Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction

David Banash, David Banash

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628923698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs. Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities.

Part One

Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books

1

The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula

Mary K. Holland

The world according to Steve Tomasula—and according to poststructural theories of language, Darwinist perceptions of nature, and systems-theory constructs of digital technology that inform his work—can only be experienced by the transient, particular human as fragmented, incomplete, relative, and irresolvably multiple. And yet art traditionally gathers and organizes these pieces into the wholeness and meaning that the world lacks, re-presenting the world with the apparent passivity of a mirror. For Steve Tomasula, however, the work of art is most integrally about work: it exists materially and physically impacts the world; it is defined by its function and use, not by cloaking and aestheticizing of these active dimensions; and it results from the work done by humans: it is human-made, not a product of nature. At bottom, Tomasula’s fiction aims to cram a wedge into the nearly non-gap between the Real and the endless ways we represent it to ourselves, while accusing itself of being no wedge at all. The essentially Lacanian—which is to say, Freudian, or perhaps Cartesian—notion that the self necessarily experiences everything as mediated by the self, and therefore has no direct access to reality, presents the basic problem of Tomasula’s work; whether and how art might offer a solution to that problem, or simply a way of comprehending the problem, while also identifying itself as part of that problem, motivates its unfolding. Ultimately for Tomasula, art is one of the many lies—like science, like history, like culture—that we cannot live without, if we are to live at all. But unlike the other scaffoldings we cling to, the other masks of the untouchable Real, art for Tomasula offers the possibility of making the Real present, pointing to the Real,¹ by exposing itself as nothing more than mask.

But Tomasula’s work does not confine itself to critiquing systems of signification and their relation to an abstract Real. Rather, his novels connect that theoretical inequity between representation and reality to a materialist critique of the inevitable inadequacy of any individual vision of the physical world, and a social critique of the inequities of power producing those visions. Thus, in all of his novels, the frameworks we use to stand in for reality—whether conceived as abstract idea or material whole—change as the dominant ideology changes: in VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), music evolves from earthsounds to mouthsounds, melody, then genetic duet, while The Book of Portraiture (2006) depicts the evolution of modes of perception via mechanisms of representation, from the invention of alphabetic language to the reinvention of human life via genetic alphabet. TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) goes one step further, imagining a looping creation myth in which frameworks of perception evolve in and out of complexity as humanity repeatedly builds and destroys the master framework of time. These texts suggest that our ways of understanding reality are culture, insidiously self-perpetuating in that it both results from the gathering of individuals’ understandings, reactions, and desires, and shapes them, invisibly. VAS demonstrates how the most horrifying societal practices become accepted, even forgotten, not just through its story, but through its real-world examples of horrors we’ve assimilated, lost track of, or not even noticed. Years after learning in school of the Nazis’ sterilization programs, Square (the narrator of VAS) learns of those programs instituted decades before in America, “The Land of Free Choice”²: he marvels that one can acculturate to his own commodification, as did Ota Benga, who killed himself after his removal from the Bronx Zoo where he had lived in the Monkey House with an orangutan (VAS 297); he fills pages with pictures of ads selling gene manipulation and the eggs of beautiful women, meticulous documentation of Miss America’s decreasing dimensions, and reports of the eighteen surgeries required to transform a woman into a living Barbie—all of which we will find exist in the real world, if we check. The fact that we will have to check (how could I never have heard of Ota Benga?) indicates how little we know about the world we live in, how inaccurate any concept of reality is. The ultimate simulacrum, culture produces reality so thoroughly that we forget, or never know, that reality is anything more than the set of assumptions, fragments, and misperceptions that we live in.

Such a wholesale substitution of representation for reality can’t be helped: there is no Adam’s Peak, which Tomasula imagines in both VAS and IN&OZ (2003) as a point on earth from which one can view all of creation, unframed.³ The danger, then, comes in confusing our methods of framing (narrative, schools of knowledge, facts) with the thing itself, and thus allowing particular lenses to dominate our vision in ways that distort or destroy our understanding of what it is to be human—that is, how we relate to the larger world, to each other, to the self. Tomasula’s four major works of fiction investigate our methods of representing and knowing reality (science, technology, history, language, image, story), the risks and benefits of each, and art’s value as such a method, asking what kind of art best allows us to know what is real by confronting the necessarily incomplete, fragmented, irresolvable ways that we (attempt to) encounter it. It considers the work art can do in an age defined by information systems, reproducibility, and technological manipulation of the material world and the body.

Today’s most popular mask/ideology being science and its technologies, Tomasula’s writing focuses on the concerns of science and language as interrelated arms of the culture industry that shape our world and our bodies. His fiction considers what art is in that industry, and what it needs to be in order to resist it, to be revolutionary. Just as his art explores thematically how a science grown ever more atomic in scale, and a technology evolved from mechanical to digital, make increasingly profound alterations to the physical world and the human body, so does his fiction formally explore how literature in a digital age must grow increasingly and insistently material. The implications of his theory and execution of art revise the status of literature, the genre of the novel, and material theories of art.

The danger of art

One aim of Tomasula’s fiction is exposing the dangerous lie of narrative. As a mimetic method, narrative pleases by offering the appearance of knowledge, wholeness, and immediacy, but through the mechanisms of forgetting, partiality, and construction. VAS and The Book of Portraiture (2006) enlist the constellation as metaphor for such constructive/destructive acts of understanding, in which “seeing the constellations/patterns … was more a matter of not seeing than seeing.”⁴ The narrator of the “Chronos” section of TOC: A New Media Novel also explains the pull of art as its ability sensibly to connect the random pieces of our lives: “She longed for a way to approximate the sense of a whole that was easier to fake in art than in life.”⁵ IN&OZ, more allegorical art manifesto than novel, demonstrates the danger of traditional realism and its invisible methods by contrasting two kinds of cars as two kinds of art with two very different societal functions and meanings. Mechanic, who becomes the novel’s artistic guru, transforms himself from worker to artist when he starts “fixing” cars in ways that make them inoperable as cars but revelatory as art objects: “Having grasped the essence of Car, he could no longer participate in the lie that was Not-Car, the lie that blinded people from the beauty of the Truth that resided beneath the false beauty they mindlessly used to tool about their work-a-day lives” (IN 25). Instead, he tools about the neighborhood pushing his car, whose wheels he has mounted to the roof and replaced with its doors like skis (IN 35), allowing the car in its functional brokenness to showcase its essential carness, just as his broken hammer allows him to “see its hammerness for what it was” (IN 26).⁶ Having been Heideggerianly thrown into the mechanic’s life simply because he grew up with a father who became a mechanic because cars often broke down under the bridge where they lived (101), Mechanic knows how material conditions shape our lives, how form determines function and fate—how form is the essence of meaning—as it is for his watchdogs with their “powerful bodies,” (IN 67) and for the Designer’s dog whose delicacy fits into her owner’s petite lap. Only removing this function allows us to see things for what they are, for the function they lost. Pointing to meaning/function by removing it is for Mechanic a true reproduction of the absent truth that all art is after, is testament to his understanding that such a truth can only be made present in its absence, that art neither conjures nor substitutes for the Real but rather exists entirely separate from it, and more often obscures than illuminates it. Designer, on the other hand, creates designs that “mask the grotesque viscera of cars,” as a dress or eyeglasses are “more of a language than an article of clothing or a medical aide” (IN 17). Her cars derive their power not from their ability to reveal their material function, but from their ability to “giv[e] desire form—and shap[e] the world by doing so” (IN 17). In transforming the cars’ essences into the language of desire, Designer creates “invisible cars” whose “wordless language” enables people to “change their selves by changing what they drove” (IN 91, 16, 18), thus masking both the mechanism of the car and the mechanism by which cars can be made to act ideologically on the world.

Like Mechanic’s inoperable cars, Photographer’s mental photographs and Composer’s silent music present an argument for anti-realist art. When Photographer finds that Mechanic has “fixed” his car by replacing the windshield with the radiator, he recognizes their kindredness: “All my life I have driven this car without once considering the beauty, the functionality of its radiator … but now I shall never drive again without first appreciating its handiwork, and yours, and all of those whose labor has helped make my locomotion and comfort possible” (IN 27). This attention to the object’s material function and the labor that produced it Photographer calls the “true beauty of art,” which he contrasts with the “lies and illusions we are expected to live by” (IN 27). Photographer’s own art expresses the same distrust of the “lies and illusions” perpetuated by mainstream art; having abandoned filmmaking after being “sickened” by “the artificiality of time in films,” Photographer turned to stills and then photos with increasingly tiny frames, in an attempt to minimize the opportunity for misreading: “the photos themselves, the mere flotsam of looking were what most people wanted in a photograph while the photos were the very thing that arrested looking” (IN 29–30). His quest to escape the tyranny of the frame, of frameworks of representation that manipulate viewers who believe they are seeing unmediated reality, leads Photographer to “take pictures without any film in the camera,” and then to abandon framing devices altogether by building a house as a “walk-in camera obscura,” in which he stands, “eyes shut, letting the image that came in through the window that was a lens project itself onto his closed eyelids” (IN 30).

Composer presents a similar argument for anti-realist art that results in a similarly solipsistic alternative to traditional art. His concert begins with a manifesto for anti-realist art, which accuses mainstream art of distorting reality by “FRAMING the world in such a way so as to CROP from view the WHOLE OF MUSIC and make of it a standardized assemblage of sounds to play while in the car or vacuuming the house” (49). Later, Composer will argue, as if he has been reading David Foster Wallace, that “by preventing audiences from slipping into the passive, dreamlike trance of listening, by forcing them to instead work for every note with their eyes, they apprehend the constructed nature of music. That is … they see how there is nothing natural about it” (IN 74). Further, he points out the structuralism of music, that it, like a language, operates and means only relationally, and that our investment of meaning in its distinct parts is also a construction: “we see how illusory is the concept of ‘a’ note. There can be no ‘note’ without an absence of sound between other sounds. … And so it is with all genres of music and the invisible assumptions that make them possible: No military music without a military. No church music without a history of churches” (IN 75). In this description, traditional art, and our traditional understanding of art, hides not just the truth of function but also the historical, political, and cultural forces that brought the art into being. But Composer’s methods of turning away from the lies of mainstream art, like Photographer’s, produce art that cann...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works
• Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula
• Part One: Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books
• Part Two: Genealogies of Representation
• Part Three: New Media and the Novel
• Part Four: Writing Wonder
• Afterword: An Interview with Steve Tomasula
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint