Writing in the Invisible Real

retrocede, Michael Mc Aloran, Erratum Press, 2024.

All great works of literature dissolve a genre or invent one in order to say what has never been said before/The author of retrocede/like Duchamp whose work encourages philosophical inquiry and a re-examination of reality itself/McAloran too has moved ahead of the Zeitgeist and taken the best strategies of the concept of the anti-novel intimidating them to the extreme and fabricated a virtual code that sits astutely in a position to express the meta-physical move of semiotic potentiality into actuality/ Authorship is ambiguous knowledge dubious and the truth is unknown or relative/McAloran/s language operates on the molecular level of understanding/The molecular is about the minute/the fluid/and the constantly changing aspects of existence that can disrupt and destabilize larger molar systems like civilization and its masochistic subjects/ haunted by the ghost of the death of the finite/no scavenging for verisimilitude the narrational trajectory remains elusive in its interpolations of the digital Age/McAloran is really comfortable in the maelstrom of chaos while maintaining a degree of intentionality that drags the reader along despite the aesthetic tribal rivalries/

"The flay of tongues whispering/Blank spaces shattered fingers/the meat of distance/the flayed carcass/ripped from the inside"/And again: "in a swarm of carrion flies till seepage rot of putrid meat where sickness of till dredge collapse of psychosis bleeding the corpus underbelly…"

As Deleuze states the artist attempts to create “a style of life/not anything at all personal/but inventing a possibility of life/a way of existing.”/

In essence/the molecular is about appreciating the tiny/often overlooked details that can lead to significant transformations and new ways of thinking/It/s a way to understand the complexity and dynamism of life by focusing on the micro-level processes that drive change/a strategy of assessment [ethics] and invention [aesthetics]/Most novels glacial pace isn/t remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of those lives/McAloran is adept at revealing elements of the eclectic flow of the words that invade his head each second/there is a vital kinetic energy that he puts into work that attaches itself to the reader/there is a sense of the visionary in the work/ /In the form of arbitrary linguistic atrocities that take the form of narrative nihilism/highlighting this inertia this drabness of time that marks the first decades of the 21st Century/He achieves this while maintaining a degree of poetic harmony in the work/

"the killer’s teeth mark the pathway to the knives edge/words scattered towards the depth of a forgotten skyline/the lie of the flesh marred by sycophantic absences pissing upon in vacancy"

Each paragraph can be apprehended as an entity unto itself if the reader finds the whole text too much to take in/it is a demanding read/He doesn/t suffer from prolixity though/He cleverly avoids the tidy coherence of the novel which implies a purposeful meaning to existence and belies the chaos and entropy that surround/ "inhabit and overwhelm us/paranoiacal exigency struck out by opiate discharge/spits out as words scattered towards/flesh to peel away the abject nullity the extol of concave evisceration"/

Retrocede is relatively short terse text and exudes a clarity of style that is suited to a digitalized world/The age of the blockbuster/movie conglomerate is gone/there is something that is compelling about the boldness of the words defying immediate interpretation by a consciousness dependent on a linear code of meaning/Innovation of style is another way to relay a message and the right words can express emotions way beyond the verbal a single message to resolve into a universal meaning/

His work is not a description it is an imperative/It urges cerebral action a perpetual departure/for wherever we start in the text it remains to be done/McAloran constructs his word machine as an unfolding of complexity/a fractal mechanics of exclusion of unwanted details adding greater clarity to what was already there/telling all we need to know to keep reading/living/

"the eye of nothing as breakage upon a cold oceanic of tears of shit of null & void collision breathe of dispel till lock alone as broken silences reclaim the distances"

As we will see the work operates at the level of Lacan/s Real a permanent revolution/an anarchist politics of the word/McAlorans word machine shits and fucks and breaks bones and teeth all through the text and the reader experiences the totality of techno paranoia at its most volatile/

"reek of spent lights of the dim forgotten as circus goes the razor roundelay the bones shattered till obsolete claim upon nothing ever of as was as if to nectar of silenced overtures of the membrane's kiss upon stone nothingness"

McAloran/s retrocede/to take back[again]/is writing at the forefront of the anti-novel/He frequently abandons the traditional beginning-middle-end structure with its contagion of symptoms of banality and privileging of the codex in literature/Instead he presents events with little reference to an overall narrative if at all/a chronological order avoiding a coherent timeline that disorientates the reader’s reliance on time as direction/McAloran uses a fragmented narrative/The storyline is often broken into disjointed pieces creating a sense of discontinuity as a way of reflecting the fragmented nature of post digital existence/

"it says yet dying all the while of which as if to having in the corrupt light breakage as was sudden disavowal null it cannot broken by nothing in the vague tense spillage of bile piss cum and retrospect a dense reclaim a cracked jaw leaking the forgotten of the matter.."

"Absolve collect breakage bones a vacuum of forgotten realms scattering the eviscerated till lie alone in the vast the tread extract the teeth of malady whereof till sky alone will never of a semblance a nocturne a..."

McAloran experiments with language and with punctuation or lack of it using unconventional syntax/wordplay and shifting perspectives/The language can be dense/abstract and sometimes intentionally difficult to decipher/he has devised a language that can be difficult to follow/He works almost intuitively with the paroxysms of chaos and the extremities of a finite text which contains infinity: a history of ideas that he draws on to create his existential landscapes/Retrocede avoids a clear overarching plot/Instead it focuses on moments/images/thoughts/partial disrupting fragments of text each one seeming to be disconnected to the one before or after/leaving much to the readers interpretation/This strange and unclassifiable work a shift towards words reflecting on themselves not concerned with creating an illusion of reality but rather establishing its own conventions/Demolishing meaning/giving birth to a new unstable category of text of non-sequential units/a semi-nonfictional semi fiction/cryptic yet full of interconnective syntax/

McAloran works at freeing the oppressed text of the literary academic intelligentsia/ The text is in transition and with that comes new images and ways of seeing what is happening in the world/ Especially these decades of the 21st Century with its constellation of flows of data and algorithms/In this sense he is playing what Eric Alliez calls word games the celebration of language denying the reader the consummation of the desire to know/Matter becomes expressive enacting the Lacanian cut between the symbolic and the Real/

"stitched across where broken sudden as if to nothing of the before till in-dreaming of a bitter weight skinned what depth of razor solace a cool clean burn a garroted throat bile vomit piss upon the obsidian flowers of it till graven knocked from the tooth of spell"

As Guattari suggests perhaps the artists of today constitute the final lines along which the primordial existential questions are folded/ McAloran has the Cassandra curse in that he can see the future of text but no one yet has the foresight to be reading it/His words are fugitive ones caught on the edge of radical change in the Universe with AGI being the new beyond the limit of meaning/There is too much reverence for the history of the word/Beckett tried limiting words as a strategy/Burroughs tried to cut up the text of the collective unconscious/McAloran captures particular archetypes themes pertinent to our current times/power aggression horror and violence the symbolic expression of an inner life evoking primal emotions of wonder and awe/

There is a definite ambiguity with regards as to who is narrating the story/there is a lack of human presence which confronts the reader/a total lack of characters to identify with/

In a sense McAloran operates in a world that is beyond symbolism as we know it/According to Lacan The Real is what resists representation and cannot be fully captured by language or symbols/ It is the realm of what is impossible to express or Imagine because it exists outside of our conventional means of understanding/

Retrocede is an investigation into a corpse and remains unmediated by its author/The Real is often associated with experiences that are traumatic or overwhelming because they disrupt our usual ways of making sense of the world/It is the raw/unfiltered reality that confronts us with its sheer bloody existence/ While the Real is outside of the Symbolic (the realm of language and social structures which expropriate the very body of the citizen)and the Imaginary (the realm of images and illusions it interacts with/ The Real can intrude into our lives/causing disruptions and forcing us to confront its presence/

Lacan also links the Real to the concept of jouissance/a kind of excessive/painful pleasure that goes beyond the pleasure principle and disrupts the subject/s sense of self/McAloran is tapping into the Real the raw unmediated unconscious and making a successful attempt at revealing what is impossible to express/

"...it is of the undone till waver breakage nothing of the before where the carousel of breathe is the sickness of haven rot closed down nothing of a door made of sand an hourglass settlement knock once it dissipate a shredded lung the break of desolate…’/

The passage as a whole mediates the Real/the unutterable/ by depicting a landscape where meaning deflates and crumples and symbols fail to hold/It encapsulates the traumatic/unmediated aspects of existence that defy rational understanding/embodying the raw chaotic nature of the Real/

McAloran’s work challenges narrative conventions through its fragmented structure and linguistic experimentation/embodying the anti-novel/s critique of traditional forms emphasize the continuous flow of thoughts and feelings without a clear structure or traditional punctuation/ Retrocede is a system of reduction to a divisive self/drowning in a state of oral retrogression/a complex intersection between the politics of seeing and telling/Avant-garde experimentation in anti-novels involves pushing boundaries of literary form/language/and structure/aiming to create a new and unconventional reading experience of the valances of the sign/Life is miserable and gives nothing unless it is snatched by force/ Retrocede is at the forefront of this continuing confrontation with language and expression and unconventional form and content/In a letter to a friend Samuel Beckett expresses a desire for a literature of the un-word/Condemning language as a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things[or the nothingness] behind it/Beckett castigates literature for lagging behind the other arts/McAloran is certainly following this path of a reorientation of the word in his work and pits the microcosm against the macrocosm/depth against superficial surface/a literature riddled with questions rather than sealed off in facile solutions to the abstract threshold of thought/No matter how vivid the quality/Except for that rare individual who revels in absurdity and paradox there are no solutions to be found here/Only the place of the works productive pleasure/the [re]possession of the erogenous zones of language/a political aesthetic/s capable of creating a people yet to come/ as Blanchot states/

Lee Beckworth is the author of Celibate Autopsy, Hotel Sal Dada, Sex Fatality, Artaud adjusts his [h]ate.

[image: artwork from retrocede]