the Internet is for real; Everything I forgot I'll remember...

“The original cannot be located, [it] is always deferred; even the self which might have generated an original is shown to be itself a copy.” – Douglas Crimp (“The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October, 1980)

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“In post-Internet culture, nowness means we’re divorced of a destination and an origin. That idea, for me, was a good starting point for writing an autobiography that calls into question what’s original and the possibility of even having an origin story.” – Chris Campanioni (“Now/here Fast,” The Brooklyn Review, 2019)

When I interact with any piece of art, including literature, I scan part-whole in every possible combination and re-combination of the work. The elemental and holistic components of a text, for example, may be fractured and non-linear as they appear in Chris Campanioni’s new book, the Internet is for real—a collage of two books with many interchangeable elements, written as experimental poetry and prose; white spaces, minimal punctuation, innovative visual forms, erasure, unconventional word placement, appropriation, vispo—mapping new cognitive landscapes for navigating sensation, perception, feelings, language, and other claims of authenticity in spaces molecular and global, domestic and impersonal, normal and broken, interior, and social, intelligent machine and sentient being—New York as Ubernode. This book is not a Bretonian manifesto but a pronunciamento [“nowness”] about post-Internet spaces—more a philosophical network graph than a history.

The first one

To Adorno

Always wins   Says

 

A professor

I’ve never pictured

Naked    Waiting

 

For global warming

Is like waiting for everyone

To become a refugee

 

That is to say

To become

What we were

 

Born to be   Looking

Into the sky isn’t a yearning

To be somewhere else but to be someone

 

You aren’t   The person

You can only imagine

On the other side [“Server Leak”; 284]

Chris Campanioni (cc) is an educator, a student, a multimedia artist, a model, and an actor whose father and mother immigrated to the United States from Cuba and Poland, respectively. In 2014, his novel, Going Down, was selected as Best First Book at the International Latino Book Awards. Because he grew up as an “Other”—with the interstices of two disparate cultures—Campanioni is aware of marginality disrupting pretensions of normalcy, sameness, or assimilation. He is not, in a conventional sense, a “political” or didactic writer; however, like the British author, Ian McEwan, cc uses texts as conduits for the expression of values (see, for example, his Acknowledgments, pp. 286 to 289). No doubt woven into his upbringing, Campanioni is a writer with a strong sensibility of the tropics and other Latinx writers, many of whose works evoke the languorous mood and feel experienced here/there—awareness of loneliness in the midst of exaggerated gregariousness and movement, ongoing awareness of one’s own physical and emotional states, ambient light, recurrent nostalgia. These same words, and others, might describe the author’s New York City: melancholia and odors of street food combined with a terminal erotic charge.

moved out of whitman’s brooklyn

for the original, since 1916

eating a nathan’s hot dog with my

pretty young thing

playing on the PA around us & everywhere

there is music or there is music

to be made, the way I heard

a soundtrack in the background always

as a child now a soundtrack

for every mood I wish to feel … [“whitman’s brooklyn”; 34]

 

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And what are we if we are not all already elsewhere?

When objects and people and text move that fast, it doesn’t look like we

are moving at all. The concept of the always-already ready-made has also

made identity just another prefab, gossamer construction, less sleight of

hand than smoke and mirrors: the camera pulls back in a mise-en-scène

to reveal that nothing else actually exists beyond the beautiful binding.

[“Reading your writing (a way out of exile)”; 77]

the Internet is for real, a critical-creative narrative of auto-theory, follows his acclaimed autobiographical hybrid book, Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016), whose thesis Campanioni explained in a 2016 interview with The Brooklyn Rail—“One way to re-evaluate the model [of “high” and “low” culture] and democratize or equalize art is to dismantle it, by introducing pop culture into the discussion and the work of art itself … I am very conscious of re-evaluating the model and its means of production.” But, contrary to the Dadaists, Campanioni is not “anti-art.” He would not take the extreme position espoused by visual artist Jon Rafman—“Why keep on pulling material from 2,000-plus years of art history now that we have all these new online cultures?” Both Campanioni and Rafman, however, share a concern for the impact of technology on contemporary life and world-views; past, current, projected—if time exists at all in the post-Internet domain. If it cannot be said that the Internet is for real has a single conceptual framework, its thrust, nonetheless, advances the idea that our individual, group, national, and global spaces are in need of radical revision in order to adapt to post-Internet globalism: to work in and on its constellatory discourses. The author’s text opposes William S. Burroughs’ exposition—“I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue.” Indeed, Campanioni shows us how “the artistic world” has done just that. He counters Burroughs by detailing, diagnosing, and suggesting ways to treat the causes and consequences of commodification, corporatization, reification, and alienation in psychological, personal, social, and economic landscapes.

The book’s indeterminate associative and collage compositions echo the author’s concerns that there may be no solutions—only impressions, questions, propositions, and projections in a world in which anomie, drama, and flux are more common than certainty or pause or constancy, except for notable psychic states—conscious or unconscious, veridical, or imagined—thoughts, emotions, mirages of comfort—perhaps, a father’s voyage after political unrest somewhere else or an innocent card game with a beloved grandmother. What we want to believe, to remember, is “real” may be a fabrication, just as we are continuously fabricated by others’ drives (money?, power?, fame?, sex?), by others’—and our own—incessant claims to bodies and time and … et cetera, just as the bodies closest to us are marked by the best that Capitalism has to offer—served on Limoge plates, in crystal flutes—the Body Politic as personal contract, the subway become domestic space, subway as phallus, subway as spam processor, notebooks as whole-brain emulations, identity created by algorithms, gazer as the one gazed—runway become Buddha path, as in Campanioni’s poem: “give us the runway, and we will lift the world.”

Considering his text as a whole, as well as, particular poems and essays, Campanioni, a former copy-editor, writes in the tradition of the Dadaist, Tristan Tzara’s, “cut-up” method of composition. Like a genome-editor, the author’s works “cut and splice” imagination, experience, language, and events in-the-world. In her discussion of collage poetry, the critic Marjorie Perloff observed, “each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Campanioni’s text represents such a juxtaposition of poems, short prose pieces, sentences, concepts, images, music, and rhythmic elements, fulfilling many of Modernism’s Formalist criteria for “good” literature. In his discussion of Perloff’s project on collage poetry, David Banash stated, “Critics readily recognize collage as one of the most important techniques of the twentieth-century,” pointing out, further, that collage is a “revolutionary” avant-garde form with a “complex relationship to … mass media.” the Internet is for real can be viewed as a creative autobiographical commentary on those relationships, using collage to represent “complex,” differentiated, interrelated, and interacting themes. With this approach, the author unites substance and form.

There is a sense in which everything that can and needs to be said about the Internet is for real is available online in serious, cogent, challenging reviews and interviews, an ironic observation given the title and substance of cc’s new book, reinforcing the synergy between form and substance. In addition to these commentaries, it is important to place Campanioni’s project in historical perspective, and the book reflects several intellectual traditions, including, Cubism (collage), Italian Futurism (“free” poetry, acceleration), Dadaism (anti-establishment, syntactical rupture), Surrealism (the unconscious, dream interpretation, fantasy), Postmodernism (fracture, self-reflexivity), and Michel Foucault (surveillance, biopolitics). Other elements frequently pertain to Eros, sex, orgasm (William Shakespeare’s, “die,” la petite mort), politics (Syria’s call for “Karameh! Karameh! Karameh!”), and death (“now the news / Philando Castile’s murder”). Despite these significant influences, however, the Internet is for real most clearly reflects Jacques Lacan’s theoretical approaches, with recurrent references to the gaze, dreams, mirrors, the “Other,” the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, desire, lack, as well as, Lacan’s intellectual forerunner, Hegel, and his idealist philosophy—in cc’s words: “utopic.” In his analysis of Lacan’s mirror stage, John Docker has observed that the “narrative [or autobiography, in the present case] is a concealed ideological discourse, to which [the reader’s] unconscious has responded.” We might take this notion as a starting point to mine the Internet is for real for psychoanalytic content, as suggested by such passages:

Absence precedes & permits my imagination. If I were to imagine you,

right now, putting your fingers here, like I am, folding a page to mark

your spot, a desire for a certain smile, a certain eye movement, I would

have to absent myself; I would have to absent myself from any possible

encounter with the real you so I could really begin to imagine you, here,

with me as I sit with you. & to confront my image of you makes me de-

sire this communion more. & to confront the absence of myself—there

is nothing better in this life. [“(#selfiefail)”; 186]

 

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In the mirror you closed your eyes & wished for someone else [“In the Multiplex”; 196]

 

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A close-up of a bathroom mirror, steam on the lens, a palm pressed up

against the glass cross-cut with water dripping from a faucet, bare feet

on lino, the suction sound of a body opening, or closing.

 

The jump-cut of wish

To fulfillment [“How Do I Look?”; 63]

 

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The song I’m listening to after I wrote this, as I am reading it back, edit-

ing it, revising, removing things and forgetting what it was I’d wanted to

add, is called “Wet Dream” which includes the repeated chorus

 

I’m in love with myself

I’m in love with myself’

I’m in love with myself [“Manufactured Pleasures”; 173]

In a recent interview, Campanioni addressed the claim that his writing represents “excess,” suggesting that he is complicit in the very forms of overload, waste, self-indulgence, and disorder that the Internet is for real critiques. Entropy is a hallmark of the post-Internet universe in which cyborgs have access to every “bit” of available information and where nothing disappears. Technology has disrupted what John Docker calls “the literary-modernist orthodoxy—mass conformity.” “Conformity” requires cohesion and entropy is increasingly difficult to deaccelerate, resist, or erase—if it can be filtered, manipulated, managed, or avoided at all. Campanioni’s perspective avoids nihilism by reframing “excess” as “a loss of control,” (thus, entropic), and as he has readily asserted in the same Brooklyn Review interview, “I want to embrace that lack of precision.” The author, then, chooses to “embrace” and disrupt excess by deploying the verbal equivalent of Rauschenbergian bricolage—never stopping the process of innovation and generativity—like Chomskyan linguistics, like the Internet. Continuing his dialogue with Brooklyn Review editor Tom Kozlowski, cc suggested that “excess” may be part of a Latin American literary tradition—a potentially subversive idea and one worth lingering on.

Readers expect an autobiography, even an experimental one, to provide an intimate experience. What do we know about Campanioni after completing the Internet is for real? The book is as much a Philosophy text as it is a work of Literature, Criticism, or Art. He shows himself to be, without self-promotion, an astute, mature observer of the universal network graph, including himself as a single node. Campanioni’s presence and force of character have an immediate impact. In spite or maybe because of that, the Internet is for real, as an in-depth, challenging composition, may not satisfy the consumer of mass-market or pulp writing, or even a reader expecting traditional poetry, or the form and generic markers of the “poetry collection.” On the other hand cc’s topical range is broad, and, in true Postmodern fashion, “story” ruptures, slides toward the reader—even the voyeur or the superficially curious.

Indeed, the book embraces anyone prepared to participate in a performative, discursive project. the Internet is for real embodies extreme “interpretive power”—the capacity to generate ideas and discussion, as well as the potential to endure in the literary canon. One can imagine the book as the center of discussion in a classroom or Town Hall or at a public gathering or a meeting of friends. Campanioni has suggested in interviews that the text might already be out of date, thinking, no doubt, of the velocity of information change at every level and in every detail covered in the Internet is for real. It is not contradictory to suggest, however, that the book is a wise place to begin considering or to continue reflection about the seemingly overwhelming state of all imaginable events-in-the world that might affect meaningful entropy-management, anxiety-reducing filtering, as well as coordinated, effective action. Campanioni shows himself to be a major intellectual force—an analyst and critic of the human condition in the midst of technological forces—their causes and consequences, costs and benefits. As he writes toward the very end, or very beginning of this reversible text: “Everything I forgot I’ll remember in another book” [“Server Leak”; 284]. Campanioni’s future projects are eagerly awaited.