Judah Rubin & Lewis Freedman Give a Stunning, Not-Fake Interview at BOMB
Two beautiful minds meet upon on the banks of a lake in Wisconsin to talk about "divination, food science, taxidermy, rabbinic literature, and the act of discussion itself." Lewis Freedman, author of the just-published Residual Synonyms for the Name of God (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Judah Rubin even discuss the inscriptions that constitute sense in an artificially-flavored potato chip. "Do you believe in the contemporary truism in which maturity can be boiled down to learning how to stop right before you feel nauseous?"
And then there's poverty as lending itself no more to radical art-making, and interrogative exchange itself:
[Judah Rubin] Does it always happen in an interrogative exchange that one person is attempting to produce the nonsense that is denied by the subject of the conversation? Is the interviewer's role to act, here, as the non-space of nonsense?
[Lewis Freedman] Yeah, maybe, when you read interviews that's often how it works. You can feel the interviewer feeling out the thing not yet said, trying to make space for it, and then there's another displacement in that movement. That's one of the reasons I love fake interviews so much, like Ted Berrigan's interview with John Cage, because those displacements get screwed with in the simulation; when the interview is actual these movements are so often a thing dictated by someone's ego being honored to be the subject of itself.
JR So, are you describing a sort of spectral ventriloquism? How does this play out in divination, which is contingent on ritual?
LF So I fear I have a very particular and maybe narrowed imagination of how this happens because of my own obsessions. For me, this has a lot to do with the idea that surfaces can be inscribed, can hold a simulation of interiority, can hold a scene in which the person or force that is inscribing itself upon the surface simulates themself as an exterior force whose record can inhere in the interior time of the surface. And I suppose I imagine—and I'm not saying this is truth, but I am saying this is one of the old dramas of the technology of the inscribable surface—that one of the things that can happen when we begin to write is we experience the forms of our own subjectivity emerging. We experience the content of ourself emerging by making shapes around it. We are repeating a drama where we imagine that the technology of inscription itself—the capacity of a surface to hold a record and replay it, as well as our capacity to recognize a surface as potentially inscribable—is already a replay of the event in which the interior space of our subjectivities emerged. It's like we have an origin myth attached to the inscribable surface in which our interiority emerges through a break with something outside of it that wasn't previously outside of it, so that suddenly there's this recording of the outside that is our interiority while the outside goes on without it. And so we're involved in this kind of drama in which inscription replays the original emergence of our own subjectivity, and in which we feel we can start at the beginning and access an outside. I think about this drama in relation to divination rituals, like in ancient Mesopotamian extispicy, where they imagine the gods have written on the liver of a sheep, and they'll splay that liver out—
JR Sure, or Romans with chickens.
LF Is that true? They did that, too—with chickens?
JR I think so.
LF They read the liver as an inscribable surface, but as a surface that, because of its deep interiority—it being inside of a sheep and all—only a divine outside can inscribe. And in order to read this divine inscription they go through a complex set of prescribed rituals until they can say, for example, that because such and such a figure on this liver looks like this cuneiform sign, therefore such and such a thing will happen.
JR I wonder then what that might have to do with early cinematography, with someone like Muybridge?
LF The nineteenth-century recording technology stuff is really interesting because there's all this imagining of the outside writing.
Read it all, of course, at BOMB.