
David Allen Sibley, Blue Jay, August 2022. (David Allen Sibley refused permission to reproduce.)
VIRTUAL REMAINS1
of natural crisis. Now she is in Singapore and wants to change her Incomplete into an A. I try to tell her that it doesn’t matter, that I already gave her an A, but she doesn’t understand, maybe because it’s 4 a.m. for her and I don’t know how much outside stimuli anyone can take in at that time. But the student requested this meeting and time, and who am I to think that I know what’s best for her?
Maybe my difficulty focusing is because I’m writing this on vacation, at the beach. Vacations are supposed to be virtual. You take your essential aspects, and leave your real life and your actual problems at home.
In the piece “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid writes that for something to appear to us as paradise it must be familiar, but at the same time must have no history, no troublesome details or petty quarrels.2 Vacation is a temporary paradise that you can buy. Vacation, like paradise, must appear to us as some kind of familiar blankness. Not real or actual, but essential.
On my vacation, I’m attempting to find blankness via literary theory. I’ve brought Barbara Johnson’s famous essay “Apostrophe Animation, and Abortion” to the beach.3 In this essay, Johnson considers the poetic figure of apostrophe, a form in which a poem is explicitly addressed to something or someone missing, absent, dead. In doing so, the poem can perhaps animate the missing, absent, dead figure.
(I live in the United States, where the judiciary is, as of this writing, gutting what little bodily [abortion] rights and access we previously had. One of the reasons vacations don’t work is because this gutting follows you to the beach, to the edge of the ocean, to the border.)
Apostrophe works by bringing in a presence by calling to it, even if the reader and poet both know that the presence is far outside the real, actual possibility of response. Johnson’s essay attempts to understand this form of address in lyric poetry, and to discover its implications for state violence and politics.
I am bothered by this essay, however, even on the beach. It seems to me that Johnson misunderstands the virtual presence that U.S. politicians are calling upon when they talk about abortion. Following Johnson’s reading of Gwendolyn Brooks,4 Justice Harry Blackmun,5 and others, the apostrophized subject for Johnson is the fetus. While she notes “that there tends indeed to be an overdetermined relation between the theme of abortion and the problematization of structures of address,”6 this problematization occurs for Johnson because of the undecidability of the reality of the fetus who is perhaps animated by the apostrophic address.7
What bothers me here is that the addressed-but-virtual figure in current political discourse is not the fetus. Instead, it is any person that could, even hypothetically, gestate. Such people are the subjects addressed in this debate, despite, or precisely because, this debate would seek to render these people as virtual—essential or in essence only, as opposed to real or actual. The debate seeks to render the reality of such people as undecidable. The debate pretends to address such people, while simultaneously requiring that they be unable to participate in the debate—as if missing, absent, dead— if they don’t conform to an essentialized myth of womanhood. I’m not going to cite examples of this here because I refuse to grant a flake of rhetorical validity to the question of whether women8 are only an expropriable essence (virgin/whore, leather/lace, etc.), or whether they are real, actual people with specific bodies.
Rather, it seems that the example of abortion points to the problem of virtuality and apostrophic address. I look around me, here at the beach, but also everywhere, and I see no essences. And everything that appears to me as possibly essential, and without actual, real presence, announces itself to me now as a real and material reality cloaked in a misuse of language. This misuse of language naturalizes and mystifies the “vast, empty brutality that secures the here-and-now.”9
My vacation fails to be a good vacation precisely insofar as it is invaded by real, actual life. The idea that this beach could be scrubbed of its history and present me with no obligations is a politically expedient fiction, and the politics this fiction serves are imperialist, colonialist, fascist.
Not only am I working on this vacation (meeting with students, writing an essay, teaching a class on Zoom), not only am I getting sunburned, not only will I never get the sand out of my Barbara Johnson book, but I’m also on stolen land. I’m buying things—coffee, food, sunscreen— with money that I get paid for nurturing students. And nearly all of these students have taken on crushing amounts of debt to neoliberal universities for the privilege.
Further, because this beach is on the ocean, I, along with nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population, am firmly within a 100-mile/160-kilometre “border zone” where United States Customs and Border Patrol exercise enhanced authority to stop and search.10 It could be fun to write about the ways in which a border is virtual, not real or actual. But to do so would be irresponsible, and would necessarily ignore the many people for whom this border structures life and death, freedom and captivity.
Finally, and this is where I’m going to just get silly, this vacation is my first in seven years, and I am pretending that these five days are going to offset the stress and grief of a life that is among the best lives available anywhere, but is also a life which is fundamentally not good enough. In a bad world, what can a good life mean? In a bad world, what is a vacation other than a bad-faith rationalization of real, actual circumstances that kill and injure me, my loved ones, my friends, strangers, animals, trees, everything that I recognize as life/being alive, etc.
This may be how the last few years and the attendant shift to virtual classes, virtual screenings, virtual performances have impacted my thinking, writing, and artwork. I have lost faith in the notion of an essence without a real or actual presence. My putatively virtual classes are far more materially imbricated than my in-person classes are. Similarly, the central putative void of the current apostrophic discourse around abortion in the U.S is a romantic, politically expedient fiction designed to obscure the material existence of actual people.
What this means for me is that I want to stop indulging such fictions when and where they don’t serve me or people I love. The virtual calls upon a reality that is putatively missing or absent in order to invent an intransgressible essence.
When I view an exhibition or a performance on my computer or my phone, I want to recognize how that viewing is arguably more materially rich and socially determined than when I experience the same event live or in person. The materials (asymmetric extraction, neocolonialism, global climate disaster), manufacture (sweatshops, the suicide-prevention nets around Foxconn), distribution (supply chains, global climate disaster), and site (LANDBACK, property-as-financial-speculation) of my electronics is suddenly and explicitly part of the shape and form of the artwork.
And this is to say nothing of the ways in which the ongoing pandemic is rife with romantic, politically expedient fictions. We have been told, for example, that the pandemic means that people with “preexisting conditions” are expendable, that China is a malevolent force, that the only solution is individual action, that the pandemic is essentially over, and so on. Such claims seek to obscure reality in order to invent and sustain a (eugenicist, jingoistic, individualistic) essentialism.
Under such circumstances, to view even the most lighthearted artwork or music video on my computer or phone is to view something that is a real, actual, material event unfolding materially within and without my own base materiality. It is this persistent immediacy and vulnerability of bodies interacting, even or especially when computers and distances are involved, that a lens of virtuality would seek to mystify.
The next questions that I have, then, go something like, “How can I think and work within this gap between the mystification of essence and the real/actual? How can I work against the grain of politically expedient fictions that are antithetical to the persistence of bodies, kinship, and love? How can I, a stillborn child of deconstruction, have recourse to a real (lowercase) that could refute such fictions? How can I explicitly enact the idea that these last few years and these next few years are the least virtual of any that I have experienced so far? How can I enact the ways that I’ve disappeared myself from society, but feel ever more acutely implicated in social machinations?”
In order to think through these questions, it is as though I must construct two territories with a border zone in between. On one side of the border, some analysis of material life and the gaps in language. On the other side of the border, some synthesis of principles that get elaborated through a series of fictions. And smuggling across the border—because borders exist to invent transgressions—some unspeakable contaminations, agents, vectors, presences.
For example: A long time ago when I was still in school for sculpture, I built a device using some basic pneumatics, an aquarium pump, and a little programming. The device would light a cigarette, take a few puffs, and then snuff the cigarette out on the arm of a chair. I was imagining torture as something that
happens automatically, in the comfort of my home. Set-it-and-forget-it torture.
What dissatisfied me about the device, however, is that only creatures that have arms, and that can imagine a chair arm as being roughly the same as their arm, would be able to understand the fiction. Only creatures with arms, that also know that the arm of a chair is inexplicably called an “arm,” would be able to sympathize with the chair. If torture is really going to be torture, the creature being tortured needs to understand its present misery as torture. Without this understanding, it only experiences pain as the actual pain of nature, the real pain of life, the pain of the world.
So, I threw that device with all the pneumatics away, and wrote it all down instead. Many creatures won’t understand that a chair arm is their arm—most animals don’t even have arms—but every creature can read. I’ve been teaching animals to read since 1983, and that’s part of what kills and tortures them, so they will understand.
But there are some things that, even when I write them down, animals still don’t understand. For example, I was once on a topless beach. I was there because I had a four-month-old baby who was still breastfeeding, and it seemed expedient to breastfeed on a topless beach, rather than endure some unpleasant interaction around breastfeeding on a different beach. However, the topless beach was a private beach, and I was soon approached by a staff member and told that children were not allowed on the topless beach. The staff member explained that some things were inappropriate for children. I pointed out that a four-month-old is not a child, that babies can’t generally focus their eyes on anything more than a few centimetres away, and that this particular baby probably couldn’t coordinate any sensible image of anything that wasn’t one or another of my tits. But the staff member insisted that women were for sex, and that children—even babies— must have nothing to do with sex. So I left the beach.
I wrote this whole story down for an opossum and its babies that I caught in a Havahart trap. But the opossums never understood. I even tried to communicate the story in scent (sea and sand top notes, a sour-milky base, and a musky, castoreum dry down), but the opossums still didn’t understand. There was something about sex that didn’t translate. I felt responsible for this unbridgeable gap in communication, so I let the opossums bite my hand before I drowned them in a trash can filled with water. I still have the scars.
I teach animals to read for the U.S. military. They are the only ones hiring for full-time work, and honestly, even if you don’t work for them, you still work for them. Even if you don’t live or work in the U.S. Everyone has two choices: you can turn yourself into, or in to, the authorities. That’s what the “invisible hand of the market” means, I think. I had the choice of this, or learning to be a drone pilot, but I’ve never been good at working remotely. If I have to do work, I want to do quality work.
The other hard part about communicating with animals is that they don’t have interiority. They are all solid on the inside. All energy and stimuli appear to them to emanate toward them, from the world. Teaching them to experience abstraction and undecidability is part of the torture.
Humans do, of course, have interiority, though we imagine ourselves filled to the brim with memories and knowledge. We imagine our energy and stimuli to come from inside ourselves and emanate outward, into the world. Maybe this is what an especially sympathetic blue jay meant when it told me something to the effect of, “Humans are vacants/empty/blank11 creatures. While humans know this, they collect all manner of imaginary fragments in order to imagine themselves full, and then use their imagined fullness to bludgeon the world.”
I was trying to pull the wings off the blue jay as it told me this, but it wasn’t working. I could tell the blue jay was still only experiencing the pain of life, and not a pain deliberately inflicted as an act of communication. It kept telling me that I was the one that wasn’t understanding. Maybe it was right.
These failures—the sympathetic blue jay and the family of the opossums—are outliers. Most of the time I am able to teach the animals to read in just a few months. Once they can write back and communicate a few points, I know that we can proceed with inflicting pain, and that the essential content of the pain will be clear, or close enough for all practical purposes.
I’ve stolen the phrase “close enough for all practical purposes” from the punchline to a joke that my grandfather used to tell me over and over again when I was little. He was a very theatrical joke-teller. Though this was his only joke, he nevertheless delivered his lines as though to a large, delighted audience.
The joke went that some behavioural scientists wanted to study engineers and physicists. So they took a physicist and an engineer and positioned them at equal distances from a beautiful, topless woman. The behavioural scientists then told the engineer and the physicist that every ten minutes, they could halve the distance between themselves and the topless woman.
Ten minutes pass, and the engineer carefully moves closer to the woman, but the physicist doesn’t move at all. Another ten minutes pass, and the engineer again carefully moves closer, but the physicist again just stands there, staring blankly. So the behavioural scientists stop the experiment.
They say something to the effect of, “Sorry, engineer, hold on for a minute. Physicist—maybe you don’t understand what we’re doing here. You can halve your distance every ten minutes, but you’re just standing there. You’re ruining the experiment.”
The physicist responds to the effect of, “Behavioural scientists, I understand the experiment. But as a physicist, I also understand that no matter how many times I halve the distance, I’ll never actually get there, only infinitely closer.”
The behavioural scientists talk among themselves for a minute, and then say something like, “OK, that makes sense, physicist, we hadn’t thought of that. Engineer—did you realize that? What are you doing? Why are you still moving closer?”
The engineer responds something to the effect of, “Yeah, I know that that’s essentially true, but I also know that I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”
It’s pretty much the same process with children. My infant from the beach is now a child and learning to read. There’s no point in teaching him any kind of rule of pronunciation. You tell someone how “ch” sounds in “choose,” and then you realize the rest of the sentence is something like, “between machine or school,” and that rule gets you nowhere. Instead, you just have to make them practice reading like they are practicing hitting a nail with a hammer. Or something else that is just repetition plus force.
Once my child can write, and can communicate a few points, I know that we can then proceed with inflicting pain, and that the essential content of the pain will be clear, or close enough for all practical purposes. And I know that then the topless woman from the beach or from my grandfather’s joke will disappear.
An escaped animal returned to my classroom (which is actually my home) and told me that this learning to read is all about the creature leaving a period where The Imaginary is primary, and entering a period where The Symbolic is primary. In a sense, this is the way you make a man. The animal tried to pass these ideas off as its own (it was always my star student) but I know better, even though I’ll never read the books that the ideas are scavenged from.12 I’m more interested in the woman disappearing from the topless beach, from my grandfather’s joke, from language in general. What happens to her? I’d like to find out because it seems of fundamental importance to my own life, my own disappearances. I used to be a famous sculptor, for example, but no one remembers because now I teach reading and writing for the U.S. military at enormous cost to everyone involved. I used to go out. I used to be on a topless beach. I used to cringe at my grandfather’s joke. I used to have rights that didn’t cost money. I’m still here, but I used to be real. In a sense, this is the way you make a woman.
It is in this capacity that I’ve been interested lately in the virtual. I won’t put it in proper-noun caps like The Symbolic because I want to preserve the way that it is something lower, more tactical, than The Imaginary, The Symbolic, or The Real. Those terms seem like part of my disappearances. But “virtual” seems just as sinister. I am interested in the ways in which the word “virtual” has become a predicate for “reality,” “classes,” “medicine,” etc. It seems to point to a disappearance of some je ne sais quoi. Something that is missing, absent, dead.
I’ve read the entries for “virtual” in both Merriam-Webster and the OED, but the definition doesn’t stick in my mind. I’m having trouble focusing. Everything seems vague and unsatisfying.
All I can remember the next day is something like, “Essential, or in essence, as opposed to real or actual.”13 I open my computer to review the definitions, but I end up skimming some music videos about transformation. Then I meet via Zoom with one of my students from last semester who experienced some kind
Notes
1^ The format of this essay is taken from Samuel R. Delany’s “On the Unspeakable,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 58–66, previously published in Everyday Life, ed. George Tysh and Chris Tysh (Detroit: In Camera, 1987), and Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, ed. Larry McCaffery (Boulder, CO: Fiction Collective 2, 1993). In my mind, if not in truth, “On the Unspeakable” is among the works that elaborate the format used in Jean Genet’s “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet,” in Fragments of the Artwork, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 91–99, originally “Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), from which I’ve also adapted a title for this essay.
2^ Jamaica Kincaid, “In History,” Callaloo 24, no. 2 (2001): 620–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300540.
3^ Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in The Barbara Johnson Reader, ed. Melissa Feurerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 217–34, previously published in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 29–39.
4^ Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 222–25.
5^ Johnson, 226.
6^ Johnson, 227.
7^ For a much better consideration of rhetoric, art, politics, and abortion see Aliza Shvarts in general, and in particular her brilliant essay “Abortions Will Not Let You Forget,” November, accessed May 22, 2023, https://www.novembermag.com/content/abortions-will-not-let-you-forget.
8^ But not only women. Really, anyone who could even theoretically appear to, in the past/present/future, gestate a fetus. And this includes those for whom forced sterilization campaigns, state-sponsored child abductions, and chronic disinvestment clearly contradict the essentialized myth of motherhood that has been and still is invoked in order to outrage bodily autonomy, kinship, and love. And the bad-faith rationalizations that underpin such actions seek to injure every person and body. To deny the exigencies of bodies and the ways that those exigencies cross the virtual border between “body” and “person” is to make a complex, intelligent organism into a cloudy image of mythic essentialisms.
9^ I’ve expropriated this useful phrase from the prepared notes to a talk given by Fred Moten on October 19, 2007, at the University of Chicago as part of “Anxiety, Urgency, Outrage, Hope . . . A Conference on Political Feeling,” organized by the Public Feelings group. Moten’s contribution was titled “Black Optimism,” and his prepared notes are available at https://web.archive.org/web/20220617151155/https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2007/12/moten-black-optimism.doc (last accessed May 22, 2023).
10^ Jennifer M. Chacon, “Border Exceptionalism in the Era of Moving Borders,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 38, no. 1 (2010), https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol38/iss1/14; and Mary Holper, “Expanded Expedited Removal: Can Fourth Amendment ‘Border Exceptionalism’ Be Everywhere Now?,” Expert Forum, American Constitution Society, August 8, 2019, https://perma.cc/76AG-VAX3.
11^ The squawk the blue jay used means some combination of these terms, but also has connotations of laziness. Teaching a creature to read always requires some translation in order to get started.
12^ Jacques Lacan, “Symbol and Language,” in The Language of the Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 29–52; and Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” and “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 75–81 and 575–84, respectively.
13^ OED Online, s.v. “virtual (adj. and n.),” accessed July 17, 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223829; and Merriam-Webster, s.v. “virtual (adj.),” accessed July 17, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtual.
CW Crawford is a writer and artist based in New York City. Exhibitions include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Minerva, Sydney; Temp, New York; New Capital, Chicago; Golden Gallery, New York; Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York; Interstate Projects, New York; Peregrine Program, Chicago. Publications include pieces in Blast Counterblast, edited by Steve Reinke and Anthony Elms (Mercer Union; Whitewalls; University of Chicago Press, 2012); Manual for Treason (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2011); and Touch, See, Taste, vol. 1 (Temporary Agency, 2017), and the text “Nothing to lose but our selves" for Christine Negus’s 2021 exhibition at YYZ Artists’ Outlet. Honors include the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Award for Emerging Artists, 2011; Artist in Residence, Youth Insights Writers, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012.