From: CTHEORY Editor [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 6:41 PM
To: ctheory
Subject: Review Article 50: Smart Art and Theoretical Fictions [1]


 ____________________________________________________________________
 CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 1-2

 Review Article 50  20-02-01  Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
 ____________________________________________________________________

 Smart Art and Theoretical Fictions [Part I]

 ================================================================
 ~Joan Hawkins~

 Chris Kraus
 _Aliens and Anorexia_
 Semiotext(e)
 Native Agents Series
 236 pp., U.S. $10 paper (published 2000)

 Chris Kraus
 _I Love Dick_
 Semiotext(e)
 Native Agents Series
 275 pp., U.S $8 paper (published Oct. 1997)

 Chris Kraus and Sarah Gavlak (editors)
 _Chance: A Philosophical Rave in the Desert_
 Smart Art Press
 45 pp., U.S. $10 paper, (published April 1997)

 Critics don't seem to like Chris Kraus much. At least they often
 don't like her "novels." I say "novels" (in quotes) because, unlike
 other reviewers, I'm not entirely sure Kraus's works belong in the
 generic category of "novel." Rather, as Sylvere Lotringer has noted,
 Kraus's prose works constitute "some new kind of literary form," a
 new genre, "something in between cultural criticism and fiction"
 (_Dick_, 271, 27). Kraus herself has called an early manifestation of
 this genre-bending "Lonely Girl Phenomenology" (_Dick_, 135). I prefer
 to call it theoretical fiction.

 By "theoretical fiction" I don't mean books which are merely informed
 by theory or which seem to lend themselves to a certain kind of
 theoretical read-- Sartre's _Nausea_, for example, or the ~nouveaux
 romans~ of Robbe-Grillet. Rather, I mean the kind of books in which
 theory becomes an intrinsic part of the "plot," a mover and shaker in
 the fictional universe created by the author. Books like Steven
 Shaviro's _Doom Patrols_, in which various poststructural theories
 function as characters, and Kraus's "novels," where debates over
 Baudrillard and Deleuze and meditations on the Kierkegaardian Third
 Remove form an intrinsic part of the narrative, where theory and
 criticism themselves are occasionally "fictionalized."

 Given Kraus's background, the active presence of theory in her art
 makes sense.

 Kraus and her husband, Sylvere Lotringer, are the editors at
 Semiotext(e), the small press that's largely responsible for
 introducing Anglo-American readers to the work of Baudrillard,
 Virilio, Guattari, and Deleuze. But the house also publishes
 literature--raw experimental poetry and prose by writers like Kathy
 Acker, Lynne Tillman, Cookie Mueller, and David Rattray. These are
 autobiographical works--or as Michelle Tea prefers to call them
 "first person fiction"--written by "people who take their lives and
 twist it into art" (Stark 2000). Works that consciously blur the line
 between art and life, between fiction and theory.

 Although theory plays such a key role in Kraus's books, theoretical
 discussion is often erased from or severely truncated in reviews of
 Kraus's work. _I Love Dick_, her first book, is generally described
 as the story of Kraus's unrequited love for cultural critic Dick
 Hebdige. _Aliens and Anorexia_ is represented as both the account of
 the failed reception of Kraus's film _Gravity and Grace_ and a kind
 of intellectual group biography. "Kraus tries to get over herself and
 her cinematic mishap by interweaving the account of her flop with the
 life stories of other earnest visionaries who died with puny places
 in the canon," one reviewer writes (Lieberman 2000). Actually,
 _Aliens and Anorexia_ is as much about love and sex as _I Love Dick_
 is. The eroto-infatuation arc it describes involves someone Kraus
 "met" on the L.A. Telepersonals Chatline the night she went on live
 as "Karen, a submissive woman who wants to play with a dominant guy
 who knows what he's doing and why he's doing it" (_Aliens_, 92). While
 Chris's fictionalized relationship with "Gavin Brice" is far more
 erotic than her relationship with "Dick," it involves frank fantasies
 of S &M, and its role, like theory's, is attenuated in reviews.

 "Who gets to speak and why..." Kraus writes, "is the only question"
 (_Dick_, 196). I would modify that as follows: who gets to speak, who
 gets to speak about ~what~, and ~why~ are the only questions. Certainly
 they're the questions which even favorable critiques of Kraus's work
 have led me to ask. Why are Kraus's "novels" mainly inscribed within
 a genre she has termed "the Dumb Cunt's tale" (_Dick_, 9)? Why do even
 art reviewers tend to edit, censor, filter out certain key aspects of
 her work? I can't answer these questions in the course of this review
 article. What I can do is try to redress the balance a little, and
 talk about the aspects of Kraus's art which I believe have been
 overlooked.

 I Love Dick
 -----------
 Let's start with "the Dumb Cunt's tale." _I Love Dick_ is divided
 into two parts, Part One: Scenes from a Marriage and Part Two: Every
 Letter is a Love Letter. Scenes from a Marriage lays out the
 parameters of the love story--the unifying emotional and narrative
 device of the book. It reads, Giovanni Intra writes, "like _Madame
 Bovary_ as if Emma had written it." Certainly, _Madame Bovary_ is the
 literary analogue that Chris and her husband Sylvere use. In one
 memorable segment, Sylvere writes to "Dick" about his wife, "Emma,"
 and signs himself "Charles." "Dear Dick, This is Charles Bovary"
 (_Dick_, 104-107). Chris joins in the conceit when she tells the
 reader, in an expositional aside, that "sex with Charles did not
 replace Dick for Emma" (_Dick_, 107). But _Madame Bovary_ isn't the
 only literary reference. "I'm thrown into this weird position," Chris
 tells Dick in her first letter to him. "Reactive--like Charlotte
 Stant to Sylvere's Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry
 James novel--_The Golden Bowl_" (_Dick_, 9). And when he's not thinking
 of Flaubert, Sylvere refers to Chris's infatuation with Dick as the
 90s equivalent of a Marivaux comedy. But since much of the plot is
 driven by letters, written by a couple who are attempting to seduce a
 third party into some kind of love-art ~projet~, the book also bears
 a slight resemblance to _Liaisons Dangereuses_. Like LD, _I Love
 Dick_ is self-reflexive as hell, as Sylvere and Chris continually
 critique and comment upon each other's prose, arguments, and
 plot-lines. Like LD, _I Love Dick_ establishes a fictional territory
 where adolescent obsession and middle-aged perversity overlap and
 intersect, a territory where the relationship between "always for the
 first time" and a sort of jaded "here we go again" can be explored
 (in one letter Chris even refers to herself and Sylvere as
 "libertines," a term that invokes both Laclos and Sade). And, as in
 LD where the relationship between Valmont and the Marquise de
 Merteuil is the one that really counts, the most compelling and
 enduring relationship in _I Love Dick_ is between the two people who
 initially seem to have grown a little too used to one another. As one
 perceptive critic observes, the reader-voyeur ultimately cares less
 about whether Chris sleeps with Dick than whether she stays with
 Sylvere (D'Adesky 1998).

 The literary references are fun. "Sylvere and Chris were among the
 five most well-read people they each knew," Chris confides to us at
 one point (_Dick_, 15), and for anyone who likes to read literature,
 _I Love Dick_ is a good read. But the literary references should also
 cue us to the textual savvy of the people who populate the piece.
 These are people who dig each other's references (_Dick_, 15), who
 analyze and critique each other's prose, who are very aware that the
 literary form itself "dictate[s] that Chris end up in Dick's arms"
 (_Dick_, 55). So it's strange that critics have tended to treat _I Love
 Dick_ as more of a memoir than fiction, as an old-fashioned text
 which we could read as though the past twenty years of literary
 theory about the signifying practices of language had never happened.
 "There's no way of communicating with you in writing," Sylvere writes
 to Dick at one point, " because texts, as we all know, feed upon
 themselves, become a game" (_Dick_, 61). And it's this
 self-cannibalizing, self-reproducing, viral and ludic quality of
 language and text that critics seem to have largely ignored in
 writing about the book.

 _I Love Dick_ opens with the account of an evening Chris Kraus, "a 39
 year old experimental filmmaker," and her husband Sylvere Lotringer,
 "a 56 year old college professor from New York," spend with
 "Dick...an English cultural critic who's relocated from Melbourne to
 Los Angeles" (_Dick_, , 1). Dick is "a friendly acquaintance of
 Sylvere's," and is interested in inviting Sylvere to give a lecture
 and a couple of seminars at his school (_Dick_, 1). Over dinner, Kraus
 writes, " the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical
 theory and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making
 continual eye contact with her" (_Dick_, 1). The radio predicts snow on
 the San Bernadino Highway and Dick generously invites the couple to
 spend the night at his house. "Back at Dick's, the night unfolds like
 the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rohmer's film _My Night at Maud's_,"
 Kraus notes (_Dick_, 2). Dick inadvertently plays an embarrassing phone
 machine message left for him by a young woman, with whom "things
 didn't work out" (_Dick_, 4). Sylvere and Chris "come out' as a
 monogamous hetero-married couple. Dick shows them a videotape of
 himself dressed as Johnny Cash, and Chris notices Dick is flirting
 with her. Chris and Sylvere spend the night on Dick's sofabed. When
 they wake up the next morning, Dick is gone.

 Over breakfast at the Antelope IHOP, Chris informs Sylvere that the
 flirtatious behavior she shared with Dick the previous night amounts
 to a "Conceptual Fuck" (_Dick_, 3). Because Sylvere and Chris are no
 longer having sex, Kraus tells us, "the two maintain their intimacy
 via deconstruction: i.e. they tell each other everything." (_Dick_, 3).
 What Chris tells Sylvere the morning after is that Dick's
 disappearance invests the flirtation--the Conceptual Fuck--"with a
 subcultural subtext she and Dick both share: she's reminded of all
 the fuzzy one-time fucks she's had with men who're out the door
 before her eyes are open" (_Dick_, 3). "What do you do with a Kerouac?"
 she asks, quoting a poem by Barbara Barg. "But go back and back to
 the sack with Jack/ How do you know when Jack has come?/ You look on
 your pillow and Jack is gone" (_Dick_, 4). Sylvere, "a European
 intellectual, who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of
 love's minutiae" (_Dick_, , 7). He buys Chris's interpretation of the
 evening, and for the next four days the two do little else but talk
 about Dick.

 The couple starts collaborating on ~billets doux~ to Dick. At first
 they just share the letters with each other, but as the pile grows to
 50 then 80 then 180 pages, they begin discussing some kind of Sophie
 Calle-like art piece, in which they would present the manuscript to
 Dick. Perhaps hang the letters on the cactus and shrubs in front of
 his house and videotape his reaction. Perhaps Sylvere should read
 from the letters during his Critical Studies Seminar when he visits
 Dick's school in March. "It seems to be a step towards the kind of
 confrontational performing art that you're encouraging," he writes in
 one of his darker notes to Dick (_Dick_, 27). When Chris finally does
 give the letters to Dick, "things get pretty weird" (_Dick_, 163). But
 by that time, the letters have become an art form in and of
 themselves, a means to something that has almost nothing to do with
 Dick. "Think of language as a signifying chain," Chris writes,
 referencing Lacan (_Dick_, 242). And here you can literally see the
 signifying chain at work, as Chris's letters to Dick open up to
 include essays on Kitaj, schizophrenia, Hannah Wilke, the
 Adirondacks, Eleanor Antin, and Guatemalan politics. "Dear Dick," she
 writes at one point, "I guess in a sense I've killed you. You've
 become Dear Diary..." (_Dick_, 81).

 If Chris has metaphorically "killed" Dick by turning him into "Dear
 Diary," Dick--when he finally writes back-- erases Chris. Despite the
 fact that he appears to have had sex with her at least twice and has
 shared several lengthy conversations ("long distance bills fill the
 gaps left in my diaries," she writes at one point, Dick, 239), he
 continually maintains that he doesn't know her and that her obsession
 with him is based solely on "two genial but not particularly intimate
 or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years" (_Dick_,
 273). At the close of the book, as almost every reviewer notes, Dick
 finally responds by writing directly to Sylvere but not Chris. "In
 the letter," Anne-Christine d'Adesky writes, "he misspells her name
 as Kris, and seems mostly concerned with salvaging his damaged
 relationship with Sylvere. He expresses regret, discomfort, and anger
 at being the ~objet d'amour~ in their private game and clearly hopes
 they won't publish the correspondence as is. 'I do not share your
 conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake
 of that talent,' he tells Lotringer. To Chris, he is more curt,
 sending only a Xeroxed copy of the letter he wrote to her husband.
 It's a breathtaking act of humiliation, an unambiguous Fuck You"
 (d'Adesky, 1998).

 But it's also the appropriate literary conclusion to an adventure
 that was to some degree initiated by Sylvere. The first love letter
 in the book was written not by Chris but by her husband. And one of
 the things the "novel" unveils is the degree to which women in the
 classic Girardian triangle function as a conduit for a homosocial
 relationship between men (see Sedgwick, 1985). "Every letter is a
 love letter," Lotringer writes at one point, and certainly his first
 letter to Dick reveals a desire for intimacy that exceeds the usual
 hetero-friendly-professional correspondence. "It must be the desert
 wind that went to our heads that night," he writes, "or maybe the
 desire to fictionalize life...We've met a few times and I've felt a
 lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer...So let's go
 back to the evening at your house: the glorious ride in your
 Thunderbird from Pasadena to the End of the World, I mean the
 Antelope Valley. It's a meeting we postponed almost a year. And truer
 than I imagined...I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we
 could just be what we are together. But now I'm sounding like the
 bimbo whose voice we heard, unwittingly, that night on your
 answerphone..." (_Dick_, 8-9). The homosocial tone of the letter, as
 well as Sylvere's fear that he sounds like a love-struck girl sets up
 "the game" as one of competition and intimacy between men. No wonder
 Chris--whose crush on Dick supposedly initiates the adventure--feels
 "reactive...the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the
 men" (_Dick_, 9). When Dick finally writes, he reinforces Chris's
 peripheral position. Ignoring everything that has passed between Dick
 and Chris, he responds to Sylvere's initial letter to him, in
 language which illustrates--as d'Adesky notes-- that he's "mostly
 concerned with salvaging his damaged relationship with Sylvere."

 On the simplest level, then, _I Love Dick_ is a more complicated
 piece of work than the reviews would indicate. Through the use of
 letters, taped phone conversations, and written exchanges between
 Chris and her husband, it deconstructs the classic heterosexual love
 triangle and lays bare the degree to which--even in the most
 enlightened circles-- women continue to function as an object of
 exchange. By saying this, however, I don't mean that it's simply
 another illustration of Eve Sedgwick's arguments in _Between Men_.
 Sylvere and Chris are too theoretically savvy to unproblematically
 present text/language as a transparency through which the real might
 be read. It's never clear if the style of Sylvere's letter is
 dictated by his feelings for Dick or by his awareness that the "form
 dictates" certain expressions of sentiment (_Dick_, 55). What is clear
 is that "the real" is not exactly what interests Chris. "The game is
 ~real~," she tells Dick in her first letter, "or even ~better than~,
 reality, and ~better than~ is what it's all about" (_Dick_, 11).
 Sylvere thinks Chris's evocation of the hyper-real here is "too
 literary, too Baudrillardian." But Chris insists. "~Better than~,"
 she writes, "means stepping out into complete intensity" (_Dick_, 11).
 And it's that intensity which Chris craves.

 "Lived experience," Felix Guattari writes in _Chaosophy_, "does not
 mean sensible qualities. It means intensification" (_Dick_, 241). And
 while Kraus doesn't quote Guattari until late in the text, his
 presence is already felt here--in the first letter. In fact, what's
 interesting is Chris's idea that you can somehow ~use~ Baudrillard's
 notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Deleuze and
 Guattari's notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the
 theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the
 simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as
 the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into
 Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.

 Given that Sylvere and Chris's stated goals--"the desire to
 fictionalize life" and the desire to play a game that's "better than
 reality"--are to surpass the real and, as Jim Morrisson says, "break
 on through to the other side," it's curious that the aspect of _I
 Love Dick_ that is most frequently discussed in reviews is its
 connection to the banal, its status as a ~roman a clef~. _New York_
 magazine revealed that the "Dick" of the book is Dick Hebdige, and
 rumor had it that Hebdige tried to block publication of _I Love
 Dick_, that he was threatening to sue Kraus for invasion of privacy.
 Later, he changed his mind when she promised not to use his surname
 in the text. As a result of this publicity entirely too much
 attention has been focused on Dick, who--as d'Adesky notes--remains
 "a mystery man" in the text itself (d'Adesky, 1998). The fact that he
 doesn't return messages, Chris points out, turns his answerphone, and
 to some extent the man himself, "into a blank screen onto which we
 can project our fantasies" (_Dick_, 12). Elsewhere she has called Dick
 "every Dick...Uber Dick...a transitional object" (Intra, 1997).

 Certainly he is Virtual Dick. It's difficult to know whether certain
 things that Kraus describes in the book ever really happened. And
 Dick's works, which at times are named and quoted in the book, are
 fictionalized (that is, real works are given fictitious titles and
 some of the quotes attributed to Hebdige appear to have been written
 by other people) . This may have been done to further blur the real
 Dick's identity and so avoid a lawsuit. The net effect, though, is
 curious, since the camouflage of Dick's work continually refers back
 to Kraus and Lotringer themselves. In a postscript to one of
 Sylvere's letters, Chris asks Dick to send a copy of his 1988 book,
 _Ministry of Fear_ (_Dick_, 27; the "real" book is Hebdige's _Hiding in
 the Light_). The title comes from Orwell, she says later (_Dick_, 133)
 but it also refers to a 1943 novel by Graham Greene (the first "book"
 of which happens to be called "The Unhappy Man"). It may be something
 of a hyper-textual stretch, but the links between Graham Greene, the
 author of spy novels, and the titles of the Semiotext(e) series which
 Lotringer and Kraus edit-- Foreign Agents, Native Agents--read like
 an inside joke to me. Less oblique is the reference Kraus makes to
 "Dick's" _Aliens and Anorexia_. "And then in _Aliens and Anorexia_
 you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly
 anorexic," she writes. Then she quotes from "Dick's" work:

 "If I'm not touched it becomes impossible to eat.
 Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when
 things break down. If I'm not touched my skin feels like the flip
 side of a magnet. It's only after sex sometimes that
 I can eat a little." (_Dick_, 134).

 Later she quotes again from "Dick's book."

 "Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of
 an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from
 food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal?
 Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light
 around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry
 shortcake, mashed potatoes..."(_Dick_, 134).

 "This's one of the most incredible things I've read in years," she
 says (_Dick_, 135).

 Dick Hebdige hasn't written a book called _Aliens and Anorexia_, but
 Chris Kraus has. And I don't know if Hebdige is slightly anorexic,
 but Kraus has written that she is. In _Aliens_ , she quotes from her
 L.A. Diary: "If I'm not touched it becomes impossible to eat, It's
 only after sex sometimes, that I can eat a little. When I'm not
 touched, my skin feels like the flip side of a magnet" (_Aliens_,
 147-148). And later, "anorexia is not evasion of a social-gender
 role; it's not regression. It is an ~active stance~: the rejection of
 the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food, ~the
 creation of an involuted body...Synchronicity shudders faster than
 the speed of light around the world. Strawberry shortcake, mashed
 potatoes~" (_Aliens_, 163). The observations about food fluxes and the
 "mechanical sign of the meal" are a paraphrase of Deleuze--whom she
 quotes in _Aliens_ (163). The stuff about intersubjectivity appears
 to have been written specifically for Dick.

 "Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm," Kraus writes,
 "when things break down." But intersubjectivity in the text occurs in
 and through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and
 citation become blurred.  The lines in _Aliens and Anorexia_ are
 printed without quotes, and they aren't attributed to "Dick." Given
 the context, it's hard to say who is quoting from whom, who is
 incorporating whose work, who is feeding on whom. My guess is that
 Kraus attributes her own language to "Dick" in _I Love Dick_--and in
 that way acknowledges what she explicitly states elsewhere in the
 text. It is through her love for Dick that she begins to write,
 through her passion for him that she finds her own voice. And in that
 sense he can be seen as an "author" of her work. But this doubling up
 of language and self-referentiality is also an elaborate part of the
 "game"--a reminder that even (or perhaps "especially") critical texts
 are unstable, are signifying chains which feed off themselves. Even
 critical texts can be/should be seen as "fiction."

 It seems as though reading the "real" Dick Hebdige's work enables
 Kraus to find a way of talking about art, a way that makes sense to
 her. "You write about art so well," she tells him in _I Love Dick_
 (131). But she does, too. "I'd chosen film and theater," she writes
 at one point, "two artforms built entirely on collisions, that only
 reach their meanings through collisions" (_Dick_, 137). And that
 reliance on montage serves her well in her writings on art.
 Interesting juxtapositions and allusions combine with a tremendous
 eye for detail and for the political to make us think differently
 about specific pieces and about art as a whole. Rock 'n roll lyrics
 cut in, inviting connections that function like hyperlinks
 themselves. In this way, Kraus's writing on art bears some
 resemblance to Hebdige's (Hebdige's long quote from Bo Diddley's "Who
 do you love?" in his essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example); but
 the voice is definitely her own. The essay-letters in the second half
 of the book (Every Letter is a Love Letter) are linked to Kraus's
 obsession with Dick (her drive to his house the first time she plans
 to have sex with him is intercut with her memories of/meditations on
 Jennifer Harbury's hunger strike on behalf of her Guatemalan husband,
 for example). But the essays also take on a life of their own,
 independent of Dick. And they are essays, not just "riffs," as
 d'Adesky calls them. The piece titled "Kike Art"(_Dick_, 190-210) is
 easily the best thing on Kitaj I've ever read, and her meditations on
 Hannah Wilke and Eleanor Antin are wonderful pieces of art
 criticism/history. I particularly like the way that she invites us,
 throughout these essays, to consider who gets "accepted" into the art
 world pantheon and who doesn't and why. The way she asks us again and
 again to go back to those moments we consider "avant-garde," and read
 them through a slightly different lens. And I like the way she
 invokes theory--seems comfortable in a kind of theoretical
 skin--without necessarily using theoretical language. Kraus tends to
 perform theory and, through the performance, she demonstrates how
 much it matters. "Every question, once it's formulated," she writes,
 "contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves
 with false questions" (_Dick_, 225). It seems to me that that quote
 might be used to summarize the critical project of theory in the past
 decade.  It certainly could be used to summarize the critical projects
 of the other writers who haunt this book--including Dick Hebdige.

 Subject Position/s
 ------------------
 One of the questions which Kraus struggles with throughout _I Love
 Dick_ is how to reconcile the writing process with the idea of a
 fragmented subject. "For years I tried to write," she tells Dick in
 the middle of a long piece on schizophrenia, "but the compromises of
 my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And 'who' 'am' 'I'?
 Embracing you & failure's changed all that cause now I know I'm no
 one. And there's a lot to say..." (_Dick_, 228). The book begins with a
 third person narrative in which Chris refers to herself as "Chris."
 And throughout the Scenes from a Marriage segment of the book, she
 periodically reverts to that third person narrative stance. It's only
 in the second half of the book that she settles into the first person
 pronoun. "The difference between now and fifteen years ago," she
 writes, "is I don't think I was able, ever, to write any of those
 notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for
 myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded
 like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of
 myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can't stop writing
 in the 1st Person, it feels like it's the last chance I'll ever have
 to figure some of this stuff out" (_Dick_, 136). And then, later, "in
 order to write 1st Person narrative there needs to be a fixed self or
 persona and by refusing to believe in this I was merging with the
 fragmented reality of the time. But now I think okay, that's right,
 there's no fixed point of self but it exists & by writing you can
 somehow chart that movement. That maybe 1st Person writing's just as
 fragmentary as more a-personal collage, it's just more serious:
 bringing change & fragmentation closer, bringing it down to where you
 really are" (_Dick_, 137).

 Kraus's struggle to find a subject position out of which to write is
 graphically represented on the cover and title page of the book. "I
 LOVE *DICK*," the cover proclaims. By the frontispiece, however--the
 page just before the section entitled Scenes from a Marriage --the
 "I" has displaced "Dick" as the dominant term. "*I* LOVE DICK." "I
 kept asking myself why I kept reading," one graduate student confided
 after a seminar discussion of _I Love Dick_. "That's why." Opening
 the book, he pointed to the outsized "I." Women students told me that
 they were rationing pages toward the end of the book, prolonging the
 reading experience and trying to defer the end. Like the male student
 quoted above, they didn't care about Dick, but they cared a lot about
 Kraus's process of inserting herself into the narrative, her process
 of finding a voice.

 Aliens and Anorexia
 -------------------
 If _I Love Dick_ is mainly about building/finding subjectivity--
 discovering a subject position from which to write in the 1st
 person-- _Aliens and Anorexia_ is very much about tearing
 subjectivity down. "If the 'I' is the only thing we truly own, we
 must destroy it," Kraus writes, quoting Simone Weil. "Use the 'I' to
 break down the 'I' " (_Aliens_, 27). So it makes sense that the
 romantic trope that Kraus uses in this book is not the adolescent
 infatuation she deconstructs and ironizes in _I Love Dick_, but an
 adult S&M relationship that begins when Kraus calls the L.A.
 Telepersonals Chatline, looking for phone sex. "Makes sense" because
 one of the effects of S&M violence is to suspend the "crippling
 effects of rationality" which is associated with the "I," the ego
 (see Lotringer 1988,16). "That he had the power to wrench those
 sounds from her--that she had granted him that power--astonished him,
 made him reverent and tender. She was disintegrating for him," one
 author writes on the subject (Trachtenberg 2000, 103). And
 disintegration, the breaking down of boundaries, is what's at stake
 here.

 As in _Dick_, the romance in _Aliens_ unfolds across, through, and
 within texts. "Gavin Brice" is in Africa; Chris is in L.A. The rules
 of their relationship are that she sends him sexual narratives via
 e-mail. If he likes them, he phones and "finishes the tale." Here, as
 in _Dick_, the relationship between language and desire is made
 explicit, as language both creates and satisfies sexual need.

 But language and narrative here don't just serve as masturbatory
 aids. Rather, as Kraus suggests, there is some fundamental connection
 between the erotic and language, between pornography and
 "literature." Or perhaps it's just that porn is narrative in its
 purest form. At any rate, it occurs to Chris that by sending e-mails
 and receiving phone calls "it might be possible to learn something
 about narrative" (_Aliens_, 94). And about style. "The spaces in between
 the nexus-points of Fuck can be pure play," she writes (_Aliens_,
 94-95). In her e-mail messages to Gavin, the "spaces in between" are
 spaces of intellectual play, spaces where literature, philosophy,
 theory and art are directly addressed and brought to bear on the
 matter at hand. She begins reading Joseph Conrad because Gavin likes
 his work, and breaks her own theoretical meditations down into the
 kind of language that Gavin prefers to read.

 But while these "spaces in between" seem to offer the possibility to
 move beyond fantasy toward a kind of re-materialization (once again,
 I'm reminded of the Deleuzian ideas Kraus evokes in Dick ), to move
 from virtual sex to "real" sex, words " all fail the magic prize"
 (Violent Femmes, Add it Up ). When Chris suggests breaking out of the
 confines imposed by a textual relationship and asks to meet Gavin at
 some neutral place, he begins pulling away. He doesn't call, doesn't
 even e-mail. The next time she phones the chatline and leaves her
 signature come-on, Gavin leaves a message in her box. But he doesn't
 recognize her "line;" he doesn't even recognize her voice. He thinks
 he's contacting a stranger. Once again, Chris is humiliated in front
 of the reader, erased, removed from the story.

 One reason that narrative is so important to Chris in this book is
 that her movie _Gravity and Grace_ doesn't seem to have one. "_Gravity
 and Grace_ was an experimental 16 mm film about hope, despair,
 religious feeling and conviction," Kraus writes. "Driven harder by
 philosophy than plot or character," it was "just...unappealing"
 (_Aliens_, 3, 4). Based on Simone Weil's _Gravity and Grace_, the film is
 about the breaking down of barriers, the rupture of a certain kind of
 ego, the search for God transposed onto encounters with
 extraterrestrials. In the six months following its completion, the
 film was rejected by every major film festival "from Sundance to
 Australia to Turin" (_Aliens_, 4). In January, 1996, Kraus took it to the
 European Film Market in Berlin, as part of the American Independents
 group. When it failed to find a distributor there, she began to write
 a book about its failure. That's when she "met" Gavin Brice, a
 successful filmmaker/producer. And the relationship between the S&M
 narratives she shares with him, narrative in general, and art form a
 crucial nexus in the text.

 Like _Dick_, however, _Aliens_ is always more complex than it seems.
 It's not just narrative--the gift for spinning words into appealing
 stories--that's the issue here. Like _Dick_, _Aliens_ is informed by
 questions of voice. But while _Dick_ explores voice as textuality and
 subjectivity (how do you find your "voice" as an author; in which
 "person" do you write), _Aliens_ is much more concerned with what
 Barthes calls the "grain" of the voice, its texture, as it is
 mediated by technology (Barthes 1985). "Was it possible to mourn the
 absence of a voice?" Chris asks. "A voice that wasn't even whole, but
 digitally dismantled, reconstructed" (_Aliens_, 170). The answer of
 course is yes. And just in case we have our doubts, Chris finds a
 literary analogue to help us make the leap. "She phones him at the
 same time as he, in space and time," she writes, quoting Marguerite
 Duras' _Le Navire Night_. "They are speaking. Speaking...They never
 stop describing. And at the moment she speaks, she sees herself. He
 tells her, put the phone down you (sic) your heart...He says his
 entire body's following the rhythm of her voice. She says she knows.
 That she can see because she's listening" (quoted in _Aliens_ 170).

 The idea of being able to see because one is listening is a loaded
 one in Aliens. While Chris initially suggests that _Gravity and
 Grace_ failed because it lacks a well-told "story," she also worries
 that the film failed because of some essential lack of vision on her
 part. "The idea of 'movie' was a mesh of words and voices and
 emotions which I'd just assumed that Dennis [the Director of
 Photography] would know how to translate," she writes. "I'd never
 thought of movies visually before; I could hardly tell the difference
 between a two-shot and a closeup" (_Aliens_, 103). As if to underscore
 this, she quotes Sylvere. " 'Why,' Sylvere asks me to this day,
 'would anyone with so little visual imagination as you ever want to
 be a filmmaker?' " (_Aliens_, 106). For Rhonda Lieberman, who reviewed
 _Aliens_ for _The Village Voice_, this passage--and Chris's lack of
 visual sense-- provides a clear rationale for Chris's failure as a
 filmmaker. "Given Kraus's description of her filmmaking approach,"
 Lieberman writes, " it's no big surprise that G&G [_Gravity and Grace_]
 tanks" (Lieberman 2000, 1). For Kraus, however, the issue's not so
 clear. What she's pursuing is the idea of "movie," not just making a
 film. And so everything about the medium as we know it is up for
 grabs. "Can movies start with images?" she asks (_Aliens_, 19). And for
 Kraus this is not a rhetorical question.

 The artistic ~problematique~ posed by the text, then, is the degree
 to which narrative and formal convention can and should dictate
 "art." "I showed the movie to John Hanhardt, who was then the film
 and video curator at the Whitney," Kraus writes. "He invited me to
 his office to explain why I'd never be an artist. John said although
 he found my work 'intelligent' and 'courageous,' it lacked beauty,
 criticality and narrative resolution...And it confused me, wondering
 why intelligence and courage were considered negative attributes in
 female filmmaking" (_Aliens_, 162-163). Or why perhaps "beauty,
 criticality, and narrative resolution" should trump "intelligence and
 courage" in the art-film game (where the jackpot has never been
 particularly large). When Lieberman caustically comments that "Kraus
 tries to get over herself and her cinematic mishap by interweaving
 the account of her flop with the life stories of other earnest
 visionaries who died with puny places in the canon," she ignores the
 fact that all the artists and "visionaries" described in the book are
 people who struggled mightily with the issue of "beauty" and its
 essential link to art. The project (or unwitting result) of the book
 is not, as Lieberman asserts, to suck us "into an intellectual time
 warp, one that revives an embarrassing '80s moment that fetishized
 'transgressive martyrs' and glorified hysteria as a site of
 resistance to patriarchy" (Lieberman 2000, 1). Rather the book asks
 us to go back and revisit one of the dominant tenets of all the
 avant-garde, anti-Art movements of the 20th century: namely that art
 and beauty aren't necessarily synonymous terms and that in the
 technologized sphere of the 20th century there may even be something
 a little politically suspect about mandating an aesthetically
 pleasing art. An art in which "beauty, criticality, and narrative
 resolution" trumps "intelligence and courage."

 As though to emphasize the importance of this intellectual project,
 Kraus frames her frame story with descriptions of the millennial
 countdown:

      Countdown on the milennium (sic) clock at 34th Street
      and 7th Avenue in Manhattan, a grid of twitching
      light-dots advancing into numbers, ringed by
      brightly-colored logos its sponsors burned into the
      plastichrome--TCBY Yogurt, Roy Rogers, Staples,
      and Kentucky Fried Chicken-- neo-medieval message
      from our sponsors, instructing us that time is fluid
      but Capital is here to stay--
      468 days, 11 hours, 43 minutes, 16 seconds to go
      (_Aliens_, n.p. before p. 1)

 Given the context, the clock invokes a mood less of anticipation than
 of panic. There's the sense that time is running out. And that sense
 is reflected in other sections of the book, as well, as Kraus tells
 us that Sylvere Lotringer wants to get his mother's World War II
 story before she dies, and as loved ones do die before Kraus has a
 chance to say goodbye. All of these encounters are mediated by
 technology--the clock keeps track of the days--time running out; bad
 news comes via e-mail, phone, and fax--machines which frequently
 garble and lose things; the stories of Holocaust survivors and
 deportees are tape recorded and preserved--machines marking time and
 transmitting/ preserving/ garbling/ losing/ reconfiguring voice and
 image. I'm reminded of Baudrillard's description of the clock at
 Beaubourg.

      The perfect symbol of the end of the century is the numerical
      clock at the Beaubourg in Paris. There, the race against time
      was measured in millions of seconds. The Beaubourg clock
      illustrates the reversal of time characteristic of our
      contemporary modernity. Time is no longer counted from its
      point of origin, as a progressive succession. It is rather
      subtracted from the end (5,4,3,2,1,0). It is like a bomb with
      delayed effect. The end of time is no longer the symbolic
      completion of history, but the mark of a possible fatigue, of
      a regressive countdown. We are no longer living according to a
      projected vision of progress or production. The final illusion
      of history has disappeared since history is now encapsulated in
      a numerical countdown (just as the final illusion of humankind
      disappears when man is encapsulated in genetic computations).
      Counting the seconds from now to the end means that the end is
      near, that one has already gone beyond the end.
      (Baudrillard 1998, 1).

 In a sense this marks a kind of reversal of the historical logic of
 progress and time that is played out in _I Love Dick_. In that
 earlier book Chris plays the Violent Femmes' song "Add it Up" as she
 waits for Dick in a motel. It's an appropriate choice. The first
 lines of the song--"why can't I get just one kiss?"--make the perfect
 ironic commentary on Chris's relationship with her on-again,
 off-again maybe-beau. But "add it up" could work as a kind of coda to
 the book as a whole, as well--could serve as an appropriate summation
 to the book's trajectory of progress (things develop, subject
 positions emerge, relationships evolve). In _Aliens_, on the other
 hand, the mood is much more one of "subtract it down," as Chris
 literally works against the clock to break herself--and history--
 down. "Countdown," she writes in the filmscript for _Gravity and
 Grace_ (which is included in its entirety at the end of the book).
 "Ticking of a time bomb. The world explodes" (_Aliens_, 178).

 Works Cited
 -----------
 Special Thanks to Nathan Carrol, Chris Dumas, Jonathan
 Nichols-Pethick, Jake Smith and the students of C792:
 a seminar on "Yoyeurism and the Society of the Spectacle".

 Barron, Stephanie ed. _Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-garde
 in Nazi Germany_. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.

 Barthes, Roland. _The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980_.
 Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

 Baudrillard, Jean. "In the Shadow of the Millennium, of the Suspense
 of the Year 2000." CTheory Vol 21, No. 3 (Article 61; 98/09/23).

 Bennahum, David S. "Just Gaming:Three Days in the Desert with Jean
 Baudrillard, DJ Spooky, and the Chance Band." _Lingua Franca_
 (February 1997) 59-63.

 D'Adesky, Anne-Christine. "Stalking Theory." _Nation_ Vol 266
 Issue 20 (6/01-98) p30, 3 p. Accessed through EBSCOhost Full Display

 Dean, Jodi. _Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace
 to Cyberspace_. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.

 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
 and Schizophrenia_. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
 Minnesota Press, 1987.

 Guattari, Felix. _Chaosophy_. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York:
 Semiotext(e), 1995.

 Hartmann, Frank and Richard Pettauer, "Dj Spooky: It's All Jazz." _An
 Interview on Sound and Media Literacy_. 04.06.1998
 http://www.heise.de/english/inhalt/musik/3244/1.html Accessed
 Sept. 11, 2000.

 Hebdige, Dick. "Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean-Michel Basquiat and
 'Dark' Side of Hybridity." Jean Michel Basquiat. Ed. Richard Marshall.
 New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1992. Dist. by Harry Abrams,
 New York. pp. 60-70.

 Intra, Giovanni. "A Fusion of Gossip and Theory." Artnet.com
 http://www4.artnet.com/Magazine/index/intra/intra11-13-97.asp
 Accessed 7/17/00.

 Kraus, Chris. "Private Parts, Public Women." _The Nation_. Vol 267,
 Issue 16 (Nov. 16, 1998), p. 36; 3p. Accessed through EBSCOhost
 Full Display.

 Kroker, Arthur. _The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French
 Postmodern_. New York:St. Martin's Press, 1992.

 Lieberman, Rhonda. "Film Fatale." _Village Voice_ (April 19-25, 2000).
 http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0016/lieberman.shtml
 Accessed 7/17/00.

 Lotringer, Sylvere. _Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in
 America_. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

 Reynolds, Simon. _Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and
 Rave Culture_. New York: Routledge, 1999.

 Rimanelli, David. "Mad Love." _Bookforum_ [a quarterly publication of
 Artforum] (Spring 1998). p. 7.

 Shaviro, Steven. _The Cinematic Body_. Minneapolis and London:
 Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1993.

 -------------- _Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about
 Postmodernism._ New York and London:High Risk Books, 1997.

 Stark, Elizabeth. "GRRL Guide: An Interview with Michelle Tea."
 _Lambda Book Report_ , Vol 8, Issue 10 (May 2000). p. 18; 2p.
 Accessed through EBSCOhost Full Display.

 Trachtenberg, Peter. "The Thing He'd Done." _Bomb_ (Summer 2000),
 pp. 100-105.

 ____________________________________________________________________

 Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the Dept of Communication
 and Culture at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of
 _Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde_
 (U of Minnesota Press, 2000) and is currently working on a book on
 experimental film culture of the 1980s and 1990s.
 ____________________________________________________________________

 * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology
 * and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews
 * in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
 * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
 *
 * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
 *
 * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Austin),
 * R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln),
 * Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San Francisco),
 * Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson
 * (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross
 * (New York), David Cook (Toronto), William Leiss (Kingston),
 * Shannon Bell (Downsview/York), Gad Horowitz (Toronto),
 * Sharon Grace (San Francisco), Robert Adrian X (Vienna),
 * Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein (Chicago),
 * Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
 *
 * In Memory: Kathy Acker
 *
 * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
 * Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Victoria, B.C.).
 *
 * Editorial Assistant: Jeffrey Wells
 * World Wide Web Editor: Carl Steadman

 ____________________________________________________________________
 To view CTHEORY online please visit:
 http://www.ctheory.com/

 To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
 http://ctheory.concordia.ca/
 ____________________________________________________________________

 * CTHEORY includes:
 *
 * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
 *
 * 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
 *
 * 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
 *
 * 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
 *
 * CTHEORY is sponsored by New World Perspectives and Concordia
 * University.
 *
 * For the academic year 2000/1, CTHEORY is sponsored
 * by the Department of Sociology, Boston College
 * (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/soc/socdept.html)
 *
 * The editors wish to thank, in particular, Boston College's
 * Dr. Joseph Quinn, Dean, College of Arts and Science, Dr. John
 * Neuhauser, Academic Vice-President, and Dr. Stephen Pfohl,
 * Chairperson, Department of Sociology for their support.
 *
 * No commercial use of CTHEORY articles without permission.
 *
 * Mailing address: CTHEORY, Boston College, Department of Sociology,
 * 505 McGuinn Hall, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467.
 *
 * Full text and microform versions are available from UMI,
 * Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale
 * Canada, Toronto.
 *
 * Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
 * Documentation politique international; Sociological
 * Abstract Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political
 * Science and Government; Canadian Periodical Index;
 * Film and Literature Index.
 ____________________________________________________________________

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************