Preface/Conclusion: Metacommentary without Depth?

Do not be deceived by its apparently academic “content”: this is a speculative work. Rather than write a traditional paper because I had a particular argument to make, something particular to say, I decided to see what (if anything) would have been said in such a saying.

That caveat notwithstanding, there are things that I can say (now) about the conditioning influences of “Sexing the Cut” that might be useful for a reading/viewing. The point of departure is Victor Vitanza’s topographical/political analysis of MOO ethos and textuality, and his article on this, “Of MOOs and Folds,” forms the primary backbone of the piece. I suppose it is possible to read the entire essay as an exposition of Vitanza, both in its content and in its form. Vitanza advocates a textuality of folds and surfaces, of half-twists and cuts (the ambiguity of the cut runs throughout “Sexing”), and the formal aspects of this essay—that it is in Flash; that it involves multiple overlapping texts; that it is devilishly hard to read in any conventional way—reflect an attempt to “perform” a textuality that might be something like this. In this sense, “Sexing” is a bit of wager, taking Vitanza’s bet (or, perhaps, calling his bluff?). But bringing the half-twist of performance to Vitanza’s concepts introduces another dimension to the discussion, one that lies directly in the experience of the reader/viewer, and one that concerns me in general as we struggle to come to terms with new media technologies in our academic writing.

This dimension is the aesthetic, here confronting us (me) in an unaccustomed way: I am used to discussing aesthetics from a distance, as the subject of my writing, but not usually as the central and substantive problem of my work qua work. “Sexing” works against the formal conventions of academic writing on several levels, and this formal manipulation foregrounds the aesthetic experience of my readers in a way that blurs the distinction between art (the performative) and theory (content). For Vitanza, the ethical moment in social formation is the cut, the rape, the founding of depth (historical, corporeal, metaphysical) that is the condition for the possibility of violence. To move away from an ethic of depth toward one of surfaces, however—“Sexing” suggests— summons the cut according to a different axis, that of the aesthetic. Thus, Derrida, Ponge, and Stein (the small red text running throughout is from Tender Buttons) are folded throughout “Sexing” as a kind of chorus humming a question that goes something like: if we cut loose from the depths; if we flay this beast, flatten out its skin and trace its undulations in multiple directions; if we abjure the penetrating incision but weedwhack the protuberances (“that give our lives meaning,” to quote Rickie Lee Jones); if we go the way of the Deleuzian fold; then what keeps us from the pure cut of Kantian beauty? That particular violence? This is a question that accompanies another question, that of how academic writing can or will respond to the possibilities that new media offer for intellectual expression. Many readers may note their difficulty in discerning the point of the piece, not surprising given that its argument lies almost entirely in the reader’s gut, at the level of affect. I believe that the more we experiment with the conventions of academic writing, the more we put ideas into the concrete practices afforded by new media, then the more we will be faced with the social and ethical situation faced by the Modernists, in which the aims of expression chiasmate (if I may invent a word) with those of communication. What responsibilities come with this work? I ask this because it seems to me that new media allow us increasingly to put abstract concepts into concrete practice, and because I don’t believe that this is merely an abstract exercise in consistency. For readers, it creates demands that are not just (or primarily) intellectual, but cognitive, perceptual, and aesthetic, as well. What ethic might govern the inflicting of these demands? What new or old conventions might govern the violence that comes with the entry of aesthetics into academic writing? (Or will we turn Kantian and say that our work is “disinterested”?)

The original version of “Sexing” contained no playback control mechanism (the present version has two small buttons, one for stopping and the other for resuming play, in the lower center of the screen), and it should be noted that the piece should be viewed initially without stopping: the violence of the piece comes through much more clearly, and to the extent that “Sexing” has an argument, the sense of violence it induces in a reader is central to it. Please note also that the sound is set to a finite number of loops, calculated to coincide with an uninterrupted viewing. The control buttons do not control sound playback, so the reader may anticipate running out of sound during controlled movie play. The buttons are there now for second viewings, reflections on the medium and its relation to academic writing, and further reflection on content.

Works Cited