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Reading/Writing Para(-)Sites: Madeline Gins’s Word Rain

January 2004
Interfaces 21/22(2):241 – 266

DOI:10.3406/inter.2003.1252

Authors:

Dagmar Buchwald

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Arakawa and Gins - Special Issue

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INTERFACES

IMAGE TEXTE LANGUAGE

n° 21/22

volume II

ARCHITECTURE AGAINST DEATH

ARCHITECTURE CONTRE LA MORT

COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS

UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 7—DENIS DIDEROT

Revue reconnue par le CNRS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Section II (continued): Poesis and Autopoesis

Dagmar BUCHWALD

Reading/Writing Para(-)Sites: Madeline Gins’s Word Rain ..................................................... 241

Mary Ann CAWS

The Construction in Question.................................................................................................... 267

Lissa WOLSAK

Union of Open Sets ................................................................................................................... 275

Marianne SHANEEN

Inhabiting the Impossible .......................................................................................................... 281

Marcia LANDY and Stanley SHOSTAK

Five Senses to Immortality........................................................................................................ 299

Patrick PARDO

Of Self-Marmots and Humansnails: Arakawa and Gins and the Architectural Body...............315

Charles BERNSTEIN

Every Which Way but Loose .................................................................................................... 327

III. Vita Nuova–Life On New Terms

Chet WIENER

Some Critical Steps Towards Life on New Terms ....................................................................333

Art SHOSTAK

Helping Sociology to Reinvent Itself: Another Gins/Arakawa Possibility .................................. 345

Shaughan LAVINE

The Architecture of a Person..................................................................................................... 351

238 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Klaus BENESCH

The Architectural Body: Reconfigurations of Space in Posthuman Culture.............................357

Sandy BALDWIN

Tentatively Dedicated to Our Transhuman Destiny.................................................................. 367

David KOLB

Oh Pioneers! Bodily Reformation Amid Daily Life.................................................................. 383

Shaun GALLAGHER

Body Experiments ..................................................................................................................... 401

JondI KEANE

The Multimodal Consequences of Coordinology...................................................................... 407

Reuben M. BARON

Towards a Social Ecology of Landing Sites and Architectural Bodies..................................... 435

SECTION II

(continued)

POESIS AND AUTOPOESIS

READING/WRITING PARA(-)SITES: MADELINE GINS’S WORD RAIN

I love visitors, accidental mechanical ones, ghosts, microphytic

agents, myself. I need this miraculous help as much as possible. In

this book, I am the third I, near the beginning of a perhaps infinite

series of them, and in the middle of this book.

(Madeline Gins, Word Rain 73)

Epistemology, understood as the meta-field where all scientific and artistic disciplines meet, is the area

of the blank1 where Arakawa and Madeline Gins have been pursuing their “unfocused” research for more

than thirty years now:

Arakawa: He [Heißenberg]’s trying to say to us, don’t focus, if you want to see anything. As for intention, you

have to spread intention—a single “I” does not exist…

Gins: Thought itself is a blind spot… Have to look at that again. (Creeley 39)

When thinking of Gaston Bachelard’s demand for a non-Cartesian epistemology we can immediately

see in what sense Arakawa and Gins work on a rather similar enterprise. For Bachelard, following White-

head, a substance should be defined according to the coherence of the principles which serve to coordinate

its characteristics, rather than according to a cohesion within itself as realism posits it. Thus he prefers to

speak of “ex-stance” or “sur-stance” rather than of a “sub-stance” (Philosophie du non 78). By this contex-

tual or “intensional” definition, objects are described according to their relations to other possible states,

according to their variations and according to the structures of cognition/contact on the part of the involved

observer. Writes Gins:

Consider the point to be the quantum of intension. Intension may be defined as the point of connection

between the subject and his subject matter marked by the relation of aboutness. It is this point of intension,

the click of consciousness, which must at the Death of God come to be considered as the pivot of certainty. Of

certainty of what? Certainly it is a holding pivotal point of relation. As it is moved to move/be moved here and

there, it inheres, adheres, coheres (or is made to appear to?) (“Arakawa” unpag.)

1 “Blank” seems to denote by approximation that which precedes and underlies all thought, action and perception and can-

not be directly thought, acted, or perceived. See my earlier attempt at defining the term (Arakawa and Gins, Reversi-

ble 26).

242 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Madeline Gins is certainly right in calling her books “guerrilla epistemology” (Gardner 61). We will

see that Word Rain or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A,

G, A, R, B, O, It Says, the earliest work by Madeline Gins (published in 1969) and unfortunately hardly

known, can be read as a subversion of Cartesian epistemology, of humanism and its conception of sub-

ject/object—and as an early attempt at To Not To Die.

Dialectically speaking, any order implies its negation—disorder, chaos. But in the margins between

order and (dis)order, we find the liminal case, the liminal infringement, which Christian Enzensberger calls

the place where “dirt” of any kind occurs (32). This liminal area, this para-site, is also the point out of focus,

where the parasite in the sense of Michel Serres thrives.

The parasite, writes Serres, lives well by “leaving the battleground” (262). Gins’s Word Rain, I will

argue, adopts similar tactics. Instead of directly confronting the Cartesian tradition of space and thought, the

guerrilla strategies of the text undermine “rational” and “narrational” discourses clandestinely. A book

beyond Cartesian space, therefore, it is also a source of para-sites. Gins’s “Guerrilla epistemology” is not a

simple, orderly, clean negation of order but the blurring of any kind of clear-cut distinctions, a profusion of

parasites and para-sites. Thus, Word Rain does not argue dialectically as befits modernity. In fact, it does not

argue at all; it lets occur.

Word Rain, then, is certainly a non-Cartesian book though it does not directly confront Cartesianism.

Instead, it confounds that very system of order—the order of cogito versus res extensa—not by negating it,

but by confusing it, smudging it over. The blurring of the borders between human being and environment,

logos and matter, subject and object, person and text, reader and author is the most striking aspect of the

book.

Gins, who like Arakawa believes in the necessity of a collaboration with the viewer/reader up to the

point where the former spectator becomes a “mediator or an experimenter or both,” certainly does not regard

the book as a passive object: “Is not the Book a more open-ended Receptacle than once imagined? A hollow

tube? A Bottomless? A Conduit, Constant, from Nature to Model” (“Arakawa” unpag.).

Some readers of Word Rain will be drawn into the book’s eddy. Surfacing, still quite wet and ruffled,

they will find that their experience of objects, their concepts of “self” and “things” have been affected, even

infected by their reading. Readers of Word Rain will have to acknowledge that reading is by no means a one-

way operation. Do readers control their reading or are they reigned by the words that rain on them? I will try

to show how readers and text fuse together in the “mist” which is a pervasive metaphor of the book, but at

the same time much more than a meta-phor: it is the mist of microbial miasmas, the mist of blurred sight, the

“dirt” of perception, the mortal enemy of distinctness, but also the fecund space where new forms come

alive.

In Word Rain, written language behaves as a horde of rebellious parasites. Its letters become more and

more selfish, the stars of their own choreography. And the readers become their “medium.” As voiced enti-

ties, as emanations of the throat, these words also encroach upon the reader, and guide his reading:

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 243

When you seef I say breathe fast; sslow breathing; mthrough the mouth; n you will breathe through your

nose; vf very fast, you are right; vs very slow, you are right; hhold your breath. (5)

The words informed me clearly but in muted tones. They whispered past my vision. In this way the sentences

breezed in, almost catching me unaware. (61)

These directions instruct the reader on how to read the text, and how to breathe while reading it. More-

over, the reader’s breath and the voices of the novel’s characters are equated with wind. They “waft,” they

“whisper.” This breath-like quality of words reveals another parallel to the parasite as described by Serres.

Associating wind and noise with the holy ghost at Whitsuntide, or the Jewish “ruagh,” Serres suggests that

the holy ghost (“the living word”) is, not unlike the parasite, a “third term” (65). For Michel Serres conso-

nants are the real parasites. They articulate the “waft,” the streams of voice, or sound, thereby creating lan-

guage—properly speaking—difference, phonetics, and eventually semantics (253-54).

Word Rain does not only stage the takeover of the parasite as media theory by printing mimicked

sound; what is more, the letters of the text read by the protagonist of the text-within-the-text are said to be

formed by two subversive, “colonies” of “microphytic agents” that are organizing themselves to “write” the

statement “I am the living word”—a project that prompts us as readers of Word Rain to raise suspicions

about the origin of the print we hold in our hands. After page upon page of text riddled with hyphens, cros-

sed out words, mathematical formulas, photographs of fingers on the text, and finally, the material clustering

of letters on the last page, it becomes clear that the “surface of signifiers” has taken on a life of its own. This

revolt of signifiers turns the servant of the message—the material surface of the text, the print—into a “corps

of the microphytic ballet.” The medium literally becomes the message, and the “message” achieves agency

by looking for readers to be its new “hosts.”

Word Rain celebrates the parasite as “static” (noise, disturbance of the signal, or mist), as that which

modulates breath, but also as microorganisms similar to William S. Burroughs’s dictum “Language is a virus

from outer space.” In Word Rain the rhizomatic web of “microphytic agents” dispels logocentrism. These

word-microbes disappoint the expectation of an immediate and transparent universal language. They mock

the dominance of the eye, because they can only be smelled, not seen. And they become a “swarm” (“colo-

nies”). Writing, hitherto enslaved by fiction’s insistence on “meaning,” begins to lead a teeming life of its

own. But what is more — the “living letters” endeavor to infect the readers of Word Rain. The message of

this text is: To read is the equivalent of agreeing to lose control, to be entertained in a para-site where the

reader is “guest” and “host” at the same time.

Not a trace of mourning over a dissolving human subjecthood or divine logos. While Burroughs de-

monizes language as a virus in the framework of panparanoia—“What scared you all into time? Into body?

Into shit? I will tell you: the word” (qtd. in Shaviro 38)— there is no humanist nostalgia to be found in Word

Rain. For Burroughs, the viral inscription of language is a triumph of the symbolic order, of the law of the

father, of capital, and in its last consequence, an invasion of evil. In Word Rain, however the rebellion of the

“microphytic agents” is a joyful subversion of the logo- and heliocentristic orders. Their mimicry—for Bur-

roughs, protective camouflage—is less a weapon of defense than a means of lively intervention.

244 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Burroughs’s question—“Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?”— acknowledges the inhe-

rent symbiosis and co-evolution of host and parasite (qtd. in Shaviro 39). But “life” still seems rather revol-

ting to him. Word Rain, however, seeks to heighten and redefine life. In Word Rain, life is not incarcerated in

a subject and thus will not end with it. In dissolving the Cartesian subject’s armor, and dispersing it back into

the world, Word Rain unmasks death as the fate of walled-in entities. In Word Rain, boundaries become heu-

ristic devices that will have to be renegotiated day by day. No longer are there clear-cut borders between

organic and inorganic matter, between matter and idea or sign: “Metaphors […] I plant these in my soil. I

transplant these to grow in my soil” (77). Neither are there limits between flora and fauna, letter and mi-

crobe. Processes of liquefaction, lubrication, condensation, glutination and, eventually, cellular and literal

vivification jubilantly present words as self-(dis)organizing and the “world” as a thick continuum encompas-

sing signs as well as objects, matter as well as mind.

After all, “cleaving” is a concept of paramount importance in Pour ne pas mourir/To Not To Die. So

far, Western thought has more or less relied on “splitting up” and “analyzing” the world. But “cleavage” is

not only (cell) division but also (cell) coherence (Arakawa and Gins, To Not To Die 64). If destiny is to be

reversed, Western concepts of identity, control and mastership have to crumble. This cannot be done by re-

placing one point of view with another. “Looking on” or “looking at” will no longer do, no matter from

which perspective.

In the following I will read Word Rain with Michel Serres’s essay on the parasite in mind, focussing—

or rather unfocussing—on the dirt of experience, on the subversion of categorical order and the conception of

an autonomous self.

From meta- to miasma

Well before Kristeva’s analysis of the “abject” became influential, the German poet Christian Enzens-

berger wrote a treatise on “dirt” in which he described the subject as an ongoing construction of building

walls around itself and of throwing out/up external stimuli, a process which, in psychoanalytic terms, can

refer quite literally to vomiting. As we know, the concept of the modern subject arose in the wake of Carte-

sianism, and is constituted by the isolation and distillation of the “self,” as well as by the abjection of every-

thing that poses a threat to the autarky and autonomy of this self. These threats are what Enzensberger refers

to as “dirt”—anything that infringes upon the distinctness of the individual. Because the subject needs to see

itself as exclusive, intact, homogenous, organized, and unique, Enzensberger explains, it abhors ambiguity,

heterogeneity, and hybridity, but most of all blending, mixture, and “unclean” states of aggregation. I refer to

this subject as Cartesian, because it conceives of experience as a one-way-operation; because its creed is

freedom (understood as independence), distance, and the choice to decide which experience to have and not

have. Given these requirements, Enzensberger asks: “Does not any contact with the world, every experience,

every action, every knowledge contain an element of dirt? Does the person really believe that he or she is

most a person when completely separated from “the world’? Is that the rationale behind the untiring obses-

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 245

sion with cleaning?” (16-17).2 We will see that in Word Rain contact is contamination, experience infiltra-

tion.

With the onset of modernity, and in a world that continues to be dominated by Cartesian logic and

ethics, the symbiosis between one’s “own and proper” and the “other” must be repressed, or expelled, in

order to not endanger the clear-cut distinction between subject and “abject,” a distinction that must be defen-

ded and redefined day after day. As Michel Serres puts it in Le Parasite:

Such repression refers as much to religious excommunication, political imprisonment, the isolation of sick

people, trash collection, generalized hygiene, the pasteurization of milk and so on as to Freudian repression.

But what concerns us is history as well, the history of sciences in particular: whoever belongs to the system

perceives less and represses more its noises in proportion to how much he or she works for the system, thus

never ceasing to be in the good, the just, the true, in nature, in norm. All dogmatisms thrive on this division

whether it be hidden or explicit. (91)3

For the Cartesian subject, Enzensberger suggests, any contamination is a sort of death. Along the same

lines, the subject abhors “swarmlike” entities, tiny multiplicities, the teeming hordes of crawling bugs or

wriggling worms—in short: the parasites (23-24). In the non-modern and non-Cartesian Word Rain, we as

readers have the opportunity to witness these parasites at work.

As Michel Serres describes it, the parasite does not fight directly; it interferes, intercepts, and is nei-

ther “foreign” nor “proper.” As a wizard of mimicry, moreover, the parasite itself remains imperceptible

except for the effects it has on its “host.” For Serres, then, the mimicry of the parasite is not a tactic to dissi-

mulate an “essential self” or identity. Here it is not really a question of one being imitating another. Rather,

the parasite cloaks itself by achieving a confusion of “figure” and “ground” through techniques similar to

camouflaging:

In order to avoid inevitable rejection or exclusion reactions, an animal parasite will produce or secrete at

the points of contact linking its body to the host’s body a tissue that will be identical to that of the host. The

parasited body is abused or duped, as one wants, and stops reacting, it accepts the other, acts as if the visitor

was its own organism. It accepts the other and all its demands. The parasite plays on mimetic strategies. It

does not play at being another, it plays at being the same.

I am not sure whether mimetism is exclusively parasitical, but this is a necessary ruse for thieves,

strangers and guests; it is a disguise, camouflaging in the colors of the surrounding milieu, when the milieu is

the host or the other. (272)

Cloaked by its tininess, the parasite multiplies exponentially; it fills the space with its invisibility. The

parasite, explains Serres, does not rely on mechanical forces. It is a geographer, a topologist, and keen on

2 Translation mine. Unfortunately the specific style of Enzensberger’s treatise—subjunctive mood and indirect reported

speech—is lost in my translation.

3 Translation of quotations from Michel Serres by Jean-Michel Rabaté.

246 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

knowing its territory. It has no need to argue with words because it has the unique ability to disturb the very

means of communication. When you inhabit the channels of communication, you don’t have to plead

anyone’s case at all (Serres 262). For Michel Serres, noise or static in a communication channel or in a mes-

sage is a parasite as well. However, what is “parasitic” from the point of view of semantics, is the the condi-

tio sine qua non for any sound or tone. Similarly, matter is usually regarded as irrelevant if not detrimental to

writing and meaning. In Word Rain, however, writing and words depend on, or even are themselves every-

thing usually considered as parasitical to meaning:

Words are made by: ink, print, paper, wood, air, electricity, light, holes, metal, glasses, rubber, erasers,

smoke, lead, water, lemon juice, etc., tongues, connections, letters images, objects, films, nerves, blood, heat,

fire, selection, decision, me and substance in every form. (47)

Writing a book which stages reading-as-the-profusion-of-parasites, Gins highlights the always-already

inherently parasitical relationship between text and reader, author and text, writing and meaning.

Hence, Word Rain is more and less than a metafictional novel. Its strategy resembles the technique of

mise en abyme, a technique for which a strand of meta-fiction has become quite famous, only at first glance.

In the fictional space of the text, a woman sits in the library of her “host” reading a text “in which” several

characters interact. This woman might be understood as the subject of Word Rain, while the text she reads is

her object. But from the first chapter there is yet another “subject”—an “I” that controls, and has a myste-

rious connection to, the fictive reading subject in the book:

I am folded into her. I am involved in the curves of her grey folds. I know how to use them. I know better

now than at first but I knew then too. She moves as I shift. Words rain on a molded juncture which you might

mistakenly call my head.

I fill her up at the typewriter. I move her femininely as befits her body. I take her with me. I introduce the

tensile subject into her. I am her introduction to the room, to the word rain, to the waterfall pummeling down

over membranous rocks. I find her room. I move in the damp ocean. Words cannot say how I am she. (3)4

The relationship between “I” and “she” in this text reveals a disturbing intimacy: “I wrote her and read

her to her before she wrote this book. Except for a few insertions I left her on her own/(TOUCH)/ except to

be with her every instant” (7).5 At the same time, it is a relationship characterized by an objectifying and

dissecting instrumentality: “I introduce the tensile subject into her.” As “tensile subject” the “I” of the text

escapes the human and humanist scale. Although projecting itself as active, it is passively subjected to the

waterfall of the word rain. Moreover, this subject does not seem to have a human physique, but: “a molded

juncture which you might mistakenly call my head.” At times, the “I” of the text goes so far as to acquire the

4 The text is unpaginated; my pagination begins with the first page of the first chapter.

5 The word “(TOUCH)” is inserted in this sentence so that, when the page is turned, it overlaps the word “TOUCH” on the op-

posite page. The text comments that: “They [the words] face each other. It will be seen that the word TOUCH is facing it-

self (and it may be imagined to do what it says when the book is closed)” (6).

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 247

traits of an extraterrestrial or alien, but it is not clear that it comes from the “outside’: “I must say that (even

though it is entirely possible that I originate a million miles from here) I am closer than this book which is

very close” (3). Or as we read later: “I was falling. I fell thousands and thousands of miles in a sitting posi-

tion until I reached the chair that I sat in and it touched my bottom” (59).

While the meta-fictional novel works with hierarchies of narrative layers reflecting each other, Word

Rain allows characters, letters and voices to interpenetrate and fuse within its pages. The “inside” (of Word

Rain, of the text read in Word Rain, and of the characters) is always already colonized parasitically. Even the

“I,” which one might initially presume to be the source of the discourse, is the effect of an agencement of

foreign bodies: “Foreign materials of every nature scraped against one another, absorbed one another. This

brought to mind a strange coherence upon which the hope of my continuance depended” (61). Due to the

lack of distinguishable “layers” in this text, therefore, there can be no mirroring like that found in the meta-

fictional novel. Instead, “platforms”—early precursors of “landing-sites”— travel through all conceivable

and inconceivable states of matter and planes of consistency:

Theym [the “platforms,” D. B.] are substantially insubstantial. They are tenaciously inclined toward a solid,

hard, hollow elastic pulpy quality. Through this inclination they undergo or come across everything indoors

and outdoors, in every season, on the patio, vf in the library, etc., as for a start they pass through or come

across friction, fluidity, liquefaction, lubrication, gaseity, vaporization, density, hardness, elasticity, texture,

pulverulence, softness, water, air, ocean, land, gulf, m plain, lake, island, marsh, marsh, marsh, stream, wind,

river, oil, resin, semi-liquidity, pulpy wads real or wafted. (39)

The distance necessary for any “meta” or mirroring is thus absorbed. As these “platforms” contami-

nate each other and coagulate, the “mist” allows for an absorption of the fictive reader/narrator in her rea-

ding, in the weather and in words.

As the process of reading Word Rain progresses, the relationships between subject and object, logos

and life, master and servant grow more and more precarious. Yet as the writing seems to become increasin-

gly “alive” and material, the reading, and presumably reigning, subject becomes less so, gradually evapora-

ting into a mist, into a “rain” of words and letters. Similar to Serres’ concept of the parasite, this “noise” or

“mist” acts as the tertium quid to the two antagonistic forces engaged in battle: “The old battle, the two figh-

ters together vanish in this fog. When the mist vanishes, one can see the two as friends, associates, allies,

now they have no other foe but the mist” (263).6 Though at first the mist merely disturbs the fictionality of

Word Rain, it will absorb that fictionality more and more until the text becomes unintelligible, and eventual-

ly, unrecognizable as a text. Gradually, the mist is undermining the age-old tug-of-war between “subjec-

thood” and “objecthood”:

The mist. The size distribution, median and modal size of the drops vary greatly from case to case,

according to the method of formation, history of the mist, its age, the wind, temperature and radiation

6 Translation mine.

248 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

conditions, thickening or thinning tendencies, admixture of smoke or other “foreign” microphytic agents,

effect of rain or snow falling into from under or above.

It is noteworthy that the routine observation of mist as a meteorological element has been confined in all

weather services and observatories, to recording the observer’s opinion as to whether or not true mist exists

at or in sight of his station in life at the time of observation, and 2) [sic] the observer’s estimate of the degree

to which his vision has been displaced or replaced by that of the mist. (107)

Presented as though it were a quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this passage emphasizes

not only the continuum between subject, perception, and object, but by its pseudo-scientific diction also

mocks the Cartesian rhetoric of “clairement et distinctement.” Or as Bachelard puts it: The limiting case is

where a substance can only be determined according to its alteration (Philosophie du non 95). Alteration,

however, implies someone who takes notice of at least two states.

Similar to the “becoming-everyone” that Deleuze and Guattari count among the strategies of becoming

invisible, the colors of clear-cut distinction, such as cold blue or warm red, dwindle away in Word Rain, ma-

king place for “taupe” and “gray,” the colors of letters and fog, and—less often—for “yellow” and “green.”

On one hand, the off-colors of the “snuggling mist” obstruct clear vision, and on the other, unctuousness

prevents any “seeing-through”:

The undiagnosed illness of which he complained was, I felt sure, a severe case of diplopia. The probable

cause was the inordinate amount of grease which a thorough examination had revealed to be present in both

eyes. He did not say, but I feel sure that, as a matter of blurred fact, he rather enjoyed the constant change

which his condition offered him. There is also, as might be imagined, a great delight to be had in seeing

between an object and itself. (71)

Word Rain praises the loss of vision due to mist or smarmy retinas as the “delight” of “see[ing] bet-

ween an object and itself,” of losing clarity, and blurring perception. Bachelard, we recall, remarks with a

certain resignation that in the wake of Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty the Cartesian formula had to be

rewritten as “on connaît clairement ce qu’on connaît grossièrement” and “à l’une la clarté sans la distinction,

à l’autre la distinction sans la clarté” (Philosophie du non 79). Word Rain’s version, however, is free of any

regret or resignation: “I am a precise cloud” (66).

This blurred or fuzzy logic is also what Michel Serres suggests in lieu of a binary logic, taking the

place of the dialectics of inclusion/exclusion, friend/enemy, and subject/object:

We will never again answer by yes or no to questions of belonging. Inside or outside? Between yes and no,

zero and one, an infinity of values appear, therefore an infinity of answers. Mathematicians call this new

rigor “fuzzy”: fuzzy sub-sets, fuzzy topology. Let they be thanked: we had been waiting for this fuzziness for

centuries. […] From now on, my book will be rigorously fuzzy. (78)

Serres’s “rigorously fuzzy” and Gins’s “precise cloud” leave the paradigm of the “eagle eye” behind, a

paradigm which in many post-modern studies of gender, deconstruction, and postcolonial texts, has acquired

a “bad” reputation as the signature of heliocentrism.

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 249

Jane Gallop, for example, draws attention to Freud’s privileging of the visual and the concomitant de-

valuation of smell—for her, a hallmark of modernity. According to Enzensberger, odors belong to that kind

of “dirt” that contaminates the subject most effectively. Odors do not allow for a focusing of the senses,

much less their exclusion. Nevertheless, they remain quite distinct, even if hard to name. An odor is rigorou-

sly out of focus, a precise cloud, yet penetrating. It reminds the subject most strongly of its porosity. The

olfactory, along with the other secondary senses of taste and touch, endangers the modern cult of distance.7

Visual perception allows the subject to experience itself as selective and distanced. The visual is thus the

realm where the subject can most easily succumb to the illusion of being wholly active, while the perceived

remains entirely passive, as if waiting to be perceived. The sense of smell is transitive as well as intransitive.

It is not only perceived, it inhabits the subject. Writes Gins: “To be transitive is to have a carry-over onto

something else. So thought smells to have a body all spread out in transitivity.”

At the same rate that sight is obscured, or made opaque, olfactory impressions gain heightened impor-

tance. To these, tactile stimuli are equally joined, and fuse in a jouissance of surfaces:

As I picked up the next page, I was aware of the texture of the paper interposed between that of my fingers.

Their structures were nearly aligned. The nap, tooth, web of the paper surface felt nice to the pulsing tissues

of my fingers. It reminded me of the taste of mushrooms. (62)

The fictional world of Word Rain thickens until “looking through” the surface of signifiers onto, or in-

to a construed fictional world is no longer possible. Ultimately the letters on the last page of the text merge

into a kind of “black noise,” an overlapping cluster of the print word. Only the last two sentences of the text

become legible long enough to explain their analogy: “The body contains 98% of water. This page contains

every word in the book.”

“Springy pudding” or glutination

Heuristically speaking there are at least four different levels or “platforms” in Word Rain which will,

by and by, melt together into one “word puddle.” Prior to this, however, these “platforms” register and un-

dergo several processes of glutination. One layer “above” the protagonist, an “I” addresses the actual readers

of the book, giving him/her a para-site, i.e. the time, space, and everything there is in the book:

I give you this book for a present. It comes with a room, light, a country, sky and weather. I will arrange for

you to be made aware of these in detail. You may look at everything. You will see only what I see. Look at this

sentence. There is nothing on it. Now look at this sentence. I see a plate of desert ribbed with dunes held in

place with drops of slime just above a layer of petrified tentacles. (3-4)

7 For more on this subject, see Buchwald 35-37.

250 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

This narrative voice directs the reader’s attention to the strategies of creating the illusion of a “real

world” as used by “realist” fictional texts. These are strategies that function only as long as the reader re-

mains unaware of them, or as long as the reader can achieve a quasi-automatic “willing suspension of disbe-

lief.” As long as the reader’s attention is not drawn to the fictionality of a novel, as long as s/he does not

become aware that it is constructed with words, the reader sticks to the author’s lime-twig, or to put it in

Gins’s words: “In any case I was certainly […] caught on the hook at the end of the author’s line” (80). In

such illusionistic techniques the chain of signifiers is supposed to function like a window-pane, providing a

“glance” at the represented fictional world, as if the reader were “looking through” it. Although the reader is

expected to become psychologically involved with the narration, the metaphor of “looking” at the world

represented emphasizes a certain conditional distance between reader and text. The reader is invited to

“look,” certainly, but can just as easily refuse to “look,” closing her eyes or the book itself.

Literary critics in the tradition of Wirkungsästhetik (reader response theory) greatly stress the active

role of the reader in “concretizing” the text—in filling the “gaps” with his/her own imagination. Without

collaboration on the part of the reader, they argue, the fictional world of the text would not be created. De-

spite the “active” role of the reader, this activity is nonetheless an unconscious one. As soon as it becomes

conscious, as soon as the reader is aware of what s/he is doing, the illusion is spoiled.

The intricate relationships of interdependence between “blood donating” reader and “vampiric” text

are often clad in binary language, simplified into stereotypes of male/female, subject/object, active/passive,

reader/text, glorifying critical distance. Once this relationship threatens to reverse itself—once, that is, that

the text takes begins to “devour” the reader rather than the reader “digesting” the book—a certain discontent,

uneasiness, if not outright disgust is articulated by literary criticism: the text is deemed “manipulative.”

When we speak of the “reception” of a text by its reader, it is thus not to be taken literally; the reader is sup-

posed to “penetrate” the meaning of the text, and the organ predestined for this activity is the mind’s eye.

Hence the metaphor of “looking through” a text characterises both the “naive” as well as the “professional”

reader: creating the illusion of a fictional world (the role of the reader), as well as disturbing that illusion (the

role of the critic). Whether the reader “looks through” the signifiers into a created world, or the critic “looks

through” the strategies used to create that illusion, the dominance of visual metaphors in discourses of read-

ing is unmistakable.

Word Rain draws attention to this fixation on the eye, and pokes fun at it: “Look at this sentence.

There is nothing on it”—and literally speaking, there is nothing on it (on this sentence). “Now look at this

sentence. I see a plate of desert ribbed with dunes held in place with drops of slime just above a layer of pet-

rified tentacles.” Although literally speaking there is nothing “on that” sentence either, the narrative voice

pretends to “see” something which is difficult to visualize. Thus the reader is still stuck with interpreting

words in order to arrive at an image. These words—“plate of des[s]ert”—are ambiguous: a dish? Or a land-

scape? A “plate of dessert” would, of course, make better sense, especially in the larger context of foods that

are repeatedly mentioned on the same page. But the word’s spelling and its immediate textual context

(“dunes,” “layer,” “petrified”) suggest that we here read an arid landscape. Attempting to visualize both

readings of this sentence at the same time, the reader encounters at best an almost impossible task, and at

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 251

worst, the perfect image of abject horror: the vision of a dainty dessert—with its connotations of civilized

table manners—overlapping with an image of Lovecraftian dimensions—conjuring abject images of a land-

scape which, in the Jewish-Christian tradition, is the location of non-civilization, the place to which the

scapegoat, laden with filth and sin, is sent, and where the devil resides. The “glue” between these conflicting

images is—horribile dictu—“drops of slime.”

Word Rain exposes the reader’s willingness to “concretize” and “fill in gaps,” and it exposes the ma-

nipulative power of the narrative voice: “You will see only what I see.” So far this is a technique shared by

high modernism and meta-fiction alike. But while modernist approaches, with the exception of surrealism,

are still dedicated to some sort of enlightenment ethos—that replaces looking through “good prose as win-

dow-pane” with seeing through a narrative technique—Word Rain’s ambiguity does not aim at achieving an

ironic distance between reader and text, but at a subversion of the very discourses of clarity and rational

comprehension.

The reader becomes aware of the sticky strings of the text, a realization that only leads to her getting

all the more stuck in them. There is “gluey stuff” in all layers of the text. The first to experience this is the

narrator within the fictional world of Word Rain: “I had kept my finger glued to the corner of page nine,” she

writes (21). And later: “As I pushed the first page of the second chapter between my sticky fingers…” (28).

The characters within the text she is reading, moreover, are not far behind in coming into contact with the

sticky viscosity that characterizes their fictional world:

Almost walking past him, she reached out and touched him. Her fingers became stuck in him. Horrified, Mary

attempted to recoil. She was unable to release her fingers. It felt as though they were bound in a springy

pudding. The old man hissed and wailed. About Mary’s many fingers, the pudding pulsed warmly. Her eyes

wouldn’t open. […] Once Mary was pulled out of him, the old man’s story ceased to be told behind them. He

collapsed out of the room. (61)

Here the subversion of power, which Sartre ascribes to the viscous, turns the person who wants to

touch—the person who wants to actively make contact, and who, in this gesture, takes the dominant posi-

tion—into the passive captive. The viscous, says Sartre, at first appears as if it could be possessed. But at the

very moment when one assumes to possess it, there is a strange reversal and the viscous begins to possess the

touching person, making him/her sticky. To touch the viscous means to be in danger of dissolving oneself in

stickyness. The being of the viscous is the soft and sucking adherence of all parts, coherence and secret col-

lusion of everything with everything. In short, in his horror-stricken vision of stickiness Sartre describes the

strategy of adhesion as a subversion of power relationships (700-1).

Later, he warns:

In itself, it is terrifying for a consciousness to be become viscous. Being viscous entails soft adhesion, and by

suckers coming from all parts, a sly solidarity and complicity of each with all, a vague and soft effort of each

252 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

to become individualized from which follows a falling back, a flattening emptied of the individual, sucked

clean from all sides by the substance. (702) 8

Word Rain, however, provides its readers with instructions for mentally and imaginatively engaging

with stickiness:

Ropy gas fibers, ropy gas shavings, these are always present inside and outside. You can make wood

shavings or shavings from a fruit. If a gas could have its outer edges gradually shaved off, if it were

temporarily given the necessary solidity to allow this to be done while still remaining a gas, you could, as you

have just done, in this way produce gas shavings. These would be of a ropy substance composed of stringy

runners. These runners speed through a vapor as the agents of an intention. Once they have angled through

it, they are brought into a new existence as the springy, pulpy substance of which their own growth has

heralded the possibility. In this state, they carry messages, record actions, allow actions and when there is an

intention provide runners. Similarly, when there are runners there are intentions. There will be more later.

I remembered the possibility of a ropy substance hardening into a pulp. (43)

The phrase “Ropy gas shavings” demands that the reader imagine the unimaginable, but with no prom-

ises of “freedom” or “enlightenment.” On the contrary, as the opacity of the text thickens, its world becomes

less and less open to the subject. The reader witnesses that objects are not investigated without an effect on

the investigators; the “glue” of their materiality remains on the hands of the subject. Similarly, observation

cannot be a one-way operation and human relationships are not based on temporary contrats sociaux of

autonomous individuals.

“Oiled geometry” or “the clear embolisms of symbols”

In Gender Studies, mathematical systems have been described as belonging to the “daytime side” of

the male-female axis. They are associated with being “dry” and “sterile,” as belonging to “form” rather than

to “substance,” to “spirit” rather than “flesh” (Whitbeck 69). Thus did Samuel Smiles hope engineering stu-

dents could learn “discipline” by studying maths: “An engineer could not fulfil his major task, bringing order

from chaos, if he were sensuous, self-indulgent, reckless, untidy, or emotional” (qtd. in Hacker 40). In this

view, mathematics can give form to passive “chaos” but cannot create anything out of nothing. In Postcolo-

nial Studies, moreover, the Western concept of mathematics has been regarded as the secret weapon of cul-

tural imperialism, especially for its implicit emphasis on rationalism and “objectivism” (Bishop). In Word

Rain, however, greasing theoretical concepts and anointing geometry may indeed produce a “clandestine

procreation”: “I induce a sly birth with my eyes the lines of creases. (Delete) I massage geometry with

scented oil” (1).

8 Translation by Jean-Michel Rabaté.

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 253

Pregnancy and procreation have long been relegated to the “night side” of culture, to the side of femi-

ninity. For the modern subject, these appear to be somewhat “dirty” and “disorderly” processes, which must

be strictly controlled. The association of birth with vernix caseosa and baby oil, and of death with “extreme

unction,” documents the connection between lubricants and biological processes on the one hand, and “civi-

lised” rites of passage on the other. Gins collapses the semantic field of aridity and abstraction with the se-

mantic field of greasiness and palpability, so that rigidity and slipperiness are not used as opposites but fuse

in “liniment algebra” and “creamed mathematics.” With a bit of salves and greases it might be possible to let

the reader experience the untidy procreative power of mathematics. When geometry is massaged with

scented oil, it is sanctified as well as debased by materiality (at least from the perspective of rationalism). On

the other hand, it becomes procreative and alive: “This page is a continuance of my insertion. There is a

word for this. It is, according to my preferences, a fecundating mathematical process, lubricated multiplica-

tion” (48).

When the calculating machine is lubricated, multiplication works like a well-greased clock:

I have made investigations into her language. I have investigated the means of her disposal. I have preserved

these in oiled geometry, liniment algebra and creamed mathematics in hope that they will not become mixed

with the word rain.

[…]

W = word O = zero E = mc2 M = meaning

W + E + O = M

- M - M

W + E + O - M = O ----------- *W + E + O - M = O

[…]

Org (x) means x is an organic unit

Yxy means Organic unit x is transformed into organic unity y

(i.e. x divides into several parts of which one is y

[cell division] or fuses with one or more units to produce y [cell fusion])

Orgs. (x) x is an organism

means if something then something

means subclass or subrelation

Axioms

1. Org (x) Th (x) Each organic unit is a thing

Org Th

2. The members of Y are organic units:

Yxy Org (x) Org (y) Mem (y) Org (7-8).

254 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Everywhere in this text, and in its very title, mysterious formulas (e.g. a formula for calculating the at-

tention span of the reader) mock scientific abstraction and its myth of universality. The “clear embolisms of

symbols,” well-smeared with the ambiguous humor of those who prefer not to speak directly, produce

“cough”, “dream blood” and “philosophical investigations” by their very own surreal-word alchemy:

The whirlpool of the pivotal question subsides.

The mouth of the sea

Wet words peel off the surface tension

Screams of air bubble up

and mumble through

the clear embolisms of symbols

C = carbon O = oxygen U = uranium G = gold

H = hydrogen cough = COUGH

pH2ilOsOpHical investigatiOns

The gas mask reads in the mist = 7 = 24

Dream blood = 2 = 10

Word = 1 = 4

Instant Water = 2 = 12 (63)

In guerrilla semiotics, mathematics often functions as an “encrypting technique.” Word Rain, however,

uses the indirect, but nonetheless effective strategy of mimicry. The “anointed” equations pretend to be

mathematics which could be read, given a certain amount of paranoia, as hermetic abbreviations. But behind

the inscrutable smile of “G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says” there is no secret but the name itself. The

cryptic allusion to celestial orbits is a simple (?) case of homonymy:

Platforms can also be: G = grate or gas

R = rostrum or reason

A = attention or action

E = energy T = time B = bush

O = orbit

In this case a set (S) of platforms (p) would be:

Sp = G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O,— the name of a star. (39)

Lubrication helps build up the differentials between inside/outside, figure/ground necessary for the

generation of “self” or gestalt. Grease, as waterproofing agent against the “word rain” might temporarily

hold the rain at bay and conserve the identity of an object: “I have preserved these in oiled geometry […] in

hope that they will not become mixed with the word rain” (111).

But according to Enzensberger contact with grease again means a loss of mastery:

Grease sticks, but not absorbing, rather like a film. Every surface, including the skin, is dispossessed; no

matter if it is fluff, down or velvet, it turns into grease. Water runs off from it, wiping spreads it even further

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 255

[…]. Once I am done, I am completely cut off, there is no getting through, I slip, I trip, I can’t master it. I

possess nothing, the fat possesses everything, and whatever I touch will bear the signets of its new master:

grease […] I am lost. (21)

While greased geometry becomes the midwife for “a sly birth” and fuzzy logic, it also means a willing

loss of control. In the end the emulsifying power of shady microbial words—“It was due to the fact that each

colony secreted a pistol spray of cobalt blue violet bile which, though indiscernible, had been found to aid in

the emulsification, digestion and absorption of words” (115)— triumphs over all endeavors for identity.

“Word rain” or liquefaction

Similar to these sticky and greasy substances, the element of water is pervasive on all “platforms” of

the text. For the characters in the text that the protagonist is reading, the word rain condenses into ele-

ments of their fictional world. But it is the signifiers which “produce” water, as in the following passage in

which the abundance of liquids owes its existence to a series of negations, i.e. to a purely linguistic opera-

tion:

[…] under the mist, I was reading.

Not across a plain lake, a wooded field, a river stream, a windy hill, a gulf or a marsh but right out

across her front lawn the woman ran clinging to her blue raincoat. She ran through the word spray and

touched its streams with her free hand. Around a motion’s breeze spun a spinwheel of pulses. (44;

emphases mine)

The bright sun of the first chapter, emblem of heliocentrism, seems to be quite tactile and easily ab-

sorbed by the living bodies of reader and “host”:

The sun was poured on him. It settled into both of us. It crept right through the library window,

through intangible crevices, down onto our molded membranes and was absorbed through the

acrobatic mush of our living to sink into each of us as a variety of infra-red supportive hands which

hugged and pushed in among other places beneath the diaphragm; and thus, similarly, across this

room in two separate cases, the sun once again defined a somehow familiar comfort (of sorts). (17)

As the text “progresses,” however, the sun is visibly clouded by mist and fog in “an onslaught of

vapors” which impedes sight (as well as sense) (53):

The sun poured onto my back and hugged my shoulders gently, almost at my skin scraping, loosely

winding me about with light rays, stepping all over me, so much, much more so had it done so before

so as it did not do so now with the grey and taupe vapors hanging around now mistily. (31)

And later:

Grey and taupe vapors composed a mist. As the grey mist swirled, for a moment, the taupe vapors

were missed, until the grey parted and the taupe vapors strained themselves through. The sky, led

through the end of the reader’s line of sight (the quay), was seen as mist. Mist scene. The quay at the

256 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

tip of the sighted pier hardened into a sighted touch of the body of mist which the reader saw. (?) My

lips touched it too.

The mist was sighted. It has also been cited that hollow spaces contain many points of reference.

The incidents of light have been noted and frequently reported. (42-43)

In the end the sun is done for: “The sun bit the dustn in back of me” (22). Moisture and haze per-

vade the fictional world of the protagonist, as we see in the following passages:

Little drops of moisture slipped around and down my neck in that hot early summer afternoon as

ahead of me I allowed the print to filter through the sticky room into view. (14)

Cloudy vapors dulled the window panes by padding them inside and out with their ropy gas fibers

of an invisible weather-proofing substance. Grey and taupe vapors slapped the fresh air about. […]

When I looked down, the bold-faced print wavered up to me through the vague mist from the hollow of

my lap. (30)

I took a sip of the pineapple juice. It was pineapple-grapefruit. The mist pinched the atmosphere.

Moisture leaned up against me. It caused the curvilinear desire for something to drink to jut out just

like that. [31)

The mist was almost dripping down as it snuggled about close and far. (36)

The misty vapours affect the reader/narrator within Word Rain through her body, her thoughts, the

pages she reads, the characters of her reading matter, the letters—and the implied reader as well: “Words

are water soluble. This is clearly and moistly so. After all the reader is a reef in the blue-eyed Red Sea.

(And all this belongs to an organic question, it says.) (63). Words are soaked with rain until they become

“word puddles.” Words rain even on “the molded juncture which you might mistakenly call my head.”

They evaporate and recondense into a “waterfall pummelling down over membranous rock.” They form

into a “river of hypotheses, categories and disjunctive relations” letting in turn “tumble out” words. Read-

ing is like raining and being rained on at the same time. One wishes that the phrase “it is reading” could be

said in the same sense as one says “it is raining.” Watery words are active and passive, transitive and in-

transitive, creative and created. Water and words are not distinct entities with definitive phenomenal quali-

ties. Instead, they continuously change their state and identity. After all, there is some kind of miraculous

magnetism in this text between water and words: “A drop of mist had condensed just between the word

“the” and word “package.” Water is magnetic in a special way” (32).

The woman reading from within Word Rain is not a pure observer, simply registering each of these

processes; she is drawn into them: “Words vaporized before my very eyes. My very eyes. Ass I continued,

they recondensed on the heavily padded internal tips of the line of sight” (61). Strictly speaking, the pro-

tagonist is able to understand the processes of liquefaction because she experiences what it means to li-

quefy. Humidity pervades her: “The mist punctuated my face. It underlined the bags of my eyes. It rained

through my eyelashes. It met with the perspiration on my blouse” (87); “A light rain came through the

jellied senses” (111). The distance between recognizing subject and recognized object vanishes rapidly:

“The little droplets of letters gathered into word puddles on the pages. I is slipping out of me” (19). Mer-

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 257

leau-Ponty’s admonition that in speaking and listening one becomes that which one listens to and that lan-

guage is literally “pregnant” and “impregnated” with sense (165), also applies to reading. It is as if the

entreaty uttered on page 74 was already granted: “Please grant this apriori osmotic bond forever.” And

eventually this is what comes to pass: “She is raining” (103).

Her thoughts are described in metaphors of pumping and evaporation as if thinking was a processing

of liquids: “The contrapuntal valval actions of my memory, my thoughts released a foam through which I

perceived, now and then, roric figures mistily arranging themselves on a polished, rounded field of spun

thought” (71).

In addition to the description of thought and memory as phenomena of water balance, as occur-

rences of osmosis and forming cysts, the organic character of these events leads to a decomposition

marked by smell:

An incorporeal cyst was formed to mark the occurrence of every parallax in my thought. The zone

of incorporeal cysts within the field of my being, within the millions of fibers within the body of my

imagination, was my memory. The intractable ligature between this memory zone of cysts and the

various platforms of perception and interpretation was an apriori osmotic bond.

The delicate memory cysts would from time to time decompose releasing foul-smelling skatole. To

prevent this from occurring too frequently, or for too prolonged a time, I used iodine, symbol I. I

synthesized this, this I, through the gruelling process of interpreting and reinterpreting dreams and

signs and through squeezing the necessary tincture out of all this I read. (73)

“I” becomes a passing effect of stagnation in the water balance; it coagulates and revaporizes. Some-

times “I” is a signature of the narrating position; sometimes it is a chemical element: “I went fast. Faster than

I have ever done before. I was picking up the meaning without stopping to accumulate words. Speed. I loved

it. Soon it would be over. The words stuck to the mist, I to the meaning” (85). The protagonist, “I,” forks

and then flows back into itself again. Flows of water, of scents, of identities dissolve all stable ground:

The mist dappled my face. I settled down in my body. The mist was settling down too. The smell of

fragile birthday candles (blue, I thought) being snuffed out, wove in through the partially opened door.

Another smell straddled it grotesquely. The microphytic agent? Who asked that. The mist steamed out

of the two o’s of my nose. That’s impossible.

I poured my concentration down onto the page. I thought the word “parallel” was misspelled. Only

half of me knew how to spell. I concentrated on it, but I was no longer in sure grounds. (86)

At the end of the novel, there is left neither narrator nor narration. Instead of referring to something

outside itself, language is steeped in a soup of parasitical life and washes everyone away who tries to grasp

it. Watery words reign supreme. Yet, despite their dominance, they still have to fight for survival:

The colloidal fog creamed the wide face of the afternoon. The epic of microphytic life besieged the thin

flexible rectangles. I turned to wipe off my face. Later I disappeared from the picture. A low sound, a

tracer, moved lowly along the pavements, everywhere. This was barely enough to generate the critical

amount of tension necessary for the maintenance of solidity. The words clung to the pages for dear

life. (108)

258 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Finally, only two intelligible sentences remain, sentences which can now be understood as being

synonymous: “The body is composed 98% of water. This page contains every word of the book.”

Of course, Word Rain is a book in the tradition of surrealism. Its imagery owes a lot to surrealist

performances and installations such as the Taxi pluvieux by Dalí. But Word Rain is also a document of

feminist aesthetics. Luce Irigaray discusses in “La ‘Mécanique’ des fluides” the hegemony of solids in

physics and metaphysics and the concomitant exclusion of liquids and their specific (feminine) qualities in

the discourse formation of modernity. For Irigaray there is a certain solidarity—pun intended—between

the preference for solids in physics and the insistence of phallocentrism on stable identities—a solidarity

which includes psychoanalysis (qtd. in Gallop 39-40). Thus, for Lacan, discourse cannot include the

woman, because it needs stability and identity, while the language of woman appears to be fluid, hysteri-

cal, formless and useless as the secretions of the womb [sic]. Her language is said to be “continuous,”

“compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusible” (Irigaray qtd. in Gallop 39). Due to its conduc-

tivity, the language of woman is easily and readily traversed by other flows. It fuses with other bodies in

the same state of aggregation. It dilutes homogeneously until it becomes impossible to determine what

belongs to what. Since the language of woman is per se diffuse, it can never have a stable identity or allow

identification (Irigaray qtd. in Gallop 39).

Now, according to Irigaray, Lacan’s object a is excluded from the subject because, one might argue,

it usually refers back to a fluid state—milk, urine, saliva, blood (Gallop 41)—approaching “dirt” in En-

zensberger’s taxonomy. But even the purest and most pristine of fluids, water, undermines the identity of

solids. For Enzensberger, the paradox of all liquids, but of water above all, consists in the fact that it both

produces and dissolves order. On the one hand, water cleanses, producing order and clear outlines by read-

ily absorbing all and everything, even the most disgusting matter (Enzensberger 16). On the other hand, it

dilutes and dissolves order—first as trickle, but eventually in a flood. The deluge no longer cleanses but is

the end of all order. The most “perfect” purity is, at the same time, the end of all experience. As soon as all

dirt is eliminated, the system has purified itself to death and experience comes to an end. There is no

longer anything to experience. Writes Enzensberger:

One thing was clear: dirt was categorical. All purity was in vain. The more rigid a categorical system,

the bigger the dirt it produced; the more refined it was, the more manifold kinds of dirt. In some

systems the human being itself became dirt. He considered the current system as such a one. A certain

ambiguity occurred: cleanliness became dirt, and perhaps vice versa. (41)

Enzensberger’s “ambiguity” depends on the double-meaning of the word “human being.” Referring

to the biological corporeal body, “human being” indeed appears as “dirt” in the system of subjectivity.

Referring to “subjecthood” it is at least a disruptive element from the perspective of “pure becoming” in

the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, or vitalist approaches to subjectivity. From a posthumanist perspective,

“human being” as philosophical or biological category is an ideological and historical construct. The unin-

telligible “clusters” at the end of Word Rain are less a degré zéro of order and humankind than the produc-

tive chaos of new or other corporealities.

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 259

“Microphytic agents” or becoming-swarm

We postmodernists know better. We must say […] that language never

“speaks itself as language’: it’s always some particular parasite, with its

own interests and perspective, that’s issuing the orders and collecting the

profits. What distinguishes a virus or parasite is precisely that it has no

proper relation to Being. It only inhabits somebody else’s dwelling. Every

discourse is an unwelcome guest that sponges off me, without paying its

share of the rent. My body and home are always infested—whether by tape-

worms and cockroaches, or by Martians and poltergeists. Language isn’t the

House of Being, but a fairground filled with hucksters and con artists.

(Steven Shaviro 43-44)

The “microphytic agents” enact the most subversive strategy in Word Rain. They undermine the

idea of authorship and authority, they infiltrate the notion of a subject inventing/controlling its own ideas,

even of having written the pages of the book the narrator is reading.

As we see in the following passages authorship smells suspicious:

He [the author of the manuscript the protagonist is reading] said that it was entirely possible,

almost certain, that two microphytic colonies of bacteria had settled on the blank pages, twisted their

tiny bodies into male and female letters and had remained there, clinging to those pages for dear life,

even before he had a chance to get started. […] The author then cautioned his reader to smell each

page as a simple yet sufficient precaution against being taken in in the future. He assured the same

reader that although the odor of these microphytic letter heads and bodies was indescribable, it was

nonetheless distinct and unforgettable. He said that touching the page would be no help at all but that

the smell would always and immediately give them away. (13)

The tiny particles had been studying for thirty years the strenuous art of abstraction-deflection up

to the point of a worded sentence. So that now the wordy tours jetés and minutely perfect extensions

had come through practice to be a habit, a nearly natural function of the ropy gas shaving bodies to

which they belonged. At times they even talked while unattended to. Here they were mumbling about

how late the sandwich and how hungry I was. (32)

The spirit-matter dichotomy, so dear to Cartesian reasoning, breaks down when invisibly small bac-

teria begin to invade the domain of the mind, language, and meaning: “Microphytic bacteria live long

deaths. They just said that and one of them is urging a group of them on to say: “I am the living word’”

(19). Moreover, this corruption of the logos seems to be infectious:

There was certainly no question about it. The smell was there certainly. It was surprising, though, that

they were completely indiscernible to the touch. Touch. I let the page slip out of my hand not entirely

sure that I had not been contaminated by the taut and tenacious microphytic agent. (31)

260 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

Parasites; in the sense of teeming, crawling animals, are present both in the world of the protagonist

(“A worm twisted up into the weather. Let’s pause for a moment”), and within the fictional world of the

text she reads (13). In that text, the characters are particularly puzzled at the arrival of a mysterious pack-

age. Their guesses concerning the content of the package, though, quickly intertwine with the scene of

reading by playing on the semantic affinities between “ant colony” and “microphytic colony,” or between

“word rain” and “moist package,” insinuating by analogy that the book Word Rain might also have been

written by word-microbes, or may at least be infested with them:

Mary’s guess, in a word, was pissmire colony. Why, because they had ordered them from California

seventy-four years ago. And though the request had never been answered in her grandmother’s

lifetime, the receipt was still on hand. In fact, letters about the difficulties of procuring and then

maintaining a healthy colony and the complications involved in the shipment of it were still part of

their current affairs.

That was piss for urine and mire for ant, so named for their discharge, which was an irritant fluid

so named because popularly regarded as urine.

The bottom corner of the package was already moist. Also, the lack of organization of the ant

colony company would easily explain the absence of any marking on the package and the missing

letter. By the end of the page, the others were mistily saying doubtful yet possible. (37)

Steven Shaviro propagates in great detail the connections among ant colonies (“Ant Farms… a ma-

chinery whose only purpose is to be its own sweet self.”), the insectoid paradigm in general (and in the

works of William S. Burroughs in particular), and the notion of writing as “secretion” or “discharge” of

almost cosmic dimensions (Shaviro 45). Similarly, Enzensberger claims, the written word could be re-

garded as secretion (34). In Word Rain as well there is more than just a metaphorical nexus between the

secretions of the “pis[s]mire colony” and the smelly humidity of language. The first chapter of Word Rain

discusses the origins of the words infesting the book: “So too every word has been lived, although I must

sadly admit that I do not know any living word besides myself which is a secret” (5). Later on we read that

it is a colony of microphytic bacteria which forms “the living word,” oscillating between “secret” and “se-

cretion.” Words are better smelled than seen, insists the text, because they are the result of micro-bacterial

metabolism:

One short sniff was enough to assure me that the original author had had no part in this page. Instead

the literal guest ballet of the microphy… Instead the frozen corps of the microphytic ballet… A

microphytic colony had subsumed his role and imprinted itself on the page where it had become all

stuck in its metaphors. (30)

Eventually the protagonist begins to suspect that even the outlines of her “host” (in whose library

she is sitting) are formed by literal microbes: “Halfway across the room, the man turned to face me. […] It

was possible that thousands of microphytic bacteria made up his outline. The smell was unforgetta-

ble” (16). Host and parasite, host and guest, fuse into one another. Microphytic agents are interspersed

with everything.

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 261

Reading Word Rain, we may even be tempted to smell at our own copy of the text: “In my nose,

there was a smell. I held my nose. […] However both pages had microphytic the odor of microphytic

spelling inside and out” (87). But even when the text becomes so “non-sensical” that it literally reeks of

microbial intervention, this is no sure indication of infection. Authorship as such, style, and intention have

become hopeless categories:

Nor was the author’s style any more what I had thought it was. He had been so taken with the

laughter that he had remained doubled up, bent over with it in a corner of the last paragraph while the

succeeding paragraphs were straining at the bit, or at any rate haphazard.

The page was brought to my nose. The smooth paper smelled only like the expectancy of a smell

before a distinctive smell. In this case, there were obviously no bodies on the page. If the author were

to claim an intrusion as an excuse for this page, in view of the findings of my nose, he would not have a

leg to stand on. The joke about the 43 inch slab of grease with microphytic bacteria forming the most

voluptuous of human lips was his baby. (69)

Even the pages expressly ascribed to a human author emanate a scent: “A moist draft turned the

page, which seemed to be heavily scented with a human perfume” (115). “Human” is now measured

against characteristics of the microbial, and even of paper:

Mist buckled the page. It snapped to attention while the microphytic alphabet roamed the weather’s

inversion noting subtle differences. I sat apart. Looking for all the world. My face was paper thin.

Murmuring pages. Pressed-pulp rectangular shavings piled razor thin planes through and through the

mist and my animation was left suspended. (109)

The text of Word Rain is staged as the product of a heterogeneous collaboration of human and non-

human “agents.” Other texts as well are part of its production; they give guest performances or are “hi-

jacked,” cannibalised and fed into the “mother’-text. Intertextuality as literal incorporation is, after all, a

form of parasitism. Accordingly, half of Word Rain’s ninth chapter, “A. Mist and Flood—Evaporating

Endings,” consists almost entirely of endings of other books—Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, for in-

stance, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gertrude Stein’s The Making

of Americans, Samuel Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

The “quoted” ending of Mickey Mouse Comics is, moreover, programmatic for the parasitical para-

digm:

Once her soiled gloves had been taken care of, Minnie began to settle down. For a while all was quiet

with Mickey there beside her. Then, turning to him with the beginning of a smile on her downy face:

“Mickey,” she said, “Did you hear that sound? I think we have mice in the house.”—Mickey Mouse

Comics. (118)

Because “Mickey” and “Minnie” have proper names and a house of their own, and because they en-

ter the symbolic order of language to get rid of the “dirt” (“soiled gloves”), they “pass” as subjects. The

anonymous mob of mice in “their” house, however, is an intrusion of vermin—this is how bourgeois sub-

jects are made. But “Minnie” smiles as if she understands the ideological character of the dichotomy sepa-

rating owners from thieves, based on two “classes” of mice, i.e. concealing that in both cases we can speak

262 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

of mice. Says Shaviro: “Who is the parasite, then, and who’s the host? […] We all have parasites in-

habiting our bodies; even as we are ourselves parasites feeding on larger structures” (39, 43). The separa-

tion of “proper” and “alien” becomes obsolete and makes room for symbioses that cultivate other, though

not quite as transparent, agencements. It makes room, in other words, for a modest kind of “presence.”

I have not been able to rid (read this word with an accent) myself of words. But the words, the rain of

words, the weather being what it was, with not one day, one hour willing to stand up alone without its

weather, the low warm puddles, the reflective mist; these combined to achieve the final opalescence of

my presence. (107)

Despite what are, at times, dictatorial gestures (“I am the only one who can decide to breathe. I will

help her and you when you practice to be me”), there is no autonomous, individual “I” in the text who

simply uses a writing instrument (4). Writing has become “WRITING (WITH A BLOOD VESSEL

STYLOS),” because author, writing, and letters are inseparable (80). The narrator shrinks to a nomadic pli

of utterance, as weightless as the microbial letters: “Over there in the center, I am imploded as the size of a

fly. Words fall off the curls of nothing after I have left for the next moment” (3). The capital “I,” once a

pillar of an authoritative and subjective ego, disperses and is folded into the other letters: “i entered the

m(i)st. i started (i)odine. i filled f(i)ll. i make h(i)m. i am always (i)n. (So what)” (106). “I,” insists Word

Rain, is a word:

I am a word. Any word pick any word. Which leads us to my secret. Even I have to stop and think

how to say something at times. I might finally be wordless. I will not say.

I am the liar the one who says I am not telling the truth. (4)

It multiplies; it divides. It is nucleus, medium, creator, and creature at the same time, without ever

being a “one.”

But where do the words come from, then? Words said to have a breath, words which can take the

protagonist unawares? Are they “apparitions,” a spectral fold in the phenomenal world? As an ironic side-

swipe at the surrealist dogma of écriture automatique, pages 71-73 are footnoted:

This footnote is here to record a miracle. The asterisks above the line segments indicate the place at

which three words appeared even before my fingers, my typewriter, arrived at that space on the paper. […]

Since these words seemed to coincide with what I’d been about to say, my first thought was that my thought

had somehow managed to pre-empt the role of my hands and to outline itself there. […]

I love visitors, accidental mechanical ones, ghosts, microphytic agents, myself. I need this miraculous help

as much as possible. In this book, I am the third I, near the beginning of a perhaps infinite series of them, and

in the middle of this book. (71-73)

Words appear and obscure the agency of utterance: “I, no i, (me, mine, she, her, us) am B(b)eing oc-

cluded. The occurrence of words” (107).

Words “happen” thanks to invisible “microphytic agents” procreating in the suitable culture medium

(paper, author, reader): “Every book fell through me. The way bubbles are held in soapy water, conversation

is held in me, and when I blow, it is vocalized. I travel in words”(66). When the “I” of the text compares

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 263

itself with paper it is as if it needs to prove its superiority as host: “I am warmer than paper. I can hold more

words. My erasures can be made to reappear. Words need not merely press themselves parallel to me; any

angle of entrance is acceptable and useful” (66).

In this anti-myth of creation, there is no creator who creates anything without creating himself. In-

stead there is a chain-reaction of “self”-generation. The “consciousnesses” of narrator/reader or author

appear as epi-phenomena, their “actions” a kind of “breeding”: “I unfold a sentence. Out of the sphincter

valve of each word comes the shorthand of a new sentence. And here, in the defining mold which these

sentences cast lies one flavor of my consciousness, perhaps vanilla” (49).

The lessons Steven Shaviro ascribes to William S. Burroughs are also taught, and with a vengeance,

by Word Rain:

Don’t try to express “yourself,” then; learn to write from dictation, and to speak rapturously in tongues. An

author is not a sublime creator, as Dr. Frankenstein wanted to be. He or she is more what is called a

channeller, or what Jack Spicer describes as a radio picking up messages from Mars, and what Jacques

Derrida refers to as sphincter. (Shaviro 45)

Contact with the culturing medium threatens the reader with infection and infiltration. The reader is

thus “sentenced” by Word Rain [48]. The “activity” of reading is described as copying, as if DNA was

inscribing itself. The individual turns into a “replicator,” and the reader into a catalyst:

It is enormously true that coincidental with the ability to read is the ability to make copies. Copies

have been made of simple, complex sentences, words, microphytic agents and molecules, in the

presence of the reader who acts as a catalyst. At the same time, the reader is also continuously re-

copying himself. (116)

The similarity here between the “microphytic agents” and viral infection is striking:

When a living cell is invaded by a virus, it is compelled to obey this order. Here the medium really is

the message: for the virus doesn’t enunciate any command, so much as the virus is itself the command.

It is a machine for reproduction, but without any external or referential content to be reproduced.

(Shaviro 40-41)

Imploringly, “I” attempts to move us, the external readers of Word Rain, to comply with its para-

doxical instructions. The following quote shows that there is more at stake than a simple verbal “double

bind” (“I am screaming at you. Don’t listen to my words”). In fact, in this passage there is more than a

whiff of remote control, of infection, and even occupation:

Listen to me. Now, right now. Whatever I say you must do. Anything I tell you, you will listen to. As

I speak, so shall you move. Listen. Remember I have my claws of disease. I say to you now, Forget

about these words. Throw them away. This one, right now. Out. Away. I am screaming at you. Don’t

listen to my words. Read this with your eyes (did you know that each of you have at least fifteen pairs)

closed. I will tell you what you will do. I am telling you what you are doing. I am not writing this, I am

talking it. Don’t dare think otherwise. Are you listening to the razor in your ear? Put all thought out of

your mind. Put it here… Smell this sentence. Now do this Cut off your head.

264 Interfaces 21/22 (2003)

You better get away from yourself for awhile. Burn these words with your attention but do not see

them. […]

I have your head over here. Come here and get it. I will let you feel it again. Here are the wet, deep

tube, the powdered face, the light-sensitized almonds, my ear drums, the balanced parts whose normal

composure is arrived at by my telling you so. Try not to look at your nose, pick me off this page again.

There must be a strong concentration of me in you. (77; emphases mine)

Similarly, even if more in the panparanoiac vein of Burroughs, Shaviro claims: “It is not “I” who

speaks, but the virus inside me.” He continues:

And this virus/speech is not a free standing action, but a motivated and directed one: a command. […]

to speak is to give orders. To understand language and speech is then to acknowledge these orders: to

obey them or to resist them, but to react to them in some way. An alien force has taken hold of me and I

cannot not respond. Our bodies similarly respond with symptoms to infection, or to the orders of viral

DNS and RNA. (Shaviro 42)

The reader of Word Rain is similarly drawn into the eddy of the text, becoming its collaborator: “if

you feel you have nothing to say, pick up this book and say anything from it. Rearrange the words any

way you like. The last page is the key. […] I cannot prove that I (you) am reading. Is there enough space

for you?” (120).

But what is more: S/he is written by his/her “own” reading process: “The paragraph which you are

about to read has never been written. You are writing it now. I will write you.” Soaked with the word rain,

left directionless and decapitated by the instructions of “I,” infiltrated by the “microphytic agents,” the

reader of Word Rain can now begin to infect others:

I appear on a page which would otherwise be blank. I, the mist, the agent, she, appear to swoop you and

stratify you, circle you, and synthesize, just as I do now in this short paragraph into which I have fallen. I am

not telling you but you are thinking that the two pages between which I fall were made by me in her for you to

see against the same word rain, through the mist, against different patterns of breath, similar but different

accents to your attention. I have taught her how to make this special ruler by which you can measure

yourself. In order to make these words move, you must give your attention to them. Notice, I am gone. (54)

Dagmar Buchwald9

University of Bielefeld

9 Born 1958 in Karlsruhe; studied sociology, comparative literature, English and American literature in Munich, Bielefeld,

Boston, and Constance. In 1990 Ph.D. thesis on Gertrude Stein’s late modular novels (Jenseits von Aktion und Passion.

Munich: Fink 1995). Research fields: Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies, cross-transfers between the Humanities and the

Sciences; afro-futurism; theories of abjection, emergence and metamorphosis. Currently working on the figuration of the

parasite and on virtual worlds and their communities. Lives and teaches in Bielefeld.

D. Buchwald: Reading/Writing para(-)sites 265

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A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia

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Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism

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The Mechanism of Meaning

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ARAKAWA, and Madeline GINS. The Mechanism of Meaning. 3rd ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.

Reading/Writing Para(-)Sites: Madeline Gins’s Word Rain

Abstract

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