Davis Schneiderman and the Third Mind: An Interview
with the Experimental Writer and Multimedia Artist
An excerpt from this interview originally appeared
in Issue Three of Mildred Pierce
Magazine (http://mildredpierce.wordpress.com).
Abecedarium is a collaborative novel that
follows a nonagenarian man named Fex who is gifted
with superior, highly coveted genes in a society
where DNA is bought, sold, traded, and stolen. The
setting shifts with each chapter, moving from a carnival
to the Nazi occupation of France to the Bowie County
Fair’s 143rd
Annual Steak-a-Rama, all on the set of what sounds
suspiciously like a reality TV show. Unlike a realist
narrative, Fex undergoes no real character arc as
the novel progresses, and there is very little of
what could be called a plot or narrative arc; the
book can be read in virtually any order. But plot,
setting, linearity/nonlinearity seem of lesser concern
here. More important is that Abecedarium is an experiment
in collaboration, and a linguistic experience all
its own.
Davis Schneiderman and Carlos Hernandez wrote Abecedarium
together over five sessions in an apartment in Ithaca,
NY, where they would each write for a period, switch
seats, “edit/overwrite” each other’s
work, and switch again to edit/overwrite once more.
Through this process, Schneiderman and Hernandez
claim in the Note on Process that prefaces the novel,
a “third mind” developed, moving between
them as they wrote. They call this mind Fex, and
Fex, also the protagonist is arguably the only stable
element in a text that works to destabilize character,
setting, language itself. But if Fex is the author
that has arrested and supplanted Schneiderman’s and
Hernandez’s authorities, Fex is not the only author,
for branching off of this third mind are other third
minds that have developed between Fex and authors
including Lewis Carroll, Bjšrk, and William
S. Burroughs — whose book The Third Mind, written
with Brion Gysin and which itself appropriates the
titular concept from elsewhere, is the obvious reference
for Schneiderman and Hernandez’s own use of the third
mind in explaining their project. Intertextual collaboration,
then, is just as important to the project of Abecedarium
as the collaboration between Schneiderman and Hernandez
that is at its forefront. In this way the novel produces
layers of multiplicity that allow it to escape the
function of the author as it relates to the power
apparatus of the state.
Escaping authority, enacting multiplicity, writing
between points: the project rings of Deleuze and
Guattari. Abecedarium exercises a number of Deleuzian
elements, notably the rhizome, the multiple, and
the nomad. In his Dialogues, written with Claire
Parnet, Deleuze explains that his collaborations
with Guattari are never about working together, but
working “between the two” (17). “We
stopped being ‘author,’” Deleuze claims (17). “What
mattered was not the points” — the authors
as individuals — “but the collection of bifurcating,
divergent and muddled lines” — the rhizome
— “which constituted [A Thousand Plateaus]
as a multiplicity and which passed between the points,
carrying them along without ever going from the one
to the other” (ix). The rhizome, Deleuze explains,
is a structure like grass, producing multiplicity
by growing from the middle (viii). This structural
conception stands opposed to the arboreal model:
where traditional models of thought put forth the
book as a “hierarchy of root, trunk, and branch,” Deleuze
theorizes it as a “multiplicity of interconnected
shoots going off in all directions” (Translator’s
Introduction xii).
Schneiderman and Hernandez’s description of a third
mind works similarly to the kind of line between
points that Deleuze describes above. Fex is not simply
the sum of both writers, but something entirely different
that emerges from their synthesis. Fex is the encounter
between the two; in Deleuzian terms, Fex is a “double
capture”; he works by “showing what
the conjunction AND is, neither a union, nor a juxtaposition,
but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken
line which always sets off at right angles, a sort
of active and creative line of flight” (9-10).
Abecedarium is a rhizome that grows from the stammering
borne from the two writers’ conjunction. As such,
the writers manage to sidestep the function of the
author, escaping into a kind of anonymity where their
individual contributions are neither identifiable
nor important. In the process, they produce the multiple, “break[ing]
free from structure … producing a rhizome and
not a root” (26).
Why do the multiple? What are the politics inherent
in performing multiplicity? While Schneiderman will
claim no political agenda in the interview below,
any use of an alternative literary model is in some
sense a political act. To perform the multiple is
political, perhaps even revolutionary, for it battles
with the bulk of Western philosophy and its insistence
on binaristic modes of thought. In a section of the
Dialogues signed by Parnet, she links the binary
machine to apparatuses of power and explains how
language works within the binary: “Language
is not made to be believed but to be obeyed” (22).
But beneath the order-words — the words that carry
dominant meanings — is what Deleuze refers to as
the stuttering and which others might call noise;
this subterranean usage of language is “like
language’s line of flight” (22). The goal
of the multiple is to produce these lines of flight
by deterritorializing language and resisting the
binary machine and its insistence on order-words
(26).
The author fits in because any claim to authority
is necessarily a declaration of power and a gesture
of allegiance to apparatuses of power. Parnet explains
that, any time an author is designated, “thought
is subjected to an image and writing is made an activity
different from life, having its ends in itself” (25).
Authority claims power, and “power is always
arborescent” (25). Writing’s aim is, or should
be, according to Deleuze, “to carry life to
the state of a non-personal power” (50). To
do this, it must “[renounce] claim to any
territory” and to authority (50). In a sense,
Deleuze is imagining a purely democratic mode of
writing, absent of hierarchies of power.
This is where the nomad comes in. “Nomads
are always in the middle,” say Deleuze and
Parnet. They have “no history,” only
geography, and their paths trace unorganized and
uncontainable lines of flight (31). Nomadic organization
is rhizomatic, then, in opposition to the relationships
of power that are “codified in a State” (32).
The Deleuzian project — “to make thought
a nomadic power” — purports to “shake” the
state model of power, to disarm or unsettle “the
idol or image which weights down thought, the monster
squatting on it” (32). Abecedarium’s Fex,
both the character and the third mind that writes
the book, is the nomad. As a character, Fex traces
lines of flight across numerous temporalities, geographies,
and discourses. His path is uncontained, uncontainable.
And yet, though Abecedarium seems to almost uncannily
adhere to the Deleuzian model of the book, it is
not interested in doing only that, and in doing it
rigorously. As it does with nearly every constraint
or rule or game that its writers have set up for
it, the novel sidesteps and violates this model at
the same time that it seems to embody it. For instance,
while the novel manages to escape authority through
multiplicity and in so doing resists the binary machine,
its adherence to stable gender binaries, to the stable
heteronormativity that Fex seems to project, seems
potentially problematic. In the interview below,
Schneiderman explains that he and Hernandez wanted
Fex to remain stable amidst a web of destabilization.
As for the other rules, the book derives its tension
precisely from alternately adhering to and undercutting
them.
In his response to a question asking him to describe
the avant-garde, Schneiderman posits that an avant-garde
work is aware of its market status and its materiality.
Abecedarium’s imperfect enactment of the Deleuzian
multiple indeed highlights its own seams by foregrounding
Schneiderman and Hernandez’s collaboration, by refusing
to claim authority in the traditional sense. Add
to this Deleuzian model the use of Burroughsian cut-ups
and other kinds of intertextualities, and the result
is a book that is both aware of and resists its ‘bookness’
on all fronts, recognizing and reinforcing its place
in a lineage of predecessors while producing lines
of flight at the same time. Its title purports to
be a primer to the alphabet; that there is no simple
A to Z here, but rather an order that is, as Schneiderman
says, “fungible,” suggests that Abecedarium
is a primer to a new alphabet, one that is not an
alphabet at all, but an assemblage of generative
lines of flight.
What follows is an interview with Schneiderman done
in two installments. The first was conducted over
email; the second in person while at the 2008 &NOW
Festival of Innovative Art and Literature at Chapman
University in Orange, CA. The two installments are
interspersed. Hernandez did not respond to emails
requesting an interview.
Interview
MM: What is exciting about collaboration for you?
DS: I think of all my work as collaborative. There’s
two types of collaboration — well, there’s more
than two, but I’ll break it into two. One type is
where you’re explicitly collaborating with another
person, as I do with Carlos [Hernandez in Abecedarium],
and as I do in many of my other works — I’m about
to do a piece with Tim Guthrie, who’s here [at &NOW],
he’s kind of a multimedia artist. And then there’s
the collaboration one does in a pastiche sense, when
you’re interacting, interfacing, intertextualizing
with older authors, and you can do this very implicitly
in the kind of anxiety of influence way — you write,
and you’re very influenced by Proust, and it’s kind
of floating in the back of your mind. Or it could
be more in a Kathy Acker sense, and I think of Blood
and Guts in High School, with Jean Genet. She meets
Genet, she borrows from a book from one of his Moroccan
friends, with the text taken directly from it. So
there’s that type of collaboration.
What I’m interested in is the Kathy Acker type,
because I like that explicit materiality of the writing
process. I don’t like to pretend that there are no
seams in writing. Collaboration shows those seams,
and I like that.
MM: How do you differentiate between this project
(Abecedarium) and projects where you’ve used an alter
ego as a collaborator? Why was it important for you
to take up a more actualized collaboration, and to
market it as a collaborative novel?
DS: The alter-ego methodology of my text Multifesto:
A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil, limited
edition 2004), a fabricated reader of a fabricated
writer, edited by me, and Phoenelia Yeer, who may
or may not be fabricated, traces the work of d’Mescan,
his precursor Henry Mescaline, and Mescaline’s 1960s
editor David Schneiderman, the latter of whom certainly
existed at one time and in one particular place-well,
these are just explicitly acrobatics of the same
multiple-ego situation of all writers. Take Deleuze
and Guattari: the only way to be multiple is to make
the multiple happen in the process of making a book.
In this text, I collaborate with not only myself,
but also Genet, Acker, William S. Burroughs and a
hundred others, whose words appears in various guises
throughout the text.
I would not call this an un-actualized collaboration,
but a deliberate pastiche that in its constitutive
vectors operates similarly to the two-person approach
of Abecedarium. In that text, [written with] Carlos
Hernandez, a real person, in the same sense that
you or I are real, the multiplicity of the text [is
actualized] (your word) through its composition method.
We write, unwrite, overwrite, amend, elide, and fight
each other, or, versions of each other-implied authors-across
the different sections. I won’t say which sections
originated with either of us, but if I were writing,
first, say, the chapter, “Fex During the Occupation
of France” (Chapter 5), it was no more the
me responding to you now who wrote that text, then
it was the you asking me these questions now who
wrote your teen-angst poetry. I don’t simply mean
that it is a question of time (we are different now,
than before), but rather, that a collaboration like
Abecedarium — with its few ground rules — creates its
authors in the process of its composition. We do
not plan and outline and roadmap and stencil and
trace. No, we write as we write, and in doing so,
the character of Fex writes me, a particular version
of myself at a particular moment — during the writing
of the “France” chapter. Thus, the
collaboration is as much about its process as it
is about the fact that two people worked on it. Multifesto,
while expressing different parameters of construction,
operates homologously. Both books are collaborative.
All texts are collaborative.
MM: I know that you have a forthcoming anthology
on collaboration.
DS: On the exquisite corpse. Which is a type of
collaboration, certainly. This is tracing the exquisite
corpse from its surrealist incarnation as writing
— “the exquisite corpse will drink the young
wine” was the first game — and also visual;
and the many, many different ways it’s been used.
My essay is about an online collaboration I did
with four, five other liberal arts colleges, where
a student at my school would write something and
another student would respond with a painting — all
digital, all electronic. So collaboration is in the
background there [in the anthology as a whole], but
it’s in the foreground in my mind. There are two
other editors, and I think their concerns are not
the same as mine. But it’s certainly part of the
essay.
MM: Do you think it’s safe to say we’re in an age
of heightened collaborativity?
DS: I
don’t think it’s ever safe to say anything
like that, because for every person who agrees with
it, others wouldn’t. But if you look at the
rise of digital/electronic culture and the internet
— I’m thinking of a few years ago when
David Bowie had a contest, where he posted twenty
or thirty loops of his songs, and the best remix
got used in a car commercial? That’s sort of
the official co-opting of the strategy. For years
people have been doing
— and they still do — Bjork remixes
through SubRosa. Bjork doesn’t officially
approve them, but she doesn’t
take them down. So I think, something about Flickr
and MySpace and Facebook … I mean, the party
lines say yes, these are more collaborative. But
I don’t necessarily think they’re deliberately
collaborative. I think they’re collaborative
simply because those are the mechanisms of creating,
and they’re not thinking
about it theoretically. I think that will come later,
people will look back ten years from now and think, “This
means something in the story of where art has gone.”
MM: Why do you think the attachment to the notion
of a single author, the solitary genius, continues
to persist?
DS: It’s kind of a legally ensconced fiction, and
what I mean by that, if you know anything about the
beginning of copyright, the first copyright law in
the western world was like 1709, called the Statute
of Anne in London, and it was to protect London booksellers,
who had a kind of monopoly on a particular author’s
work, from Scottish pirates who would come in and
would buy a book and do it cheaper. It had nothing
to do with the rights of the author. The author was
still at the end of a feudal patronage period. So
it’s only when you get into the Romantic era, and
you have someone like Wordsworth advocating heavily
for what became the Copyright Act of 1842, that you
begin to get this Romantic idea of the author as
solitary genius, and the production of that author,
in the form of legal copyright, as something that
is owned and protected, of the inner spirit or the
soul.
The idea didn’t even exist in Shakespeare’s time,
as seen in the fact that basically all of his plays
are pastiche and heavily borrowed from other works.
I don’t think anyone would have given that a second
thought. But if someone were to attempt to do what
Shakespeare did today, even if they got away with
it by fair use, it would be looked down upon. It
would be seen as unoriginal.
I think it’s such a big deal because, and all the
critical legal studies will tell you, that the law
doesn’t exist prior to the articulation of the law.
It’s the legal code itself that creates the law.
It’s not like there are universal doctrines that
are inscribed in the law. The law sort of says what
the law is and thus becomes the law. So I think that
we just live in this society where this has been
part of the legal code, and in the late 1800s, in
the robber baron period, you get corporations becoming
individual entities according to the law, and they
begin to make use of these copyright laws. And because
consumer capitalism develops at such a rampant pace
in the United States, it gets dovetailed with this
idea, too. So by the time you get McDonald’s suing
anyone who uses their logo, the idea of originality
and genius is pretty well established within our
society.
These are not necessarily my ideas; this is kind
of the summary of copyright scholarship.
MM: In your “Note on Process,” you
explain how the process of editing and reediting
each other’s work “encouraged us to lose ourselves
in the work so that a third mind that moves between
us could develop.” I wonder if you can speak
to the influence Burroughs had on this project. (I’m
assuming that your idea of the third mind was appropriated
from Burroughs.) In what ways do you see Burroughs’s
strategies and theories of writing as relevant to
the present cultural moment?
DS: As a Burroughs scholar, I find myself always
playing with these concepts, and, in fact, I am in
the midst of a multi-year project to bring out a
new edition of The Third Mind [by Burroughs and Brion
Gysin], based, hopefully, on the original text from
the 1960s, and not merely the altered version from
the late 1970s. The former uses a series of astounding
Burroughs/Gysin collages, which, due to expense,
were never published. Burroughs and Gysin, you might
know, took “the third mind” from a
self-help book called Think
and Grow Rich by Napoleon
Hill. You think. You grow rich. I assume my residuals
from Abecedarium will do the same for me. As for
Carlos, I plan to screw him out of his share.
What’s interesting about The
Third Mind is the economics
of the concept, and, the economic world reversed
(à la Pierre Bourdieu) of Burroughs’s
oeuvre. I’ve
taken many things from WSB: most prominently a fearlessness
in the approach to making a text. The “machine” that
creates the project is always a version, in its nuances,
of Gysin’s Dreammachine: a spinning cylinder
with a light bulb in the center, both animating and
mesmerizing the viewer. WSB’s strategies are
multifarious in the same manner — they animate and
mesmerize. Don’t
fight fire with fire, but with a recording of fire.
Pour everything into a cement mixer and see what
comes out. I’m always wary of who manufactures
the cement mixer, though.
Parts of Abecedarium, especially “Fex’s Contractual
Obligations” are cut-up in the Burroughsian
mode, while at the same time actualizing (your earlier
word) an argument Carlos and I had while writing
the book. He felt that I was overtaking his sentences,
writing in between them, detourning them, while he
was doing more the work of addition and fleshing
out. My approach is always linguistic, and so, I
laid out the argument in that chapter — which is perhaps
one of the “harder” ones to get through.
It jettisons everything you’d want to have, and for
that, I thank Burroughs.
MM: Can you clarify a bit what you mean by that
last sentence?
DS: By the “it” I mean the chapter
itself. Well, it’s a cut-up that’s materially trying
to — I mean, you wouldn’t know this unless I’m telling
you — but I mean, a reference to the process of
writing. Carlos was very upset at one point; he just
felt like the book was sounding like me. He’s a little
more linear writer; his content is odd and kooky,
but linguistically he doesn’t do the things that
I do. So where he would add to the end of my sentence
or write the next sentence, I would insert words
between them, to break apart, fragment them. He was
upset about that at one point. So I took that argument
and basically wrote one chapter, wrote the argument
down and sliced and cut up the argument. I gave it
to him after my hour and said, “All right,
here, do something with this. What can you do to
get back at me?” And I think in a weird way
that defused the tension of that moment.
The chapter is a cut-up in the Burroughsian tradition,
but it’s not an exact cut-up. You know, if you sort
of try and count and add the words, it doesn’t … You
think you understand the system, but the system is
not a system, it’s sort of an accidental system.
I’m not being doctrinaire about it. And I do that
in all of my work. I establish a game, but I don’t
think it’s all that important to be faithful to the
game. I like to play with the tension between the
expectations of the game rather than the expectations
of traditional narrative. You open a realist novel,
it goes from A to Z, you know where your climax is.
It’s a game, and from it you understand the narrative.
I don’t want to give you the ease of understanding.
I want to present a game that’s in opposition to
something else, but then I want to do the things
that are in opposition to the game at the same time.
MM: So when you say cut-up — I’m familiar with Kathy
Acker, not Burroughs so much. Does [the language
in this chapter] have an actual source?
DS: No, so this is another thing. I’m cutting up
my own stuff. Although I can’t promise that there
isn’t the work of other writers in there, because
there is, but not in the same way that Acker in Empire
of the Senseless will have a whole paragraph, or
Federman will do that, and then chop it around. Or
Burroughs will take the Saturday Evening Post and
do it. What I start with [in “Fex’s Contractual
Obligations”] is the substance of the argument
I have with Carlos, and that becomes the original
text. It’s a text you don’t see. It’s an argument
of oral text. And then I start cutting and moving
and playing around with that, in the context of this
reality game show. This is like when Survivor was
just starting to get big.
MM: I looked up some quotes that were in italics,
or some phrases that were italicized that seemed
suspect, that I thought might have original sources.
DS: And did you find anything?
MM: I did. I found some stuff.
DS: Tell me. I’d be interested to know what I used,
because one doesn’t remember these things.
MM: I was going to ask you how that comes about
for you. Do you actually go to a text when you’re
stuck and pick something up?
DS: It’s interesting, because sometimes things stay
with me. And it’s really weird, but there’s a great
novel by Brian Gysin, The Process, which is a great
novel, I think underserved. There’s something about
a festering, gaping baby mouth. I wrote that, and
then I was reading one of my favorite writers, Jean
Genet, and I found it there. This process took two
or three years, and when I saw it in Genet, I was
very surprised because I thought that I had written
the lines. I had just confused myself so much. So
what did you find?
MM: From “Fex Falls”: “Mechanical
devices exteriorize the processes of the human organism.
Fex stops at a flat rock floating inches above the
rushing turbine of water; he removes a razor.” The
italics come from Burroughs’s The
Place of Dead Roads.
DS: How bout that. And I’ve written extensively
on this novel, although not in years. I can’t tell
you whether this was just in my mind, or if there
was a copy of this laying around. More often than
not, there’s a copy laying around: it’s a book that
I like, and I know that there’s something I’ll find.
I’ll encourage my students to run in the basement
of our library and take ten random phrases and start
with that, and I do the same kinds of things. But
occasionally like the Genet-Gysin line, which I assume
he borrowed from Genet, I sort of have it there [in
my mind]. There’s a famous quote from the French
Calvinist philosopher Blaise Pascal: “God
is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.” And I’ve used that
line, in fact I have an e-book from Blazevox with
that as a kind of subtitle. And I was just reading
an introduction to Borges’ collection Labyrinths,
and Borges, I found out in the introduction, was
fascinated with this line, and traced it to the 12th
Century, so it’s much older than Pascal, in all these
slightly different forms. I find that historical
digging fascinating.
MM: I found a few other things, just for your information.
This one right here from your work (“As Fex
Falls, So Falls Fex”) is from Burroughs’s
The Ticket That Exploded.
DS: Now that one, right, is similar but not exact.
MM: You changed it halfway through.
DS: This one has always stayed with me. This is
the opening of The Ticket That
Exploded. Have you
read these books? How did you think to look there?
MM: Google.
Now that GoogleBooks is pretty awesome —
DS: Oh, I see. So the first three pages — if you
read nothing else of that book — that has always
stayed with me. And this scene reemerges in my fiction
quite often in different ways. It’s about a guy who
is rooming with someone else, and he begins to grow
suspicious that he’s trying to kind of merge with
him. The sounds of their hearts get in tune. They’re
kind of playing this game. That’s always with me.
I did that explicitly in this case, because that’s
what I want to happen, the third mind that we’re
working with, you know where two writers write and
go together.
I don’t mean to be crass about this, but I’m always
fascinated by when women live together, their menstrual
cycles sort of line up, you know, things just get
in sync sometimes. The heartbeat. Sometimes I press
my daughter to my chest, and she’s excited and I’m
excited and our heartbeats, I can hear them sync
up. There’s something beautiful about that.
MM: I hope you can talk a bit more about the authorial
anonymity presumed by the notion of a “third
mind.” Can you describe in more detail the
process of collaboration? Having done some research
into your past work and knowing very little about
Carlos, I found myself assuming that your contributions
were the dominant of the two, and trying to identify
for myself which sections were originally written
by you, and which by Carlos, and where the editing
took them in new directions. How interested are you
in the reader’s response to this obscuring of authorship?
DS: I typed out a wonderfully elusive answer to
your question, and then my computer died, and then
I lost the answer upon reboot. I blame Fex, or Carlos.
We constructed the statement, the note on process,
collaboratively, but, of course, it represents only
the aspects of the collaboration, which we attempted
to articulate at the moment of its composition. It
no more divines the nuances of the composition than
an author bio tells you about some real author at
the other end of a royalty check. Yet, it leaves
you satisfied like the a good toothpaste commercial,
creating the conditions of our material anxiety,
and setting you up for the important decisions to
come when you finally reach the toothpaste aisle.
There are ten chapters written in five distinct
segments. And we each “originated” five
of the chapters, but there is no telling whether
the “originator” composed two pages
of crap in the first composition period, or seven
pages of pure gold bricks shat out the wrong side
of Pharaoh’s intestinal track. In other words, when
phase two begins, the overwriting/cutting/amending,
etc, the autonomy of the first writer quickly falls
away. I’d be hard pressed to identify who wrote what,
because we wrote the text at my home in Ithaca, NY,
so Carlos was already an outsider: sleeping on a
cot, or the floor, or camping in the backyard. He
did bring some lunch meat along, roast beef, I believe,
which despite my vegetarianism I reluctantly let
him keep in the refrigerator. So you see, we each
had physical, bodily advantages. Fex cuts through
these with deft quickness. He is unforgiving, but
loveable. Try him out in your home, but be wary,
he is tricky.
Fex writes himself, and in doing so, he unwrites
us.
MM: Like the experiments of the Oulipo writers and,
to a lesser extent, the Dogme 95 filmmakers, this
kind of experiment, through constraint, privileges
the texture and substance of production over content.
Why privilege the writer in this way, at the expense
of readerly reception?
DS: You are correct in that texture and substance
emerge, explicitly, at the fore of the work. This
has everything to do with content, which simply changes
form according to the texture and substance. And
yet. And yet. And yet. The writer is not privileged
at the “expense” of readerly reception,
unless we could agree that A) the writing of constraint
does indeed sacrifice content for form, and B) this
relation is somehow analogous to the relation between
the writer and reader. In other words, your question
implies that textural production is somehow the rarefied
sphere of the author, whereas content-oriented texts
float in and out of the reader’s mind like puffs
of cotton candy. I don’t agree with the suppositions
necessary to the question.
Abecedarium only privileges Fex. Fex never loses.
That’s a prime principle, but perhaps, also merely
a postulate. There is no proof for the winningness
of Fex. A turkey can stick his head out of a hole
each day to be fed, and then, the day before Thanksgiving,
to be sliced. No record of previous wins can determine
whether the blade will descend tomorrow. It’s entirely
possible that Fex has fragmented the writer to the
point where autonomy is sublimated, always, to Fex
himself. I lose myself in the questions, because
in writing Fex, Fex is re-writing Carlos and me.
I used to be taller and better looking.
MM: Getting back to the splicing, the body, the
DNA, all of these things are of course crucial to
the narrative of Abecedarium, it would seem. But
it also seems that the language works to function
kind of on a metalevel. You are splicing language
as you talk about Fex’s DNA, etc. Where does that
come from? What is your interest in DNA and these
scientific ideas?
DS: I have the nonscientist’s interest in all of
these scientific ideas. There’s a much better version
of this genetic intertwining, and it’s Steve Tomasula’s
novel Vas. Best book of the last ten years, by far.
Steve is a good guy, and a brilliant writer; he went
to UIC, in fact.
I don’t think I do it as well as people who actually
know the science, but I’m interested in the idea
of everything being a linguistic code. And what we’ve
discovered about DNA, we give it names: G A C T,
and we move those names around, and you get Down’s
syndrome or you don’t get Down’s syndrome. I always
think that I would have been more interested in math
if somebody had explained to me in high school that
it was an abstract language, rather than proofs and
derivatives. But where does it come from? I don’t
know if it comes so much from my reading as it comes
from just — and this was, we wrote it in 2001, kind
of at the height of the zeitgeist, you know, the
human genome project had just been concluded, and
it was in the news. Dolly the cloned sheep. So I
think it was just sort of floating about at the time.
And there’s characters, Gact, and Tacg, who appear
in my other novel, Multifesto, which is impossible
to find because there’s only 50 copies of it. It’s
supposed to come out from Spuyten Duyvil in commercial
form at some point soon. So I wouldn’t say this is
an obsession of mind — I don’t always write about
this topic — but at the time, it was sort of in
the air.
MM: I was also struck by how the novel’s tendency
to “reset” every chapter seemed to
possess a video-game sensibility. If we see Fex as
a two-dimensional avatar of the synthesis of two
minds, under what constraints do you see Fex operating
under?
DS: Fex is four-dimensional: he is 5’8” tall;
approximately half that from extended fingertip to
fingertip, and 32” at the waist. He exists,
you’ll notice, in an astounding array of temporal
and spatial locations, and in this latter sense,
stands outside Euclidean and Newtonian physical states.
He is constrained only by the languages he operated
within, which is why he slips through the net of
language whenever possible. As we learn in the final
moments of Abecedarium, he follows “a feeling” rather
than a road, a desire rather than a responsibility,
and an indefinite rather than a definite. Except,
sometimes, when he does the opposite of these things.
MM: Especially considering your interest in and
appreciation of Acker, who destabilized gender when
at all possible, I was interested to note — and
you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like
Fex’s gender is limited and consistent throughout
the novel. Was this a conscious choice?
DS: I’m struck by your question, and I don’t mean
to critique your question, but it’s one of those
questions, like “You wrote about a penguin!
Why didn’t you write about a monkey?” That’s
your agenda, and I appreciate that.
But I will say that there was a conscious choice
not to do that sort of thing, only because the one
rule Carlos always had — so, there’s a couple rules
to these chapters. Every chapter has to mention a
carnival dragon. Every chapter has to mention foie
gras. There’s a couple other things. Carlos’s rule
was that Fex always wins. Fex always comes out on
top. Fex never loses, and I think that’s pretty evident
throughout the book. I wanted to kind of represent
this kind of Colonel Klink figure who is moving through
time and is octogenarian, or nanogenarian, who knows
how old this guy is. Part of it is I was deliberately
trying to write an elderly character. Even though
he acts like a youthful person. That’s a group that’s
left out of most novels. But because he’s sort of
dominant, and virile and impotent at the same time,
I think the choice to make him a man and make him
stable in that way was a deliberate one. We wanted
him to be the top of the hegemonic pool. He’s a venture
capitalist: he’s the guy who sells his genes at an
auction. And even though the book does lots of destabilization,
I didn’t necessarily want him to be the carrier of
that. I wanted it to be the structure and the language.
MM: Going back to — you were talking about rules.
DS: Yeah. Those were basically the rules, and what
we did was we created the character Fex first. We
had one meeting, I think it was in New York. We sat
down in a park one day, and said, Well, how can we
do this book? We can’t really set up a plot, and
neither of us were interested in that. So we picked
something that should appear in each chapter, [the
carnival dragon and foie gras], and then we decided
we needed a character. And there was an old emeritus
professor at Binghamton who looked like he was dead.
I won’t tell you his name. But he sort of wandered
around, and he was just like … he was Fex. No
one ever talked to him, no one really knew what he
was doing there … he had been retired for about
twenty years already, and I guess he was a nice guy.
But he just seemed sort of timeless and, you know,
triumphant. And we began to think about writing a
character who was older, because it’s just not done
that often. I guess we were doing the Golden Girls
novel.
So we decided that that was a rule. And what we
did was, he came to my apartment in Ithaca, New York.
I believe that we each brought out some stuff. Just
put some books on the floor. He brought some stuff
and I brought some stuff. And whenever we couldn’t
think of anything, we would just grab. So that was
another sort of unintentional rule, was that we’d
just sort of take.
The collaboration, which I think I mentioned in
the Note on Process, that we’re doing now, is I’m
in Chicago and he’s in New York, and we sent each
other a box of fifteen things. And each object had
a map attached to it. It could be a map of the moon;
it could be a map of your circulatory system. And
we call each other on Sunday morning, 8:30 in the
morning Central time, and we each randomly pick up
an object and a pen. We hang up the phone and write
one thousand words. Then we have voice translation
software which we’ve deliberately untrained, and
we read our text back into the software. All the
words get distorted. Not all, but key words. We email
that to the other person, and then we do basically
the same thing that we’ve done here [in Abecedarium].
So, we’re interested in setting up rules which kind
of have a restraint or constraint, but again, the
rules are not draconian, and they can be violated.
Sometimes that’s the fun, is to violate it.
MM: What is this propensity towards making up things
and being elusive (referring to a question and answer
about Deleuze that has been cut from this version)?
DS: I guess that part of it is that it’s none of
your fucking business. No, I’m just kidding. That’s
being elusive. Part of it is that the writing is
the message itself, and I think of people like Pynchon
or J.D. Salinger, you know, they didn’t give interviews
because it was the work. And I don’t believe in that,
because clearly I like to perform, and I have a good
time in this sort of persona. I get a lot of mileage
out of that. But I don’t think that I really want
to explain the writing.
When I was giving a talk at a colloquium at UIC
a few years ago, I got into a long, drawn-out discussion
with Walter Benn Michaels about this, because he
really wanted to pin me down on the specifics as
well, and I just refused to do that. His interest
was in the machine, like if we’re coming up with
this machine and using it, how important is it for
the reader to know that — because some of his early
work was about the intentionality of the author.
And I just refused to say whether it was important
or not important, because for me the meaning comes
from the reader. And so you asked me that question
about Derrida, and of course I’m sure Derrida’s in
there. But rather than giving you the theoretical,
boring, alienating-to-the-reader-who-doesn’t-know-Derrida
answer that doesn’t add to your understanding … I
guess you either sort of pick up on those things
or you don’t, but you’ll get a different interpretation
of it either way. I try to code these things with
many different layers — not deliberately, like, “Oh,
now I’m writing the academic layer, now I’m writing
the … ” — you know, not in that way.
But since my work is such an amalgamation of different
things, of culture and my own academic training,
I put that in there.
I never try to pretend that what I do isn’t from
a really privileged position, in that I was trained,
quote-unquote, to be a writer. I mean, a lot of it
is kind of my rebelling against the traditional MFA
workshop model. It’s kind of a weird system we have,
where people get PhDs in creative writing and go
on to get these jobs where they produce more of themselves;
there’s a kind of replication at work. So I always
try to make that mark on the book itself. Some of
the intellectual content is in there jokingly, sometimes
I misuse it deliberately. In Multifesto, I have all
sorts of historical anachronisms about World War
II that the careful reader would say, “Wow,
this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about at
all.” This deliberate messing with that code.
MM: Why do you resist the MFA workshop model?
DS: Well, I didn’t get an MFA; I got an MA. Did
you meet Dmitri Anastasopoulos with the two-year-old
who just walked by? He was my first creative writing
teacher. He was a graduate student when I was an
undergrad, at Penn State in the early 90s. It’s sort
of weird that we’ve come full circle here. He was
very important to me because I was like this 18-year-old
kid, and he taught a class like I would teach a class,
and brought in like Beckett’s Texts
for Nothing,
things I’d never heard about. He gave me a list of
books that you might be interested in. I still have
that list, folded up and marked on. I went through
all these various texts. So that was good for me.
By the time I got to my advanced undergrad at Penn
State and grad at Binghamton, I just found the workshops
weren’t that useful, because you just do more of
the same thing, and after a while it becomes about
the primping and the preening. I began to feel like
it wasn’t so much about the development of my work
as it was about people attempting to be coxmen, jockey
for position, have a kind of swagger. Or they were
writing from such a different space than I was. I
didn’t feel persecuted or anything, but I remember
someone saying in an MA workshop: “Why can’t
you just write it so it makes sense?” This
was the stuff that became my book DIS that just came
out from Blazevox. And I just felt like, you know, “fuck
you.” I just wasn’t getting a lot out of it.
Which is why I took it upon myself to take all of
the theoretical courses at Binghamton, in the comp-lit
department, which was the theory-heavy place. You
could get a PhD and only talk about the short story
in the abstract and do nothing, or — I really gave
myself a comp-lit or English-lit PhD and just happened
to do a creative dissertation informed by all these
things.
For me, it was actually someone saying, “You’re
going to take a class on Proust, and you’re going
to read all of Proust,” or Beckett and Stein,
that helped me produce things like this, much more
so than workshops. I think you outgrow workshops
at some point. There’s always the danger of falling
under the unintentional domination of the workshop
leader, in the same way that everyone wants to please
the teacher. I think you can be shaped in a way that’s
very detrimental. You know, for years, you could
read any story from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and
even if they were very good, you would know that
it was an Iowa Writers Workshop story. That’s bad.
That’s a bad situation to be in.
I try to make my workshops less about releasing
the inner genius and more about doing crazy collaborative
shit. I want to break down the process. It’s kind
of an anti-workshop model.
MM: Going back to what you said about Deleuze and
Guattari and the multiple: “the only way to
be multiple is to make the multiple happen in the
process of making a book.” Here you’re referring
to your previous novel, Multifesto, which I haven’t
read (it is hard to find!). In regard to Abecedarium,
a question could be posed as to whether the polyvocal
multiple is violated by the form of the print/text/book
as an aesthetic object. If the polyvocal impulse
seems to want to violate the aesthetic object (and
perhaps you will disagree with that assessment),
why is this polyvocal project in book form? Why is
Abecedarium not an event without the commodity?
DS: Megan, this is the event that we’re having right
now. I wrote the book in order to get people to do
interviews with me. No. I mean, this strikes me as
another, I mean, I’m not quite sure that I can parse
that question, but it strikes me as another one of
those, “you wrote about a penguin, why didn’t
you write about a monkey?” questions. I mean,
you can always impose your own theoretical agenda
onto other works.
But I do believe that the materiality of what we’re
doing, the Oulipian constraint, that those are ways
of producing a text. It’s Chiasmus’s idea to number
the pages as letters and to do some of the titling,
and what Cris [Mazza] said to me over email, or over
the phone, when she saw the book, before I saw it,
was, “You can’t really read your name. You
must be upset about that.” And actually, that
makes me really happy. I like the fact that you can’t
necessarily really read the chapter titles, that
you have to go back here [to the table of contents]
to figure out what they are. I don’t know if you
had that experience, but some of them are basically
unreadable. I like the idea that everything’s just
sort of falling away. Some of that really speaks
to this question.
But it just wasn’t an event, it was a book we wrote
together, we sat down and we did it, but it wasn’t
meant to be anything other than a book.
Deleuze and Guattari would say that even a thing
that appears to be the most kind of territorializing
moment can be a line of flight, can go in a different
direction. They critique the idea of the book as
the tree of knowledge, but I don’t think that means
that they think nothing should be a book. Their works
are books, too.
You could also read this book in any order. You
could pick up any chapter and read it. We wrote them
in a different order, and we thought about the order
we wanted them to be in. But even though the first
chapter kind of introduces him and the last chapter
has that kind of switch to first person, you could
read any chapter in any order. And all the chapters
I think but one were published on their own. Burroughs
has said you can read Naked
Lunch in any order. Deleuze
and Guattari said you can read A
Thousand Plateaus in any order. I don’t know if you can really read
Naked Lunch in any order. I don’t know anyone who
can even read A Thousand Plateaus, for the most part.
It’s a difficult book to read. This book you can
read in any order. It could exist in another way.
Whereas Tom Clancy’s novels can only exist in one
form. So you can imagine the possibilities here.
MM: What is the object of writing a book as such?
What do you hope to achieve by doing that?
DS: I
don’t hope to achieve anything. The writing
is what it is. I never have an agenda. I never have
— and I’m being slightly elusive here.
I never sit down and say, “My book is making
this political statement.” These are not ideologically
driven texts. But these are texts that are driven
by my upbringing as a writer, and the things that
I’ve
read, and the places that I’ve trained, and
the type of writing I respond to, and yes, it’s
going to take an innovative or experimental form.
But within that, there’s still a large spectrum
of the different — you can see it here at &NOW,
things that are doing one thing and things that are
doing another. There’s no intention — this
is where Walter [Benn Michaels] would disagree with
me. There’s no intentionality
here on my part. There simply is the thing that emerges
in the production. I think of Gertrude Stein. Production
is composition; composition is what determines what
you write. It’s not a kind of planning stage
beforehand. So we mean this to be a kind of object
that rises. And when you read it and when you reread
it, it turns into something else each time. There
are themes; there are things that are connected.
But you’re not
supposed to come to a modernist epiphany in the final
moments. Although we wrote the final moments to sound
like they were giving you an epiphany. You’re
supposed to have that little shiverish thing.
MM: Was the switch to first person [in the last
chapter] part of that?
DS: I don’t think that we even noticed that that
had happened when we wrote it, but then when we looked
back at the ten chapters, we were like, a different
thing’s happening in this one. I rarely write in
the first person. I always write in the present tense.
Always. All my own work. I even write the past tense
in the present. I’ll say, “This happened yesterday:
I am driving down the street.” The future,
I write in the present tense. I’m interested in that
kind of moment of happening. But it did seem like
a nice, interesting way to end the novel. Although
it could have gone in several different spots and
had the same general effect. First chapter, right:
if you made that the first chapter, and transposed “Fex
at the Carnival” and made that the last chapter,
that would work as well. The order is fungible.
MM: How would you define ‘avant-garde’, or ‘the
contemporary avant-garde’? What characterizes it?
DS: This is a difficult question. And it’s a question
that’s very much on the minds of people here [at &NOW].
It’s a question that you even could get different
answers for, if you said to people, “Do you
think FC2 is an innovative or experimental press?” Because
a lot of people think that FC2 in its original form
was doing really different stuff, really different
stuff in 72 than it’s doing now. I’ll give you a
perfect example: Vas and the famous story of how
FC2 passed on it, and they really regretted it because
it’s such an FC2-style book. I think they just missed.
I know one reader who read it and said, “Yes,
this is a book for us,” and the second reader
said no. It’s done by committee so then it went to
a third person who said no, and that kind of ended
it.
What characterizes innovative and experimental work?
It’s not just Things That Come Out From a Small Press,
because there’s a lot of crap that comes out from
a small press, too, and I’m sure you’ve seen some
readings here today that have not engaged you. You’ve
probably seen some good things, and you’ve probably
seen some things that you think are just so-so. So
it’s not just that you have to have a DIY aesthetic.
Steve Tomasula would say that it has something to
do with the conceptual aspect of it, that it’s conceptual
art, that it’s aware of its own boundaries. And I
would agree.
What I would add is that it’s always aware of its
own market status. If it’s small press work, it’s
not pretending that it could be from Random House.
It’s doing something that speaks to the economics
of its limited distribution. It’s aware of its materiality.
I tell my students you can spend years reading the
great books of western literature, however you define
them, in order to become a great writer, or you can
take a pair of scissors and cut some phrases from
Proust and stick em in your piece right now. Burroughs
would say this as well. Need some background on the
tropics in 1890s? Google it, get some language, and
start mixing it around. That’s not cheating. That’s
not a shortcut. That’s how your mind works. It materially
borrows things. You hear a song, it stays with you.
But we think the artist must somehow go through this
long, dark night of the soul and struggle to take
on all this information through their genius, then
spit it back out in a new form. But the artist is
simply a cipher, it’s simply someone who opens himself
or herself up to the flow of information, to the
Baudrillardian thing, who takes it and jiggles it
around in the cement mixer and sees what comes out.
So for me, work that does that is innovative.
But there’s mainstream work that does that as well.
One book you could argue about is House
of Leaves.
Some people would say that’s a brilliant book. Federman
said to me a few weeks ago that a student asked him
at Lake Forest, “Do you like that book?” and
he said that it was crap. It has no heart. So for
him, there has to be kind of an emotional core. And
his work has that.
Some of experimentation you could say is way too
slippery or intellectual and kind of leaves you cold.
There’s one writer here who I like personally a lot,
and every time I hear him read, I get that same feeling,
like I’m just hearing this randomness, like it’s
just written by a technocrat. There’s nothing to
it. I’m guilty of that myself sometimes. But the
heart is fickle. The heart is a Romantic idea, so
you don’t want to decide what type of heart — put
in a cyborg heart. This is why Kathy Acker’s so great.
MM: A certain cohort of independent presses like
FC2 and Chiasmus seem to operate under well-defined
ideologies of avant-gardism that adopt pseudo-revolutionary
rhetoric. How do you see Abecedarium challenging
contemporary dominant narratives? How political a
project is this for you?
DS: As I’ve written many times, I am less than sanguine
about the possibilities of avant-gardism/experimentalism/whatever
to “do” anything. Joe Tabbi (at UIC)
and I had a discussion in which he expressed a similar
suspicion of the rhetoric of these presses. To what
extent does the language of FC2 signify an actual
challenge to hegemony? Well, of course, by its very
existence, the books that FC2 publish articulate
a challenge to Tom Clancy. But is Tom Clancy listening?
Is he training for a cage fight with ___________?
The Means of Distribution remains the most important
difference between the work of the best innovative
presses (FC2, Chiasmus, etc.) and the production
of the larger houses. There are very real issues
at stake in what the former publish for the integrity
of this challenge: what languages are deployed? And,
I can imagine serious problems should these small
presses start publishing the same work as mainstream
houses. I support the small press community, and,
its political stances. And yet. And yet. Abecedarium
can only be political in so much as it exists, and,
it can only exist in so much as it find warm home
in the bowels of the avant-garde world. The question
of politics remains interwoven with the means of
production and distribution, which are tied, directly,
to the identity of the author, or in this case, authors,
or, in this case, Fex, who unties everything together.
Megan
Milks: When Eyeballs Land on Blazing Paragraphs 
Davis
Schneiderman excerpt from ScatØlØgically
Yours by
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
