I didn't set out to write an essay
I stated last month an interest in exploring authorial voice, authority, and the weight of truth/realness in the construction of narrative. In viewing my friends work this month, I was pleasently surprised to find myself repeatedly asking questions in relationship to their work that were in this really specific vein. For instance, while considering Caitlin’s work of giving voice to inanimate buildings I wondered how anyone writes across a difference? Who has the right to assume what identity? Is there something about the lawlessness (yet hyper surveilled state) of the internet that makes us feel like we can grab identifications almost at random, or obtain a level of anonymity where we are more free to express through the first person a multiplicity of identities and little t truths?
The first person pronoun has been of great interest to me as of late. Upon hearing of my curiosity related to the boundaries of authorial voice, my partner suggested a foray into New Narrative writing by way of a collection of essays called Biting the Error. For me to attempt to summarize New Narrative writing would be to do it a disservice and would risk conflating a historical literary moment with style and philosophy, the complexity of which I don’t have the chops or the knowledge to talk about at the moment. I can say with some surety that experimenting with alternately emphasizing and de-emphasizing the weight of the first person pronoun and probing the complexities inherent in any one identity have proved to be very useful to my personal writing process. Within Biting the Error, there is an essay, 'Delirious, always Becoming' by Doug Rice which speaks to what it means to write from a dissociated place; disassociated from yourself, your body, your culture, an identity that you have invested in, an "I" who is presently unable to define what that means.
“To write through an uncertain body, to write memories of an/other body that has been cut off from its origins and desires, demands that a writer experiment with multiple languages and syntaxes. Every sentence potentially a joy, written in amazement before turning or refusing to turn the corner. The ‘I’ becomes a foreigner in his mother’s native tongue. And he is homeless. As transient movement, this dislocated ‘I’ falters and slowly begins to drift.”
Rice describes here the bewilderment and amazement that comes with the territory of being a little bit lost, or misplaced. Rice suggests that there is no other recourse for the uncertain body than to experiment, to try on other narratives for size. Live there for some time, maybe forever. The rich opening left by an I who wanders is further complicated by the mediation of modern technology, the sanctioned disposability of consumer culture and the schizophrenic nature of the internet. I do not think it is mere coincidence that in three pieces this month, vocal transformation effects were applied to a speaker’s voice--the pitch up, pitch-down, warp features that are now common to even the most basic home recording software--as a sort of subterfuge: to obscure, enhance, or confuse the native speaker’s identity.
This trend, through a complex series of associations, led me to the work of video artist Ryan Trecartin. Trecartin, who falls generationally in between Gen Y and the Millennial generation, has a fluency in morphability that only someone raised on modern technology can afford to have. In Trecartin’s piece Sibling Topics (section a), one Trecartin’s people, called Auto Cedar, post-op, top surgery scars exposed, speaks of this mutability, his voice pitched-up to a near squawk: “You can’t give an automated body freedom without it going around killing things, which it is, and I’m excited about it, which I am, because I don’t want a body anymore. Fuck the body--I want a soul and I’m gonna make my own soul cuz I’m not gonna wait and find out if I have one or not.” Linguistically deft, Trecartin’s characters speak within multiple and varied idioms, with accents and dialects that are hybrid, that they pick up and drop with seemingly little to no consequence. Their voices are auto-tuned as they sing, “ I hate foreign people, yeah”. They have avatars and alters and--as evidenced by Auto Cedar’s refusal to “wait”--there is an urgency in their need to remake their reality. In doing so, they colonize spaces according to their own agenda. They know too that spaces have identities that are slippery and infinitely profuse. In Comma Boat, a person, in a black bob, blue and green painted face, wearing a thrift store sweatshirt and jeans, pulls a “French Man” from the "audience" (of what spectacle? It is unclear.) promising that he will divulge something significant about the "stage", then rapidly switches focus to the camera, “What the fuck are you not filming me for? Is your hand getting tired, motherfucker?”. Don’t wait for an apology from them. This shit is straight sourced from TMZ. Back to the stage. The stage, by the way, looks like a basement rec room, with a hot tub in the corner (is that a raft inside?), orange traffic barrels and riot shields are among the detritus populating this stage. Our “host” continues, “I want the French Man to announce the transition of the stage. This stage is officially a tranny. Say it!” He does and we know that it is true.
In the uncanny valley of Trecartin's worlds, I buy into the speech act. Saying is enough to make it so. Yet, this truth feels totally impermanent and not tethered to any future tense, maybe because you know that at any moment the speaker will morph, their voice will fly up or down an octave, the scene will jump cut to another place entirely, or someone else will stake a claim on a truth, and suddenly it belongs to them. I am not interested in parsing the philosophical undercurrents of Trecartin's work--I do think that it is a perfect example of work that not only acknowledges its present moment but is indistinguishable from it. It leads me to wonder, what will the first person pronoun mean to those of us who have grown up crafting web based identities? What will the connotation of "real" come to be when the knee jerk reaction is to associate 'reality' with 'shows'? What is a conversation when a large portion of that communication is mediated through disembodied means? Will those of us who see gender and sexuality as fluid and changable re-define "the real" as something beyond biology? Most of all, I wonder where the lines will be drawn when it comes down to assuming narratives and realities. Apologies for signing off with this old aphorism but it does seem that only time will tell.