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Listening thru Walls: Sonic Reinscription and the Masquerade in True Detective William Clark
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n the third installment of his Cage quintology, the late James Incandenza, whose head was consecrated in and, as we later reconstructed, crumped in a microwave oven, and who was dead, on account of the microwave or Wild Turkey or, surely not but maybe, something of the immaterial, at the age of fifty-four in the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, and buried in Québec’s L’Islet County along with the Clipperton suicide footage gives the viewer this: The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent, the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs (Wallace 988).1 I should like to consider this vignette as an instance of phantasmagoria,2 not as a critique of scopophilia, but as a structure of thrown image and as a threshold to the kind of séance I am interested in, first here and then in (the voodoo of) southern Louisiana. I go to these places first in interest, but, then, also as they are explicit (and profane) occasions for witnessing the ongoing redistribution of the riches of
1 This brief description of the late Incandenza’s film is included in the 24th endnote of David Foster Wallace’s brilliant and moving Infinite Jest. The endnote documents Incandenza’s impressive filmography. Heath and Heaven were oft used actors in Incandenza films. 2 I am using this term after Walter Benjamin, as in his unfinished Arcade’s Project. We will understand it variously here, but first as an opening or cut that one enters as “in order to be distracted.” Thinking with southern Louisiana is to think in Creolized language (See Éduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation). I mean to think about the English (false) cognate of the French “to ask” or “demander,” whereby “as in order to be distracted” is compounded with “as [an] order to be distracted.” We will regard this assertion of “the distraction” or “periphery” later. It should be necessary from this, the start, to understand the phantasmagoria as diverse and poststructural, as a deployment multiply directed by the narrators thru their narrative, “now a landscape, now a room.” See the opening chapter (page seven is cited here) of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pr. of Harvard U Pr., 2003.
North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
human life that have been strangely altered in ways intimately bound up with capital and, inescapably and categorically, race. The phantasmagorical, here the carnivalesque, in its multiply effective critique, is at work at once to conjure the damned to undam the reservoirs of life and then to afford them theaters in which to speak about the ways in which those two-way witnessing waters have been redirected or stilled in the discursive efforts of American white supremacy. These effort are latent in looking (spectator sport) and are effaced in speculative finance. It is unavoidable for us here to invoke Emerson and his infamous eyeball which should be understood after the Incandenza film as grotesque, maximally bloated, gorged on vision, wrong vision: Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (Emerson). This transcendental vision of the transcendentalist par excellence organizes wrong vision rightly around occulted sumptuary laws governing illusory relations in which one can look or consume the sight of others3 without being infected by the look, which is, for us, an infection not of a penetrating “look of the Other,” but of an invaginating sonic engagement, what Du Bois has already called “second sight” (Du Bois 3). Therefore, what Emerson describes at once as a “transparent” eyeball is revealed in fact to have always been “colored” or, indeed, “black” in real ways. Pace Emerson, I would describe transparency as the spectator’s technique of visual, racial oppression that imagines black people, black
3 Compounding “sight” and “site,” I should like to understand, elsewhere perhaps, imperialism, imperial impulse, or what Glissant (again in his Poetics of Relation) refers to as an arrowlike nomadism as inextricable from the kind of ocularcentrism that I am interested in here.
