It’s all too easy to devote all of our attention to deciphering the radical in radical fiction. But to do so is to gloss over the question of fiction – specifically, what purpose does fiction have? Speaking about the effect that fiction has on him, David Foster Wallace wrote that it made him feel “unalone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep conversation with another consciousness.” (Miller) Fiction is, above and beyond anything else, an attempt at communication. It’s an unavoidable condition of human existence that we can never know precisely what another person is thinking or feeling. The fictive element of fiction is that it holds the promise of revealing to us the subjectivity of that unknowable Other.

Postmodernity was marked by the “rupture” of deconstruction, the point at which Western metaphysics dealt not only with structure, as in Marxist theory, but with “the structurality of structure” (Derrida). For fiction writers, it meant revealing and playing with the fictiveness of fiction’s claim to communication. Postmodern writing is marked by that self-awareness of itself as a work of fiction – indeed, we could say that we have reached a kind of high water mark in self-aware writing. The preface to Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a prime example – it highlights the extent to which this memoir has been fictionalized, including dialogue which “is obviously not true, as when people break out of their narrative time-space continuum to cloyingly talk about the book itself” (Eggers). But as the author himself acknowledges, “[t]here is no overwhelming need to read the preface…[i]t exists mostly for the author”. We seem then, to have reached a kind of impasse – while postmodernity’s self-awareness was arguably radical, the sort of meta-fictionality exemplified by Eggers is obstructing fiction’s true purpose – to communicate to a reader.

How then can we take a step back from the relentless trickery and self-aware winking of postmodernity without falling into the trap of nostalgia? For it is the concept of nostalgia that best captures the anti-radical tendency in society and in literature. Gertrude Stein said that the present never wants to be what the present is (Berry). Having grown up with the literary, political and aesthetic reference points of previous generations, it is inevitable that the present will seem all too loud and ugly – we simply have yet to create the vocabulary or cultural yardsticks by which to appreciate it. Which is why nostalgia has been used to sell everything from war to cleaning products. That sort of appeal to golden eras and ‘the good old days’ is a cornerstone of conservatism precisely because it offers a comforting and reassuring vocabulary – John Howard’s vision of the 1950s as a white picket fence and nuclear family feels like something safe and familiar to hold onto in the face of postmodern bogeymen like asylum seekers and terrorism.

What nostalgia reacts against then, and what it draws its attraction from, is the alienation of the present. Our present has been described as a society of information overload – and the postmodern brand of alienation has been diagnosed as an inability to cognitively map those complex networks of information (Jameson). The radical response to this alienation however, is not to try and make sense of it – that is the nostalgic response. I use nostalgia here in the theoretical sense – that is, the traditional Western metaphysical search for a fixed, originary centre which will give meaning to everything else around it. Of course, postmodern writing has already dispensed with this search for a centre – by constantly reminding us of its fictiveness, postmodern fiction revels in the confusion and unmappability of postmodernity, disavowing any kind of authorial intention which might give meaning to the chaos.

However, as mentioned above, postmodern writing ultimately fails its communicative function. Not because it’s ‘too hard’, and contemporary audiences are ‘too stupid’ to understand postmodern writing. It fails to communicate on the level that Foster Wallace outlined as the threshold for good fiction because as a technique, postmodern writing merely mimics postmodern information overload. In doing so, it replicates the alienation of the postmodern present, which is why readers, even the ones who ‘get it’, often come away from postmodern writing unmoved.

Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality posits a relatively new method of oppression through the gathering of knowledge – by collecting endless data and statistics, governments are able discipline and control society (Otto). For governments, if something is knowable it is therefore controllable – the Northern Territory Intervention is a domestic example of the government’s ability to justify its invasive control of a social group through data collection. At worst, when postmodern writing such as American Psycho writing is unable to communicate something true and human it just becomes more data.

But what truth and humanity can we communicate as fiction writers without falling back on nostalgic essentialisms (which, it must be remembered, we’re not avoiding just to keep up with critical theory fashion but because those nostalgic essentialisms are always ultimately exclusive – and are vital in the creation of narratives of dominance and oppression)? It is worth quoting Foster Wallace here at length:

“the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle…Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” (Foster Wallace)

So it isn’t some Truth that we’re striving to communicate but the very struggle for truth which defines all of us. For Stein, art changes not in the pursuit of novelty but instead to capture something that has already happened. Put another way, radical fiction is writing that attempts to develop a new vocabulary to come to terms with the present. In our case, that means neither making sense of the postmodern present nor merely mimicking its complexity – instead, radical fiction now should be communicating the particular alienation of a century in which we are increasingly technologically connected to every other human being on the planet and yet we feel as alone and overwhelmed as ever.

Radical fiction now should, in a sense, embrace the unknowable as unknowable. But this is not the cold, cerebral experimentation of postmodern writing.  It’s an incredibly sad, scary and human approach to the postmodern present. Acknowledging the unknowable as unknowable is to concede the limits of language – there are some things which language is just unable to adequately convey – not least of which is what each of us is thinking and feeling at any given moment. But the paradox is that by pointing that out, we as fiction writers are able to communicate across the inherent limit of language because we each feel our aloneness and reading about it as a shared human condition alleviates that loneliness, even if just for a moment. Samuel Beckett said that he was always looking for the perfect word “so that the thing that [he was] trying in vain to say can be tried in vain to be said”. If fiction is fundamentally a form of communication, then radical fiction is fiction already marked by its failure – it is writing that sets out to fail.

It’s hard to tell whether or not my recent paranoia and extreme mood swings are due to the overwhelming drudgery of writing a 10,000 word essay in a week, the numbing stress of waiting for visa documents to come through in time to go on exchange or the amount of midnight coffees I’ve been indulging in lately. But one minute I’m a world-beater, on the fast-track to hall-of-fame academia and the next I’m a worthless self-indulgent would-be writer who will eke out copy for fascist magazines ’til I qualify for the pension. Which, if we keep bumping up the retirement age, will be never.

In any case, when what appears to be extreme mental frailty in the male peaches begins to appear on the old family tree, it makes you look over the proverbial shoulder, let me tell you. Do I have the same worm wriggling around inside my peachy innards, I am gestating little buggery monsters as I type?

What is clear, amongst all the peach metaphors and hyperbole, is that I’ve caught a fairly virulent strain of hypochondria from my father. Whether it’s mental illness or Chronh’s Disease, this peach always seems to have a maladie du jour. Which is the sort of morbid thing that peaches do, in their spare time. Of which they have a lot – what else is there to think about out there exposed on the barest of branches where any one of hands, beaks and slugs can have their way with you? Where even the wind carries the threat of imminent death? No, it’s a precarious existence, peachiness. The best one can hope for is a career at Goulburn Valley or SPC, safe in a tin can Peachdom, preserved in your own juice alongside Walt Disney, awaiting the Second Coming…

At what point did my handwriting begin to resemble my parents’? It never used to. It used to be a sort of miserly scrawl – miserly, that’s what my Mum used to always call it, because people with small handwriting are always misers, she said – more like little frantic scratchings than legible script. But now I found my handwriting getting larger, more loopy and free form. It took me a while to figure out where I’d seen that handwriting before. And then come memories of Mum writing out our tuckshop orders on those brown paper bags and Dad leaving notes all over the house – Close the back door before you leave, Don’t waste water.

In fleeing my parents (to uni, into writing-and-music-not-medicine, out of home, overseas) I hoped to escape their influence, their burdensome past and expectations. But my hand betrays me – even as I write a story about leaving them behind, the very handwriting itself reminds me of them. And as I write, my literary influences rise up from the deepest reaches of my subconscious. There’s Mark Twain’s version of the Joan of Arc legend, which made me cry in Grade 5. A young adult fiction rendering of Arthur and his Knights, which I can never find but whose themes – unrewarded heroics, betrayal, brotherly camaraderie – still tug on my heartstrings when they surface in the most banal formats (the ending of the first Fallout videogame, for one, and the ending of the first Redwall book by Brian Jacques, Martin the Warrior).

And will I ever escape the haunting image of Remedios the Beauty floating away into the sky? And how often have I returned to that final, unforgettable sentence in The Great Gatsby, which itself seems to eternally recur even as you read it?

Ultimately I’m writing for myself – I have to. Even the most attentive reader, with the most intimate knowledge of my life would only come away from a piece of my writing with an infinitesimal number of meaningful moments of influence. All the rest are there for myself – because reading is ultimately a lonely pastime and any writing (well, my writing anyway) is like a series of echoes of other pieces of writing – both by me and by other people. Images and phrases have a way of recurring in my writing, again and again, as if I’m trying to scratch away an itch. Which is the pleasure in rereading – new echoes surface – and why I have a guilty pleasure in rereading stuff I’ve written a long time ago – it’s the same as looking at my handwriting; the echoes multiply with each revisit and eventually I don’t know what parts of me are real and what parts are echoes. Eventually I’ll be like a reverb chamber, endlessly echoing on and on and on…

The above is a screenshot of a skills assessment my housemate was completing for the Newstart (dole) payment. It’s supposed to help recipients learn the sorts of skills they need to be able to find gainful employment…while reinforcing some subliminal stereotypes while they’re at it…

The text reads:

“Chief’s tend to be high achievers and work towards achieving a promotion as soon as possible. For this reason they often accept extra responsibilities and strive for recognition of their abilities.

Businesses also need Indian’s. Indian’s are often the staff members who get things done and are comfortable with accepting direction.

They don’t  mind doing menial and repetitive tasks and prefer not to accept additional responsibilities. Businesses need Indian’s and they are an important component to business operations.”

I’m not sure which I’m more concerned with – that whoever wrote this didn’t think that there was something suss about telling us that Indians are the perfect convenience store employees…or that a skills assessment test for the unemployed doesn’t know how to use apostrophes.

This is a recording of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. He records himself speaking and then plays it back into that same room, recording that playback. He does that again and again, each time picking up the resonant frequencies of the room. The recited text describes the process itself:

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

As you listen to the recording, the speech becomes unintelligible and eventually all you are left with are the pure resonant harmonies of the room itself. Stay tuned for a performance of I am sitting in a room chez Pèche.

Ever since my girlfriend made a speech at my 21st in which she mentioned that I was particularly fond of Jacques, I’ve been copping a lot of shit about him. Lately it’s reached a kind of crescendo, and I feel as if I can barely walk out the door without being subjected to snide jokes about Continental philosophy. So, in an attempt to deflect attention from my love of deconstructionism, here’s a list of other nerdy things I enjoy which you can tease me about:

- Noise music

- Arsenal FC

- Human Rights

- Computer games

- Cycling

- End-of-the-world movies, especially ones with the scene where someone volunteers for the almost-certain-death-save-the-planet mission and then they ask who for anyone who will come with them to step forward and then everyone does, at the same time

- Coming-of-age films, especially ones revolving around high school sports teams in which a boy earns his father’s respect by almost winning the same trophy his father had won as a boy

- The internet, especially the badly spelt parts

- General low-brow procrastination which doesn’t revolve around ontology, epistemology, the limits of language, or the human condition

PS

I <3 JD 4 eva

But he is my idol.

Infinite Jest sits on my bookshelf at eye-level when I’m sitting down at my desk. So whenever my mind wanders (which it often does) my eye is always caught by that dominating spine. Sometimes I succumb to temptation and open it up – half an hour later I’ll emerge from a tangle of words and images and thoughts and voices and characters and feel torn between putting the book down (and getting some food or studying or going out or you know, getting on with life) and re-entering the impossibly layered world of tennis academies and halfway houses.

But most of all it’s an addiction (it’s the only word for it) for D.F.W.’s voice, which hovers above and in and underneath the myriad of voices who speak in the novel. And not because he’s slamming you over the head with some Authorial Intention – quite the opposite. He achieves that incredible feat that only a handful of authors have ever been able to pull off – he creates achingly real, human characters who exist autonomously of their creator – and yet every sentence is imbued with his intelligence, humour and compassion.

At the end of the day, reading Infinite Jest isn’t nearly as intellectually exhausting (which it is, very much so) as emotionally exhausting. In an interview, D.F.W. once said that he thought that what set fiction apart from other art forms was that at its greatest, it managed to make you feel like you were communicating one on one with some other human being, some true thing was passing between you. He said that it was this illusion which alleviates the terrible loneliness of living, and reading his novel I felt so strongly that there was this guy in America talking to me, telling me that life is complex and wonderful and worth living.

That D.F.W. hung himself little over a year ago is therefore doubly tragic – the world lost a wonderful, kindhearted human being, and now when I read his work, I can’t help but wonder if I heard him right the first time after all.

[N.B. The following is something I wrote for Chalk Press, a forthcoming publication put out by a bunch of totally rad (as in cool, but also as in radical) people from Melbourne town. Email them at chalkpress@gmail.com for more info if you're interested, and keep your eyes peeled for it!]

Violence is a collection of six essays, each a meditation on the ostensibly non-violent systems which allow for real world violence. Zizek is particularly critical of what he calls the “liberal communists” – the “good people who worry”. The arch-liberal communist is Bill Gates, for whom there is no single working class – instead there are just specific problems to be solved. Gates is the single greatest benefactor in human history but, like Richie Rich’s philanthropic father, all his good intentions belie the fact that his enormous wealth is founded upon a global system which entrenches oppression.

Similarly, the First World doles out help to the developing world in the form of aid and credits and in doing so, is able to avoid the key issue – that it is the very global financial system which generates First World wealth which is responsible for the misery and suffering of the developing countries. 

The challenge for us is to articulate this critique in the context of contemporary politics, which Zizek describes as “post-political bio-politics” – the (supposedly) non-ideological expert administration of the security and welfare of human lives. The point of life becomes life itself – nothing more. Giorgio Agamben described this state of being as homo sacer – the life that can be killed but not sacrificed – because there is no longer any ideology to be sacrificed to.

What better way to characterize our current experience of university than the non-ideological expert administration of our education (read: The Future of the Nation)? The question has been asked, is the university still worth fighting for? In recent years, it certainly doesn’t seem so. It’s a common complaint amongst lefty students that our elections seem to increasingly occupy a kind of post-ideological dead space populated by vacuous promises for more beer and less protests. However, as has been pointed out, are student campaigns based around ‘access’ any better?

Zizek uses the Paris riots of 2005 as an example of an explosion of violence that had no purpose, no utopian vision. The protestors made no coherent demands.  This was not, he argues, a result of the impotence or stupidity of the protestors but rather, as Frederic Jameson put it, their “inability to locate the experience of their situation within a meaningful whole.” Demands based around access fall into the same category because they do not encompass a wider critique of the university as an institution. Because demands for access are based on the same ideology as that which sustains the university’s inequality (namely, liberal democracy), they are not an ideological or systemic critique but instead fall into the same post-ideological landscape as demands for an entirely service based student union.

Zizek also has an interesting explanation for continuing social injustice.  The just society, as articulated by John Rawls, is one in which social inequalities are not the result of inherited hierarchies but instead natural inequalities – that is, our laws should be judged by how they help people with the very least, on the bottom rung of the ladder. However, such a society would only lead to resentment – my low social status would be totally justified, and I would be denied the pleasure of blaming an unjust social system for my failures.

Perhaps that is why students persist to make their way through a system that is so palpably unjust? Because at least this way, when they eke out their lives in unrewarding jobs they will have something to blame.

Alternatively, perhaps student apathy stems from the basic sense of well-being that comes from knowing that, at least, we’re free to choose. Zizek argues the converse: that the concept of forced choice is at the heart of liberal democracy. You are free to choose so long as you make the right choice. Put another way, at university we are free to choose a product, so long as we choose to choose. Demanding a better product is still affirming that choice to choose. To not choose at all, to question how our university educations are implicated in global systems of control (of information, people, capital) is not a choice that is open to us. After all, when we vote, our primary vote is cast not for our preferred candidate but for the very system of voting in the first place.

But just because you have to choose doesn’t make that choice meaningless. Instead, it serves a crucial symbolic function – the empty gesture which underpins the social order. Even though you must love your country, it is also vitally important that that love comes from your own free will.

Ultimately, Zizek’s point is a difficult one to come to terms with.  He debunks our illusion of free choice which valorizes the liberal subject who is supposedly a free autonomous agent. By doing so, he strips us of our political agency (at least as we commonly understand it), but his point is that an attachment to the illusion of freedom distracts us from the systemic and institutional conditions for injustice. To campaign for concession tickets for international students is to ignore Brecht’s question, “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” The mistreatment of international students has its roots in the very structure of the system that brings them to Australia in the first place – and concession cards will not only fail to change that system but can distract us from the bigger task at hand.

But can we just stop campaigning for concession cards and smaller class sizes? After all, it’s one thing to say, forget about all that, concentrate on the bigger picture. But to do so would require a leap of faith beyond the post-ideological landscape in which we have learnt and cultivated our politics. As Orwell said:

“It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinctions[…]I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person.”

Having just wiled away the wee hours of the morning playing scrabble, we retired to our rooms and laid down on our beds and stared saggy eyed at our computers. The house was so quiet that we could hear the gentle hum of our laptops, and our typing seemed thunderous.

Supper had been at the European, gnocchi of some sort with a nice pilsner. It’s strange sitting in a bar/restaurant around midnight, being served by very attentive staff.

Before supper was a rambling, chaotic, tardy, intimate sound gig. There were more people on stage than in the audience. But as the set progressed, individual performers would rest their instruments and sit down with the punters, until we were all watching and applauding an empty stage.

Dinner was nachos in front of trashy television. Intellectual and pseudo-intellectual conversation filled the ad breaks.

We’re floating gliding sailing from meal to meal, bubble-wrapped and carefully packaged, sealed and hand-delivered, signed for, safe and mollycoddled. We play Scrabble at 4am because we can.

It seems slightly ludicrous to me that racism has become the topic of the day. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel marked out by racial difference, and I think I grew up with a strong sense of just how horrible racist humour is for the person at the butt of the joke.

And no, it’s not as simple as being ‘offended’. I take offence to racist jokes when I see them on stage or on the television, or when it’s yelled out by a drunken stranger outside the pub. That sort of thing is easy – sure, it makes me angry, sad and pissed off but I can come to terms with it – those people are just racist fuckheads, they exist, fine, move on. But what is much, much harder is the racist humour practiced by friends, towards me, in their capacity as a friend.

How do you want me to respond? It’s a question I grapple with from day to day. I know from experience that the appropriate response, the response that will garner the most social and cultural capital, is to laugh along. Better yet, I should take the joke further – I should tell another racist joke. My role here is simple – to validate my friends’ jokes, to assuage any guilt they might have. It’s the most horrible colonialist logic at play here – it is not enough for you to assert your difference from the Other (your ‘ethnic’ friend) but you need the Other to reinforce that difference, to constantly carry that difference within them as a part of their identity.

Christopher, in a response to an earlier post, wrote that race is a construct – that “each of us chooses to construct, and identify with, our own idea of our race differently”. This patently ignores the position that an ‘ethnic’ person is put in by so-called ‘friendly’ racist jokes. In the moment that a friend tells me a racist joke about Asians, I am confronted by the choice to either a) laugh along, validate their joke, acknowledge my difference (my Asian-ness) as a laughing matter; or b) kick up a fuss, point out their racism and thereby make them uncomfortable and resentful, and inevitably confirm my difference as some sort of taboo, like a terrible stain or defect that we don’t mention in polite society.

When you separate out ‘artistic practice’ from everyday conversation, as I think Zoe and Christopher were hinting at in their responses to my previous post, then we are making a false distinction between the public and private spheres. We would effectively be removing political responsibility from our ‘private actions’, casting our conversations with friends as apolitical. What that means is that I am effectively barred from responding to friends’ racial humour on a political level – instead, my only recourse is to option B, which is effectively an appeal to the personal – ‘Please don’t tell that racist joke because it offends my hypersensitive sensiblities’. It means that my friends are able to channel their racism into the ‘private’ sphere, leaving their public personas unbesmirched so that they can pontificate from the moral high ground when ‘bogans’ have the gall to enact the violent racism that they themselves perpetuate in their everyday lives. The public/private division means that the privileged, white middle-class can have their cake and eat it too – they can publicly denounce politicians, art and popular culture as racist (and thereby confirming their own anti-racism) while privately enjoying all the psychological and social benefits of the colonialist in private, as they guffaw over some joke about my squinty eyes and yellow skin.

And it’s not a simple matter of race ‘education’, and nor is the problem ’self-ghettoisation’, as suggested by Nicholas. The idea of integration, or multiculturalism as panacea for the ills of racism ignores the centuries of colonialism which have exacted a heavy toll on our collective psyches. Envy, self-loathing, wanting to be white, or regressing to some simplified idea of originary ethnicity – these are all part and parcel of growing up ‘ethnic’ in a largely homogenous society. I found the most interesting part of the panel at TiNA was when Bhakthi said that she tries not to write from a position of ethnicity. The phrase ‘ethnic lit’ is often used to denigrate and pigeon-hole fiction much in the way ‘queer lit’ is used to devalue a wide-ranging work of art until it can only be seen to be saying one thing. The worst thing about racist jokes told by friends is that it does the same thing – it simplifies my complexity down to a one word definition. And it is only natural that I should then want to escape that definition – thus bringing about a never-ending cycle of running away, and then towards, and away again (and so on) from my ethnicity, that thing that both defines my value, and takes it away.