When Eyeballs Land on Blazing Paragraphs
ScatØlØgically Yours by Davis Schneiderman
Schneiderman’s work follows the renegade countertradition of linguistic experiment, taking up where William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, among others, left off. With Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), a pastiche of apocryphal marginalia surrounding the life and work of fictional writer Henri d’Mescan, Schneiderman terrorizes the form of the introductory college reader while jamming two fingers in the eye sockets of author-ity. (P.S. He does this within pages united by a sandpaper cover that quietly burns off the covers of neighboring books: subterfuge.) With Abecedarium (Chiasmus, 2007), a collaborative novel written under preset time constraints with Carlos Hernandez, Schneiderman and his co-author lose themselves to the third mind that develops between them, and also to the third minds that emerge from the interaction between their text and the texts it appropriates. In doing so, the authors destabilize plot, setting, time, the rigidity of language itself. Like Abecedarium, which follows its protagonist as he moves through various episodes in an unspecified near future, DIS, (or, the Shadow of the DOME of Pleasure) (BlazeVOX, 2007) is a sci-fi picaresque, following an autoerotic fetishist as he explores a virtual-reality pleasuredome while avoiding a cult group whose arcane mythology centers around a World Worm originary god.
DIS’s Cultists reappear in Schneiderman’s most recent manuscript, ScatØlØgically Yours, alongside one of Multifesto’s secondary characters, here catapulted to protagonist status. Dial-Up Networking is either the best Acker creation who never lived onpage, or Acker herself reembodied into a tattooed paramilitary pleasuredome — as if there were a difference between the two. Either way, Dial-Up is a vicious sheela-na-gig, a woefully landlocked pirate stuck in the dried-out Lake Michigan of the novel’s setting and wreaking havoc however she can. That Dial-Up and the Cultists, among other characters and props, appear and reappear in Schneiderman’s ouevre suggests an intertextuality among and between them: Schneiderman collaborating with and referencing Schneiderman. This sort of self-referential intertextuality is unsurprising considering the ways in which his novels, particularly Abecedarium, work to escape authority by producing layers of multiplicity, in what could be argued is an enactment of the Deleuzian multiple.
Deleuze will crop up again, but first, the premise of the novel. In ScatØlØgically Yours, we are transported to the year 2039, when Lake Michigan is waterless, dry, scabbed over by relentlessly burning fires, and now called the Wildland-Urban Interface. Two groups struggle to gain possession of the Interface: the Quadrilateral Commission powers-that-be, who have been steadily building planned upper-middle-class communities since the lake’s Great Drainage in 2000, and who are stumping to win the Interface’s statehood; and the Cultists, aka Umma-Segnites, aka Manueverians, poverty-stricken negativists who have devoted their lives to the World Worm, aka Umma-Segnus. Naturally, Quadrilateral wants to annihilate the Cultists, or more preferably turncoat them into complacent citizens of any of various Quadrilateral communities. And naturally, the Cultists are resistant to such nefarious plans. Meanwhile, there’s rabid terrorist leader Dial-Up Networking, a rebel from the Quadrilateral life, and her band of guerrilla punk Blackout Angels, who are from the novel’s outset getting increasingly creative, and increasingly scatological, with their anti-Quadrilateral tactics.
If this is dizzying, try sucking on a Schneidermanian sentence: your tongue and/or eyeballs may get speared with the bubbling poison-darts of its words. As in his other novels, the world of ScatØlØgically Yours is an explicitly linguistic world — sure, it is populated by the traditional fictional elements: plot, character, setting, so on — but Schneiderman is emphatic about laying bare the linguistic nature of these elements; emphasizing, for instance, that language is not employed to describe setting, but is rather deployed to create setting. The following short passage, wherein the novel’s second protagonist, Qui, a Quadrilateral employee embarking on a trip to the corporation’s next planned community, provides an appropriately metalinguistic example:
Qui scans the language of the horizon. A tinkling curtain of smoking sentences and blazing paragraphs, punctuated by the glyphs of silence and introspective phrases, diagrammed with flaming underlines.
(42 in my version)
Here the author’s use of figurative language is not metaphor: the horizon is literally composed of language, as are (accordingly) all images, all characters, all the Cultist mythology, all of the narrative itself.
Elsewhere and throughout the novel, Schneiderman works to underline the physicality of language, doing so by attaching it inextricably to the body as well as by stressing the physical nature of reading. Both of the novel’s protagonists, Qui and Dial-Up Networking, communicate through their bodies, specifically through their bodies’ orifices. Qui is perpetually and relentlessly coughing, a kind of Deleuzian stuttering that introduces noise into the “order-words” that he, a drudge to Quadrilateral, must obey (Deleuze 22). As Deleuze explains in the Dialogues, using the example of a schoolteacher, a person in a position of power does not provide information through language so much as s/he “communicates ordersÉnecessarily conforming to dominant meanings.” But beneath that linguistic schema is what Deleuze says “could be either the shout, or silence, or stuttering, and which would be like language’s line of flight, speaking in one’s own language as a foreigner” (22-23). This kind of stuttering Deleuze sees as liberating, as a way to resist the power apparatus of language and its dominant meanings. In these terms, Qui can be seen as something like a Kafka character equipped with Artaud’s screaming body, an employee lost in the system but whose body, with its persistent coughing and occasional vomiting, manifests resistance by stuttering “as a foreigner” in his own language.
Foul-mouthed Dial-Up Networking, meanwhile, speaks through her cunt in the language of desire, desire so powerful it impels her to inhabit other bodies. Her character is similar to O of Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, and surely indebted to terrorist-pirate Thivai of Acker’s Empire of the Senseless: she is a desiring machine, her mission to fuck and bomb. Where the project of Acker’s characters is exploratory, saddled with the task of finding or creating new worlds where they can exist fully in bodies that desire (where in this world they cannot), Schneiderman’s Dial-Up has given up the possibility of existing fully in her own body; rather, her new world is created through the act of becoming someone else, inhabiting another’s body. And so she “jumps” into others via fucking, not unlike the way in which a narrative inhabits its readers by jumping in through the eyeballs.
Eyeballs are important in ScatØlØgically Yours, especially as they relate to Dial-Up: she has lost use of one of hers, and it is ringed with tattoos like the rings of a tree trunk. In Dial-Up’s sections, Bataille’s Story of the Eye is referenced both explicitly (26, 165) and implicitly, with Dial-Up intentionally confusing her cunt’s eye with her good eye: “the open eyeball of my cunt” (34). Schneiderman’s novel is a Story of the Eye that is surely as grotesque and surreal as the original, updated to the future, where America has died to be resurrected as Post-America, and where sex is not wedded to death, as it is in Bataille, but is here wedded to inhabitation, identity-shift, possibility: a becoming, in the Deleuzian sense.
When Dial-Up jumps a body via fucking, she is becoming-other. Deleuze explains becomings as “nuptials,” the “opposite of a couple,” the antithesis of a binary machine. The wasp and orchid being the famous example: “There is a wasp-becoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture since ’what’ each becomes changes no less than ’that which’ becomes” (2). Dial-Up, inhabiting another body, is neither Dial-Up nor her host, but a host-becoming of Dial-Up and a Dial-Up-becoming of the host: an assemblage, a “we”. In this novel, sex functions as the path to assemblage, a way of performing the multiple. The sexual encounter, then, gives birth to “a stammering” which enables “active and creative line[s] of flight” (Deleuze 9-10). Dial-Up’s sexual conquests are thus the enactments of possibility; the potential for a new world, a way out of the novel’s apocalyptic fire-lake and the detritus of Post-America’s late-capitalist power apparatus.
A similar story of the eye is played out for and with the reader, whose interaction with the text is of course mostly through eyes. ScatØlØgically Yours is Schneiderman at his most brutal, each sentence designed to tattoo the reader’s eyes with unthinkably grotesque images in a replication of the tattoos that ring Dial-Up’s bad eye. The author makes explicit the physicality of reading: when Dial-Up gets locked in a library, her first-person changes to second, now directed outward at the reader, and she realizes, pulling a book from her face, that, when reading, “the body is never really severedÉrather, the audience’s eye is sliced” (208). Moments later, she sees words swimming in her mirrored good eye. She “[has] become a book” and is now “nowhere to be found” (212). She, the reader, you, me, are now not ourselves, but an assemblage, neither reader nor book but both, together, an encounter, a double capture, a we.
Don’t forget to blink.
An Interview
with the Experimental Writer and Multimedia Artist
Davis Schneiderman 
Davis Schneiderman excerpt from ScatØlØgically
Yours by
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
