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Prologue II Making My Own Rules & Performing My Selves: Breaking through the Labyrinth of Signification and Discursive Practices
Linda C.H. Lai On a Chinese animal chess board, I have studied the hierarchies of the human species embedded in the deep structures of Chinese civilization. At Starbucks I have studied the chance relation between a Mocha Valencia, a mini chicken pie and a mobile phone of an obsolete model on a wooden surface with a two-foot diameter. I took a contact sheet of my collaborator Theresas and started erasing, pasting and making marks. I wrote across a photograph: was it autograph, margin notes, or poetic performance? On a lonely white wall I thought I saw for all real numbers x and y, if x*y = x(x-y), then x*(x*y) = -- as if it spoke the logic of chance for my future. I tore out a page of my lecture notes for my students and asked Theresa to make a photograph about the contents. In some great poets anthology, I recorded friends e-mail addresses and phone numbers in the margins, but forgot to leave their names. On blank paper, my right hand dropped the words I and fly, automatically and nervously. Call Myself a Writer? Do the above episodes qualify someone for a writer? to my labyrinth and beyond. If you think they do, welcome

There are many imaginary books I could have written to precede this one I once wanted to do a book of letters confessing to my siblings my reasons for silence and non-participation in their lives. I fancied writing a story with many woman characters and multiple female subjectivities in which not much happens. I have lived many stories in which women hurt each other without realizing how and why. Actually I have written a short piece on myself visiting my own funeral -- something many undergraduate students have thought of doing? I have written a story of the

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slow process of a young man killing his creative drive. I have written a detached study of the unseen and the unspeakable of a famous New Testament episode: the male protagonist was bewildered, then dumb-founded, and in the end went mad. I have written a lyrical account of my grandmother in the exotic setting of Vietnam, a place neither she nor I have ever visited. All of these I wrote in a short story writing workshop during my graduate studies in the States. I got an A- for all of them except the one interpreting a biblical episode. My conservative professor said she liked them I was not sure because my final grade was B and I was not in the mood to argue with her. My classmates were more honest: they observed that my protagonists often under-went significant changes, but always for the worse. I have not attempted a single short fiction ever since that graduate workshop. From a writers point of view, narrative closure often invokes in me a sense of therapeutic self-deception, or a rush of agony. As a reader, being led along a narrative stream as it flows and unfolds to arrive at its final resting place is like watching my minutes and seconds being eaten up by ants. Constructing a story is building a ship and engineering its journeys in which you also turn readers into the object of the pleasure of determinism. Narrativity is a strange thing an addiction and the drug as well. Probably due to my background in cultural studies and critical theories in general, I felt a strange compulsion to write about world cities, especially mine, Hong Kong, or urbanity in general -- a sure obsession with chaos and decadence. I stay away from nature: mountains and oceans invoke in me a fear so great that it devours my awesome wonder. If nature charms, itd better be contained as representational forms a photograph of it, a painting or video about it... Or is it due to an unguarded political correctness that I tend to valorize the mundane, the trivial, and the ordinary? But everydayness can be frozen formality. Mongkok and Temple Street can be turned into an exciting exotic other if you know what I mean. Cultural studies, too, have provided me with all the grids and routine gestures to arrive at effective narrativity. To be informed and to be original form the most subtle moral dilemma. How do I constantly locate myself in that momentary, fleeting space of being free? How do I form a tangential relation with the game of signification and the norms of representation without being kept within? I have to face it and be honest: this book is in a sense an act of self-redemption though not self-redemption in itself. I constantly shuttle between being drawn to and pulling myself away from the game of writing. The one single episode that embraces my fascination as well as suspicions for writing

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activities is a scene in Stanley Kubricks Shining based on Stephen Kings novel of the same name. The protagonists wife quietly arrives at her husbands writing desk and discovers in horror his work, a tall stack of paper, printing the same line repeatedly: all work and no play make Jack a dull boy. This for me is the most memorable textual installation in the history of creative representation, even more powerful than Xu Bings Heavenly Books. Writings and words have become empty signifiers and yet a unique signifier that of the urge to articulate, the power structure that has burdened the history and convention of writing, as well as the identity value of the writer. And there is nothing horrific about the episode: for the practice of writing has always been more about when and where someone should make oneself an author. Its about who of what status should possess authorship of books of a certain thickness. So theres nothing scary. In fact, the episode truthfully links the activity of writing to our death instinct. Beyond meaning-production, the act to write is the very effort to stay in touch with reality and culture, to feel that one still breathes, that one is existentially entrenched, thus steadily proceeding toward and narrowing ones gap from the grand finale of death. And perhaps the repetition of certain words, phrases, lines and expressive constructions is the plainest fact, the most ordinary mark of our everyday life. Language is not just a kind of vessel, and meanings are not all that matters Finding My Own Rules / Performing My Selves In setting up the rules of my writing activities for this book, I mainly situate writing as a form of play. A continuous shift between positively writing and changing strategy to destabilize crafted meanings turns the writing process into a here-and-now performance of my many selves. Automatic writing and automatism in general have been my tactics in such context. A lot of the writings in this book -- especially in sections Text-photo and Reflexive Exchange -- are ready-mades (or found objects) of eclectic sources, all pointing back to the disparate, incommensurate moments of my having lived as a social, cultural subject. There are lecture handouts, study notes, personal journals, daily automatic writing exercises, criticism, column pieces, publicity writings, unfinished stories, mind-maps and images, a movie ticket I happened to keep, streaming TV news reading that happened to enter my conscious reception all written for particular purposes and audiences from the past. As an undergraduate English major, I hated poetry classes most. The methodical,

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excessively laboratorial approach turned me off on the spot. But as someone with a habit of scribbling on paper from time to time, poetry was my natural language. Sounds pour out to form meandering streams of unsettling followings articulating the here and now. The flow of the present continuous fascinates me. Writing as an instantaneous act of self-articulation and self performance has informed all sections of this book, especially Photo-text, Dancing with Sounds No Phrases No Lines but Texts, Dialogues in Two Tongues, and Reflexive Exchange. Automatism: Although a genealogy of automatism in the creative culture remains an open question, automatic writing is often said to begin with the Surrealists in France in the 1920s. Since then automatism has become a conceptual thesis and creative method that price chance over deliberate intention, perception/intuition over conception. It embraces dreams and the unconscious as unique creative resources. The term thus pertains to the importance of artistic procedures, particularly rules designed to limit the artists conscious or voluntary control over a certain part of the creative process. Automatic procedures look for accidents and encourage free association. In automatic writing, one writes continuously, without planning, follows ones free flow of thoughts, or attends to the here-and-now of the five senses. Automatic writing leaves at rest the careful engineering of escalating crises, climaxes and resolution of conflicts. Instead, it slits open the unfathomable vastness of the unconscious mind from which fragments of the unintended pop up to dash away before you calm down enough from your shock to make sense of it. Automatic writing is not hypnosis. But it does beg you to loosen up, to let go, to lay down your defensive mechanisms, and to care less about your face and dignity -- in order to boldly and curiously listen to those broken thoughts and strange tones and voices of yours drawn out by chance. You may feel knocked off your chair, moved to tears unprepared, or starkly surprised, puzzled, or you find yourself retrieving a handful of cues to some deliberately deleted moments from your past. You also adventure, ready to grasp and grab. Automatic writing, like poetry, too, prices the present continuous tense, and on top of that, attends to the fragmentary and the elliptical. Automatism often takes as its tool free association (or associative thinking) to tap the inexhaustible resources of the unconscious mind be it an unanticipated thought, a surge of passion, a laughable desire, irrationality, dangerous, inappropriate intensions or frustrations. Just say yes to them. No inhibitions. No self-censorship. Youve got to be spontaneous, flexible, and at the same time watchful and attentive of

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whatever sweeps across your mind. Jot it all down. And along the way, be mindful of the subtle meanderings and respond with the tactful play of rules. Digress. Diverge. Hop. Reach out. Stretch and extend. The more rules constrain, the farther you go; the more winding the journey is, the more surprises. Within the game of automatic writing, you allow yourselves to probe into your unconscious mind. So whats left and remains on paper is nothing more than what chance and accidents allow, or present-tense vestiges of the past act of writing. The principle of automatism has allowed me to reconsider writing not as a positive act of deliberate planning, conscious manipulation of mind, and the effectuation of intended meanings, but as a fluid form capable of discovering, for the writer, lost voices, hidden realities and unvisited emotive and cognitive landscapes. I almost wanted a whole book with pure automatic writing. (Then I discovered the works of Taiwanese female poet Xia Yu. I wouldnt want to be someone elses convenient found disciple.) Some of the original automatic texts are presented here raw and untouched. In other cases, I have combined various automatic pieces and invented a new structure to hold them together. Or else, the overall process of Crypto-glyphs creative exchange was motorized by automatism, which has forced open new doors and unlocked many prohibited domains. Automatism peels off the sweet, colorful surfaces of photographs to reveal the myriad of voices and realities, and snatches banal images to redefine their freshness. Writing as Conceptual Art: intermediality and more My approach to experimentation in writing finds affinity in a few key theses in Conceptual Art. The first is the fascination with both theory and criticism as part of the creative content, underlined by the attempt to challenge the division of labor between art objects and interpretations, between producers and explainers. A second thesis of Conceptual Art holds that principle and experience cannot be separated and looked at as one more essential than the other. Third, Conceptual Art questions the primacy of the object in visual art and, instead, begs that works of art theory should be accorded the conjectural status of works of art.1 Lastly, the deliberate use of found objects, or the ready-mades, challenges the social institution of art and its assumed authority to determine the meanings and values of individual creative works. In this book, the theories and critical discussion of writing and the creative product of writing are equally important. Poems, short stories, prose and so on all have their own generic conventions and histories; and literary writing, expository forms, journal

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writing and critical analysis are all assigned fixed, legitimate spaces in the circulation of cultural artifacts. In this book, I have collapsed the established generic boundaries in writing. At times, writings are looked at as found objects: individual pieces point to, but not necessarily signify, memories of past events, my personal history of writing and the material existence of the writings themselves. Once taken away from its original contexts, they traverse very different waters to effectuate new communicative and expressive activities. The extensive appropriation of found objects is also an alternative to realism in self-documentation. Each found object has its own time and space, fictional, representational, or purely material and together they form an assemblage, as already discussed in this books General Introduction. Performing Feminist Sensibilities: deconstruction and feminism reconsidered The evolvement of texts and my creative responses to photography cannot be fully understood independent of the feminist sensibility that has formed my subjectivities. But my relationship to feminism, too, has been changing. My sincere response to feminism at one point meant the telling of stories to convey a feeling of suppression. For feminist thinking at one point was very much about producing alternative paradigms (and alternative epistemology) via the critique of distortion and under-representation with re-reading (interpretation) and re-writing (re-assignment of meaning) as tactics. Unfortunately, this has confined feminism to the ghettoization of feminist sensibilities. To me, the stable identity-label-personae charged with simple politically correct solutions at times felt dogmatic and imprisoning. For in reality I experience myself as sometimes masculine and at other times feminine, whatever content social values have given these two labels. In fact, there are moments when I am neither masculine nor feminine. And this is not all. As I step into my middle age in my aging body, I also feel the 20-year-old rebel becoming more alive, while my madness and fascination with the fantastic connect me back to the little child, much alive, but who in real life was never allowed to have wild fun. I am practically heterosexual, and I even bear the many traits of a sacrificial woman. And yet I am extremely fond of women: they are the real smart spirits, charming and titillating. No doubt, the erasure of differences is far more imprisoning than whether or not one bears a certain politically correct label. Differences allow me to speak and act with an endless list of subject positions and writing is to embrace the endless shifts from one to another,

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ruling signification and the quest for alternative meanings inadequate. According to Judith Butler, the politics of performativity is to open the signifiers to new meanings and new possibilities for political re-signification. Performativity is a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it requires an act-like status in present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.2 Performativity emphasizes the powerful expression of the ways that identities are constructed iteratively through complex citational processes, a repetition of acts constituted by the subject.3 Butlers feminism is intervention. Drawing from Speech Act Theory and post-structuralist language theories, her feminist intervention frees itself from the signifier-signified chain, honoring individual acts of writing as a fresh instant to get in touch with established meanings to question them and to renounce any hint of absolute authority. Intervention is necessarily here and now. Deconstruction is not about looking for substitute meanings, but to beg for continuous engagement. My involvement in the Crypto-glyph project can be looked at as a series of footnotes on my deviation from nominal feminism. Theres no transcendental quality that endows on me a stable, single identity. Multiplicity is not disorder or schizophrenia, but rather continuous self-performance carried out in fragmented sequences, automatic acts, with cracked voices, entrenched in specific spaces and temporalities. In brief, the textual activities in this book price the performative over the discursive, unfolding selves of differences in action, no matter how diverse and contradictory they may be. ******************** Having stepped in and out of the writing profession for all these years, I have never thought of myself as a writer, nor dreamt to be one. Now suddenly I have a book with Theresa -- after the instinct of play rather than work! Shouldnt I have put together some normal writing into a book before I attempt on full-scale deconstruction? Surely I have made my choice here: let the past be the past. Now this book project is over, I find myself once again in the confined space of my labyrinthine world, coming face to face with my own limited talent and wondering: whats next?
1 2

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory, p. 989. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative (New York, London:

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Routledge, 1997), p. 12. 3 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex (New York, 1993).