is difficult to talk about, because as Joan Retallack might say, it refers to the kind of ‘unpredictable pleasures’ that are involuntarily experienced, like ticklishness. It’s the funniness, the humour, the pleasure of their language used, if not unpredictably, then wryly, naughtily, astutely, warmly. At a very basic level, the surprise of a pun or the unanticipated swerve of language can cause delight. More profoundly, this delight can serve to challenge habits and expectations of reading practices. And even more profoundly, I would argue that in the case of Stein and Farrell, it can serve to challenge habits and expectations of poetic tradition. That is to say, humour can deflect, invert or corrupt generic expectations, and in doing so, can make productive, positive claims about the inventiveness of innovative poesis. In other words, this humour is not a piss-take – nor is it irony, sarcasm or schadenfraude – this is humour as newness, humour as affective surprise, humour as unsettling playfulness. What can we say about the phrase “carpet steak,” or the title “nude descending a liftshaft” other than that they delight us, surprise us? We can say we are delighted and surprised, and that these affective experiences are essential to what Retallack calls highly-charged poesis. We know the pleasures of making; we know the pleasures of playtime, the pleasures of urgent attention.

I was fortunate enough this week to hear a paper by London-based thinker Steven Connor, called ‘Living without Art’. In this wonderful paper, Connor talked about humour yoking together things with non-things, that is, working in a transitional mode where what is known or anticipated becomes unknown or unanticipated. Jokes depend on this negativity – language confronts us with the unlikely proposition that a thing is not a thing. In its unlikeliness, the proposition is charged with newness, it shifts thinking into new territories. What other response is there than to laugh? To laugh is literally a release; it releases the energy-charge that is generated in the intensity of dislocation. Stein and Farrell are both constantly dislocating language. In reading their work, the surprise of this dislocation might find its release in laughter.

Surprise makes us aware, and awareness can find surprise in any banal thing. The two modes work together in what Retallack calls highly charged poesis, a ‘making’ which is happening in both compositional and reading practices. She says: “[Highly-charged poesis] is very much about how one experiences a transformation of one’s sense of time, and about agency, one’s active role in making sense of what is happening, making collaborative meaning.”

Photo by Katie Spence

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

Imagine a very small bit of radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. In the course of an hour, a single atom of this radioactive miscellany either will or will not decay. If it does, the counter will detect the ionisation and a mechanism will relay movement so that a hammer smashes a flask of poison. If it doesn’t, no change will be detected and the flask of poison will remain intact.

Imagine that the radioactive miscellany, the Geiger counter and the poison are all securely arranged in a box with a cat. At the end of the hour, the cat will either be dead or alive, depending on whether an atom has decayed and a flask has shattered.

According to the early 20th Century Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system only transforms from a superposition of states, simultaneously one and the other, to a single state, either one or the other, when the act of observation takes place. So according to the interpretation, before the lid of the box is removed, the cat is both alive and dead. Imagine a cat smeared across parallel planes of dead and not-dead; trapped in some vibration until our gaze pulls it into stasis. After the lid comes off, you will look inside and the cat is either alive or dead. Your engagement returns smeared cat back to stable cat.

Now imagine that you have a gun to your head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. When the trigger is pulled, the particle is measured. If the particle spins in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If it is spinning anticlockwise, the gun will not fire.

You sit in a chair and pull the trigger. The gun does not fire. You continue to pull the trigger for eternity and the gun never fires. You continue to live. If you travel back in time to the beginning of the experiment, you pull the trigger and the gun discharges. You are dead. In the first case you lived and in the second you died. Every time you pull the trigger the world splits and the two possibilities occur side-by-side. Every time you pull the trigger, the chance of surviving decreases by half but never reaches a non-zero number. There will always be a small subset of unlikely worlds in which you survive. A conscious ability to observe your own creaturely sensation – in other words, to feel your own pleasure – may have ceased in the first gunfire, but you have achieved a state of quantum immortality by committing quantum suicide.

These two thought experiments, the cat and the gun, are variants of the same paradox. Schrödinger’s Cat interrogates a popular interpretation of quantum activity that runs the risk of separating experienced reality from hypothetical mechanics. The quantum suicide paradox explores the potential non-conscious selves existing across infinite universes. In the sense that dead-undead states in the second experiment are versions of the observant self, this quantum suicide model imagines Schrödinger’s paradox from the perspective of the cat.

Both experiments radicalise the time of death. We might say that we are constantly moving towards the event of our death and therefore we are always in an intimate relation with being dead. Yet this idea supposes that we are travelling on a timeline with some anticipated horizon as a limit. The rim of our experience is death and time is tugging us along. A dead-alive paradox in this idea is a fantasy. In the two thought experiments, alive and dead are two textural qualities in a complex field of potentials.

In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is able to experience events in his life – including his birth and his death – simultaneously and non-linearly. I’ll avoid the use of the phrase ‘time-travel’ here (though it is used in the novel) for two reasons. Firstly, when Billy moves through different temporal zones, his material body stays in the present, albeit in a kind of dumb, anaesthetic state. It is his consciousness and his memory of experience that moves. Secondly, the words ‘time-travel’ imply that any radical temporal movements occur on a stable x-axis, as Vonnegut writes, like beads on a string. To anchor Billy in the present and imagine that his extratemporal experiences are simply back-and-forth deviations to hallucinogenic other-times mean that we are stuck in a simple, unimaginative geometry.

If we must represent Billy’s time-experience spatially, let’s imagine it as fractal, or vortical, the texture of toffee as it cools from syrup to brittle. Constant difference and unending self-sameness. To map it would be to map a bowl of porridge. All experience is remembered, all memories are constant, all time is in flux, all chaos is sensual, all moments are stretched across spastic durations. If you want to talk about a centre of a now-time, the real Billy Pilgrim in the centre of his living, you have to first find the centre of a milkshake, a wormhole, a clusterbomb in the split-seconds after detonation. Find the centre of a melody, a toothache, a pile of shavings from a wood-carving.

Critics of Slaughterhouse 5 have said that Billy Pilgrim reveals a deeply cynical and nihilistic fatalism in Vonnegut. Billy is seen as a pin-up for every passive non-feeler who has let himself be dragged through the pathological hostilities of modern trauma; the histories of war and holocaust, the banalities of family, the stupid failures of lives and love. Yet what these criticisms assume is that Billy’s experience of loose time, his conscious, sensate, simultaneous memories, represents a passive or disengaged surrender. It assumes that Billy somehow gives up what is known as ‘free will’ in order to move across the textures of time. And yet this idea of ‘free will’ protected by Vonnegut critics falls down at the slightest nudge. Billy Pilgrim was sent to Germany as an eighteen-year-old small-towner, spirited out to the wintry dregs of an inconceivable war. This was the experience of Vonnegut, and the very fact of his service shatters whatever triumphant myths there are about the absolute free will of the individual, carving out his own fate against any odds.

The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the Earth is the only place in the universe that practices the myth of free will, which relies on the same simple geometry of a straight line. Each moment is a bead on a string and at each moment our experience of time is the experience of choice. Every choice contributes to our sense of final becoming, a catalogue of what we chose and avoided, what we achieved and what we failed to overcome. If all time is all time, as it is to Billy, it is not how we compose our lives in each moment; it is how we negotiate the total sum of all moments. In this sense, an idea of ‘free will’ might become more an idea of attentive encounter with the entirely non-Euclidean shape of experience. The first atomic swerve that produced the smallest something, the slight swoon or dip into another, the intimacy of touch and closeness, the activity of collision.

At every sentence of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is alive and dead, at war and in his marital bed, on Tralfamadore and in Ilium, New York, a cat and not-a-cat. Every potential Billy lives out each wonderful desire and failure. So it goes.

An essay of mine (based on a conference paper given at The Art of the Real in Newcastle, May 2008) has been published here at TEXT.

Teddie Adorno and Charlie Chaplin meet at a party in Malibu in the mid-1940s. Standing next to each other, they are parodies of themselves. Both in auto-exile, neither belongs to the hologrammatic fantasy of California. They are each always other.

Adorno is introduced to an actor, recently returned from war, whose missing hand has been replaced with an iron claw. As soon as the actor turns away, Chaplin, standing centre stage, mimics Adorno’s split-second expression of abject shock, that one frame in a moving image that contains the recoiling and guilt of recoiling, compensating and guilt of compensating, as the claw is sighted and the handshake ritual glitches. Chaplin captures the expression—barely a glint—and apes it. It is both an exact resemblance and a gross exaggeration, copy and caricature.

Years later, Adorno remembers this encounter in celebration of Chaplin’s 75th birthday: “All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty;” says Adorno, “solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational.” Such cautious reverence is significant. Elsewhere, Adorno superimposes laughter and cruelty as a key moment of ‘culture industry’:  “[A] laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everything else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity.”

What separates Chaplin, and perhaps what earns him this reverence, is his unknowableness, his elusive playfulness, his suggestiveness. He is not merely a producer of cultural capital, in the sense that he is not an actor or filmmaker by way of trade or profession. He is an incessant performer. His off-screen performativity is his social mode, and each banal act of clowning, each momentary update, complicates a sense of his ‘true’ self, so that the very notion of a true self might finally collapse. Chaplin is Chaplin is Chaplin. He is beyond schizophrenia and towards compulsive multiplication.

In Modern Times, Chaplin’s frequently sampled other, the Tramp, negotiates the pathological shittiness of Depression-era capitalism. The factories, when still running, are Fordist panopticons. Some workers are revolting, others are having nervous breakdowns, the majority are ground to automatons. Beautiful waif-girls are stealing bread and bananas. Cops are herding riff-raff. Gaols bloom with Commies and misfits. The rich waft past like rakish ghosts. Chaplin’s Tramp moves through the scenes as an odd composite: despite his earnest Protestant work ethic and his infallible ‘goodness,’ he is exceptionally naughty and is constantly being carted away by police. He corrupts the micromanaged body-economics of the factory assembly line by failing to cope with the repetition of bolt-wrenching. When the system corrupts Chaplin begins to dance, a truly non-profitable economy of movement for the productive industrial capitalist.

It is too simple to say that in Modern Times the Tramp performs a perfect allegory for the human spirit under threat from modernity. Indeed, it is too simple to say ‘human spirit,’ and it is certainly too simple to say that capitalism operates outside the human in order that it might threaten some organic essence. It is certainly a seductive temptation, to pit the Tramp against the superstructure and to hope that the human prevails and the machine is corrupted sufficiently. Yet it might be more interesting to imagine the Tramp—rather than exemplifying the human or standing-in for a human whole—as a composite or hybrid that operates on a plane beyond representation. In other words, Chaplin as performer becomes the Tramp as a series of cinematic images, not singular but many. His body is a collection of film grains, and the composition of the Tramp as a celluloid object has three resonances. Firstly, the material of his body as it changes through space, that is, his mime and slapstick, shape and form. Secondly, its reproduction in light. Thirdly, the relationship between the body’s movement, its cinematic image and technological processes that produces it. The Tramp is as human as the camera lens that images him, orders his composition in frames. His ego is no longer a psychological or even emotional continuum.

Walter Benjamin was excited by the implications of the cinematic body in respect to contemporary audiences (that is, contemporary in the 1930s), proposing a model of ‘innervation,’ with Chaplin as a key example. Innervation here refers to the affective flow of the on-screen body’s movement-images to the perceiving audience, so that the experience of perception simulates (and stimulates) the sensation of ‘being alongside,’ attuned with, the movement capabilities of the new cinematic technologies. So the engagement with the filmed body excites a kind of electrodynamic response in the nervous system of the perceiving body. Sensations of dissonance, acceleration, cuts and swerves.  “In its jerky and technologically mediated movements,” says Nieland, “Chaplin’s Tramp promised, as it modeled, a kind of being best suited to modernity’s public world: distracted and forgetful, dislocated and improvisational, aimless and instantaneous, at home in modernity’s mechanical world of things.” Benjamin, continues Nieland, goes even further, suggesting that Chaplin’s “anarchic personality exploded bourgeois models of personality; its “negative expressionism” set him drifting from the demands of bourgeois sociality – moral propriety, consistency of character, domestication.”

Yet there is now another danger: in setting up a loose analogue between human and machine, we approach another simple model, in which the human is not imagined in opposition to the machine, but in terms of self-similarity or psychological identification.

So, while still playing with a notion of self-sameness but complicating it, here is another idea: the parasite. In French, ‘parasite’ has three meanings. Two are shared in English, that is, the parasite as biological organism and the parasite as a relationship of social dependence. The third meaning in French is what we call, in English, static. So the parasite, as Serres suggests, might refer to any productive interference in a transmission. The parasite-as-interference model suggests any meaning transfer that is complicated, deviated, changed or added to by interloping static. In this sense, the parasite is neither wholly guest nor host, and in fact, the guest/host dialectic has no distinction in French, where both subjects of a parasitic relation are known by the same word, hôte. Rather, the parasite is the creative, corruptive, potential-filled agent of change, differentiation, agitation. The parasite doesn’t destroy the system it interferes with, but nudges it, plays with it, improvises its structural organisations. When we watch Modern Times we can imagine that Chaplin’s Tramp parasitically engages with industrial capitalism while industrial capitalism parasitically engages with the Tramp. The interference is two-way or many-ways. Subject/object structures collapse. “What is essential,” says Serres, “is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations.”

In this model, the difference produces the thing. Chaplin’s Tramp is a play of differences: if we can say that the Tramp is a character, then the character is known as a complex of minimum differences. Each movement of the body, facial expression and deviation from what is expected, framed in long and short shots, allow Chaplin’s Tramp to interfere as a mode of existence. The humour of Chaplin is in the resonances of differences and sameness, the ability to play on what is banal and fantastic, expected and unexpected, closeness and distance, intimacy and alienation. This is clowning, among other things. We laugh because play of difference is key to experience: fluctuation, attraction and repulsion, atomic collision, the pleasures of opposition, synaethesia, hyphens, the burlesque. Each making the other. Interference might have political mobility if we imagine the parasite as an organised cell of activism. Interference might imply a radical approach to clock time, where clock time operates at the unit of onward production. In this sense, interference might be anti-progress, where progress is accumulation of systemised time-units in an economy of productivity. As a parasitic relation, the Tramp works these differences. The sensation of the world and of being in the world. Tea gurgling in the gut, twisted hankie up the nostril of the boss, coffee poured through the cavity of a roast chook.

It feels appropriate to end with another snippet of Adorno’s strange and lovely birthday dedication. The reverie of comparison here is almost incomprehensible – Adorno moves from synaethesia to total eccentricity, and yet in a movement that feels entirely appropriate, fucking with the smoothness of metaphor. He writes:

The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteors’ aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and that so become him.

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me – or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed – doomed to be mine forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I am a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favourite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me – I want to lick the flesh from her bones.

Deleuze and Guattari, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, speak of a ‘body without organs’. A phrase on loan from Artaud, the body without organs refers to a limit, never reached but always desired, at which all things in flow (that is, all matter and all energy of all bodies) would flow freely into each other, without distinction. The body without organs is described as a set of practices or a collection of intensities, rather than a notion or concept. It is an exercise in continual experimentation, a site of production, distribution, crossing, passing, slipping, becoming and unbecoming, decaying and failing. “The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels,” write Deleuze and Guattari. The body is circumstantial matter, dying at once as living, shedding and shrivelling and bloating.

In imagining the body without organs, we can begin to surrender the idea of the organism, a whole bounded by an identity and a destiny. We can surrender the notion of the psychoanalytical inner-spirit. We can even surrender freedom, because we recognise that freedom is unconstrained flow in the same way that capitalism is unconstrained flow. What is left is desire. “Desire is revolutionary.”

At the beginning of Sexus, Henry Miller falls in love with Mara, a woman soon to be renamed Mona – rather inexplicably – and elsewhere called Hildred or Sabina. In Miller’s life, this woman was June, born Judith, his second wife. Throughout Miller’s writing, she is not only nominally schizophrenic but is slippery, variable and painfully unknowable as an object of desire. She is seductive. She is a series of surfaces, a cinematic image, a pathogen. When Miller meets her, he is so sickened by seduction that he renounces ownership of his body. Any romantic notion of the heart as the central organ of love is abandoned. The heart, yes, but only if the heart is seized from the ribcage, torn from its ventricles and then butchered. The heart, but only if the heart is one organ amongst every organ: the kidney and liver, spleen and gallbladder, brain and eyes. Love is disembowelment, love is taxidermy. Total ownership: I love you, therefore I need you to embalm me, marinate me, swaddle me, push me through cheesecloth and collect my curds.

Miller’s self-mutilation moves towards the body without organs. By refusing himself a functional or autonomous body, he becomes a discordant collection of intensities. He is no longer skeleton and muscle, nervous system and blood. He is now just sex-thought and misery, desire and bitterness. He is the memory of a body, patched together with the meagre sustenance of discarded proteins, shed from his lover: ear wax, dead skin, dried follicles and clots. This is true dependence. This is what we mean when we tell someone we need them. This is what happens when give ourselves up, unconditionally, irreversibly, with the full thrust of our surrender.

Miller’s renouncement occurs at the beginning of Sexus, and so we can imagine that for the rest of the book, he is sniffing around the limits of this non-bodily threshold. Fucking, eating and sleeping are intermittent occasions of intense sensation. Here and there, Miller is fed plates of pickled herrings and black rye bread, honey and figs, sweet brandy, cold sausages and hunks of cheese. The meals appear and then disappear. Sex, too, appears and disappears. For all the indefatigable rock-hard-prickness, there lacks a definable consciousness to Miller’s sexuality. And yet, it is not unproblematic. Miller’s synecdochic refrain of cunt-as-woman reeks of classically misogynistic objectification.  Elsewhere, the woman as an unpredictable and terrifying force of seduction reminds us of the abject feminine so over-represented as a cultural archetype and so feared by men.

In every sexual encounter, Henry brings his lover – whoever she may be – to climax at least once, often three or four times. Afterwards, the postcoital euphoria inevitably descends into hungry, hysterical demands for more: “Where do you live?” asks one lover, Elsie, after their first encounter. “Where can I see you alone? Write me tomorrow … tell me where to meet you. I want a fuck everyday … do you hear? Don’t come yet, please. I want it last forever.” It’s easy to get weary of Miller’s interminable sex, his non-committal and flukey ability to push lovers right up to the edge of their sanity. But there is something attractive, at least in terms of language, of his ability write deftly both the absurdity and the banality of sex. Take for example, the paragraph that follows a chance liaison with the wife of a friend:

I had a strange taste in my mouth, of fish glue and Chanel 976½. My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition. When I got into the street I felt weak in the knees. I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks. A royal bit of fucking, I thought to myself.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about the “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter” of the body without organs. “The matrix of intensity,” they say, is “intensity = 0”. Zero here is not a quantifiable nothing; it is simply energy, neither positive nor negative. Kinetic energy. Movement. A composition of intensities. The paradox of Miller’s sexuality is that his model of the body without organs is fundamentally impotent. In dis-possessing his organs, in unclaiming bodily autonomy, Miller is merely a collection of senses, each transmitting and transmitted across the membranes of his clumsy protein-hybrid. His love for Mona is an electric current, a feedback loop. It literally holds him together, yet it is corrosive, liable to drop out or skip, unsustainable. He is both masochist and sadist and fulfils neither role particularly well. At the end of the book, Miller becomes a dog. It is both a hallucination and the final transformation of his body without organs. Love has made him delirious, and poverty – a kind of chronic poverty of the body – has made him useless as a man. His only chance of survival is metamorphosis, a becoming-animal, the transformation to skulking mangy cur.

This bodily poverty is of course corollary to a broader poverty experienced by Miller in the solidification and acceleration of industrial capitalism. Food, sex and art have been absorbed into a cultural economy, and Miller is, in every sense of the word, indebted. In the following section from Sexus, Miller returns to New York after a picnic with his first wife and their child. He is on a train, watching as the city-grid starts to appear ahead:

Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison. A pair of every kind hanging by the hocks. At one end of the line starvation; at the other end, bankruptcy. Between stations the pawnbroker, with three golden balls to signify the triune God of birth, buggery and blight. Happy days. … Every now and then the doors open and shut: freshes batches of meat for the slaughterhouse. Little scraps of conversation, like the twittering of tit-mice. Who would think that the chubby little youngster beside you will in ten or fifteen years be shitting his brains out with fright on a foreign field? All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca. That doesn’t cost anything or commit you in any way. Not like eating or fucking, or making works of art. You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is still there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. Death and transfiguration – into shit! The department store life – with flimsy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter. No matter what interpretation you put on it, every thought, every deed, is cash-registered. You’re fucked from the moment you draw your first breath. One grand international business machine corporation. Logistics, as they say.

“All writing is PIG SHIT,” says Artaud, and Deleuze elaborates: “that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noise, alimentary, and excremental bits.” Language, as waste matter, as intensities passed through the body. Composed and decomposed. To shit, to speak. Language as excrement is language as process, rather than language as a device or act of expression. A process that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “ploughs the crap out of being and its language.” Continuing, D and G suggest that

The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content.

Certainly, Miller’s writing ploughs the crap out of being and its language. For Miller, the excremental experience is peaceful and productive. Time alone, passing waste, acknowledging the organic processes of energy transformation. Shitting is not just a quotidian pleasure; it is a consciously non-capitalised act, a counterfeit currency. The material exchange of shitting produces no profits. It is a form of self-gifting. For Miller, an oppositional engagement – we might say, in the form of “immaculate defecation”– with capitalised flow is the only possible engagement. He is a failure as a capitalist (not least for his decision to become a writer).

Shitting is the last point of active contact, the threshold from which all connections pass through a final connection. The rectum as event horizon. All nutritious encounters that the body has experienced are archived in this process, even if only momentarily. For the body without organs, shitting is the seasonal practice of surrendering jetsam overboard.  Miller’s model of the body is a bounty of rot: the gassy and the stinky, the sex-funk and the sweat-drip. His language is a scalpel, an agent of fermentation, colonic irrigation, purge and squeeze.