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Essays (book reviews) |
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Introduction to |
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In his
video Scénario du film Passion
(1982), Jean-Luc Godard tells a story about the birth of an aspect of cinema
history – in particular, an aspect of the business of film, its industry. (He likes this origin tale so much, he alludes to it again, years
later, in his mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma series of 1988-1998). Godard evokes for us a mythical time in
the early days of filmmaking during the silent era. The celebrated comedy
filmmaker Mack Sennett would head out each day with his crew and cast. They
would stop somewhere and start making up gags, bits of business. They never had
much of an idea how the improvisations and inventions of one day would fit with
those of the next day – but that is the kind of logic they made up as they went
along.
Soon
enough, behind Mack Sennett followed an earnest accountant. He had been sent by
the head office of the studio that was financing this madcap adventure in
filmmaking. The accountant would trail behind making expenditure notes – “demolition
of a car, 500 dollars”, “payment for a crowd of extras, 300 dollars” – and so
on. The accountant would go home each night and put these notes in order – an
order of days, and of scenes. He would write at the top of each page
indications like: “Daytime – car chase scene – garbage dump”.
Naturally enough, the studio and the accountant then started leaning on Mack
Sennett to foresee what expenditure he would incur each day. “What scene do you
think you’ll shoot tomorrow, Mack?” When Sennett started grudgingly responding
to these questions and figuring out in advance what he would shoot, rather than
just making it up on the spot, the accountant thrust his own ordered pages in
front of the director and instructed him: “Lay it out like this – write on the
top: Scene three – outdoors – love scene – front porch – late afternoon”.
And then
Sennett was encouraged to write a little more by way of explicit scene
instructions – so that everyone involved in production (art director, props
director, actors, and so on) would know beforehand exactly what they had to do,
and how much it would cost. The day that Sennett acquiesced to all these
demands, according to Godard, marked the historic beginning of that odd form of
writing which the film industry calls the script, or the screenplay.
This mythic
little story by Godard sits somewhere between a tall story, a fable and a joke
– it may even have some slim basis in anecdotal truth. So what is this story
about silent moviemaking doing in the introduction to a book about
cyberculture? When you read Memory Trade itself, you may find yourself asking a similar question many times. The book
takes a series of somewhat unfashionable angles on the strange, indefinable,
modish beast known as cyberculture. It is a surprising and serious book. It is
worth announcing clearly what Memory
Trade is not about. It is not
about virtual reality gloves or suits. It is not much about cyberpunk science
fiction. It is not explicitly about digital sampling in popular music or what
gets referred to as culture jamming. It does not once mention virtual sex – which
is a mercy. It is not a tirade against capitalist corporations or the
military-industrial complex. Rather, it is a book about thinking and writing,
creativity and image-making. It is also not a book about the future, or futuristic forecast – but about what’s already
possible and thinkable in the here and now.
Memory Trade explores what Tofts’ text calls the prehistory of cyberculture. That
prehistory trawls back through French post-structuralism, through Samuel
Beckett and James Joyce (to whom the book’s second half is devoted), through Freud and the ancient art of memory. It even goes back
to Plato and Socrates, so this is a pretty long prehistory. But it needs to be.
One of the basic arguments of the book is that cyberculture is completely bound
up with the histories of writing and language. Of course, because we can do
them more or less easily and well, we tend to think of writing and language as
the most natural things in the world. But Memory
Trade argues persuasively that writing and language constitute a technology, in the fullest and truest
sense of the word. They are vast machines or systems that we not only learn and
master, but also internalise, take into ourselves. And once writing and
language enter us, they change us.
Suddenly – in
the most normal, everyday, old-fashioned way – we are mutants or cyborgs or
interfaced beings, simply because written language has entered and changed us.
These capacities effect and determine how we think, reason, order, even how we
dream. Because I am a writer, I am often plagued by ridiculous, surreal dreams
in which the letters of the alphabet, or the
structures of a sentence, paragraph or essay take liquid or concrete form
around me, navigating me through one storm and dumping me in the middle of
another. But these kinds of dreams are somewhere inside all of us, and this
daily crisis and comedy is not so far removed from the travails of the modern
computer user – like a friend of mine who, after days and nights of feverish
work at his terminal writing one article, sent me a plaintive message: “Systems
crash is imminent”. I do not know whether he meant that his computer was about
to erase everything he ever wrote, or that he was about to have a nervous
breakdown – in fact, he probably meant both simultaneously, so interlinked was
he, by then, with his technology. Maybe he was the one running out of memory
space, and his computer was the one having the anxious nervous breakdown.
I began
this review with my Godard story because Memory
Trade is a book all about taking normal, familiar concepts and then making
them strange, showing how uncanny, weird and fundamentally mysterious they all
are. Not only writing and language, but also such things as memory, or making
puns, or playing around with all sorts of primitive conceptual toys for kids – like
Freud’s own favourite, the mystic writing pad or magic writing slate. All these
areas of human experience are technologies that have to be invented, which
separate us, alienate us in the first moment from some preceding state of
nature. But they are also creative forms that open up new possibilities for
poetry and storytelling. Memory Trade is directed against the new-fangled, self-important idea that, in our cyber
age, ‘the book’, meaning old-fashioned literature, is dead and buried, along
with all rational, linear thought. This book argues that we are always in
between the old and the new, between the historical and the possible – and it
argues that the poetic forms we already have contain the possibilities for the
slow revolution that will beset us in future cybercultures.
Memory Trade presents itself as a jam session in
its interplay of text and images. Murray McKeich’s superb digital images need
as many close inspections as Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake needs close re-readings. The strange hybrid beings which the artist
conjures for us are hard to pin down in terms of any original state. They are
humans within machines, and machines within humans. When you look closely, you
see that they are also people within people, and people created from the most
dizzying array of fabrics, textures and materials: web, lattice, chrome;
scissors, paper, rock. Like that great and underrated film Alien Resurrection (1997), McKeich is especially good with the
fantasticated eyes of these creatures: twinkling human eyeballs or vacancies in
corroded skulls; portholes on a ship or oilwells on a car; even viewmaster
goggles – these eyes are a window to nothing but themselves.
Since I
began with a film story, I will end with one, too. Memory Trade talks a lot about what was called, in centuries past,
the art of memory – an arcane, taxing, somewhat esoteric form of knowledge that
fell into disfavour at the time of the Enlightenment. The art of memory, as we
learn, provides quite a remarkabley uncanny trailer, or prehistory, for our age
of cyber design and cyber dreams. In the art of memory, people memorised
things, bodies of facts or sections of an argument, by associating these things
in their mind’s eye with the ordered rooms of a stately house. Later, as the
orator spoke, he would rhetorically activate his store of memory by mentally
taking a walk through the rooms of the house. How similar this all is to the
visual thinking, the icons and memory aids of computer graphics, not to mention
all the houses, rooms and passageways of ‘shoot-’em-up’ video games and arty
CD-ROMs.
There is at
least one great modern film about the art of memory with which Tofts and McKeich
may not be familiar. It is a film by the Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz called Life is a Dream (1986) – certainly a
classic title for the virtual age. (It is also known as Memory of Appearances, not a bad subtitle for this book.) It is based
on a famous play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca – in fact, the version used by
Ruiz is a palimpsest, a mystic writing pad, which splices together two
different authorised versions of the play: the original version, plus the one
Calderón drastically re-wrote after changing his religious beliefs. Ruiz’s film
is about a Chilean resistance fighter who, in the underground, once decided to
utilise the ancient art of memory; he memorised the list of all his
revolutionary comrades – a list which he, of course, could never commit to
print – by associating the names, in alphabetical order, with the lines of the
play Life is a Dream, which he also
memorised.
Years
later, in Paris, this man steps into a picture theatre, to watch a movie of –
what else? – Life is a Dream. Each
line of the play, of course, triggers an inner flashback to the Chilean resistance.
But the flashbacks do not happen in his head: they happen in front of him and
all around him, in the ever-mutating space of the picture theatre itself; and
all these nutty events interact with the movie that is unfolding on the screen.
Birds fly through the air of the theatre and enter the movie; a chintzy train
on screen becomes a toy train running under his feet between the cinema seats.
At one point, the screams coming from the soundtrack of the film he is watching
start to especially confuse our lost and dazed hero; he realises that there are
screams happening inside the theatre as well. He walks up to the screen and
peeks behind it: set up, there, magically, is a torture room like those he knew
in his homeland, with political dissidents being tortured on cue for handy Foley
sound effects.
In Ruiz’s
film, like in McKeich’s images, you can never tell where anything begins or
ends: reality and fiction, past and present, memory and fantasy, life and
death. They all swirl in the words of some old text long gone and yet
feverishly alive, a language imprinted on everyone and reaching into the most
intimate recesses of their bodies and souls. Life is a dream, and so is
cyberculture – but that does not mean that you cannot live it, and make it with
whatever humble or grand means you have to hand. This is just one of the
profound lessons embedded in the rich word-and-image texture of Memory Trade.
© Adrian Martin September 1998 |
