Introduction
Readers of the New Explorations Weblog may be, via the glowing review posted by Robert K. Logan (which has been subsequently re-posted across a variety of social media), already familiar with the latest publication by the provocative NYC-based poet, professor, and public intellectual, Adeena Karasick: Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas, published by the Institute of General Semantics Press. Despite agreeing with Bob Logan’s commentary overall, in this review, I want to explore the notions of language that are, in turn, explored and/or exploded throughout this latest of Karasick’s publications. As the introductory notes provided by Maria Damon indicate:
Massaging the Medium, like all of Adeena Karasick’s work, performs an exuberant engagement with language’s many delights. Here, in her latest volume, Karasick takes what has become a standard genre for high-info-density presentations—the pechakucha—and makes it a dazzling, multi-modal display of pleasure in the generative imperative of communication itself, in all its fulsome dimensions—it becomes an art form.[1]
For readers unfamiliar with the medium explored in this volume, the introductory notes go on to define the form pechakucha, granting us some indication of the trajectory of the collection of seven works to come. We learn that that pechakucha translates, approximately, to ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese but more specifically refers to a highly specialized form of presentation. As Karasick explains in her own Introduction following Damon’ s editorial preface, the pechakucha form is organized into 20 slides, each given 20 seconds of discussion thus totalling 6 minutes and 40 seconds. At this point, the reader may be curious how such a medium could function in printed format. As Karasick explains, each entry in the volume found its origins in live performance and, characteristic of her play with both content and form, this volume transplants the auditory, the tactile to the pictorial, the textual; or perhaps, more specifically collapses the boundaries there-between. As she explains:
The medium allowed me exquisite axes of entry into a virtual arena where not only can the materiality of language be exposed, but through the conflagration of image, music, voice, text, sound and animation, it highlights a ‘textatic’ slipperiness of meaning. And each piece, operating with its own structure, codes, logic, idioms, reminds us how meaning-making is always a praxis of palimpsest and dissemination, generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.[2]
Given not only the publisher, but several references throughout, it is evident the volume is geared primarily towards an audience of scholars of general semantics; nevertheless, the captivating volume also sews roots in the foundations of media ecology (but due to the exuberant and diverse array of cultural and mystical references coupled with the multimediatic collages also would no doubt appeal to an ever-widening readership including those interested in artistic and literary practice, philosophy, and Jewish Studies). As stated in her introduction:
… like McLuhan’s Laws of Media whereby an artifact enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsoleceses, each pechakucha re-visits concepts and are re-contextualized through a Jewish, feminist, post-structural, semiotic re-reading. In Zoharic terms, (13th C. mystical discourse), they employ the concept of atikin haditin, a pseudo-Aramaic neologism that means “ancient new.”[3]
Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas, as Damon states, is certainly multimodal. But I would argue, given the transplantation/transformation/and transfiguration of the pechakucha medium in print format, also presents a multimediated format that effectively evidences its content. Moreover, having had the opportunity to review her previous publication (and larger multi-textual project), Salomé: Woman of Valor, the final pechakucha in the volume performs an intertextual and multivalent weaving of meaning and uncovers the veils presented by and inherent in language explored throughout the volume as a whole.
Multimodality
As noted, each of the seven pechakuchas contained within the volume are, as Karasick explains, derived from actual live performances and have been ‘massaged’ for this particular publication (she provides a detailed taxonomy of the origins of each work). For a musicologist who studies the age of Enlightenment (of high-print culture), this is a curious reversal: to not merely transcribe but adapt live presentation for the medium of print (as opposed to the opposite; a norm for centuries). As such, each slide—each a work of art in its own—is adorned by its accompanying text. Despite being ‘massaged’ for presentation in the print medium, one can strive to time reading the text to 20 seconds and get some indication of the breath and cadence of the poet (and remediated prophet), recalling the auditory origins of the text itself; a fascinating interplay of form and content; visual and acoustic space.
This collage of visual and acoustic space is accomplished, among other devices, via the use of esoteric use of language in conjunction with complimentary images. In the third pechakucha, Karasick’s first ‘slide’ compels the reader to re-assess the role of language in constructing our reality; a reality which is implied to be inherently autopoetic. It reads:
1
Historically, the Disembodied Voice referenced something mystical. A voice from the heavens. But if “mystical” refers to that which is enigmatic, obscure, logically inaccessible, beyond space and time, cyberspace is “mystical space.” And if according to Derrida, “Spirit” embodies the Same and Other simultaneously, we must rethink the relationship of the mystical and the machine, not as oppositional, but that technology is eliding the binary between the physical, metaphysical, magical and the real, reminding us how language and thereby all knowledge is spectral, virtual, simulacric.[4]
Later in the volume, in the fourth pechakucha, entitled Medium in a Messy Age: Communication in the Era of Technology or the Media Ecology of Conceptual Poetry, Karasick points out how conceptual poets—and, one may imagine, artists writ large—derive meaning from and by deconstructing existing structures:
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Throughout history, Conceptual Poets have used the newspaper as source material for their investigations into differing models of communication: Marinetti, Mallarmé, the Italian Futurists, Wyndham Lewis, Picasso and Cubists, Tzara, Schwitters, Gysin, Burroughs; all beaten bruised BLASTed and cut-up re-sourcing systems of semiotic slippage.[5]
For readers not too dazzled by the rhetorical virtuosity of the passage to notice, the subtle references throughout direct our attention not just to the prose but to the intertextual associations established, demonstrating a mimetic autopoiesis that seems to be at the centre of the overall volume. Though appreciative of the diversity of arts represented in this taxonomy, in particular, as a musicologist I am drawn to the reference to the Italian futurists, and as a student of the Toronto School of Communication, also to the invocation of Wyndham Lewis and the associated publication BLAST. Where musicians and composers (wherever one may draw the line likewise between human and machine in the movement) of the Italian futurists demonstrated front and center the emerging aesthetics of mechanization, Lewis and his associated publication BLAST advocated the vorticist movement; an apt invocation given the collapsing of spoken word, performance art, visual art, poetry, and scholarship explored and exploded in this recent volume. This slipperiness of language is explored further in an in ensuing slide in the same work:
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Thus, for Conceptual Poets, the poem is not just a repository of information but reframing, repurposing, recreating not so much in “The Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” but in the age of mimetic proliferation. Exposing itself as units of cultural knowledge virally replicating itself, its doing with language what language has always done for itself, resembling something it is not.[6]
Given the proliferation of references—pop cultural, academic, historic—throughout, Karasick’s latest volume reaches far past the age of mechanical reproduction and remediates the oral, aural, tacticle, and acoustic in the visual, spatial, linear, medium of print while distorting the inherent logic of the latter.
Multimediality
The book collapses, clashes, and conflicts scholarly, pop culture, and historical references in a mimetic self-referentiality that pays particular attention to structure and development throughout individual entries and across the book as a whole. Moreover, the book draws us into our contemporary digital, remediated media environment, ironically through an interplay of text and images presented on the printed page:
13
And as such, all rechargeable and wireless, the telephone allows us as hunters and gatherers, to re-roam the world as modern nomads. Unattached and unencumbered by maps, compass, books, cameras, CDs, but can freely traverse, vagrant knowing we are never alone.
i wander only as a crowd.[7]
In presenting a back history of the telephone, Karasick foregrounds the readers experience with a collection of impactful cultural references. Grounding these pop culture references, however, is an uncommonly cited insight from a commonly discussed figure in media ecology:
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According to McLuhan, the term “telephone” originated in 1840 and first referred to a “device made to convey musical notes through wooden rods.” And it was the little-known Philippe Reis in the 1860’s who produced the first “musical telephone” foregrounding the relation between the media and its messages embedded in its very definition.[8]
This observation, however, is taken one step further:
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So, whether it’s Blondie’s “Call me,” or Tommy Tutone’s, “Jenny 867 5309,” Stevie Wonder’s, “I just called to say, I love you,” or ELO’s, “Hello, how are you, Have you been all right,” Chuck Berry’s, “Memphis girl” who “could not leave her number” or Gaga’s, “Sorry I can’t hear you. I’m K-kinda Busy,” the telephone has been featured in music throughout history, foregrounding the angst of disconnection.[9]
The collection of musical references (to which I would add the collected works of reggae artists Busy Signal) all point to the disconnect of self from other, self from self, and language from its constructed reality.
Language and associated constructs of reality are brought to the fore in the concluding entry in the volume, Scenes, Screams, Screens and Semes: The Salomaic Elasticity of the Page and the Stage. Therein, Karasick revisits a subject familiar to this reviewer, given my previous review of Karasick’s Salomé: Woman of Valor for this very publication. Behind the multimodality and multimediation inherent in the volume, this self-referential inclusion further emphasizes the inter- and more specifically multitextual nature of the volume.
Multitextuality
The image adorning image 7 of the concluding 7th entry is captioned “SALOMÉ EXPOSES HOW LANGUAGE IS ALWAYS A PROCESS OF VEILING & UNVEILING,” hinting towards the ultimate thesis of the volume. For those readers who have, as of yet, not encountered Karasick’s previous work, you are encouraged to do so, but it is not necessary to fully comprehend the message in this final work. In a somewhat bold, yet appropriate for the publication, assertion, the power of language to both create and negate meaning is clearly articulated in relation to the overarching myth of Salomé:
8
And, as the myth goes, the dance Salomé dances is the dance of the 7 veils; avails the veil of the veil unveiling (value volés, valor voile voici voila!), exposing how language and meaning are always both a literal and figural intertextilic web of obfuscation.[10]
In a rhetorical flourish, we learn to understand existence as ephemeral as the twirl of Salomé and all her variants various vales:
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Dancing across eras and epochs, whereby (in Korzybskian terms) the present is augmented and transmitted to a future through a past that repeats itself… Salomé’s cyclic reappearance over time points to how identity remains a septeneral secret within a secret that only another secret can reveal. And language as both material and acoustic, becomes a literal dance of veils.[11]
Conclusion
Where Adeena Karasick’s previous work on Salomé effectively collapsed functional, systemic boundaries of art and scholarship; music and poetry; theatre and print: Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas pushes further, distorting the very boundaries of aural, oral, acoustic, written, scribal, and visual spaces and collapses a performative medium within a high individualized and intimate experience using the affordances of the print medium: a captivating experience for any reader rendered auditor by the coloratura-laden, virtuosic rhetoric presented in tandem with the mesmerising, accompanying images of the volume. Indeed, as mentioned in a review snippet adorning the volume, written by my colleague and mentor Dr. Paolo Granata: “Language juggler Adeena Karasick did it again. By letting images speak, she crammed an unjammable aural experience in less than 200 pages… An absolute McLuhanesque pastiche that seizes the allatonceness of our memetic culture. A book to read with your years.”[12] Where I agree with Dr. Granata’s overall appraisal, as a musicologist, I must disagree on one point and that is that this book does indeed ‘jam’ given its flawless transformation of oral/aural presentation rendered extra-textual. Where my colleague Dr. Robert Logan chose to provide a sort of play-by-play of Adeena Karasick’s latest offering, in this review, I’ve hoped to entice readers to experience the multimodal, mutlimediated, and multivalent work on their own terms and allow themselves to become the author of their own encounter with the volume in question; a deconstructive approach seemingly implied throughout. Throughout Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas, Karasick not only offers a provocative intervention to the common-sense, received view of our contemporary media environment, but most compellingly interrogates the role of the most primordial of communication technologies—language—in constructing (and, crucially, veiling) our very reality.
The book is available from a variety of retailers including the Institute of General Semantics Press online store, Amazon Canada, Amazon US, and Barnes and Noble.
[1] Maria Damon, “Preface: ‘Fan-fare for the General Semanticist’,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), ix.
[2] Adeena Karasick, “Introduction,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), 3.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Adeena Karasick, “The Ghost in the Machine: Medium, Messages and Mysticism,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), 50.
[5] Adeena Karasick, “Medium in a Messy Age: Communication in the Era of Technology or the Media Ecology of Conceptual Poetry,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), 75.
[6] Ibid., 86.
[7] Adeena Karasick, “Ceci N’est Pas Une Telephone or Hooked on Telephonics: A Pata-philophonemic Investigation of the Telephone,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), 24.
[8] Ibid., 25.
[9] Ibid., 26.
[10] Adeena Karasick, “Scenes, Screams, Screens and Semes: The Salomaic Elasticity of the Page and the Stage,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), 131.
[11] Ibid., 135.
[12] Paolo Granata, “Blurb,” Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Forest Hill, NY: Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022), dust jacket.
