Function follows Form: New Weird 2

TTalkback: Harrison, M John: Function follows Form: New Weird 2

By gabe on Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - 06:45 pm:

My statement is this: New Weird is the function that serves the form that is the writing. New Weird is not the form itself. Am I wrong? --gabe chouinard http://hypermode.blogspot.com

By iotar on Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - 07:36 pm:

Please expand with example, Mr Chouinard.

By MJH on Friday, May 16, 2003 - 02:23 pm:

One of the things that came over very forcefully to me during the ICA event was how important simple *confidence* is to this new stuff. I think we've mentioned it here before: but on both nights of discussions (formal and informal), it was a word we heard from all quarters--insiders, outsiders, mainstreamers, readers who have no idea of what sf is, people who believe in a melting pot, people who believe that f/sf has a self-generated inferiority/martyr complex--all of them used the word confidence over and over again. For me, it's a central tenet of the New Weird: the confidence to do exactly what you see fit. You can't demolish the barricades and take your place in the publishing equivalent of a polycultural community without *confidence*. Guys like China and Justina have it in spades. If you haven't got it, catch up. You aren't in the movement yet, *but you can be*. More importantly, perhaps, since pick'n'mix is such an important part of it: you can't *do* that without the confidence to take what you want from the forms & styles on offer across a hundred years of fiction. What I felt at ICA was a sudden sharp increase in that confidence. It wasn't just the organisers who went away grinning from ear to ear & telling one another, "We live and rule, guys. We fucking live and rule." The New Weird, is, in part, taking what you want, because it's out there and on offer. Why can't we help ourselves to do this more ? Why have we got this frankly creepy idea we can--and should--only communicate with each other ?

By Al on Friday, May 16, 2003 - 03:25 pm:

Interesting - something Gwyneth said on Wednesday really intrigued me, relates to all this. She defined science fiction writing as writing in which all the parts are related to a single whole, and in which everything works in service to the core idea or ideas driving whatever's being written. In fact, I think that this is an effective, basic working definition for ANY good piece of writing / art / creative endeavour; it's not exclusive to Weird Fiction by any means. What is interesting about it though is its implications in the light of MJH's comments above - a combination of the discipline / craft to build structures that are thusly coherent with the confidence to take the components of those structures from anywhere. Going back to Justina's Venn Diagrams - existing genres are the individual circles within it - crime, chick lit, new middlebrow quasi-literature, whatever - taken like this, the New Weird deliberately refuses circling and hovers above the whole, the three dimensional presence on the two dimensional field, confident enough to contain anything if that containment drives effective work.

By MJH on Friday, May 16, 2003 - 03:52 pm:

Hi Al. I was interested by that, too. That was Gwyneth's rendition of Bruce Sterling's definition of the Cyberpunk method. It reminded me invincibly of Katherine Mansfield & Middleton Murry's definition of "particularity" in the very early 1920s. Bruce had clearly reinvented the wheel, but what's new. "...confident enough to contain anything if that containment drives effective work." That's the job.

By MJH on Saturday, May 17, 2003 - 10:51 am:

The word I've been looking for & not finding (dull old bastard that I am) throughout this discussion has been "bricolage", in the Levi Strauss sense. Knock this together with the Burroughs idea of writing as a "magical intervention" in the world, and you begin to get some idea of what I actually mean by the pick'n'mix aspect of the New Weird. You need confidence to perform acts like that. An act like that seems to provide both subject matter and form in Mieville's short story "Familiar", for instance; acts like that are the whole basis of "Gifco" or Light; or of anything of Tim Etchells'. I'm not saying that's *all* the New Weird does. Only: here's another element.

By Cheryl Morgan on Saturday, May 17, 2003 - 11:39 am:

Funny you should mention that, Mike. Jon dropped that "bricolage" word into my ear on Thursday night. Something else I need to go research before Wiscon.

By MJH on Saturday, May 17, 2003 - 12:56 pm:

It's been nagging me for weeks. Then I went to the Tiger Lilies' new show, "The Gorey End" at the Lyric last night, and they quoted a bit from an interview with Gorey himself, and there it was. The whole of Levi Strauss flashed before my eyes, nasty experience that. (I might as well say it now, because it will come out in the end anyway: The Tiger Lilies rock like utter weird bastards, and Martin Jacques is probably God. He is up there with Tom Waits and Nick Cave for me.)

By Zali on Saturday, May 17, 2003 - 01:09 pm:

All those 501s, eh? Bricolage is a good word. I think Gwyneth dropped in "sampling" too, which deals with the same phenomenon from the tech end rather than the primitive end. As soon as you discover the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste life is never quite the same again.

By MJH on Saturday, May 17, 2003 - 01:31 pm:

In L-S's sense it deals expressly with myth-making & the ad hoc construction or "celebration" of cultural stuff: also, a way of interfacing with the facts of your environment. That seems quite pertinent to what China's doing, for instance. Bricolage is a pragmatic, politic & yet magical way of pulling together the most disparate elements of your life at any given instant in time and then making them communicable. For me, so is the New Weird.

By Al on Sunday, May 18, 2003 - 12:15 pm:

'Every man to his junkshop', as Ez puts it. Interesting that what was for him implicitly negative has now become a positive. A move from a belief that a single, totalised view or summary of 'culture' is possible and desirable to an enthused and energised acceptance that you build your own individual version from the junk around you - these days, it's always personal! Prynne picks up on this idea of 'junk' also - Days and weeks spin by in theatres, gardens laid out in rubbish, this is the free hand to refuse everything. (from 'L'Extase de M. Poher') For him, the gardens are secure, unchallenging cultural constructs that reference only themselves... the rubbish is the place to be - Rubbish is pertinent; essential; the most intricate presence in our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned into a model question Which for me interestingly summarises / interacts with your definition of the New Weird, MJH (not to mention China's story). Btb poems not really laid out like this, message board won't let me do proper lineation.

By MJH on Sunday, May 18, 2003 - 12:51 pm:

Absolutely, Al. The intellectual, political & metaphysical parallels are obvious. We're at home in the Waste Land. We see it as a zone of possibility & optimism: a zone of emergence. Even our post-Seattle politics is decentred. On the one of the ICA panels Paul McAuley suggested the New Weird lacked one of the basics of a movement: it has no centre of focus. But in post Seattle politics the centre is distributed. This kind of brushfire discussion *is* a centre of focus.

By Al on Sunday, May 18, 2003 - 04:28 pm:

The internet model of a literary movement - no centre, just nodes, generating content and allowing for / enabling its free and rapid dissemination... Also, a response to your question elsewhere about the shampoo bottle. What happens to it when it's abandoned? It becomes rubbish - but it's still there, and new uses can be found for it in new contexts, entirely separate from the original niche it occupied. Re-contextualised, therefore remade, that remaking conditioned by the (hopefully) optimistic stance of the remaker, moving it beyond its original, homogeneous, commercial, function, to become something entirely personal and new.

By China on Monday, May 19, 2003 - 01:13 am:

New Weird Thoughts. I've been following the New Weird thread with increasing fascination and interest, as well as frustration. I know I'm a bit late to this party, so probably no one cares any more, and I can't post as often as everyone else seems to, but I can no longer resist saying something. It's stupidly long, sorry, I don't expect anyone to read it. i) On Movements. I'm with Justina and with MJH and against the 'No Labellers'. We have to start with a clear head about what movements are. There are several people on the New Weird thread who say some variant of: 'labels are always inaccurate', even that the whole idea at an artistic level is 'a load of crap'. This seems to me to be banal, disingenuous, and a category error. Of course labels are always tendentious, having to deal with grey areas, etc. But this is because to point at a book and describe it as 'Somethingorotherist' is not the same as pointing to a rock and describing it as 'igneous'. A label applied to an arts movement or to an aesthetic does a *different kind of job*, so to say such labelling can't be right because we're 'moving targets', or to complain about 'inaccuracy' is point-missing. This is what MJH is getting at regarding the power of naming - I agree totally, though I'd put it another way, which is that this kind of labelling, this kind of collation, is a *political and theoretical intervention*. It is not positivist bean-counting, so to point out 'dissimilarities' between grouped books or writers does not in and of itself negate a proposed category's usefulness or perspicacity. Of course, this can't be to say that *any* act of naming is equally persuasive. If I decide to group together John Updike, Richard Scarry and Jeffrey Archer and call them NeoAristotelian Denigrationists I'm going to have a much tougher job making the case than regarding (say) Cyberpunks, Revisionist Westerns or the New Weird. To *some* extent then (and only to some extent) the gut-tug of recognition with which we recognise some categories is a good argument for - not their 'existence' in some positivist sense - but their usefulness. That's a dangerous argument - gets close to 'if I point at it and call it such-and-such, then such-and-such it is'. That's why it can't be just about pointing, but about arguing. To suggest that the useful term should be 'fiction' is I think unrealistic and unhelpful - are we really going to suggest that we can't see any useful affinities between Gibson and Sterling as compared to Gibson and Ngugi wa Thiongo, and that it doesn't help us understand what's going on to group certain writers together - though many will of course be part of various groups depending on the argument (that's Justina's Venn Diagrams, again). This is complicated by the fact that a few movements *actually officially label themselves*. This leads the 'anti-label-ists' into a difficult position. Because all their arguments against labels can equally be applied to, say, the Situationists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists or Oulipo. They too are 'moving targets', their labels are also used as 'marketing gimmicks'. This means that the No Labellers have to say one of two things. a) Either the Surrealists (say) are an entirely spurious grouping (inasmuch as all labels are) - but I'd suggest that you cannot possibly understand Benjamin Peret, Pierre Naville, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Jacques Rigault, except in terms of each other and their movement (among other things, of course), b) Or they say that a movement can only be a movement if it actually proclaims itself to be one. So our arguments about New Weird might hold, but only if we all actually sign up to something. Surely this makes no sense, and it's much more realistic to think that at a critical mass of affinities, we can persuasively and more importantly *usefully* talk about a movement. When it gets formalised by the participants, so much the easier, but that's not the be-all and end-all of the argument. On which point, though I agree with Henry (Apr 30) that the New Weird is an argument, I don't agree with him that therefore a move to 'self-published manifestoes' is a bad thing, necessarily. I understand the fear people have - it's the fear that these formalisations then become policies, and the art becomes constrained. This, however, seems to me to misunderstand the nature of artistic manifestos. By their very nature they are polemical interventions, which are often breached in the particulars out of some sense of fidelity to an overall aesthetic (Dogme has a formal structure of confession because they recognise that their 'rules' are almost always breached by their own participants). Thus when, for example, people berated the New Puritan anthology because 'so many participants didn't completely obey the rules' it was a scandalously moronic diss (plenty of reasons to criticise the collection, but that wasn't one). I'm certainly not advocating a manifesto, but we have to acknowledge the possibility that it might be fun, it might be useful, and it might advance the argument. The second problem with manifestophobia is that it is predicated on the idea that regulation, systematisation and such is constraining. Why should that be the case? Look at the Oulipo movement (Queneau, Calvino, Duchamp, Mathews et al). 'As an Oulipian term, restriction means a constraining method or system or rule that is capable of precise definition. ... [T]he Oulipo are interested in such restrictions because they see in them not limitation but *potentiality*, an apparent paradox that tends to disappear when such methods are actually put into practice: restriction then becomes the mother of literary invention.' [Oulipo Laboratory, p.x] I stress I'm not particularly advocating a manifesto or a sign-up sheet or anything.