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Number 12: (In)efficacy |
| Web Fertilizer:
An Interview with American Coprophagia |
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The conversation below was taped in the wee hours of December 10, 2005, on anonymous roads between New York City and Vermont, with “Blicero” and “Speakingcorpse,” two of the three editors of the weblog American Coprophagia. Since its inception in 2003, the blog has lambasted, in its uniquely vitriolic manner, the ongoing, cumulative misdeeds of the Bush administration and their mediation via the mainstream American press. In what follows, Blicero and Speakingcorpse reflect on their curiously-named project at the crossroads of art, journalism, politics, and digital culture. Our discussion already reads like a product of its specific, bygone moment; some of the then-immediate issues now rendered ancient history in light of the recent elections. AmCop’s vitriolic critique of the American free press, however, still applies to our present and future. PART: I would start by asking about the origins of the blog, what inspired you to start it, and how you transitioned from Lee Book of Charm [now offline], your previous website, which was a literary magazine of sorts. Blicero: I really just wanted to do something nice
for my parents. Turn it off. Turn the machine off. Speakingcorpse: During the 2000 elections, and in the years afterwards, we had these “email nets.” We would have conversations about political issues between five or six people, writing back and forth to each other. It was a period in which I was reading some blogs, particularly Media Whores—the best blog-style site ever—and then I started following the links there and reading some of the other blogs. Blicero also started reading them, and started saying he was going to start a blog. B: The main periods of email activity were 9/11. A big email chain started after that. S: And it started before that, with the 2000 elections. And then it started again, with new vigor, after 9/11. B: And then again with new vigor in the fall of 2002, in those mid-term elections. At that time MoveOn was sending out email “action alerts” every day, and I was forwarding them to everyone, and that was the first time that everyone had a sense of needing urgently to… S: One of the participants in the old email nets, [AmCop’s third co-blogger] Dawkins’ friend Sam Grossman, supported the Iraq War, and there were long debates… B: There were several stages, several twists to the downward spiral that resulted in the kind of situation that necessitated the monumental expulsion that AmCop was meant to be, and the first was the massive fraud and disappointment of the 2002 elections. Then the buildup to the war, and then the beginning of the war, and the aftermath of the war, and by the middle of 2003 there was just the sense that our country had become so completely paralyzed beneath… what would you call it… S: …A frozen layer of shit, sprayed across the country, from the television? PART: If there’s a theoretical basis to the blog, it seems to be this notion of the absurd embodied by this word “coprophagia,” [literally, “shit-eating”]. It seems to be a way of either articulating, or responding to, or repelling the stream of distortions and lies perpetually emerging from the government via the mass media, which we can trace back to the 2000 elections and the lack of media criticism of the Florida debacle. Did the email conversations first take up this kind of rhetoric—a grotesquely sardonic tone, satire of ordinary news coverage dripping with rage—that has been fairly consistent in AmCop since its origin? B: I don’t know when the rhetoric first began in the emails, but probably in the move from email circuit to blog, there was probably some major shift from “action alert” type, “hey, get informed about this, get involved,” to what I call “expulsions,” or urgent and frenzied, deadpan, furious articulations of something… And it’s important that that not be sent out to people on an email list. The blog is the right medium for that because it’s something that can be written in a vacuum, immediately posted, and left there, to just emanate its… its… PART: Odor? B: Right. S: You don’t have to see it. If you like it you can visit the blog. B: Come and eat at the table if you want to… and so that enabled us to be that much more expressive, and violent… S: I remember you saying that was why we have to have a blog. I remember writing a post about a person who I called “Asshole Schwarzenfucker,” that was actually written as an email first. B: That was our first post. S: I remember you had the idea for the blog, and
you were like, “we can do things whenever we want to,”
that it could be a niche in the blogosphere… S: Can I say something about that? B: No. S: I think that one of the big problems with blogs is that they often take themselves too seriously, and that even the ones which don’t have this horrible aura of futility about these discussions [of political events] when everything that’s happening is so obvious. You need to believe, I guess, that having a discussion about it matters at some level, but I always like to think that the whole point of AmCop is that it has no political or intellectual purpose. It’s just simple, infantile expressions of anger, and also infantile modes of expression that are recursive, repetitive and pointless, and can get nowhere. B: I would disagree with that assessment. I understand that a lot of the posts are informed by that spirit, but there have in fact been a lot of eloquent and articulate things that have been said. S: That’s true. B: Maybe you end up saying something that has a kind of value, but that value is different from being accurate, or timely, or insightful, in the manner of what these other blogs are doing. And I read those blogs, and they’re great, but the sense of futility comes from the fact that all of this truth that these bloggers are posting, hour after hour, day after day, exposing lie upon lie, layer upon layer of these scandals—it all goes down the memory hole, it’s completely swallowed in this amnesia vacuum that we live in, and a week from now no one remembers any of it. One of the earliest features of AmCop was called the “Annular Flashback,” and it looked back at some exchange from the email list from the year before. It was a play on words, referring both to “annual” and to David Foster Wallace’s concept of “annular fusion,” a fictional process of energy production whereby waste feeds off the by-products of its own creation—waste feeding off waste to become more powerful and more poisonous. PART: Sounds like a theory of entropy. B: It’s sort of the reverse of entropy—it’s heading towards concentration… S: …and Apocalypse. B: Exactly. Just to look at some news item that was being exchanged a year ago has almost become too horrifying. Both to realize how sickening the item was, and to realize, what does it mean now? It’s just one more lie that will never be accounted for or reckoned with. S: It’s like thinking about Hurricane Katrina now, three months afterwards. B: There are other blogs that get lumped as “humor blogs,” such as Patriot Boy, whose blogger goes by “General J.C. Christian,” and signs every post “Heterosexually yours.” S: They’re letters to various fascists, congratulating them on their achievements and suggesting more extreme measures they might take. PART: What do you make of the success of a blog like the Huffington Post? S: That’s not really a blog, it’s a full-scale news magazine. It’s awesome. And just to clarify one thing—I agree with Blicero, there’s lots of good stuff on our blog—but I think that the spirit of not having it matter, that you can curse, that you don’t have to do build up a huge audience or appeal to anyone—that’s really important. B: We do have a small but very intelligent audience. If you do post something, chances are it will be responded to by one or more of our readers. We’ve actually had some incredibly stimulating discussions in the comment threads. But it’s also… I recently posted a series of photographs that I took this winter at a deserted Christian children’s camp in Western Pennsylvania, and that got a lot of attention. So it can also be stray fragments from daily experience that have some kind of tangential connection to the general body of horror that is our national politics and our national psyche. You can post these things, and they’ll be appreciated. PART: Yet right now it seems like there are all these little worlds that are being formed on the Internet, but it’s hard to say what effectiveness they’ll have. They run the risk of drowning each other out, in a way—there’s this incredible wealth of information on the web. S: Everything is already drowned out. B: Just in the lefty blogosphere, there are so many blogs, 90% of which are saying pretty much the same thing from day to day, which is why in this sea of voices, we hope to be somewhat unique. One thing that’s been pretty dehumanizing in the last couple years is to see how people, just because they have power, can use language as a blunt instrument, a bludgeon. The blogosphere has realized that the way to combat that is by deploying language in a very methodical, very disciplined way. Marshal your facts, marshal your messages, and march forward day after day saying something different. That is probably the way forward for the political movements on the left. But for us, who are trying to do that, we also want some way of responding to the bludgeoning directly. We want a way to lash out with what we feel like is the same violence. And of course it doesn’t have any effect; it’s a lashing out into the void. S: Violence never has any effect. That’s the paradox of violence. And our blog is violent. That’s one of the things I want to get at. PART: In my work on art of the 1960s, it seems like there was a general sense among a lot of the New Left, particularly in relation to the Vietnam War, that language had reached this limit, that the project of trying to talk things out or explain things had somehow become exhausted. You see this as a theme with a lot of the radical movements, both artistic and social, that appeared at the end of that decade. I’m always trying to compare that period and now, in particular our notably diminished political response in comparison with that of the 1960s. S: I just don’t think it’s the case that language has been exhausted. But right now, what’s so horrible is just this debasing, this killing of language [by neoconservatives and the media]. And this is powerful, because it takes away your power to respond to your interlocutors, and deprives you of language. It doesn’t mean that language as such is exhausted, but it creates a situation in which there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in speaking. B: The media abets the appearance that language is exhausted by seeming to acknowledge and respect what those in power declare as the limits of language—as it’s normally called, the “terms of the debate.” Once the terms of the debate become reified by the mass media, it really does seem that there’s nothing to say outside these bounds. S: But in no sense is language exhausted. The language used on our blog is language—it’s interesting, it’s fun. The point is this horrible disconnect between normal, healthy, human uses of language, which still flourish, and the entire public realm, which exists in a state of utter debasement and stupidity. There’s no place for actual language in the public realm. PART: This idea of shit, this irredeemable substance, completely base, a substance that can no longer be recycled… B: Oh, but it can be recycled. That’s something we constantly point out: the endless recycleability of shit. And it’s a peculiarly fecund substance. S: Do you really want to say that these words act as fertilizer? B: Yes I do. Say there’s a period that’s just so depressing that you don’t even feel like posting anything. And then something happens that’s so outrageous and so preposterous in just the right way that you’re moved to just go on a full-out rant using shit as its theme, instrument, substance and agenda. As Speakingcorpse points out, that particular shit-based rant, which I wrote recently when Jean Schmidt, or Jean Shit, expelled her shit on the floor of the House about Representative Murtha, I had to respond to her use of shit, which she had used as a weapon against me, it’s a way of returning to the origin— S: The primal scene— B: The primal scene of AmCop, to return to a place where you can return to that original flow of outraged language. S: The primal scene is also a scene of impotence and terror, because you are sitting there looking at a piece of shit. Someone has said something, and they’ve left the scene, and you’re looking at not words, but just a pile of shit. B: In the case of Jean Shit, she wasn’t there to leave. She is made of shit. And since the only thing that can come from her is shit, she’s expelling shit onto her listeners, asking that they consume the shit, regurgitate it, so that she can then reingest it, drawing power to herself, and then expel it back out again. Producing your own shit is a way of refusing to participate in this feedback loop. S: But what do you say to shit? B: This is a question that we often come back to. S: The part of me that enjoys the blog is also a part of myself that I don’t like. I can respond best when I’m hit and I suddenly feel a flash of blind fury, which, however justified, is not totally inspired by what’s going on. Clearly there’s a reservoir of rage that has other sources and motivations that is occasioned by these scandals. For me there was a consistent source of content when I was producing a series of letters to David Brooks [the conservative New York Times columnist]. B: The “Dear Dirty Asshole” posts. S: I conceive of the primal scene as the situation of: okay, there’s shit in front of me. Obviously I shouldn’t acknowledge it, or attempt to talk to it. I should step away from it, and try to do something else, something creative, or positive, something that doesn’t involve shit. But instead I insist on responding to the shit, because I insist on taking seriously the premise that it’s an utterance and not shit, which leads to feelings of rage, because, how can you talk to shit? And then the rage is turned inward, and it becomes poisonous and cancerous, and there’s this metastasizing that feeds and feeds upon itself, and is impotent—which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not creative. |