When Words Become Flesh and Flesh Becomes Words an Editor’s Preface

Abstract

I am burning like Baghdad or Detroit on “Devil’s Night” to tell a story of the postmodern. Not simply a story of a genre of art, architecture, or literary engagement, but a story of the dense and high velocity techno-structuring of the society in which I find myself (k)notted in a complex network of relations to others. This is a sociological story to counter-memorize or countermand what I take to be an emerging terroristic social formation in HIStory—a new American empire of the senseless. Although this story passes through my body, it is not mine alone. Nor am I entirely by myself in the re(w)ritings that become this text. No parasite is. Repeatedly.

A blank white virus cut through the back of her mind. Her stomach tightening. In theory, what was happening seemed at once terroristic and absorbent of all Historical perspective. As s/he labored to partially remember the shifting material origins of the story in which s/he found herself embodied, s/he turned upon the staging of this tale whose god-awful silence fed the parasitic expanse of what seemed a New World Order. Thereafter, like an ill-scripted character in a play whose author(s) escaped memory, but not entirely, she fell and kept on falling. Soon there were strange sounds electric, cyber-space and lasers. Television was everywhere and the uncanny dial tone of a misplaced echo — acidic reminders of thought-for-food resisting digestion. S/he spun to the left, staggered but not denied an appetite for revenge? “If only I could laugh,” she said to herself. “If only I could laugh.”—Black Madonna Durkheim¹