Formulating Affinities and Defiances Through Discomfort
Nadège Paquette
CONTEXT
Les Foufounes Électriques
I want to situate Acker’s performance within Montreal’s artistic scene in the 80s, within feminist debates about pornography, and within punk and avant-garde performances. Acker’s performance was part of the Tuesday series at Les Foufounes Électriques (also known as “Foufs”) presented by the short-lived magazine L’Oeil rechargeable: L’organe de la nouvelle culture and Ultimatum. During the 1980s and 1990s, the bar situated in the Faubourg Saint-Laurent neighborhood was considered a major part of Montreal’s underground scene where beatniks, hippies and punks met to attend music shows and poetry readings (Palardy 16). It thus was an appropriate location to welcome Acker and her work which were characterized as shocking and scandalous by a Radio-Canada report announcing the event (“Reportage Radio Canada”). Alan Lord, representing Les Foufounes Électriques, was interviewed and described Acker as the “priestess of the new Beat Generation [and] of the punk literatures.”
Bilingualism and the “Two Solitudes”
Acker’s visit in Montreal is an example of a bilingual experience that refuses to indulge in the mutual exclusion of the “two solitudes,” a phrase used to refers to the lack of communication between Francophone and Anglophone populations in Canada. Acker’s coming was covered by francophone media such as Le Devoir and Radio-Canada (Royer C–2). The latter introduced Acker by a single sentence—chosen for its shock value—from a video excerpt of a previous performance where she says: “I quickly chose a raped body over a mutilated or a dead one.” ("Reportage Radio Canada"). Acker’s sentence was accompanied by a somewhat flawed translation: “J’ai rapidement choisi d’être violée, plutôt que d’être mutilée ou tuée.” Translated back to English, we could read: "I quickly chose to be raped rather than being mutilated or killed.” The French translation erases the action of choosing a body which creates both estrangement and distance (Brecht). Estrangement because we do not “choose” our body like we choose our clothes but are a body. Distance because “choosing” implies that we are not bound to our body, but rather that we can exchange it for another one if it fails us. The translation thus replaces the act of choosing a body with the act of choosing to be subject to rape over mutilation or death. In other words, Acker’s use of estrangement to prevent her audience form easily identifying with her character and to bring them to reflect critically on the violence portrayed is here eclipsed, giving the impression that violence is banalized. This imperfect attempt at rendering Acker’s words accessible to French speakers situates the writer’s visit at a time when no French translation of her work was available. Yet there was an interest for her work and her persona in Montreal’s underground francophone and anglophone scenes brought together by the Foufs (Palardy 55).
Pornography and Feminisms
Later in this same Radio-Canada report, Acker is interviewed at the Foufs in front of a wall covered with graffiti where is written in big letters “NO PORN NO ART” ("Reportage Radio Canada"). The 1980s are years of internal conflict within different feminist movements that strongly disagree on the status of pornography both in the US and in Canada. Anti-pornography activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon argue that pornography is detrimental to women because its system of production is based on female exploitation and because its system of representation reifies women as sexual objects used for the male consumer’s pleasure (MacKinnon 796–97). Acker troubles the idea that feminism needs to get rid of pornography and of sex work with it. Acker appropriates the explicit and violent character of pornographic representations to dismantle binaries that uphold the norms producing gendered violence while claiming to prevent it (Ioanes 175). Her representation of sexuality follows her logic of contradiction according to which opposite terms are to be held together rather than being portrayed as mutually exclusive. It is on the subject of consent, and more precisely in the “impasse that Catharine MacKinnon highlights when she rejects the notion that consent is fully available to women as free and equal subjects,” that Acker intersects with anti-pornography feminists (Ioanes 181). They however draw opposite conclusion from this awareness that a subjects’ consent is never absolute, and that sex is never without violence (181). Anti-pornography feminists condemn pornographic representations while Acker uses them to represent the socially illegible responses that her characters have to sexual violence to problematize the symbolic violence that encompasses any principle of legibility. In Acker’s novels, consent doesn’t exclude violence and there are no “good” or “bad” victims of sexual violence. Consent needs to be constantly renegotiated by her characters and by her readers and listeners (Ioanes 180, 183).
METHODS FOR LISTENING
Layers: situating sounds
I have divided my annotations into four layers: transcript, speaker, audience, and environment. This division attempts to engage both with the source, or cause, of the sounds and with their relation to their addressee. By listening for the source of the sounds, I am practicing what Michel Chion calls “causal listening” (Chion, L’audio-vision 31). The source of Acker’s voice is addressed by two different layers. In the “transcript” layer appears what Acker reads from the pages she is holding. Here, her voice is addressed to any audience present at her different performances. “Speaker” serves to collect what Acker says to this particular audience when she is not reading. Erving Goffman, in his Forms of Talk, calls this “fresh talk” (171). Those are moments when the speaker’s formulation appears responsive to the present occasion and to the present listeners.
When it comes to sounds from the audience and the environment, listening for their source or cause becomes more complex because the crowd is not captured by the video recording. The sounds are not associated with a visual cause: they are “acousmatic” (Chion, Un art sonore 411). The additional layers of “audience” and “environment” still refer to categories of sources, yet those sources remain speculative. The “audience” layer is used to gather sounds that are mainly vocal, by which I mean produced by a human larynx and inclusive of both words and non-linguistic sounds. This layer also tracks sounds of applause as non-vocal interactional sounds. Those sounds coming from the crowd sometimes seem to be produced as a form of interaction with the speaker’s performance and other times as fragments of conversations between audience members. The last layer, “environment,” allows me to identify non-vocal sounds coming from the manipulation of furniture and objects. To whom those sounds are addressed is ambiguous to me who was not present during the recording and who has no access to any visual clue. I qualify those sounds, following Goffman, as “noise” (181). Noise happens when communication occurs. Noises are signals that impair the transmission of the intended signal, here Acker’s performance reading. Yet, in my analysis, I will argue that those noises may also be a form of interaction with the performance, or its deliberate disruption.
Within those layers, I have attempted to create annotations that are descriptive to create a set of written landmarks that might be useful in navigating the video format. My descriptive annotations are not however objective and already constitute a form of interpretation. For instance, when I write that part of Acker’s speech is inaudible, it might be inaudible to me and intelligible to others. Using this descriptive mode was tricky because I found myself performing a certain neutrality that I don’t find legitimate. My descriptions of sounds, of their supposed source or of their quality, limits them in a way I would have wished to avoid. Music scholar Nina Eidsheim explains that most people think about sounds by reducing them through naming (8). An acousmatic voice might thus be associated to a certain race and gender not because of the voice’s own quality—since the voice can be trained to perform different characteristics—but because of the listener’s biases (4, 13). Similarly, I find that non-vocal acousmatic sounds are limited by names such as “murmur” or “knocking sound” that present them as fixed and knowable rather than open and ambiguous. While I would encourage practicing suspicion toward the names I have given to those sounds, I find that their names are useful to navigate the recording.
Who Is Listening?
While attempting to label the different vocal and non-vocal sounds coming from the audience, I found myself asking the acousmatic question: “Who/what is this?” The term acousmatic designates a sound whose cause is invisible to the listener. I was thus attending to the possible causes of the sounds or, when that wasn’t possible, to their quality. In her introduction to The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American Music, Eidsheim shifts the acousmatic question to “Who am I, who hears this?” (24). Eidsheim reveals that the listener is constructing the sonic event with their own cultural and social biases. Both Eidsheim and Dylan Robinson in his Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies ask listeners to recognize their own “listening positionality” as well as the forms of training shaping their listening (Robinson 3; Eidsheim 30). My listening is rooted in a white abled body. I understand my fluid gender as a non-oppositional way of knowing and living with contradictions. This practice, coming from feminist and Indigenous perspectives (such as the one of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), is in dialogue and opposition with my experience as a franco-québécois settler living on unceded Indigenous land in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and evolving in academic structures. It is with these interlocking positionalities that I come to the recording.
The recording and its context, however, historically precede my position and the conditions necessary for me to name it with the terms that I use. While Acker read Julia Kristeva and was inspired by her notion of the “abject” to understand gender performances and roles, I live and understand my gender with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (who reads Kristeva), with Simpson’s work and, of course, with Acker’s writing. According to Kristeva, the abject is a “threat” emanating from “outside or inside” “me” (Kristeva 1). It is something that was part of “my” identity before being expelled. It is the characterization of that which is expelled as being “not me” that allows “me” to trace the borders of what is “me.” In terms of gender, Kristeva’s notion of abjection has been associated with the status of people who are not men. Women and gender nonconforming people are expelled from the category of human as being surplus, stain, trash. Acker’s characters are abject(ed) because sexual violence forbids them to maintain a sense of corporeal integrity and impermeability. In Acker’s texts, there are no “good” or “bad” characters and actions, only profoundly ambiguous ones marked by multiple transgressions.
Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection writes: “The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine.”(1) The abject is unnameable, and thus maybe my practice of naming my position would have seemed limiting to Acker. Her own practice seems to be rather to name one thing only to also name its correlative, that is its opposite according to gender or social norms. In Don Quixote, for example, the protagonist by naming herself is able “to become a female-male or a night-knight” (Acker 10). While I find that Acker’s non-oppositional views echoes Indigenous worldviews that have never adhered to Western binary thinking, Indigenous and post-colonial thinkers teach me that certain things need to be named unambiguously (Sousa and Pessoa 522). Indeed, I cannot confuse my whiteness with Indigeneity and Blackness, nor my privileges with their oppression. The technique of conflation is however one that Acker uses in Empire of the Senseless where the Algerian Revolution, May 1968 in France and the Haitian Revolution are made to cohabit in the same space-time (Borowska 160). Such conflation erases local forms of resistance to Western colonization and imperialism and recenters a white author’s perspective. Indeed, Acker’s interest for the Haitian and Algerian revolutions, and for Haiti in particular (Riley 29), is marked by her tendency to appropriate. Acker’s practice of appropriating texts from the European literary canon by plagiarizing them becomes problematic when applied to Haitian and Algerian cultural elements. In this situation, her appropriation is not disruptive of social and political norms but rather reinforces racist imaginaries and structures of white privilege.
ANALYSIS
Here I would like to offer an analysis both of Acker’s performance and of the audience’s response to it. I am interested in “aurality,” how the audience listens, and in “orality,” how the audience speaks back to what I call a performance reading (MacArthur 43). I attempt to listen to the forms of listening and sounding of the crowd. Such listening also means feeling for embodiment and looking for situatedness. While I can situate Acker’s voice in a female queer white body located at the confluent of punk, feminist, avant-garde, and academic streams, I can only ask questions about the position of the members of the audience.
Performance Reading
In this recording, Acker is reading words from a page. She is reading excerpts in prose of her then upcoming novel Empire of the Senseless. I would like to frame her reading as a performance reading which implies a written text, a style of reading (or delivery), a speaker, and an audience present at the same time in the same place.
In his talk “Three Readings: Camera, Tape and Sound,” Michael Turner frames one of Acker’s performances as a “literary reading,” which implies “words spoken from a page, as opposed to those that come remembered.” However, Acker’s reading takes place in a “performance space” (Turner). His definition suggests that this type of rendition is inhabiting a liminal space, being both a reading and a performance.
Acker’s performance reading is itself marginal within the frame of literary readings where poetry readings have received much more critical attention. In “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies,” Marit J. MacArthur maintains that the term “poetry reading” marginalizes performance by giving preeminence to the written text conceived of as autonomous (43). A “neutral” style of reading, characterized by sameness of tone or pitch and resembling Judeo-Christian services, has become the default in academic readings (39, 42). The term “reading,” and its “neutral” style, is thus a way to obscure the fact that reading out loud is always of form of performance. Thus, such reading performs neutrality to appeal to the authority of the written text, of the academic objectivity standards, and of the Judeo-Christian religious institutions. In the next section, I will explore what Acker’s reading performs and how the audience interacts with such a performance.
Gender Performance
In Acker’s artistic performance are also woven the threads of gender performance. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler develops their theory of gender performativity by thinking with artistic performances of drag. Drag plays with the non-correspondence between biological sex, gender identity, and gender performance (175). Such non-correspondence is not however limited to drag and can be applied to many performances in being. In Acker’s introduction to the excerpt she is about to read, I argue that she is performing different gender characteristics to negotiate the distance between her gender identity and the social expectations regarding a person assigned female at birth.
As Acker begins her introduction, she is interrupted by a member of the audience who tells her that she has a “nice diction.” At first, Acker doesn’t understand and makes him repeat several times. She uses a higher pitch to perform femininity, gentleness, and generosity to encourage her interlocutor. The video shows her adopting a bent posture, bringing her shoulders to the front in a gesture of compliance while also bending her head backward and sideways to signify both her openness to the question and her active attempt to understand it. When other members of the crowd intervene and Acker finally understands the comment, she first responds by being polite: “Oh, thank you sir, yeah.” While answering she makes a curtsy: she bends her knees and extends her arms as if holding the sides of a long dress, thus reproducing the traditional gendered gesture of greeting. While performing this gesture, Acker also makes a comic sound by pinching her bottom lip with her front teeth and sucking in a bit of air. She then uses a lower pitch, speaks louder and very distinctly, even spelling out the title of the section she will be reading: “This is called Male, M.A.L.E.” While spelling, she seems to be directing her sharp gaze towards the man who just “complimented” her. She then redirects her attention to the pages she is holding as her face goes through a series of light spasms during which she blinks vigorously.
I would not consider the man making this comment to be a heckler since his interruption is made at a moment when Acker is interacting with the audience and seems to be implicitly inviting participation. Yet, his comment is disruptive. This man’s “speech act,” to borrow Butler’s words, disrupts Acker’s gender performance by constituting her as a feminine subject (“Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” 16). Her early reaction—a reflex of compliance often necessary to navigate a misogynistic society—reinforces this attribution. Acker re-establishes a more fluid gender performance when she parodies femininity by making a curtsy while producing a funny noise that frustrates standards of politeness and bienséance. She also parodies masculinity by performing authority in speaking loudly and distinctly while looking disapprovingly to the man who made the comment.
Listening to the Relationship Between Speaker and Audience
Acker’s vulnerability to the audience’s comments mirrors the audience’s vulnerability to the violence of her text. While it is possible for readers to close a book that shocks them (Ioanes 183), listening to a performance in a collective space renders the audience more “captive” (MacArthur 42). In his work about film, Michel Chion argues that sound is even more intrusive than images are or, in this case, written words. Since ears have no eyelid to shield them, and since hearing is omnidirectional, it is harder to protect oneself from sounds one doesn’t want to hear than from images one doesn’t want to see (Chion, L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma 43).
In her article “Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker” Anna Ioanes analyses how readers may negotiate their consent in relation with the violence in Acker’s texts. She argues that Acker’s avant-garde aesthetic is designed to shock audiences to create varied responses such as emotional and critical engagement, identification and distance, joy and rage (Ioanes 176–77). This aesthetic of shock allows Acker to prompt her “feminist readers to reflect on the complex nature of consent and subsequently to think and feel the violation of shock alongside pleasure, absorption, and recognition” (193).
During her performance reading at the Foufs however, the author is not exclusively in the presence of feminist listeners. The listeners’ engagement is not necessarily self-reflexive. It might not allow them to recognize their own position within systems of privilege and oppression, nor how this position affects their way of listening. In this sense, Acker’s performance is not a conversion to feminist thinking but rather an experience of both enjoyment and discomfort which might lead to further reflections (Ioanes 177, MacArthur 42).
Formulating Affinities and Defiances Through Discomfort
Members of the audience are negotiating their shock through non-verbal forms of engagement such as laughter and the noisy manipulation of objects. The laughs in the crowd sometimes accompany moments of sexual violence. In Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, she maintains that laughter and boredom—which could be signalled by the manipulation of objects creating noise—brings us “to ask what ways of responding our culture makes available to us, and under what conditions” (262). Producing noise might be a way for auditors to anchor themselves back in their body through tactile and auditory stimulation, to create a distance with the verbal performance, and to produce a counter discourse. Noise can challenge Acker’s authority as a speaker talking to a silent audience. I believe this is an effect that her performance wishes to provoke through shock. Acker’s performance neither invites a silent crowd (such as the passive audience of academic poetry readings) nor a completely supportive one (like the Beats’ friendly and evangelical-like auditory) (MacArthur 56). The dynamic between Acker and her audience is neither framed by formalism nor facilitated by friendship. Yet it is maybe in this situation of discomfort that both audience and speaker are brough to formulate questions and weave affinities.
CONCLUSION
The video recording of Acker’s performance reading at the underground venue Foufounes Électriques in 1986 in Montreal captures a moment of interaction between the author and her audience. Such event bring the individual and silent practice of reading literature to the stage of a bar where literature is performed while words and noises are shared. Annotating the audio of this recording brought me to face the limits of the practice of causal listening: naming sounds coming from invisible sources demands that I speculate about their cause. These speculations need to be mistrusted, otherwise they will fix the sounds in a name and the name in a certain meaning. While situating sounds remained a fraught endeavor, listening for acousmatic sounds was an exercise in situating my own position as a listener. In this project, I have put my own position in dialogue with the discourse of the speaker and the sounds of the crowd to understand their interaction with each other and with my own knowledge production. I have read Acker’s performance as being, in part, a gender performance where gender dynamics are negotiated with her audience. Acker’s vulnerability to the crowd’s comments and interruptions is mirrored by the audience’s vulnerability to the violent depictions in her texts. Audience and speaker are engaged in a mutual exchange where they might find recognition, pleasure, and new ways of negotiating consent.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. 1988. Grove Press, 2018.
Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. Grove Press, 1986.
Borowska, Emilia. “‘Beneath the Paving Stones’: The Politics of Proximity in Empire of the Senseless and the Situationist Avant-Garde.” The Politics of Kathy Acker, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 160–201.
Brecht, Bertolt. Théâtre Épique, Théâtre Dialectique: Écrits Sur Le Théâtre. Translated by J. Tailleur et al., L’Arche, 1999.
Butler, Judith. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler et al., Duke UP, 2016, pp. 12–27.
Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” Gender Trouble, 1990, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 1999, pp. 101–80.
Chion, Michel. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition, Armand Colin, 2017.
---. Un Art Sonore, Le Cinéma : Histoire Esthétique, Poétique. Cahiers du cinéma, 2003.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 1–38.
Ioanes, Anna. “Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker.” Signs, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, pp. 175–97.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
MacArthur, Marit J. “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA, vol. 131, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–63.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Pornography as Defemation and Discrimination.” Boston University Law Review, vol. 71, no. 5, 1991, pp. 793–818.
Ngai, Sianne. “Stupimity.” Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 248–97.
Palardy, Marianne. Les Foufounes Électriques : de l’underground à l’overground, étude de cas d’une sous-culture urbaine de Montréal. Université du Québec à Montréal, Aug. 2008.
Riley, Shannon Rose. “Kathy Goes to Haiti: Sex, Race, and Occupation in Kathy Acker’s Voodoo Travel Narrative.” Kathy Acker and Transnationalism, Polina Mackay and Kathryn Nicol, Cambridge Scholars, 2009, pp. 29–50.
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Royer, Jean. “La Vie Littéraire.” Le Devoir, Nov. 1986, p. C-1 to C – 10. Bibliothèque des Archives Nationales du Québec, Patrimoine québécois.
Sousa, Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz, and Rosane Rocha Pessoa. “Humans, Nonhuman Others, Matter and Language: A Discussion from Posthumanist and Decolonial Perspectives.” Trabalhos Em Linguística Aplicada, vol. 58, no. 2, 2019, pp. 520–43.
Turner, Michael. Three Readings: Camera, Tape and Sound (Kathy Acker, Steve McCaffery/BpNicol, and Kevin Davies, as Introduced by George Bowering). 2011.