Happenings

Among the many decisive political changes that have occurred in the past few years that bode poorly for our shared future is the US overturning of Roe Wade, and the appointment of men with histories of sexual assault to positions that will determine law and political policy. This paper discusses my new work Happenings, an interactive philosophical essay that takes the form of a cinematically haunted digital poem that mashes up the work of Carolee Schneeman, the nineteen seventies feminist performance artist who famously pulled a scroll out of her vagina, with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Abel Azonca, and Vladimir Nabokov and other men for whom the imagination of sexual violence was inextricably bound to their art. Schneemann writes in 1991’s “The Obscene Body/Politic”: “I didn’t want to pull a scroll out of my vagina and read it in public, but the culture’s terror of my making overt what it wished to suppress fueled the image; it was essential to demonstrate this lived action about ‘vulvic space’ against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning” (Moreland). Schneeman’s impulse to reach inside and show the world something raw seems again to be necessary. I will situate Happenings somewhere in between the tradition of films that ask you to read written words, such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982) and Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (1985), and electronic literature where the written word becomes cinematic, showing how this interactive digital work maintains the opposition between the static (pinned down?) word and free moving image, and gives the moving image medium license to invade and penetrate the other’s spaces. The result is a violation of the rules of genre (is it a book? a film? an essay? a poem? a documentary? a lightbox? horror? philosophy? ) intended to leave the viewer unsteady, and discuss the soundtrack, composited from the BBC Sound Effects’ archive of moths and butterflies, is intended to generate deeply somatic affective responses. I will also discuss how Happenings turns to large language models for some animation and video augmentations, allowing these reservoirs seeded with Western culture memory to reveal their own uncanny and terrifying understanding of women's bodies. My paper presents Happenings as a critique of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to touch, which refer to the history of painting yet frequently miss the denotative point of artworks that tell the stories of rape, and at the same time de Sadian origins of much of contemporary cultural theory, with the goal of making the argument that contemporary academic culture’s approaches to the body, including much of queer theory, has proceeded by ignoring the reality of assault.