Hag aesthetic
The Old Hag was a spirit that visited in English-speaking folklores, where she sat on a sleeper's chest and sent nightmares to the dreamer. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. When this happened, the person was said to be hagridden. Currently, the clinical term for this is sleep paralysis, but folk cultures still hold it to be a form of possession or paranormal state.
Thus my obsession with Jenny Zhang's “Hags" has led me from hag-rides to hybrid interrogations of immigrant aesthetics of worth and worthiness. Against the performance of goodness and cleanness by immigrant children, Zhang offers a space which deplatforms purity, hygiene, prettiness, likability—all the costumes of performative valuation in the marketplace of images. In this, she resurrects the fucked-up, the hag, the baba as her lineage:
These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians.
Against the testimony of white men, or the dominant narrative, Zhang offers disdain for the lie of logic’s neutrality, or “sound reasoning,” which undermined the testimonies of Hmong persons: “Isn’t sound reasoning partly why American and European scientists and leaders told the Hmong in Vietnam and Laos, who watched their family members die and fall in from the yellow rain that was dropped on them, that they were just “making it up”? at their firsthand accounts of what they saw, what they felt, what they experienced and lived through were not as convincing as the testimony of white men who were never there, who never watched loved ones die, who never knew what it was like for their lived experiences to be not enough, to not hold up against science, to be constantly under suspicion, subject to review.”
Part of this hag aesthetic is a focus on compulsions, tics, maladaptions, and anti-social behaviors. By raising inappropriate these gestures and aesthetic correlates into iconic status, Zhang challenges positivity, self-help culture, and wellness industry, concluding:
Our compulsions are as heroic as our excesses. Our excesses as heroic as our restraint. Our forgetfulness as necessary as our total attempt to say something.
“paranoia” is an interactive installation by berlin-based artist maansi which explores how an individual is implicated in communally held fears.
2. Paranoia as a “minor reality” (+ apocalypses and angels)
Speaking of likability, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women remains timely, incandescent, brilliant as the seam ripper repurposed to open knee stitches. Allison Cardon’s review focuses on paranoia as a gendered lens, noting how Boyer probes the relation between truth and illusion, or what Freud termed "delusions of persecution.” What Boyer wants is to understand why some people's external perceptions are assumed to be real while others' are internal, or personal - tainted by illness. Gender, as a category, marks authority over reality. Professions identified with male gender tend to assume more authority and more dominance over others. To quote Boyer, "even the color of the sky is stable only as long as it has a man's proof.”
Cardon points out that paranoia and theory are structurally similar in that both rely on discounting certain perceptions and validating others in order to explain the world. The sun shone out of my earlobes when I learned that Freud’s infamous patient, Dr. Schreber, maintained the deluded belief that the sun shone out of his anus.
The politics of illness and theory share a grain, per Cardon, "each is fundamentally about accounting for the relationship of a particular subject or grouping of subjects to a general, authoritative reality.” When a subject is paranoid, this creates a transgression, an “unauthorized departure from this reality - a minor reality." Building from Eve Sedgwick’s observation, "In world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant," Cardon describes how, at critical mass, paranoid views are turned into a form of erudition, noting that Boyer takes the opposite direction, noting that the messengers gender and class determine whether they are prescient or paranoid.
Epics are the dance music of people who love war. Movies are the justice of people who love war. Information is the Poetry of people who love war.
One can hear Theodor Adorno staring at NYC billboards, drafts of Minima Morabilis in hand, finding one million different ways to say that fascism lies at the heart of the culture industry, and drawing close to how this is gendered (though he can’t quite commit to it). Cardon names the spilling of the "open secret" as a sort of slip which Boyer invests in while claiming that "poet, woman, mother" are paranoid positions. In this way, Boyer's poetry allows her to maintain a tenuous relation to the world despite its politicized realities. So the paranoiac has an abnormal relation to loss – to the things lost by opting out, by sewing, by writing poetry, by not entering races, by never fully tribing, by carving out space apart from the reign of the reality principle in attention to small particularities – and this foregrounds the minor reality.
Also in the key of minor realities comes the minor apocalypsos. Pandemic makes reality seem even less stable, even more tipped towards the abrupt endings, which made me think of Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse, published by Dalkey and translated by Richard Lourie. The protagonist is named Konwicki, and his task is to set himself on fire—but what stands out in context is the way groans become the shared vehicle for authoritative reality. Please admire the only literary passage I know dedicated to the depiction of groan-choir as universal leitmotif:
But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.
In my current reading: Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels, a series of what Volodine calls “narracts” translated by Jordan Stump and published by University of Nebraska Press. I love how the trace of the witnessing angel—the angel who watches rather than intervenes or aids, the Herzogian, Rilkean angel— is a unifying, invisible theme across these apocalyptic vignettes. [And of course I am working on an essay about this…]
Gombrowicz in 1965 with meow.
3. Paranoid attentions to detail
Maybe modernist technique includes a certain paranoid attention to detail? Even Futurism’s promise of a better world seemed tied to the absolute destruction of an existing one. This came to mind while reading Dustin Illingworth's exploration of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, where details are given such close attention that one might expect the material world to assume agency. Each detail waits to be read as signifier or omen. The novel’s texture derives from A constant sense in which an unspoken crime exists, and I think the genocides of the 20th century inflect this.
"Witold describes the life he and the Wojtyes are living as “clowning in the void,” Illingworth writes, and the mind wanders towards Trump or Boscano or Marjorie Taylor Greene, these nouveau-vague white Christian nationalists who are doing nothing if not clowning the nihilistic void created by the fake family values of the Religious Right.
Illingworth makes a point about Gombrowicz that feels disturbingly present, eerily pandemic-inflected:
"It is as if the totality of matter must be marshalled as obscure evidence for some unnamable crime. Sentences crowd one another, sweating out their anxieties as we read them. The claustrophobia of infinite relation constantly threatens to overwhelm"
I think Illingworth is right to call Cosmos “one of the great novels of thingness in world literature"; right to extol its “near-constant barrage of object and substance”; right to focus on Gombrowicz’s description of material reality as “an overwhelming abundance of connections, associations” and “a myriad of undifferentiated facts”—all of which lend themselves to creating extraordinary suspense in the ominous relationship between events and omens.
If you’ve never read Gombrowicz’s Diary, I highly recommend it—and you can find a few excerpts online at the Paris Review blog. In structuring his writing, he often relied on the discontinuity of dreams and their proximity to fugue states, to extract usable fragments:
The dream upsets the reality of the experienced day and extracts certain fragments from it, strange fragments, and arranges them illogically in an arbitrary pattern. It is exactly this lack of sense that has the profoundest meaning for us: we ask why, in the name of what, is our ordinary sense destroyed.
Karl Bulla, Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Kazimir Malevich, 1913. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
4. Disinfo dada no-no
But there is also the strangeness of how propaganda has embraced literary discourse, so that one finds, on February 17th, the EU's disinformation services put out a piece titled "Disinformation Goes Dada," characterizing the use of language in Russian state media as “zaum.” The article actually links and quotes a poem by Aleksei Kruchenykh alongside Marjorie Perloff's 2003 translation, asserting that "Zaum language attempts to liberate poetry from the restrains of denotation of words"—which is, effectively, as meaningless a statement as one could concoct from googling.
The self-described "Stratcom Task Force Dada" stomps into the discourse, calling it a way of "weaponizing the absurd," or abandoning the true/false binaries by which most media information is judged. After referencing the loose-zaum of Mayakovsky's poem, "They don't understand anything," the anonymous Stratcom propaganda task force continues its propaganda wars in the postmodern space of Trumpism and incoherent extremist nationalism.
But the anonymous Task Force author remains nameless. He or she doesn’t touch on strategies of defamiliarization, perhaps given how odd it would sound alongside the putative disinformation. Against this strange conflation of Dada and zaum, I want to suggest that zaum’s relationship to language be valued in its unique evolution. For zaum poets, language wasn’t a carrier of emotional contagions so much as a deforming agent, an experimental medium for creating new language and sound symbols, a commitment to Futurism’s eschatological vision rather than Dada’s chaotic, anti-teleogical one.
Zaum, which translates as “beyond the mind” in Russian, sought to reduce the connoted aura of words by opening the doors of resonance for sparks, for ways to thicken defamiliarized images. The reliance on wordplay and re-visionary meaning can be seen in the name itself, where “za” translates as “beyond,” or “behind,” and “um” to “mind.” Different scholars have translated it to mean “transreason,” “transration” and “beyonsense.” S
To be fair, Dada and zaum both experimented with absurdism, though Dada erred closer to political incoherence than Russian absurdism, whose proximity and patronage by Leninism gave it a hard stake in the game, drawing it closer to Futurism than Dada. Yes, Russian Futurists valued absurdity as a political strategy, an aesthetic which permitted them to foreground negation in the Russian revolution’s commitment to Progress, and the upending of convention. But an avant-garde with a political platform tends to rise or fall with its ideology, and, contra the world, I’m not sure that Dada is a catch-all for all absurdity and engagement of nonsense as vehicle from communication. To do so leaves out the call for “war against war” which animated early Dada as both a movement and a mode. Zaum can still be absurdist without being Dada.
Ilya Zdanevich in the manifesto for the 41° group, which absorbed zaum into kinetic, Russian futurism.
5. A timeline of metalogical futurism, transrational language, and zaum-spliffs
In December 1912, on the cusp of the Era of Manifesting Manifestos, a close-knit group of Moscow-based poets and artists issued their own, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Later described the founding document of the Russian Futurism, the authors determined that the “Ship of Modernity” needed to remove the old ballast of traditional formal aesthetic, including Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. ” Four fellows signed this MANifesto—David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Viktor Khlebnikov—arguing that language failed to describe the present, and a new dynamic vocabulary was needed to vessel the dynamic spirit.
In January 1913, Kruchenykh published “Dyr bul shchyl”—a short poem composed of five verses, and the first to be written in the new Futurist language of zaum. Later that year, the absurdist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was performed in St. Petersburg. Also authored by Kruchenykh, the text was pure zaum, using nonsensical words articulated in unconventional rhythms and inflections to challenge conventional meanings. It began with a pair of “Futurist Strongmen” in boxy cardboard armor. As the strongmen stepped into “the future,” they declared:
All’s well that begins well and has no end
The world will perish but there is no end to us!
In 1917, the year of the successful Russian Revolution, Kruchenykh mused on his goals in a letter to his friend, Shemshurin:
-- A riddle ... The reader is curious first of all and convinced that zaum means something, i.e. has some logical meaning. Hence one can sort of catch the reader by a worm-riddle, by mystery. Women and art have to have mystery; to say "I love" is to make a very definite commitment, and person never wants to do that. He is covert, he is greedy, he is a mystifer. And he seeks, instead of I - e [I love], something equal and perhaps special - and this will be: lefanta chiol or raz faz gaz . . . kho - bo - ro mo cho - ro and darkness and zero and new art! Does an artist intentionally hide in the treehole of zaum? - I don't know ...
By the end of the year, Kruchenykh joined up with Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Terentev to form a one-off association called "41°." Associated with an avant-garde cabaret (The Fantastic Little Inn), 41° put out a newspaper, issued a manifesto (as men must do when baptizing a new tree or claiming a space), and declared:
Company 41°, unifies left-wing Futurism, and affirms transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art. The task of 41°, is to make use of all the great discoveries of its collaborators, and to place the world on a new axis.
In 1918, 41° started the Futuruniversity and a series of lectures on various avant-garde themes, including zaum, Futurism, Futurist theater, and avant-garde poetry. At no point is Dada referenced in Kruchenykh’s or 41°’s game plan.
By 1921, Kruchenykh had abandoned the manifesto for the declaration, issuing his “Declaration of Transrational Language,” which aims to provide “a universal poetic language, born organically”—sprung from the soil of Mother Russia herself—rather than a poetic language born “artificially” in the lab of men’s minds (like Esperanto). And where to gather the words for this new, organic lingua poetica than from the mouths of lost primeval Slavic dialects? Clearly, the transrational scope was narrowing to focus on the Slavic and Russian, and the declaration was genuine, rooted in nostalgia for a purer time.
To quote Aron Ouzilevski: “Despite being likened to Dadaists for their disruptive mode of thinking, they lacked the self-irony of Dadaism and their intentions to recover aboriginal tongues were entirely genuine.” The relationship between genuineness and lo-fi, structural nationalism in literary movements continues to fascinate me—and I hope the Stratcom Dada Task Force uses its magnifying instruments to look closer at where zaum ended.
6. Random acts of zaum by others & minor addenda
“A Zaum attack is not just wordplay. It is a whole-body experience Biniashvili diagnosed based on her experiences of living, studying,and working in different countries. During a Zaum attack, the inability to understand the sounds that are heard leads to a feeling of alienation accompanied by physical symptoms— sweating, accelerated pulse, stuttering, frustration and rage due to the loss of comprehension.The incomprehensibility of the local language causes a temporary change in consciousness: words become sounds, speech becomes illogical and letters become abstract signs. During a Zaum attack, language’s formal aspect is emphasized, while the need to understand and be understood, and transform abstract thoughts into sentences that comply with the rules of syntax, are abandoned.”
[ “Zaum attack” by Nino Biniashvili ]
“Yet it is precisely this failure that points to a greater production context within which the poets were operating, that of a multilingual Russian Empire. It was the last major autocratic power of Europe that had just completed a nearly two hundred year expansionist projects; one of the most ambitious and bloody in the history of humanity. It stood as the largest contiguous country in the world. Although its populations were forced to speak Russian, their native tongues ranged from Finish in the north to Georgian in the South, Polish in the West and Mongolian in the East. Russian native speakers of the early twentieth century encountered languages that were completely alien to them (literally hundreds of languages from a staggering variety of language groups) and in many cases this encounter forced them to reflect back upon the sound components of their own language.”
[Dima Strakovsky, “Notes on the Empire of ZAUM”]
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+ In the Swedish film Marianne (2011), the main character suffers from sleep paralysis or hagridden nocturnal events.
+ As a digital gallery, The International Digital Dada Library is unable to experience paranormal states.
+ Anime fans still mourn the end of Satoshi Khon’s Paranoia Agent; see also digital subculture of installations and art memes devoted to Paranoia Agent.
+ There is an online business course titled “A Minor in Reality,” but really, what’s fascinating is the attempt to position the three workshop leaders as somehow outside the business world in their biographies: “Whether he’s guiding young entrepreneurs, hacking public sector projects, or advising the C-suites of major public and private corporations…” Asking to be collaged, they are.
+ Laura Kolbe’s review of Anne Boyer’s The Undying includes a few phrases I have marked for their evocative brilliance, including “aggro-sentimental soundscape” and “chorus of strenuous optimism” and “To strike a downbeat note is deviant.” I am deeply invested in striking these downbeat notes and staying as deviant as possible.
+ Also enjoyed Heather Green’s translation of Tristan Tzara’s “Villains.”
+ If you haven’t visited the Getty Museum’s online exhibit, “Explodicity,” an interactive companion to Nancy Perloff’s Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art, you unimperatively should. The now is absent, the past is a series of plinths, and the future is whatever shape geese make when fleeing.