1995 – A&P Manifesto Remix - Mark Amerika

Texto

A. Whereas it's true that certain strains of modernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, capitalism and even marxism pervade the Avant-Pop sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents, who have much less influence over them). Many of the early practitioners of postmodernism, from Beckett to Vargas Ilosa, Borges to Silko, Davenport to Lessing, Gaddis to Garcia Marquez, who came into active adult consciousness and textual production in the forties, fifties, sixties and early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was rapidly becoming the space where most of our social exchange was taking place. Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self institutionalization and incest, early postmodernism found itself overtaken by the popular media engine; out of such extremely diverse writers as Abish, Ballard, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and even Nabokov, whose Lolita is one of the first fictional Avant-Popsters, the A&P began its move toward increasing recognition.

B. Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A&P artists have had to work hard not to become so enamored by the false consciousness of the mass media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives, the single most important one of which is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would, sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. Avant-Popsters thus turn into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is. We have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer our own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease that infects the core of our collective life.

C. Whereas Avant-Popsters are fully aware of their need to maintain a crucial avant-sensibility as it drives the creative processing of their work, and attaches itself to the avant-garde lineage from which they spring, they are also quick to acknowledge the need to develop more open-minded strategies that will allow them to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation that fill the contemporary Mediascape. Our collective mission is to radically alter Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesture that grows out of the work of many twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch); movements like fluxus, situationism, lettrism and neo-hoodooism; and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Slint, L7, Pavement, Stereolab, Meccanormal {this list of bands constantly changes everytime the manifesto is read aloud}...

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked experience. One way to achieve this goal is to create and expand virtual niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene and Internet. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively generated electronic publications, individually designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi-media interactive hypertexts, conferences, and so forth, Avant-Popsters and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist-author creates her/his beautifully-crafted, original works consumed primarily by the elitist art world and their business cronies who pass judgment on what is appropriate and what is not.

Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.

D. Avant-Popsters welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate and collaborate. The future of writing is moving away from the lone creator sitting behind a keyboard cranking out magical, mystical verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or agent or publisher who will hype her or his work to those interested in commercial literary culture. Instead, the future of writing will feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make itself available to hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of potential associates around the world actively internetworking in their own niche communities. Our audience will be both immediate and global, and our identities will remain forever in flux as we develop self-designed nodes of operation from which to distribute our multi-media litware. As Hakim Bey, author of the ontologically-anarchic book of guerrilla aesthetics, Temporary Autonomous Zones, recently said in the magazine Dreamtime Talkingmail, we're exploring "the possibility of an art which is by no means 'sensible' in the Civilizational sense of the word, but which is nevertheless devoted with PASSIONATE INTENSITY to COMMUNICATION, and thus to a certain kind of situational clarity and accessibility" ("Anarcho-Aesthetics and The Problem of Clarity," Dreamtime Talkingmail [Winter 1994]:12.)

Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway?

E. The distribution formula will radically change from: Author --> Agent --> Editor/Publisher --> Printer --> Distributor --> Retailer --> Consumer to a more simplified and direct:

Author (Sender) --> Interactive Participant (Receiver)

Avant-Popsters and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. Mark Amerika's own new electronic publishing enterprise, Alternative-X, can be visited by navigating your World Wide Web server or Gopher software to the site at marketplace.com.

F. One of the main tenets of postmodernism is: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text, while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based on what you bring to the Text. One of the main tenets of Avant-Pop writing is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.

In a Data Age where we all risk suffering from Information Sickness, one cure is a highly potent, creatively filtered tonic of (yes) textual (or multi-media) residue spilled from the depths of our spiritual unconscious. Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data he or she has at her or his disposal. We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already readymade and ready for consumption!

G. The future of the book is happening now. True, the idea that books as hard or paperbound products coming back from the printer so that they can then go to the distributor who will try and convince retailers that their consumers will want to buy them is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon.

Nor is the lone author, cranking out her or his writing wares at home only to send them off to distant agents/editors/publishers so that his/her work can then take part in this Author-->Agent-->Publisher--> Printer-->Distributor-->Retailer-->Consumer formula. Books will remain books and bookstores will continue to sell them. Writers will continue to get single-digit royalties and the distributors and bookstores will continue to reap most of the profit. The Best-Sellers list and the New York establishment will continue to maintain their rockhard hegemony.

BUT: now there's more to communication, more to language, more to text production, than the book. There are all manner of videos, graphic novels, dissident comix, CD-ROMS, computer hypertexts, earplays, and, soon, in a universally-accessible location near you, a small black box that will sit on top of your reconstructed soon-to-be-a-computer TV that will bring into your private space all kinds of fireworks created by (yep, it's true) writers. Electronic writers. Which, it ends up, most of us already are.

H. Technology is becoming more accessible and software is getting better. Soon we can start thinking seriously of publishing ourselves in our home offices, virtual brain centers--without being accused of vanity, thanks to the growing Do It Yourself ethic that's grown out of the underground scene. Soon we'll be able to create and send multi-media non-linear narrative over the wires and into computers all around the world. And, yes, it's true, many artists will continue to depend on the institutionalized system to nurture them through their careers. The comfort of the old system will keep a lot of artists happy with things the way they are. We can hear them already saying something like "but I'm a writer, I don't have time for all this other stuff." To which we'll respond: "You can't afford NOT to find the time . . .

Reading through a hypertext, one senses that just under the surface of the screen is a vast reservoir of story waiting to be found." --Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993: 1. . . . for all this other stuff lest you be left behind.

I. The Avant-Popster is a nomadic voyager, a cultural terrorist, whose identity is constantly in flux. He/she secretly "becomes" something like Woman or the open-endedness of feminine imagination, reclaiming the terrain vis-a-vis the enactment of subliminal postures/gestures that sabotage the system's rigidity. Our strategy is to deterritorialize the institutional effects so as to generate a new level playing-field where the action of bees and bodies buzzing can once again ignite the language of our spiritual unconscious.

Our dilemma then becomes how to make the Electric real while simultaneously making the desert of our souls virtually inhabitable.

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The following is a highly selective, sometimes arbitrary, surely biased, briefly annotated, and alphabetical checklist of interesting Avant-Pop sites. This list makes no claims toward completeness (Tim Ferret, Richard Meltzer, David Matlin, Stacey Levine, Harry Polkinhorn, Jill St. Jacques, and William T. Vollmann, for instance, aren't mentioned, though they certainly could be), but it does acknowledge that any checklist on such an amorphous topic as the Avant-Pop entails myriad hidden judgments and decisions. Nonetheless, it's a start, a sketch, the delineation of a relatively uncharted space to begin to explore for those coming to this subject for the first time; those wishing to test their opinions of what's Avant-Pop and what's not against ours; teachers out to design courses about this rough new beast; libraries checking up on their stocks of the current.

Kathy Acker. Empire of the Senseless (1988). The most cyberpunkish text (parts of which are actually pla[y]giarized from Gibson's Neuromancer) by the dominatrix of the Anglo-American A&P. No discussion of the A&P can begin without a brief genuflection in her direction. If Acker captures your imagination, you should also check out her brilliant Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Don Quixote (1985), and In Memoriam to Identity (1990).

Alternative-X. An electronic publishing/writing Internet site created by Mark Amerika that features many of the fictions, manifestos, essays, and on-line culture columns by many of the writers mentioned herein. Presently located by gopher or WWW at marketplace.com

Mark Amerika. The Kafka Chronicles (1993). Less novel than formalistic and theoretical pyrotechnic exploring the instability of selfhood in an electronic culture by one of the editors of Black Ice Books, editor of Black Ice magazine, and Director of the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media writing-machine soon to be installed at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Donald Barthelme. Sixty Stories (1982). One of the original pop cultural linguistically brilliant dreck-machines, his stories are little works of big genius. If you're interested in something longer, try The Dead Father (1975), more about killing off the aesthetic past than about moribund parents.

Richard Brautigan. The Abortion (1970). The simplicity of life becomes more than surfictional as Brautigan's use of language begins to unravel the cacophony of countercultural voices that invade his hyperreality. Also see Trout Fishing In America.

William S. Burroughs. Naked Lunch (1959). Short, perhaps, of Pynchon, no one writer has wielded more influence on post-war avant-garde writing both here and in Europe that WB. NL is a cut-up text that probes various addictions, from opiates to media, control, and sex. A pivotal work.

Robert Coover. Pricksongs & Descants (1969). Prototypic A&P, particularly the dazzling tele-visual, hypertextual story "The Babysitter," by one of the most significant post-war stylists.

Douglas Coupland. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). A first-novel A&P cult-classic chronicle of the McLives of the McGeneration by an original voice for the nineties.

Ricardo Cortez Cruz. Straight Outta Compton (1993). McCaffery says: "As we move into the nineties, rap music's slice-and-dice (and then bring-the-noize) approach has been this country's most effective and original strategy for providing outsiders with a sense of the urgency, anger, and sheer exhilaration produced by the collisions of sounds, sights, and people in our urban jungles. Now, in Straight Outta Compton, Ricardo Cruz has succeeded in writing the first major rap novel."

Don DeLillo. White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991). Two of the most important novels of the last decade by one of the masters of contemporary fiction, these books explore the Baudrillardian infusion into our lives of media and other information technologies.

Eurudice. f/32 (1990). Funny, energetic, schizoid text that begins when a woman's vagina decides to run away from home. How does one write beyond Kathy Acker at the fin de millennium? Read this and find out.

Lauren Fairbanks. Sister Carrie (1993). This one reads as if Dreiser said 'I love you' but didn't mean it and went to bed with Donald Barthelme and William Burroughs. The payoff is an aesthetics of rotting zoobies, hair-tearingly funny samples on sex and the city, the art of commerce and the commerce of art.

Raymond Federman. The Twofold Vibration (1982) and Take It Or Leave It (1975). Founder of the Surfiction movement, he has been a major influence on the young avant-set for years. Both his fiction and hypertextual theory are widely translated for a growing international audience.

William Gibson. Neuromancer (1984). The white-hot prosed, gritty-futureworld cyberpunk classic. Also check out Gibson's collaboration with the abstract expressionist painter Dennis Ashbaugh, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), an amazingly expensive nostalgic electronic prose poem about Gibson's childhood and the development of several key technologies that self-destructs after one reading--available on the Net newsgroup alt.cyberpunk.

Harold Jaffe. Eros Anti-Eros (1990). Extreme experimental f(r)ictions about a media-manipulated society by one of the most significant and underrated fringe writers in the United States. See also his upcoming Straight Razor (Black Ice Books) with illustrations by Norman Conquest.

Darius James. Negrophobia (1992). A wild novel written in screenplay form, where James uses hyperreal racial stereotypes as the best logical weapon to do away with those same stereotypes. Part Ishmael Reed, Terry Southern and Richard Pryor, this one will make you look in the mirror.

Michael Joyce. Afternoon (1987). The granddaddy of hypertext fiction about a man who may have just seen his ex-wife and son die in a car crash, but is too scared to find out. Interesting fusion of traditional psychologically motivated plot and cutting-edge form.

Steve Katz. The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968). Katz's first novel is everything you wanted in an Avant-Pop novel and more. There are enough innovative narrative devices here to spawn numerous generations of Avant-Pop progeny. One can only wonder what would have happened if hypertext-pioneer Ted Nelson had gotten together with Katz back in the late Sixties and started formulating the future of multi-media texts. See also his wild and wonderful Creamy & Delicious.

Mark Leyner. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990). Short, hilarious, cyberdelic linguistic explosions that formed an instant A&P classic. Followed by Et Tu, Babe (1992), a "novel" about a Warholesque writer who becomes a living god through media hype.

Larry McCaffery, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993). The first A&P anthology, featuring work from many of the key players, including Kathy Acker, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Eurudice, Harold Jaffe, Mark Leyner, Stephen Wright, and others. Followed in 1995 by a large version from Viking. Both are excellent introductions and overviews of the fiction.

Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi. "Graffiti's Rainbow: Towards the Theoretical Frontiers of 'Fiction': From Metafiction and Cyberpunk through Avant-Pop." In Science Fiction Eye 12 (Summer 1993): 43-49. Fine introduction to the A&P phenomenon by two of the best critics of the contemporary.

John McDaid. Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992). A hypertext whose premise is that the narrator visits his dead uncle's house and begins rifling through his things. The result is a multi-media extravaganza about the shifting nature of selfhood.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen (1986). The mother of all graphic novels, pure A&P with a healthy dose of cyberpunk, set in a near-future world without heroes.

Lance Olsen. Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994). Info-dense imaginative fire set in a rock'n'roll near-future world that investigates the commodification of the arts at the end of the millennium by the critic-fictioneer who wrote the first full-length study of William Gibson.

Lance Olsen, ed. Surfing Tomorrow: Essays on the Future of American Fiction (1994). Overview of the current and future states of American fiction, with contributions from Janice Eidus, Brooks Landon, Larry McCaffery, Lewis Shiner, Alan Wilde, and many other important writers and critics.

Derek Pell. Assassination Rhapsody (1988). One of the aces of the collage-text deconstructs the Warren Commission Report's investigation into the assassination of J.F.K. through the use of pastiche, quotation, and (re)appropriation.

Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The most crucial post-war novel, period. Pynchon exerts more influence over the new generation of innovative writers than anyone else except, perhaps, William S. Burroughs.

Doug Rice, ed. Nobodaddies. An A-P zine whose first issue reads like a who's who on the scene, with work by Eurudice, George Chambers, Raymond Federman, Mark Amerika, Rob Hardin, Michael Hemmingson, Derek Pell, Steven Shaviro, Curt White, and many significant others. Three other zines with an A-P twist are Jasmine Sailing's wild Cyber-Psycho's A.O.D, Brian Clark's ultra-kewl Puck and, of course, Black Ice, which has continuously published many of the emerging A-P writers.

John Shirley. New Noir (1993). A wealth of sick pomo Poeian fictions like "Jodi and Annie on TV," about two teens who'll do anything to appear on the six o'clock news.

Art Spiegelman. Maus I and II (1986, 1992). Just when Jewish fiction went comatose, content doing paler and paler imitations of itself (Bellow, Wiesel, the late Malamud, et al.), along came this A&P graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats, and everything is dynamically possible again.

Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash (1992). Cyberpunk with a sense of humor, A&P with a sense of electronic media, here's a novel that believes there are four things the U.S. does better than anyone else: music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery.

Ronald Sukenick. Doggy Bag (1994). An answer to modernist Eliot's The Waste Land by one of the father's of A-P, prolific surfictional co-founder of the Fiction Collective and publisher of American Book Review. This book confirms Sukenick's uncanny ability to transcend generational differences and keep his underground finger on the pulse of American culture. See also his earlier novels Out, Up and especially Blown Away.

Gerald Vizenor. Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987). A "novel" by the most disruptively experimental Native American on the writing scene.

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five (1968). Time-tripping, anyone? Hybrid genres, new vocabularies, metacommentary, and a political edge that clearly marks the terrain for more formally assaultive A-P texts to tread and move beyond.

David Foster Wallace. The Broom of the System (1987). A great comic A&P narrative worthy of Pynchon which begins when Lenore Beadsman's grandmother and twenty-five other residents mysteriously disappear from their nursing home in Ohio. Full of brain-buring style and intelligence.

Bruce Wagner. Wild Palms (1993). Cyberdelic graphic novel with so much pop-will-eat-itself-referentiality that you might miss the avant buzz that drives it. Originally published in the mainstreeam magazine, Details, and eventually produced by Oliver Stone for a TV mini-series, great for the intellectually stoned. Illustrated by Julian Allen.

Stephen Wright. Going Native (1994). Superb A-P novel in which the protagonist one evening just walks out of a suburban cookout, away from his family, and begins a long, dark, vampiric drift across a drug-stunned America; and yet, as in the algebra of subatomic physics, almost all we ever see of him is his effect on others.

Enlaces

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19961028035137/http://www.altx.com/memoriam/pomo.html