Interview
This contribution examines the “post Internet” through a frank discussion with writer and multimedia artist Chris Campanioni, whose recent book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), translates Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Twin Peaks, the films of Jean Godard, and everything in between, becoming an autobiography in and of assemblage. Through exploring the ubiquity of transmediated selves in the increasingly augmented and recreational stage set of our screens, this conversation also dives into such disparate topics as the professionalization of art, textual countdowns and serialization as authorial modus operandi, and what it means to write a book with many exits. The stakes of such a critical-creative text are elaborated upon through an engagement with theorizing not only a post Internet poetics but a theory of performance that calls attention to the performance of theory. Given the fact that sections of the Internet is for real have appeared in refereed academic journals alongside creative writing publications, how can this text serve as another model for scholarly and intellectual interventions that do not depend on critical detachment, objective neutrality, and the specialization of a singular discipline?
Giancarlo Lombardi: Let’s begin where so many readers begin whenever they pick up a book: your title. the Internet is for real seems as tongue-in-cheek as your last nonfiction book, Death of Art.
Chris Campanioni: Well, many people—judging from the reviews, I mean—read that title strictly at face-value, by which I mean they read Death of Art as a verb: that art was dying or already dead, instead of as an adjective—you know, the inherent ‘death-ness’ of art, the way that Jacqueline Lichtenstein described being at the museum at Auschwitz as being in a museum of contemporary art, the way that all abstract art, which is to say the art of disfigurement, as [Paul] Virilio talked so much about, cannot be separated from the literal disfigurement of the first World War, and if that’s true or we believe it—and I believe it—you have to come to terms with the economy of art, which is to say the exchange value of art—which is always increasing, always ‘limited’ and always, by its nature, exclusive and excluding, especially in a city like New York City, which is where that book, if it’s situated anywhere, is set—all of this to understand why art is so expensive as its pre-condition of existence, and why that expense has just as much to do with money as it has to do with bodies.
GL: Okay, but you haven’t said anything about this book. Where is the stress, on the Internet’s realness, on the colloquial expression for real that doubles as a question, without question mark, on the assertion-as-is?
CC: Anyone can write about the Internet today—and everyone does. It doesn’t take much imagination. But I wanted to penetrate the Internet by theorizing it through a number of frameworks, many of which don’t ‘belong’ together. So in some sense, the book was about playing off the academy while flouting it. Titles for me, I think, are useless unless they are invitations, intellectual come-ons or pick-ups. I want to only ever attract. And so the ‘realness’ of the Internet is something so literally ingrained as a material fact that we—I include myself here—don’t often apprehend it in everyday life. What gets obscured in that incomprehension? I think it has a lot to do with that first title, that first book, the bodies sacrificed for our digital pleasures.
GL: You say you are flouting the academy; your work has also in the past critiqued the art world.
CC: Art is so embedded within an acquisition culture—a replacement of consumer culture—that it becomes just another literal product placement, a market share in the stake for social capital for the culturally privileged who pay top dollar to shake hands with the poets who they wouldn’t lift a finger to read from. Is it any wonder that the poetry world reacted so negatively—on social media at least—when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for poetry? Give us nothing, for our stake in this culture is our lack. The moment multi-million dollar musicians start calling themselves poets is the moment even that collective refusal becomes spun off for someone else’s checkbook. The ecstasy of ‘value’ supersedes the volition of the art itself, becomes a different kind of performance, which is its own performance. Sylvére Lotringer said it really well when he told Virilio that art has become a legitimate career, with all the professionalization that comes with it, and that the only difference between any other profession is that art is more fetishized. What role does art play today except as proliferation? The inflation industry comes at the expense of the increasing expansion of every museum and gallery and the manic prices the pieces fetch on the market. And as everyone knows even if they’d like to forget about it—the body expands—it always blows up a little bit—right before it decomposes. Art’s proliferation is only an attempt to stave off the certain death it already implicates itself in. But the poetry world is its own monster—and again, I include myself inside the beast. Another poet I won’t name told me the other day that the issue—or one of them, at least—with poets today is that we think of ourselves as professionals; we think of ourselves as foot doctors. Where has the exigency of producing something that remains unproductive in the capital sense gone, except that so many of us today produce books like they are business cards, another bullet-point for the CV we hope to spin off for a teaching gig? Professionalization is killing art, in the way that most people took the title of Death of Art. The blurb industry—the reductive comparative head-nods, the click-bait and poetry cliques—the continual exclusive ‘inclusivity’ of our literary community today works in tandem with this degraded professionalization, something Felix Bernstein has talked about very fluently in relation to my work, and my response to our culture of literary name-dropping and self-branding.
GL: All of your work is so explicitly intimate and yet also very energetic, effusive and often erotic. What or who are you writing to, and is it different each time?
CC: I think as a writer I have one gift, which is the confidence in believing the fallacy of every word I ever write. Which is to say their open-ness to critique and rupture by the reader-audience. Language is confident as is its nature. Every word has confidence, if we take into account the secret correspondence one has with words. So the energy you mention, the flow, the speed of the texts is also inextricable from their sensuousness, from their intimacy, from their endeavor to become the reader’s. And a lot of that attempt—particularly in this book—becomes a matter of form. The pursuit of form is really the pursuit of time, because it is always the form of a work or text that informs its duration in your mind’s eye—the time you require to spend with it or it requires to spend with you.
If my publishers would allow it, I’d do away with page numbers and replace them with a suggested duration. I want to think of the books I write as records, as albums; every time you open the book, a countdown begins, and always begins again.
GL: But with the countdown, the erasure of time is immediately evoked, and erasure has long been a central concern of your work. The sense of an ending, the possibility of a new beginning, the circularity of absence: how do these concepts gain new vibrance in your most recent writings?
CC: I especially like the circularity of absence, as you say here. That even absence—especially absence—has a beat, a movement, a quality of recurrence which we encounter any time we open a text, or better, enter a text. That this book ends, or begins—depending on which side you start from—with the image of the author leaking out and the instructions ‘It is past time we switched places’ suggests I am writing to be replaced, or at least trying to write a temporary text, and a reversible work of art. The literary world loves permanence, timelessness; it loves itself to death. But anything temporary, as we well know, is imbued with a certain kind of life exactly because of its ability to disintegrate. I used to joke with friends that I only enjoyed writing beginnings, because after page thirty, I’d get bored. But I think maybe it’s just the opposite. I only ever write endings anymore, but endings that are exits—points of departure, ways to get out.
GL: One might say that the very opposite of circularity is linearity, which brings me to your frequent use of lists, numbered or, in the case of “Letters From Santiago,” alphabetized. Readers familiar with your novels will immediately remember the ‘Exhibit’ sections from Drift, and possibly interpret these lists as actual literary installations. In the Internet is for real it seems to me that the very language of the Internet is the object of new Exhibits, where actual excerpts from random online postings are again turned into art installations, often in list form. Having had the pleasure of reading your recent academic work, I can see traces, in these lists, of the Irregular Accountings you have studied and produced under the guidance of your mentor Wayne Koestenbaum. Do circularity and linearity actually meet in your writing?
CC: What I like about the list forms is the manufacturing of order … the illusion of coherence or cohesion produced by serial itemization. So in that sense maybe I am forcing that meeting, staging a rendezvous from which circularity and linearity, among other contradictions, can co-exist and moreover, co-produce. I love what you say here about the text’s composition, performing as exhibition and exhibitionist, a desire to show but also to be seen. What’s the difference between being seen and being known, in a culture of images and data, or a culture of biometrics in which the body is first turned into an image so that it can be rendered as data, information for private companies and state agencies? I go back to the question of materiality, the question of the Internet’s ‘realness.’
GL: Yet the temptation is to bring semiotics into play at this point. Between being first image and then data, I believe the body is also inevitably a sign, and in being so, it is charged with a host of often contradictory meanings, all activated and disseminated in different places and times. Do you consider the body, and your body, then the primary object of art and communication?
CC: Yes, without question. The understanding that everything comes through the body—and language most of all—is important in reckoning with the unintended, or as you say, contradictory meanings it re-enacts. I’m interested in holding that tension, between embodying language and being inscribed by it.
GL: Let’s talk about another tension that runs so visibly in your work, the one between art and critical theory. You wear your debt to John Berger—please forgive my foray into the semiotic field of fashion—on your sleeves, however the Internet is for real, like much of your writing, is also deeply informed by and imbued with different and often differing strands of critical theory. Yet, even when you’re engaging with the complexity of theory, you never lose sight of the artist perspective. Now that you’re halfway through your doctoral studies, do you feel that your scholarly interests have inevitably shed new light and added new dimensions to your creative writing? And conversely, where and how has your scholarly work benefited from your impressive productivity as a creative writer?
CC: I’d like to think of critical work and artistic work as parallel streams of a larger intellectual-creative pursuit that demands the deployment of each. However, prior to entering the PhD program at CUNY’s Graduate Center, I did not have the theoretical language from which to better understand my artistic production—if that makes sense—and I certainly didn’t have the rubric with which to marry them in a single work or text. And because I began the approach to my critical scholarship from my perspective as an artist, the desire to produce, and especially to produce autoethnographic research, felt natural to me; it’s the only way I could conceive of scholarship as such. I remember thinking three years ago that if I couldn’t produce the kind of work I wanted to read in academia, there was no point in my masquerading as an academic; I didn’t want to participate in the reproduction of knowledge meant for a limited audience, I wanted to produce public work, work that is expansive and expanding but rooted, crucially, in its correspondence with a larger community, and my own subject-position within it. I think what I’m trying to say is that I remain very conscious of why I came here—to learn, to complicate and challenge earlier ideas, to apply my personal investigations explicitly to a public project, which is not something artists often look for or have the opportunity to enact —and I hope I don’t lose sight of it. But admittedly, that accountability also derives from my research and scholarship, from the interactions and conversations I’ve had with mentors like Wayne, as you’ve mentioned, and from what a doctoral program like The Graduate Center makes possible. In this sense, my growing research on the personal text, particularly within Post Internet culture, is indebted to what academia has afforded me; this book, too, could not have been written if not for the fact that it was written, in part, during my first two years at the GC.
GL: This gives me the opportunity to remember another mentor of yours, of whom both you and I have very fond memories: Meena Alexander, who passed away right before Thanksgiving. Like you, Meena was a poet and a scholar, invested in issues that were and are very still close to your heart. I would like to close this interview by asking you to share with us some of her lessons, as a scholar, a poet, and as a caring human being. For my part, I can tell you that, if I close my eyes, I can still see her smiling.
CC: I really cannot say enough about Meena and everything she has continued to impart to me, but I would like to begin by saying that as a person, she made a dwelling for me in an institution to which I wasn’t sure how I belonged, if I belonged. The second thing I remember Meena providing to me was actually a challenge. She urged me to take my creative approach to my critical research, reminding me that I didn’t have to choose between art and theory or ‘being smart’ and ‘being creative’ as she’d said, but that I’d first have to make the choice to trouble my own ideas about academic writing and to see what the rigor of discipline and inter-disciplinary rigor opened up for my work. Theoretically, too, my work took an explicit turn toward phenomenology, métissage, and performative models of disidentification only because of her generous and significant introductions. Meena was a true original, in her research and her writing and her approach to instruction and her instructive approach to mentorship. I call into question the notion of the single author so often because I am all too aware of this debt we have to countless other thinkers, past and present. I am deeply grateful for the many ways in which Meena’s work informs my own, and the many ways in which she continues to challenge and inspire me.
Biographies
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985. He is the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland and the author of seven books, including A and B and Also Nothing (Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2020), a re-writing of Henry James’s The American and Gertrude Stein’s “Americans” which merges theory, fiction, and autobiography. Recent writing has appeared in M/C: Media & Culture, Im@go, Ambit, American Poetry Review, and Poetry International, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017.
Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian, French, Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on Italian screen studies, cultural studies, and on American serial drama. He is the author of Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction and the co-editor of Terrorism Italian Style, Remembering Aldo Moro and Italian Political Cinema. He is finishing a monograph on the rhetoric of fear in classic Italian television drama, and is working on a new book on the uses and functions of religion in serial drama from the Global North.
© 2019 Giancarlo Lombardi and Chris Campanioni, used by permission
