Surrealism, semiotics, and punk rebellion as tools of cultural deconstruction

Transmission 143: Interview with Mark Dery, Part One

• The Power of Semiotics: Dery utilizes Roland Barthes’s semiotic lens to uncover hidden political and social meanings within consumer culture and mass media.
• Punk as a Tool: Early exposure to L.A. punk graphics (like The Weirdos) taught Dery how to “weaponize irony” and use “hostage-taking” tactics against the Culture Industry.
• The “Peripheral” Text: Dery draws inspiration from the “weird” and the irrelevant elements in culture—like a cockroach in a Hemingway novel—to find deeper, irresolvable truths.

Mark Dery is an American writer, cultural critic, and lecturer recognized for his contributions to media studies and critical analysis of contemporary culture. He gained prominence for popularizing the term “culture jamming” and introducing the concept of “Afrofuturism” through his influential essay “Black to the Future” in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Dery has written extensively about media and visual culture, with a particular interest in fringe and subcultural elements. His books include Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which examines the intersection of technology and cultural rebellion, and I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, a collection of essays on topics ranging from social anxieties to cultural taboos. His biography Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey explores the life and art of the enigmatic illustrator. Dery’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and The Village Voice, spanning topics from digital culture to social critique.

This interview is also published in issue no. 01 of our free digital magazine Retrofuturista.

This is the first part of a longer interview exploring Dery’s intellectual development and critical perspectives and culture jamming, afro-futurism, cyberculture, identity and Otherness, and technology. Read part two of the interview with Mark Dery on satire in Trump era media.

Can you tell us about some of the earliest influences that shaped your interest in cultural criticism and the fringe elements of culture?

That depends on what you mean by “earliest.” At Occidental College in L.A., where I majored in English literature from 1978-’82, I encountered Barthes’s Mythologies through the good offices of my boss, the French-born avant-garde video artist Pier Marton. As a cash-strapped scholarship kid, I was required to participate in the work/study program. A fatal combination of teen angst, punk attitude, and spectacular ineptitude (at seemingly everything but Surrealist poetry and the more outré and recherché corners of art history, literature, and transgressive thought—“the fringe elements of culture,” as you put it) ensured that I was shown the door after a few weeks on the job, no matter how menial.

My (mercifully brief) tenure in what was then called the A/V (“audiovisual”) and would now be called the IT department—a job for which I was spectacularly ill-equipped, it should go without saying—culminated in a film-class screening of Rashomon in which, distracted by whatever I was reading, between reel changes, in the projection booth (almost certainly Surrealist poetry, maybe Philip Lamantia’s Touch of the Marvelous or Edouard Roditi’s Emperor of Midnight or James Tate’s Viper Jazz), I managed to mix up the various reels of Kurosawa’s already nonlinear movie and show them out of order, leaving the audience thoroughly bemused, maybe even dazed. My wife, who was in the class, is still trying to unriddle Kurosawa’s masterpiece.

But I digress. As I say, my boss was Pier Marton, an intense, quietly sardonic video artist whose barely concealed disdain for the smiley-face vacuity and have-a-nice-day soullessness of Southern California in the late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s was a master class in Marcusean alienation. So was the weaponization of irony that was a trademark of the angry graphics and graffiti percolating out of the L.A. punk and underground art scenes. In a covert act of rebellion, he’d thumb-tacked onto his office wall. Marton had thumb-tacked a piece of punk agit-prop (inspired, seemingly, by Situationist détournement and later included in Jon Savage’s canonical study of punk, England’s Dreaming) that had gone viral: a comic-strip panel, détourned by the L.A. band The Weirdos, that featured a spiky haired, Raybanned guy exclaiming, “Just think of it, Ellen—a world full of weirdos!” To which Ellen replies, “That would be wonderful…”

Right, I thought, What a wonderful world that would be. That scrap of historical flotsam was talismanic, a thrilling sign of intelligent—and insurgent—life somewhere out there in the Society of the Spectacle. At a meta-level, it was an object lesson in the power of objects to impart lessons. As a teen, I’d read Andre Breton’s Surrealist manifestoes, Marcel Jean’s History of Surrealist Painting, Calvin Tomkins’s Time-Life book on Duchamp, and scores of books on Surrealism and its scabrous, Johnny Rotten progenitor, Dada, and thrilled to both movements’ vision of a revolution of everyday life, a cultural insurgency that employed mordant black humor, cutting irony, and dream logic to mock the sacred truths of the bourgeoisie and upend the official order—in short, to defamiliarize the familiar, to hoist repressive doxa (as Barthes called them) on the pike of heterodox thought.

I was struck, at first glance, by the comic’s appropriative logic—its Duchampian decontextualization and recontextualization of a hackneyed newspaper strip in the service of subversion; its use of sardonic humor and deadpan irony as weapons of semiotic guerrilla warfare. It was at once a sneering parody—and reinvigoration—of the moribund single-panel “gag,” as cartoonists called the form, and a Dadaist’s idea of hostage-taking (in that it forced the Culture Industry, through the deft appropriation of the brain-dead, unfunny Sunday “funnies,” to mock itself). A salvo in punk graphics’ hit-and-run rebellion against what Martin Amis would later call “the moronic inferno” of American society, the Weirdos’ comic awakened something in me—a growing politicization of what had been a semiconscious resentment, clouded by the usual adolescent alienation and the knee-jerk nonconformity of the bookish weirdo, of the cultural ideologies and abnormal “norms” of American society at large and of Southern California, where I’d grown up, in particular. That little spark lit the gunpowder trail that led, a decade or so later, to my discovery of cultural studies, which was taking American academe by storm in the ‘90’s. And that led, in turn, to my encounter with its hardier, more populist (because more broadly accessible) cultivar, cultural criticism.

I’m indebted to Marton for another early spark that kindled my interest in what I’d come to call the critique of American “mythologies and pathologies”: his attempt, in my senior year (1982), to introduce me to Roland Barthes’s thought by lending me his copy of Mythologies. Confoundingly, I found it confounding, a perplexity that will never fails to inspire head-scratching, since the book strikes me, all these decades later, as a model of Cartesian clarity and analytic rigor, its insights unencumbered by the jargon that still encrusts so much academic writing, its phrases as elegantly turned as a Doric column, its perspicacity sharpened by the pricking wit that has always seemed, to me, to be a characteristic of the “gay” sensibility in letters (whatever that is), going all the way back to Oscar Wilde. But for whatever inexplicable reason—callow youth, probably—I just didn’t get Barthes.

Later, in the late ‘80’s, the scales would fall from my eyes and Mythologies would be the gateway drug that turned me into a devout Barthesian, which I remain to this day. His dazzling use of semiotics as an analytic lens to reveal the ideological messages hidden in plain sight all around, encrypted in the apparently apolitical visual cacophony of everyday life in a consumer culture (sportscars, margarine, Garbo’s face on film) and his ability, like Sartre’s use of a glass of apricot liqueur, to spin theory out of anything and everything (steak and chips, Einstein’s brain, striptease) illuminated the landscape of mass society—and the collective unconscious of the postwar, capitalist, gadget-mad West—in a blinding flash.

I still return to key Barthesian concepts like the readerly/writerly text, the Death of the Author, and his apologia for the amateur—all of which paved the way for reader-response theory, the subcultural and fan-culture studies of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall and cultural studies more generally. As well, I still draw on his approach to reading images in Camera Lucida, especially his concept of the punctum (the element in a photograph that pierces you to the quick), which I’ve bent to my own purpose by redefining it as the apropos-of-nothing element that appears in the “peripheral vision” of the text, so to speak, seemingly insignificant yet so irresolvably irrelevant, maybe even incommensurate with the forward movement and overarching themes of the narrative that it insists you find some way to integrate it into the narrative, even though it resists integration. (The instance that inspired this train of thought is that weird, nonsensical moment in Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises where Jake, the narrator, kills a cockroach: “While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed he must have just come in from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel.” We can contort ourselves to make this throwaway moment “mean,” in symbolic terms, but in the end it’s irresolvable. Serving no narrative purpose, refusing to make symbolic sense, it defies interpretation: it simply is what it is, an eruption of the weird into a resolutely naturalistic novel.)

And I’m still moved and inspired by Barthes’s masterful combination of the lyrical and the incisively analytical in the Proustian musings that characterize his autobiographical writings. His ability to be unflinchingly self-revealing without descending into soppy sentimentality or confessionalism is a bracing antidote to the solipsism of our time, when the kudzu-like creep of therapyspeak has unleashed a flood of “inspirational” drivel. He may be out of fashion, regarded in some quarters as an intellectual artifact of the ‘60’s, like his American evangelist Susan Sontag, but I find him inexhaustibly useful, not to mention intellectually thrilling: he never fails to set off fireworks displays in the mind.

So, Barthes blew the lock on the bank vault. After the smoke cleared, I found my way to Baudrillard through mentions in Artforum magazine, then in a translation of “The Precession of Simulacra” in the journal Art & Text, and finally at full length in one of those Nintendo cartridge-sized Semiotext(e) paperbacks that were ubiquitous in the artworld and East Village hipster circles in 1980’s New York. I probably snuffled around the edges of Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, too, though his style has always been too mandarin for me, and his high-theory Marxism too far removed from the everyday lives of everyone outside the cloisters of academe. I devoured Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in a gulp, especially the chapter on panopticism. (The American intelligentsia was besotted by French literary theory and continental philosophy in those days. A friend who lived in L.A. and had a nodding acquaintance with Madonna told me the Material Girl used to carry a copy of Discipline and Punish around with her, jutting conspicuously from her purse, on the mistaken assumption that it was an intellectually chic S&M manual.)

Around the same time, I discovered Umberto Eco’s collection of cultural criticism and pop semiotics, Travels in Hyperreality, whose titular takedown of the Disneyfication of the American mind and accompanying essays “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” and “Striking at the Heart of the State” were hugely influential on my theorization of culture jamming. So, too, were the sociologist Stuart Ewen’s magisterial All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, and Mike Davis’s untouchably brilliant, Marxist-noir critique of race, class, power, surveillance, and the cop-industrial complex in L.A., City of Quartz.

On a parallel track, I was reading Greg Tate’s sprawling, rambunctious, contentious essays in The Village Voice,nominally music criticism but really the equivalent, in prose style, of P-Funk, Flash of the Spirit, and Bitches Brew, all rolled into one; a pioneering hybrid of Black cultural theory at its most radical, African-American vernacular, Ornette Coleman-esque intellectual improvisation, and whatever riffs from continental philosophy and critical theory served his purpose. At the same time, I was reading Sontag and Didion—and reading the one against the other, a juxtaposition that threw a revealing light on their strengths and weaknesses: Sontag’s analytic rigor and ponderous, self-conscious “gravitas” and grinding humorlessness; Didion’s journalistic eye for the telling detail, her guileful strategy of giving her interviewees enough rope to hang themselves with, and her tendency to refract the maladies of any historical moment through the prism of her neuroses and phobias (a tendency that brings out the worst in her current crop of fans, personal essayists who seem to know her exclusively through her books about losing her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. To this fanbase, Didion is the Madonna Dolorosa of personal trauma, not the cold-eyed anatomist of social pathologies and American delusions whose ‘60’sand ‘70’s essays cut to the bone).

My growing sense that the joyless, buzz-killing “hard domination” school of Frankfurt Marxist critique epitomized by Horkheimer and Adorno was blind to the idiosyncratic, sometimes subversive, even perverse uses ordinary people made of mass-culture texts, never mind how, in a consumer culture, we often cobble together improvised exploding devices (semiotically speaking!) from the limited options on the supermarket shelf (as in the Weirdos comic), was deepened by cultural studies, especially Dick Hebdige’s Subcultures, Constance Penley’s early work on Star Trek “slash” (homoerotic fanfic starring Kirk and Spock from the original series), and Andrew Ross’s close reading of the proto-Goop New Age “wellness” movement.

So, semiotics, literary theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and cultural studies, all of which have taken their places in the sedimentary layers of passing academic fashion, are the bedrock of my approach to cultural criticism.

I’ll hasten to add, though (so your readers don’t mistake me for a living fossil), that I’m always adding new angles of theoretical attack to my safecracker’s toolkit. Heidegger (and, yes, I do know what Grandpa Nazi did during the war), Eugene Thacker’s “horror of philosophy” trilogy, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror, Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (and his writings on Lovecraft), the nature writing of Robert Macfarlane, Mark Fisher (especially Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie), the miserabilist elegies (for everything) of the poet Philip Larkin, the religion writer Jeff Sharlet’s blood-congealing reporting on the Christofascist sociopathy of Trump Country, and the dry, wry philosophy of Simon Critchley have lit up obscure, unfrequented corners of my mind, in some cases ones I never knew existed.

Photo courtesy of Mark Dery
Featured image: The Weirdos

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others