For Person A.

A call from the Head Office

Why was she here? Inta didn't know. When the head office had sent her to the biannual convention, they had offered no explanation, and had given no brief as to her endeavours. She turned to look out the window, and observed, with some surprise, that the moon was still up. Inta slid her feet into the slippers provided by Hotel Rio Grande do Sul, sauntered over to the desk next to the window, and contemplated the imprint she had found the night before, "hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo", and the scribble beneath, "upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned."

She picked up the paper and twisted it around between her fingers, when she came across a scribble on the flip side of the sheet as well. It looked like a poem:

Mooning

Yellow moon, yellow moon peeping through my window
Movie director, wheelchaired, observing murder

Keep it cool, keep it real (for real)
Stay where you are, moon
Be a moon, moon
Moon, moon

She jolted to the sound of the phone ringing.

"Hello, madam. Felix at the reception speaking. There's a call for you from the Head Office."

"Put it through," she said.

There was a crackling sound in her ear, a pause, and a deep, muscular voice, as if from far away, sighing as it uttered each word emphatically.

"Inta," it said. "You must make an appointment with the Master of the Mansion."

Pause.

"You will receive further instructions." Dial tone. Felix: "I guess whoever it was hung up."

Inta put the receiver down, a felt as if she was falling. She was nineteen years old and she was falling from a skyscraper, passing windows where single mothers changed their babies' diapers, where whole families had their breakfasts, where old couples stared at her, pointing at her, because she was naked, her arms tied together behind her back, still falling, falling, young men inviting her to stay awhile, falling and falling, now gagged, her speech incomprehensible even to her own ears.

"Funny," she thought. "I'm falling from the skyscraper and I'm perfectly calm, as if for every floor I pass I get older."

Inta observed her image in a fractured window. Her face look wrinkled, her hair short, and her arms bruised. She had to get out, but first she had to get to the bottom.

A knock on the door.

"Are you all right in there? Madam? Are you all right?"

Inta opened the door.

"Oh, it's you Felix. Just had a nightmare."

Felix slipped her a note.

"You received this message this morning. Can I get you anything? Would you like some breakfast brought up to your room?"

"Thank you, Felix, that would be lovely."

She unfolded the note. It read: "Who told you it was all right to love me? Certainly not me. Midnight. By the town hall." Signed Mundt.

Letter from superego

Dear phatic,

At the Bourdieu-list, on 4 Jan 2004 at 16:54, Emrah Goker noted the journalistic/scholastic argument used by right-wing French (or Turkish) Republicans to support discrimination against young Muslim women ("We are trying to liberate them from their male fundamentalist oppressors by removing their foluard/turban") is only an excuse for the state elites' nationalist/irredentist angst.

I responded with a notion I seemed to remember from Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998) that Indian nationalism came out of a struggle to control access to women. I just reread Loomba, and she's paraphrasing Partha Chatterjee on the matter:

Well before nationalism launches itself against the colonial state, anti-colonial nationalism attempts to create 'its own domain of culture (which includes religion, customs and the family). The supremacy of the West is conceded in the material world, whereas the spiritual world is claimed as the essence of national culture, one which must be protected and defended. The more colonised people imitate Western skills in the former sphere, the greater the need to protect the latter. (Loomba, p. 190)

I guess I must have confused these comments with Fanon's notes on the use of women as anti-colonial signifiers in Algeria. Not so strange, perhaps, since Chatterjee's and Fanon's sensibilities may sound similar (analogous). Fanon claims that French colonialist doctrines identified Algerian women and family relations as the crucial site for their onslaught against native culture:

If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight. It is the situation of woman that was accordingly taken as the theme of action. The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered ... transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, demonetized, indeed dehumanized object. ... After it had been posited that the woman constituted the pivot of Algerian society, all efforts were made to obtain control over her. ... Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of the European is always preceded by a rending of the veil. (Fanon 1965, 37pp)

Fanon the explains how "the resistance movement demanded that the nationalist Algerian woman both veil and unveil herself in its cause. She was asked at first to Europeanise herself to penetrate the European quarters of the city, since the colonial regime assumed that Westernised woman would not be part of the resistance. The unveiled Algerian woman had to fashion her body to being 'naked' and scritinised, she had to move 'like a fish in the Western waters' while 'carrying revolvers, grenades, hundreds of false identity cards and bombs'. But such a woman is not unveiled at Europe's bidding, hence she does not signify loss of cultural identity but the forging of a new nationalist self. ... Some years later, when the colonial state understood that not all unveiled women were alienated from the nationalists, the Algerian woman was ordered to veil herself again." (Loomba 193-194)

Your humble servant,
T Fjeld

Instructions
How to change reality *
(manual in 7 movements)

1st Movement.
Make a concession: Allow realistic intrusion into your text.

2nd Movement.
How is the world around you different from how you want it to be?

3rd Movement.
Articulate the realistic element as a fictional moment.

4th Movement.
How would it be possible for this fictional moment to reintroduce
itself into the real?

5th Movement.
Imagine a possible world in which the change you want may take place.

6th Movement.
In composition, allow for realistic coherence (avoid formal collision
with realism).

7th Movement.
Disseminate and Return.

* Footnote: 'Realism' is considered dominant (and) in its
contemporary manifestation.

Who made who?
Who made you?
Who made who?
Ain’t nobody told you?
AC/DC

What is science fiction?
A primary notion of science fiction may be that it is fiction set in the future. The word itself, though, simply indicates that it is a fictional text (not a documentary or in another genre that purports to mime a pre-discursive reality) having science as its subject matter. A popular notion of what science indicates that this type of narrative text should have its emphasis on the so-called hard sciences. This conforms to the narrative content of a number of artifacts common referred to as hallmarks of the science fiction genre: Blade Runner, Alien, Solaris, 1984, Brave New World, The Time-Machine, Metropolis, Frankenstein, and so forth. All these narratives are either set in a relatively distant future in relation to the time of narration, or, in the case of Frankenstein, in a contemporary setting with an isolated incident of a futuristic element. Other examples of the same type of fabula is found in the numerous horror- movies dealing with science “gone amuck”, where, e.g., a biological weapon is haphazardly unleashed on the general public.

While it is a mistake to cling to the idea that science fiction are restricted to themes common to (astro-)physics, biology, chemistry, etc., it has become a popular notion that the genre should deal with an imagined possible future, and that they should feature technologies that are not yet invented or not yet implemented in the way recounted by the story. Some of these futures may in turn be employed in so-called realistic or factional narratives, so that newspapers may portray an politic as “big brother policy”. They may also be productive of popular practices, such as the current obsession with “gadgets”, apparently empowered to convey as sense of avant-gardist technological edge to their owners or knowers. It is as if the entire fascination with the form of modern telecommunication is anticipated in scientific imaginigs. Because isn’t it precisely in the form that science fiction makes itself know to the popular imagination?

Besides suggesting that it is a complicated matter to distinguish clearly between fictional and factional (“realistic”) narratives and that facts may imitate fiction as much as fiction may mime facts, these insights stop at critiquing the latter part of the term, the fictional status of these narratives, but leave us short of a critique of hard science as the central organizing element of the genre. However, most of the narratives mentioned above, and also narratives that are common referred to as science fiction but that don’t conform to the generic outline above, such as Borges’ “Book of Sand” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, also feature a certain formal creativity. We will limit our deliberations on how to articulate this generic moment to two narratives: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Book of Sand” and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, considered as sampling a more common formal moment to which we wish to call attention.

In “The Book of Sand” the narrator acquires a monstrously expanding book, an artifact without beginning or end that threatens to usurp the entire world into itself. The narrator stores it away on top of a shelf in the basement of the Buenos Aires public library, author Borges’ workplace at the time, in the hope that it will forever remain there, as a stowed-away Pandora’s Box. The book represents a singular artifact in the story, such as was the case with the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, intruding into the normality of a narrative contemporary. But whereas Frankenstein’s monster is produced by an aberrant science, the abnormal book in Borges’ tale comes from nowhere and ends in a possible contemporary world. It doesn’t have a story of origin, and its existence doesn’t end with the completion of the narrative. It stands as an object miming the narrative act itself, unappropriable, confusing, potentially monstrous, and never-ending.

In Blade Runner, it is the replicant who provides the photographs that are the organizing core of their memory. Darren Tofts recount them as “proof artifacts” (“The World Will Be Tlön”), reminding the audience of the fictional, derived nature of the replicant’s sense of reality, but also, by diegetic implication, interrogating the audiences notion of realism. The blade runner constitutes as evidence of the replicants’ inauthentic past, an interpretation echoed by Tofts in his classification of them as “memories ... belonging to someone else”. Tofts, similarly, finds that Borges’ narratives “intrude into the world-outside text”, as a kind of paradoxical dream. However, if both Blade Runner and “The Book of Sand” threaten to swallow the world, in a kind of psychotic immersion, in the mother-as-body, they also provide a destabilizing moment to the fictional universe, proposing themselves as realistic narratives considering objects available for practices of validation. [The notion of validity understood here as the practice of realistic affirmation par excellence.] As Donna Haraway points out in her Cyborg Manifesto, we already “find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras ... both in formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit).” Separating the content of a subjective imaginary from its form, or its body, may never have been a tenable construction, and it would only be within such a construction, exemplified by the blade runner’s interpretative framework, that these moments could constitute a sort of psychotic demon.

From the replicant Rachel’s perspective, these insights exhibit no more than those epiphanic moments when we realize that we were never fully ourselves, and the untenability of an isolationist notion of subjectivity. In Rachel’s radical confusion as who made who, we cognize the fear, love and confusion of cyborg culture: a never- ending recursion as to the question of originary authenticity. As a formal manifestation, such as in Blade Runner’s narrative non-closure, it is symptomatic moment of science fiction as a generic phenomenon.

From Recitals:
Rules change

I, the poem hereby declare that
From now on
From this moment

Meaning is not to be found behind, before or beyond
Me, but between

You and I, the poem

What is pornography?

Nikolaj Frobenius, scriptwriter of Insomnia (starring Al Pacino, Hillary Swank and Robin Williams, and directed by Christopher Nolan of Memento-fame), let hisself be interviewed by Bøygen (The Bend, also a character in the last act of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, a devil-like appearance), in conjunction with the publication of The Shy Pornographer in 1999 (Le Pornographe timide, Actes Sud, 2000). More or less wittingly, the conversation drifts into a comparison with his 1996 novel Latours katalog (De Sade's Valet, trans. Tom Geddes, Marion Boyars, 2001). Frobenius, a master of scriptwriting from LPC college in London, studied the letter the Marquis wrote from the Vincennes and the Bastille to his manservant Latour Quiros, and immersed himself in what he calls a Sadean universe.

*

It is basically violent, inhuman and paradoxical -- and confusing. Confusion is a cornerstone i de Sade's way of being in the world and communicating in language. As soon as we engage in a careful reading of him, we find out that his language works on several levels. You find reason, which in a way incorporates you into his universe, and it says: 'This happens, my good friend, if you don't follow the path of virtue.' It is a very confusing claim, since it directly follows descriptions of what we may call the Sadistic problem: a world of fiece passions and fascinations, but where apathy is also just around the corner. There is an affinity with the executioner and the victim, and contradictory elements are played out in turns. [Georges] Bataille finds de Sade's literature paradoxical, since it essentially is the victim's language. I believe de Sade tries to destroy language, in an attempt to overcome a lack of communcation.

How?

de Sade lives in complete isolation for large periods of his adult life because of his extravagant transgressions of the law and common sense in France. He's imprisoned, and eats, writes and fantasizes, that's all he's doing. I think his most important problem, from he was a boy, has been his distance to others. And what constitutes the bridge between myself and everybody else? That's language. That is what he wants to destroy, I believe that's what he wants. With his monotony, with confusion, with constant repetitions and detours.

In order to completely burn down the bridge between himself and the world around him?

Perhaps, but also to provoke a reaction, to get attention in some form or the other. He's up there on the bridge that language is, demolishing it. You will find the same effect with a great many other pornographic authors: Charles de Mas, Bataille, Cooper. It is a constant struggle at the borders of language. Pornography is conserned with 'non-language', that which exists on the other side of language. With those authors I mentioned, you will always find reflections on the boundary between language and non-language.

In a restroom at the Metro:

Requirements

Hide meaning behind
Narrative stanzas perfected
As if

Frozen in a moment of
Thought, midair,
Indebted to ideas

Unthought, more than
Real