"What Alerts, Alters": Hacking the Narratives of Cultural Memory with Rankine, Eady, and Philip

Abstract

Poet Harryette Mullen connects the long literary tradition of reference and recycling with more recent versions of "remix" culture in her Recyclopedia, arguing that "poetry... remakes and renews words and images, ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected," even "salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge," a generative re-creation that finds not only new art but also new horizons for the human (Mullen vii). Writers have long found power within historical material, and long leaned upon their audiences' collective knowledge of the past in order to enter and amend cultural memory.1As information theory joins literary and cultural criticism, new vocabularies emerge that can expand our understandings of poetry's aesthetic and ethical potentials for meeting the past and for constructing the future. Looking at poetic projects as "hacks" in the dataset of cultural memory changes our understanding of narrative to a technology that can proliferate alternatives, rather than ossifying a dominant paradigm. If we visualize the ideas recycled through poetry as information flow, then a "hack" can serve as a productive metaphor for generative intervention. Traditionally, "hacking" refers to interference in computer networks. McKenzie Wark, however, recuperates the word from its teen basement computer geek prankster image in A Hacker Manifesto. In Wark's hands, "hack" becomes an action applicable to any creative act, metaphorized as tapping into the flow of power or diverting restricted information into avenues of greater access.2 While production merely copies, a hack differentiates (Wark paragraph 160). For Wark "to hack is to release the virtual from the actual" (Wark paragraph 74). Wark's interest lies in the value of hacking itself, but I propose a more targeted use of the idea: to hack is to break apart collective memory's seemingly fixed narratives, allowing multiple stories to emerge into actual life.Claudia Rankine, Cornelius Eady, and M. NourbeSe Philip further this expansion of social memory, and their formally demanding hacks may be usefully read with N. Katherine Hayles' formulations of database and narrative. For Hayles the technologies of narrative and database/dataset function symbiotically; applying her vocabulary allows a vision of cultural memory as a malleable dataset holding exponentially more possible narratives than normally visible.Such notions of information offer a structure for reading authors who insist that the past is never truly past, never complete, and never contained in one telling. Strategically applying the computer programming term "database," or more accurately here "dataset," allows a continuation of Eric Havelock's and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' interventions in the archives of memory and culture. After all, a dataset "is not a stable archive but a constantly shifting set of relationships" (KochnarLindgren 136). Artworks that call attention to their own construction, as Rankine's, Eady's, and Philip's do, also point to the data assembly of culture itself. Hacks must expose that "what is represented as being real is always partial, limited, perhaps even false" (Wark paragraph 74). So while narrative masquerades as fixed-the only possible story to be told, the only possible arrangement of parts-in reality the pieces of a dataset may be organized and read in any number of ways, telling any number of stories and voicing any number of perspectives and characters. Hayles' materiality attention also counters Wark's virtuality obsession, so that both may be marshaled in the reading of poetry and performance, theoretical incursions upon time with real-world resonances.Claudia Rankine's Don t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric pries open the seemingly fixed narrative of American memory through the staging of a constructed subjectivity. Cornelius Eady's drama Brutal Imagination invites history's hidden specters into public view, directly confronting the fissures exposed by Rankine's (anti)-lyric. …