music and medium

"You can't have art without resistance in the material."
William Morris

As a sort of sequel to my last post on "Textile and Text," I'd like to pick up some themes I discussed in relation to Mary Carruthers in order to explain my first impression of Caribou's new album, Swim, which arrives officially in mid-April. Dan Snaith (aka Caribou, formerly Manitoba) has said that he wanted to make a dance record full of “music that's liquid in the way it flows back and forth, the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan . . . Dance music that sounds like it's made out of water, rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does." Swim does just that. In fact, what first struck me about the sound of this album is how much attention it draws to its medium. Swim is an appropriate title for an album that is unapologetically thick in the way it sounds. It's dance music that is explicitely processed, affected, distorted, mixed and arranged. In short, it is richly synthetic, mediated. Of course, all recorded albums do this; but few albums are this self-conscious about it.

The album cover features something very much like an LP that is vibrantly expressive and textured, in contrast to a voided background. In this sense, Swim essentially does with music (and I'm quite aware that electronic artists have been at this sort of thing for quite some time), what poetry does with language. As Jerome McGann writes, "The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible -- literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are."

As Mary Carruthers rightly sees it, there is no such thing as knowledge (or meaning) outside of discourse. This idea is nothing new. Marshall McLuhan said it similarly when he famously pronounced that "the medium is the message" in the late 60s, and Derrida wasn't very far off when he wrote, "there is no outside the text." McGann, from whom I quoted in above paragraph, would likely agree, but he sets out to do something slightly different. In his book, The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann calls not only for an engagement with bibliographical data over and against “romantic hermeneutics,” but contends that “Literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance." Because texts are always manifestations of concrete historical moments (or, in McGann’s words, “localizations of human temporalities”), no reading of a text is ever the same: “. . . every text is unique and original to itself when we consider it not as an object but as an action. . . . [it] is always a new (and changed) originality each time it is textually engaged.” Although he works against literary theories that imagine an ideal message behind the literary text and render the physicality of reading as a fall from grace, it would be wrong to call McGann’s approach reductive. Rather, it is an attempt to recognize the social possibilities and the irreducible heterogeneity of literary interpretation.

textile and text

Although I'm usually bitter about the long commute, I was lucky to be on the University of Manitoba campus yesterday. I was there for a class but it turned out that at the student gallery in University Centre, a friend of mine, Chantel Mierau, was having an opening for her thesis project. The project deals with memory: its embeddedness in language, the way its stored and processed. And it demonstrates this through the tedium of textile work.

Chantel's thesis begins with dozens of particular memories typed out onto index cards. Some are several lines long, while others consist of a few words; and some are mundane, while others are unsettling (the example that sticks out in my mind is "Oma was part of the Hitler youth"). She then processes these memories into binary code. This encoding is done for each memory and typed out onto small pieces of paper. She then knits the code in perl and knit variants with different yarns (apparently in the simplest knitted fabrics all of the stitches are knit or purl). These varients allow her to knit these encoded memories into pieces of fabric. Video becomes a crucial medium for the installation because the performative quality of the knitting, the working through of these memories, is what constitutes the memories themselves.

Part of what I love about this project is that the materiality of these memories cannot be separated from their linguistic pattern, nor can this encoded pattern be separated from the performance, the process, of knitting. The code is already present within convention, but requires some skill for it to become intelligible. Here, language becomes the condition of material possibility. This connection between language and fabric is nothing new. The Latin word textus comes from the verb "to weave" and as the medieval scholar Mary Carruthers points out,

it is in the institutionalizing of a story through memoria that textualizing occurs. Literary works become institutions as they weave a community together by providing it with shared experience and a certain kind of language, the language of stories that can be experienced over and over again through time. . . . Textus also means 'texture,' the layers of meaning that attach as a text is woven into and through the historical and institutional fabric of society. (The Book of Memory 14)

It is the burden of Carruther's work to show that premodern texts have a functional social purpose. Such texts are used primarily as devices that trigger a reader's recollection of memories stored in the mind. In this setting a book can only be considered "read" when it has been internalized; that is, a text becomes part of the reader in order for it to matter at all. Such practices enable a significant form of embodiment that modernity utterly rejects. In a documentary culture such as ours, books become objects of knowledge. And knowledge, in turn, become an object, a document, to possess and master. For the project I've been describing, memories (even those that we'd like to forget) are encountered and processed (another method of presentation in Chantel's thesis features the memories passing through a handcrank) in the act of knitting. In premodern reading practices, internalization (being read by the text) was synonomous with reading a text. And to some extent, something similar is going on in this project.

With old books and manuscripts one can hardly be too careful. These hides once belonged to animals whose natural oils made for versatile leaves - an ideal base for the scripts that decorate them. As historical objects, manuscripts are invaluable. At least, this is the general protocol for English students like myself.

In class a couple days ago, we ended with the question of conservation vs. use, with regard to the old, rapidly deteriorating texts that fill the University of Manitoba's archives. It struck me that the very question we're asking here --whether it's better to guard and protect these manuscripts from the consequences of time or to use them in an academic context as objects of study-- indicates our that our culture understands books in a way very different from those who once depended on these manuscripts for devotions, worship and entertainment.

While old books were certainly valuable in their day (some obviously more than others) the question of obsolescence is a recent one. Sometimes it seems like academic culture doesn't really know how to deal with old, dying things. Can we let go of an old manuscript? Better to put it box and hide it away in a dark archive so that it is still somehow "there" for us to imagine, if not to use.

For this same class, I'm reading two recent bestsellers that feature old books - The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. Both tend to sensationalize the field of book history, using old texts as vehicles for modern ideas about religion, tolerance and human knowledge (Brooks especially has some deeply problematic platitudes about the Haggadah, re: what and who it's for). To engage these contemporary constructions of manuscript culture, I'll be presenting on Mary J. Carruthers' The Book of Memory, contrasting the popular notion of the book as a reified object with Carruthers' presentation of the book as a guide or intermediary for the medieval imagination.