Dr. Kane X. Faucher is the author of Urdoxa (2004) Codex Obscura (2005) Fort & Da (2006), Calqueform, Astrozoica, De Incunabliad (2007). Jonkil Dies, Tales Pinned on a Complete Ass: Travel to Romania (2009) The Vicious Circulation of Dr Catastrope (2009)

Author's websites: HERE and HERE
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Dr. Kane X. Faucher discusses poetic methodology, educational background, his current instructorship, and myriad concepts associated with his artistic and academic endeavors with Counterexample Poetics editor, Felino Soriano.

Felino Soriano: Kane, the philosophical, the investigative, the environmental awareness and how language supports these poetic entities, are brands of capturing-the-reader when visiting your work. Can you please elucidate your poetic methodology in terms of encompassing your approach, the figurative and literal styles of thought, and what, to you, is/are the causational connection/s of birthing a finalized writing?

Kane X. Faucher: I've been mulling over this rather intensely dense question trying to rally and organize in myself some sort of conceptual tread, and it would seem that what I would like to say concerns what is most immediate to me at the moment amidst a myriad of ongoing concerns; namely, that I would like to make the attempt to answer this question according to three rubrics that I think are pivotal. Not only as a guide for any who would be reading us, and so to be in good faith by providing a sort of precis, a table of contents, but as well to organize myself so that I may return to these rubrics whenever I happen to stray. These rubrics would concern thought's relation to words, the notion of "work"[ing], and that curious hyphen between art and politics. But before all that, perhaps I may be permitted a historical sketch to provide some context, that desire for a narrative that speaks of a poet's development.

The story of my writing poetry begins in the hoary year of 1995 at age 18, living alone in my rather slummy apartment in Ottawa. At that time, I was quite enamoured with the graphic work of H. R. Giger and was going through what many of us go through: an awkward and superficial Marxist phase. During that time I fumbled through biomechanical-themed poetry where its soft and naive critique of a state apparatus I couldn't even begin to truly fathom came off as youthful petulance. My unsubstantiated enthusiasm and ambition compelled me to invent what I dubbed "inorganicism", which was to contain all my political ravings, dystopic futurist rants, all melded with the usual adolescent penchant for the macabre as I listened to Bauhaus and Joy Division on the old 45. Once that ran its course, much like a flu, I engaged in poetic imitative utterances, guided by a rather loose and unfocused kludge of conceptual principles slackly defined, quickly betrayed, and later abandoned out of fickleness or lack of mental stamina. Tried as I did to make a poetic name for myself in Ottawa - a town already saturated with glittering names - this did not work out, and it was partially due to my lack of focus and my youthfully exuberant desire to be respected as a great poet without doing the time as my elders had already done. There is no doubt that I must have come off as ridiculous - if on the radar at all. My last real bout of poetic production came in 1998, but by then I was more focused on my first year of university. Poetry took a back seat to another nascent and perhaps foolish desire: to write novels. I began with a literary autobiography (a bit premature at the age of 21), mostly as an emulative exercise after reading too much Henry Miller. The text, entitled "Corrigenda" and running 400 or so pages, was an atrocity with very little salvageable content. It succumbed to my first textual purge in 1999 when I brought it to the train tracks and burnt it to ash. I was, however, not deterred from the novel format, and I began feverishly scrawling one right after another - only some of which survive in very small parts when I interpolated them into more recent texts. Poetic production was slight for many years until 2003 when I negotiated a new (and hopefully more mature) direction. Production was slower, but more meaningful. Gone were the empty phrases, the stumbling cliches, the awkward mergers between words that went themeless unto the page; in their place was a larger focus on language itself. However, there was still something quite awkward about my production. This was during my "academic" phase where I became a slave to my reading. At the time, I was doing my MA in philosophy, already used to publishing in refereed academic journals and focusing my output on writing essays, voraciously consuming thousands of philosophy books - these habits were bound to infect my poetic practice. Sometimes the merger produced interesting results, and at other times it rang hollow and pretentious. The academic phase began in my one year in Vancouver and spilled into my return to Ottawa.

With my renewed focus on novels in 2004, and upon the publication of my first, Urdoxa, I had just been accepted into the PhD program here in London. Suddenly, I was writing more poems and publishing again. But with more emphasis on novel-writing, there was only so much time I could devote to it. By 2006, I had underwent a strange transformation whose after-effects were till being felt 2 years later, which was precipitated by my stay in Romania. All I can truly say about that was the sudden flush of perspective that was beginning to round out my work.

We come to the now, and to the future, which is always an orientation of the present. I have become disenfranchised with my poetic production once more and am eager to take flight into something new. Whereas the last few years have seen a great deal of etymological play, I am eager to test out the uncanny in expression. At bottom, perhaps I am partially in agreement with Freud's pessimism in his final work. Expression, full and pure, is dangerous - a seething of atrocity and aggression where unreason and anarchy are crowned. If this is the real human condition, then perhaps I have not really written poetry yet, but only casually flirted with it, occasionally been a pilgrim in its domain, tasting only a small draught of its irrational and astringent substance. This of course assumes that poetry must be a reflection of the real, and we can question the validity of reflection / representation as well as take issue by what is meant by the real. There might be only one solution, and that is to write directly from the spinal cord, bypassing the over-intellectualizing act of writing poetry. If pain is registered as immediate knowledge of a bodily state first in the spine before processing and revision in the brain, then poetry should emerge from a new kind of phenomenology - an immediacy only granted by the nerve. Is this not the lesson Nietzsche bequeaths to us when he speaks of the "wisdom of the body"? Is this not the practice of Artaud who declares "shit to the spirt [mind]"? Even romanticism is a fake, for the nervous immediacy of contact of body in relation to other bodies, a body of the social, a body of knowledge, a chemical body, are expressed through the filter of alleged "passions". It is not good enough to say "I write / paint what I feel" since it still makes nerve-immediacy a fugitive rattling somewhere deep inside, consigning it to rational overcoding. The "what" is quiddity, a reliance upon ontological categories, and so yet again rationality has its muddy footprints all over the nerve-rug. What is necessary is stoic logic that makes the verb itself the event and not a subsidiary quality, attribute, and accident fossilized in a noun. No longer that static copula of the "the man IS angry", but rather, "the man angers". In this way, poetry can escape fetishizing objects as fixed unities, as well as freeing the objects from being anchored by their attributes. No, life is not sad, but rather "life saddens", the fish is silvering, nature natures - all of this allows processes inherent to the subjects become variable, mobile, liquid, verb-al.

What will such a "spinal poetry" with its nerve-floor even look like? Will it be poetry at allo? Given the historical and linguistic prejudice of language itself, a great deal of "reverse-engineering" may be required to develop a whole new lexicon of expression where the speech act is not divisible from the event it expresses. A whole new pragmatics is required, and the recurring risk will be the prejudicial temptation to "ontologize" poetry: objects in one pile, subjects in the other, their links being a few gestural adjectives.

As you can see, I am segueing into first rubric: that of the thought-word relation that continues to keep me awake at nights. At stake here is the very nature of expression's possibility.

The parenthesis between myself and the page, thought and word, is a spectral gap, ellipses stretching out infinitely. This gap can never be closed, though we may try. Is this not the chase after the ultimate signified, after rainbows, horizons, Truth? Such is the fate of expression. Perhaps there is a moment of fulguration, an ekstasis that makes word and thought one, but that is the proper domain of the mystic, the prophet (but how hard it is to convey revelation in non-ecstatic terms or to the non-ecstatic multitude). Instead, between word and thought is a chasm, widened by the intervention of physiological response time, intermissions of other thoughts that wedge word and thought further apart. It is perhaps like Godel says of axioms: each act of definition or description will itself have to be defined or described, ad infinitum. Is not expression a description or definition of the expressed?

Perhaps what is needed is a language that can spiral off towards an infinity by way of a vector - not by cerebral control, but by chance. Would this be the means to create a new ground zero of language? The "splendid isolation" between word and thought can, with poetry as the honest broker, enter into an entente cordiale - that is, word and thought can enter into interactions, dialogues, and even mitigated agreements without sacrificing their autonomy or surrendering the integrity of their mode and function. Still, given the kind of chasm between the two, perhaps all we can hope for is an uneasy peace. Nominalism has its clever work-arounds, but we are condemned and so must tolerate this strange economy of disparate items in their linked chain of relations: thing-thought-word, thought-word-thing, etc. A new relation, a new intensity, is formed depending on the starting point - this starting point contingent upon where we come in to this flow across the canyon between word and thought. Semiotics may act as the guarantor of this economic exchange, even seducing us to believe in a neat and clean transfer between word and thing, but chance and multiplicity underwrite it all. And so, the meaning of the word or the attempt to grasp it in thought, or assign it to an object, is always slipping. But, perhaps, this slippery aspect is actually more of an elastic connection between word-thought-thing...A moment of ecstasy where space and time are suspended enough to bring about a collision. I don't mean to sound Kantian here, though! I realize what I am saying here, which is an example of the overall problem of representation-expression, makes me appear as though I am tucking the solution away in some noumenal domain, shifting responsibility out of laziness to somewhere unreachable, or perhaps being a poor rehash romanticist who is perplexed by the awe and sublime of the inexpressible. I cannot help but make this detour which may suggest that I have, in my under-theorizing attempt, reached my limit. I am caught on the comma of my own problem, and there doesn't seem to be a conceptual way out of it. We can resist Heidegger's solution all we like, but it is one that I cannot help but return to; namely, that it is at the limit of ontological explanation that poetry begins. This, to me, is the secret lesson of authenticity in art: a blind muddling through the unknown. Times like these, which overtake me on occasion, impress upon my mind Deleuze's statement nested in his study of Nietzsche: that it is indeed up to us to go to the extreme places, the tropical zones of thought, to - as Nietzsche says - become hyperborean. Fear and trembling before this gaping void (albeit unavoidable if we are serious thinkers and creators) is merely recursive ego-action, a circuitous replaying of the mirror as we only (re)inspect the look of horror upon the face of ourselves in the unknown, how the artist-self appears in the face of void rather than to shift the view to the void itself - or, at least, that unknown zone where there are no anchors to resemblance to give us footing. To become hyperborean (Nietzsche), to stumble about in dark incandescence (Bataille), to lose our bearings when centre and margin are discovered to be arbitrary designations (Derrida), to be the perpetual flaneur (Baudelaire), to be a difference engineer on a chaodicy (Deleuze and Guattari) - these prescriptions seem to make sense to me, "me" who is both a hundred miles before and after "myself", a "myself" that is devoid of a centre, but is rather a "fluxus" (like everything else). This provides us as poetic engineers with the energy that both sustains and defeats us. A poetic Will asks us to will every possible resistance and to will that resistance will be equal in its willing to resist us. I apologize for such a tangled statement. In less tangled terms, I want what challenges me poetically, and my willingness to meet those challenges, to be perpetual.

Contending with impossible transactions between thoughts and words in this economy I've already invoked, there is concentrated double bind. This forces me at times to quarantine either my words from thoughts or thoughts from words as if to prevent further contagion. But I also know that this contagion, this cross-contamination, is not only necessary but impossible to prevent. Yes, I can edit my work out of its lunatic state, whittling conveyed thoughts into more germane and identifiable shapes, but the fluxus of writing is a rhapsody of the relationship between thought and word that does not end in writing since the reader is then "infected" by the reverse movement of word to thought (precipitating their own journey of fluctuations). Stalin once said that writers are the engineers of human souls, but I see writers as epidemic-machines, virus-disseminators, plague-makers. I say this under full acknowledgement of the contemporary romance we have with anything viral: viral marketing, for example. The romanticism of the viral is underscored by a nostalgic return to revolutionary thinking since the conceptual virus is emancipated and emancipating: it utilizes any and all means at its disposal to attack and alter conventional ways of thinking, transforming even the State into a kind of immune system to be infected and recoded from within, using its own resources against it. Viruses hijack discourses, sometimes becoming the motor of political terrorism. Viral methods are the perfect realization of democracy: they infect without prejudice. Of course, the message can be prejudicial, such as hate speech or target-marketing or ideological abuse, but the method itself is clean. Our fascination with viruses is perhaps caused by a realization that conventional revolutionary activities can no longer thrive in a State of Control, and so the virus stands as transcending the food chain, the methods of containment...And since a virus does not operate as an external agent to which we must arm ourselves, it is that much more effective.

You'll have to pardon my fascination with such things as viruses and cancer since their analogical applications to literature and philosophy are of exceeding interest to my academic and writing practice. It has become so central in my thinking in the last decade that I cannot help but read someone like Galen without immediately performing a transfer to, say, the act of writing or the study of language. As far as medicine and language go, I am not the first nor will I be the last to see a possible connection between Galen's semiology - the study of physical signs - and that of language as a system of signs (semiotics). Language succumbs to differing states, ruptures, new flows, just as the physical body does. Even heteroglossia has its analogical mirror in the perpetually differing states of the body. Language itself is a fascinating pathology, a vitalist and viral mechanism of continuous transformation. The attempt to impose a singular meaning to a word treats language like a disease to be cured, but multiple meanings is an incurable condition (nor should it be cured). Perhaps this devotion of mine to mutation and multiplicity explains why I so quickly dismiss hermeneutics and verificationist principles. I forget who first coined "language is a virus", but it is frighteningly accurate.

FS: You mention the hyphenated spectrum containing the existences of art and politics, which, can be seduced into a subjective ideology, infusing one’s works with one’s political stance of the current epoch; history, too, then can become a slogan of life’s symbolic path-takings, leading into where one’s art can reside, but then, vanish, too, quickly.

Your poetic burgeon is an interesting one, and also one that many can relate to in its singular-blended-eventually with multilayered purposes. I’d like to present a question now, relating to the novel experience, the writing of such a purposeful brand of expression. Many I’ve spoken with, poets, too are writers of prose in its many definitional categories. What is the distinction between the two bodies of poetry/prose, if indeed one exists? Also, can one bring a heightened, hedonistic joy over the other, and if so, what is the causation of such an unbalanced, artistic trait?

KXF: This question is incomparably vast, and rather than default to the shadowy yet robust line of thinkers on this question between what characterizes poetry versus prose, I hope you will grant me the latitude to riff with a few incomplete reflections. First, let me phrase this question according to how I read it so that my reply will be entirely by my interpretation of the question without committing any violence to the intent of it. First, I read here: what is the difference between poetry and prose, if any at all. Second, does the one have some degree of satisfaction or jouissance over the other. Third, what accounts for this disequilibrium. Before rushing toward my temptation to answer the third, which seems to entail what intrigues me greatly - that of tension - let me answer in some semblance of sequence.

Form is prescriptive as well as an ascription. It assumes or imposes upon matter (we'll say a bloc of text) an idea that can be categorized. The idea is not so innocuous since our idea of poetry, for example, is not innate. You and I and someone else all have our "idea" of what poetry is supposed to "look like" and the constituent parts that make it conform to the idea of poetry. This, of course, is frequently challenged by experimental poets who flout the rules and preconceptions of what makes a poem. For some, a poem follows an implicit rule of resemblance, and is judged according to that rule. But this assumes the perfect poem, of which all other poems become derivatives, mere copies. Platonic poetry? We may reach a consensus that some written text is a poem given our experience in reading what is called poetry. Further, if the written text appears in a poetry anthology or journal, it carries with it the added context which aids us in calling the writing a poem. The issue of context is not one to be taken lightly or for granted since it could turn out that an intended poem would not be viewed as such if placed outside the context of a poetry journal. This is especially true of poetic experiments that do not resemble a traditional idea of poetry. I once sent an email, unanswered, to Christian Bok about his book, Eunoia. Eunoia is perhaps one of the most daring and challenging reads in experimental sound poetry produced in the last thirty years. I asked if he would recognize his own poems if confronted by a stranger on the subway merely orating them to him. I apply this question to myself, and so I am unsure if I would recognize my own poetry if spoken to me outside the context of a poetry reading or book.

In terms of the difference between poetry and prose, I am a bit leery. Apart from those texts that dub themselves or are dubbed prose-poems, the distinction may be a fiction. But here is the curious pitfall: whenever we ask the difference between one thing and another, we may be complicit with what either of them are. That is, to know the difference between x and y, I have to know what x and y are. I may know the function of (what is called) poetry and prose, and I may know that they have different demands, but do I know what they are fundamentally? Yielding up a description as a means of defining poetry or prose causes me to lapse back into being a prescriptionist; setting limitations and parameters on what is poetry or prose. I prefer to play it safe when I can and avoid the ontological question entirely, but my answer is no less vague and prone to the same error. I would say we are dealing with text, and text alone in different "modes" since modalities can be methods of variation, and are individual expressions of a particular thing. But, then, I come to another limit: what is text? If I say, for example, that the visual poetry of John Moore Williams or bP Nichol do not qualify as text, but utilize textual elements such as orthographical marks, then what is it? My definition of text would have to either become narrowed or broadened. If I opt to narrow my definition of text, then I marginalize what I consider "poetic production". If I broaden my definition, then I run the risk of becoming a textual idealist, stating that all is [in the] text. That sort of Derridean view is compelling and puts me at odds with my own metaphysical assumptions. If all is text, then to speak of an "outside" of the text is impossible. Perhaps there are two thoughts on this: 1. pantextualism would be the view that all is text and text is a part of everything. 2. Panentextualism would take this view up into a transcendental, quasi-Spinozist field where not only is text everything, but that text is greater than everything, more than the sum of its parts.

Speaking more concretely on poetry and prose, and moving on to your second question...Although, I am uncomfortable allowing myself to go along this chain of reasoning since it may result in my misrepresenting a crucial consideration of mine as of late which concerns the idea of "the work". But that, I am sure, I can return to. For me, the difference between poetry and prose in my specific practice is one of modes, and even these modes have micro-modes that make them differ from one another. At times, the prose mode infects the poetry mode, and vice versa. Some of my poems, if arranged end to end, would read like prose; some of my prose, broken up into staccato lines, would read as a poem. What unites these modes is a willingness to express an idea, a sentiment, an non-definable moment, etc., but formatted differently. There is more demand for sequence in prose, even if it is highly experimental, but poetry also has its demand for sequence deriving from its title or theme.

If the difference between poetry and prose in my particular use of those "forms" is modal, then this runs into the third question of tension. Sometimes we may feel the urge to make a painting, but instead channel that energy into writing a short story. That energy source, that inspirational force, can bring about strange and uncanny results, ferrying us to very different conclusions. Sometimes we write a poem with the feeling and desire to frame a door, or play an instrument with a desire to eat a sandwich. The tension results in the mode of thought being translated into a particular expression of action. This tension is also found in that curious and much-harped on thing called "voice". Felix Guattari points out the personalist illusion of this thing we name "voice", which we dress up with all the ornament of that other precious assumption, the "individual". "My" voice compared to "your" voice - is there such a thing? Our voice is inhabited by someone else's voice (or many voices). The father, the schoolmaster, the idealized sense of the writer as type occupies the zone we may believe is freely unique and ours. Perhaps it is the concatenation of those adopted voices that in their mixture produce singularity, uniqueness, that thing of personalized harmony as a result of this hybrid voice. But our speech never occurs or emerges from a vacuum, and so there will always be echoes and residues of so many other voices vying for expression, for enunciation. A poet like Penn Kemp could tell you a great deal about voice and multiplicity, and although she seems to maintain a primarily "vocal" practice, it belies a much more mature understanding of enunciation than I can offer.

As the crown to this question triad, my own "enunciation" will take "work" - which is to say that I want to pause on this idea of work in sketch. We should, to be in good nature toward the creative episode that motors either the mode of poetry or prose, yield to the clamour without imposing our (sometimes institutionally-derived or implanted) prejudice of the legitimation process. It is (is it?) always a matter of the work. The question of authorial responsibility is far too vast and loaded to entertain here. Is writing, as a work, an expurgation for some, a divesting, a hollowing out? Or is it a metastatic prosthesis of oneself (an ego, or, perhaps in honour of "oneself" being so blended and blurred with one's surroundings as to be in good faith with continuum)? The work and working (the working that writers do) are incredibly different, sometimes at vicious odds. The question I return to, because I have to or feel I must out of some latent feeling of justification toward a state apparatus that has a strict and limiting definition of what it is to work, is what does it mean to be a "working writer"? Does this only happen when the tools are in our hands? Is it considered work when we are merely formulating in our heads, taking an experiential stroll, drinking beer, chatting with colleagues, reading, letting things "simmer"? If that is a kind of work, it isn't a kind of work a labour economy can embrace. The idea of "the work" is an ambiguous term since it can imply a collective assemblage, an ongoing labour, a completed result of a singular task, etc. Not all "work" is orientated toward completion, nor powered with a purpose in mind. Our understanding of work as merely the means toward x or the completed x is terribly limiting, demonstrating the prejudice of product value. I am working, I work, the work, this is working: no matter if it is phrased as a verb or noun, it still carries an indiscernible character to it. At what point, for example, does "my work" or "my working" become "the work", as if in replacing the possessive with a definite article attributes a higher value?

It suffices that I must, am obliged to, "do the work" in answering this question with no further digression, no further covering up and masking of laziness, reticence, or moot issue.

Both poetry and prose concern, for me, a leap from chaos to composition, from composed matters back into chaos (willingly or otherwise). However, what differs between the two concerning practice is how after my thought leaps intop that abyss, it comes out; thoughts like seeds diverge and grow differently. With prose, it is more taking on the plant-form of the lunatic, the graphomaniac, the serialist who serializes by way of maddening proliferation and recursive loops like an arabesque (is that not the name Gogol gives to it?). Using a quilt method, I write snatches, vignettes, unanchored texts that may be threaded into a whole, although I may not know which of the 30 or so prose projects it will fit best in (or be made to fit in). Whatever that chaos, that abyss, serves up becomes the scene of a sensation, a spectacle that is dressed in words. My life is cluttered with thousands of pages of handwritten notes, and just as many untitled computer files.

Notes, endless notes. At times, a merger takes place between two disparate prose projects, with the use of these notes as bridging material. It is as though, at times, even though my notes and projects appear to be working at cross-purposes that they are actually in some clandestine or subconscious collusion. These notes form some semblance of a whole, the thinnest minimum of regulative rule or thematic coherence. The tensions play on an absolute surface, but the interconnections of the notes and various projects reside in their depths, in their volume. Sometimes I come back to this overwhelming pile of notes and untitled files and play the broker between them all, marshaling them to a single purpose. All elements become intensive zones, sharing their contents and interpolating themselves. Never, of course, as a seamless thing, but as a non-distinct terrain of text. Even some of my more straightforward prose is merely a cover - a veneer of order thrown over the chaosmos (to borrow from Deleuze) of these writings. All of them operate in a kind of neighbourhood, they throw off sparks, they are held together by their tensions rather than my attempt to struggle against the cacophony. None of my works has a beginning or end, or they can be read out of sequence to create new beginnings and endings. Everything seems to coalesce into a maddening tangential vector of writing - the graphomaniac curse. Contradictions nest there comfortably, there is no reliable narrator or grounding point, and every attempt to resolve contradiction involves more writing - which only multiplies disparity and contradiction.

Even academic prose interjects, makes for itself a little garden of overgrown production. Literary prose, too, becomes a production machine. Poetry interferes and rips through any ordered fabric of the other modes. All of these modes essentially become blurred into a chaos engine. Who is to say that here, even in this interview, the elements of prose and poetic modes are not making their effects known, sending out little tubers? Even when the text attempts to speak in an orderly and programmatic fashion about the cancerous, there is no objective outside or safe port - even that text succumbs, becomes cancerous, multiplies and proliferates itself according to the law it tries to describe or circumscribe.

FS: The collocation, internally you speak of vis-à-vis chaos and composition is an approach of articulation I’ve not yet become acquainted with through another’s vocalized vantage point. This chaotic infrastructure containing ideas, concepts, philosophies of the needed-conveyance is intensely visual. I can obtain an abstract algorithm, the many or singular struggles within, the imaginative one, too, of trying to ascertain an overload of information which needs to become part of the finished brand of writing.

In your answer you’ve inserted work into parenthesis several times. What is work; what is this juxtaposition of creative|physical posits which require subjective intensity, cultural adaptation to the environmental setting of the artist’s current physical and psychological state? What is your intent for any form of art you create, to become defined as, through the viewer’s definitional articulation? Is there, or should there be this type of self-inflicted “pressure” put on the artist, one that disavows artistic intent, and lands in the hands of another’s stated or silent mis or true understanding? I’d like to delve into this, this subject of, what I’ve called “conversational understanding” in that there’s a form of reciprocation involved between the artist and viewer, one where at least a semblance of understanding of artistic intent exists.

KXF: Akrasia, or what seems like it, may actually be this state of acting toward something more creative than in reliance upon something more uniform, regimented, striated, accoutered in the corset of reason. This chaos versus composition situation is a fascinating connection. It is perhaps in Deleuze and Guattari's chapter on "from chaos to the brain" in What is Philosophy? that delivers the most vivid, evocative, and cogent relationship between the writer and thought. Their portrait of the writer would be one of struggle, a struggle against chaos that initiates a process of annihilating cliches. For them, the blank page is not the same kind of hindrance of being creatively blocked, but reformulated as a problem of how to occupy that blank space. The writer must create what Joyce called a "chaosmos" - the function of translating the burbling chaos into a non-cliche expression (cliches being the default of reason). The writer produces variations which, to my mind, are a brand of multiple unities we can assign a term of serialized "chaoddities", each composed of non-linear paths that intersect, break off, reconnect elsewhere, diverge obliquely, and never endanger their properties of being micro-unities of a kind.

This line of physical and creative labour is blurred by a realization of what has been called both immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism. Thinkers of the multitude like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate how even this immaterial labour can succumb to becoming hegemonicized. And then there is the variants of vector capitalism and network capitalism that arranges work in such a way that all workers become relay-engines of information capital, cooperating synergistically toward a goal through a "freedom within a framework" process of individual decision making processes. B still follows A in such a schema, but the small dollop of freedom is that one can make creative detours on the condition that B is still the result. In a forthcoming article, I discuss this curious transformation between subjugation of the worker to work and the newly devised plan of "constructing" subjectivity within the framework of granting limited freedoms at the workplace. Of course, in the end, this subjectivity is still an externally shaped product granted small concessions to make it feel as though it were free.

The culture-work environment need not be solely an adaptation, at least in my view. Yes, we become entrapped in our milieus. I can take a very plain example of myself: I require certain environmental conditions to be met to produce at what I consider my highest productive quality such as an inspiring environment (trees, books, thought-provoking conversations that occur before and after production), the ability to smoke cigarettes, access to the occasional dose of "liquid encouragement", a chaos of paper piles and books, etc. I prefer to work in places where I can control certain aspects of my environment (environmental controls being key to political adeptness) and have no control over others (interruptions, white noise, plenty of external stimulation like music, a strong wind). The tension between what I control and what I surrender to external forces is the gap that can only be closed by the creative process. I create my environment to my needs as much as I adapt to it. The tricky part that I think occurs to many artists is in not using our constant search for an environment in which to work a work in itself, an excuse not to work. There have been times when I weaken to such an excuse: "This area does not meet all my specifications, and so therefore it hinders my production." How many of us go up to the mountains, or to the seaside or an ambient cafe with the intent to produce under "ideal conditions" only to find ourselves so wrapped up in our intention to work that we become idle with the paralysis of actually achieving that state...Or that it fails to measure up to our ideal expectations? And then there's the root problem staring up at us all along: our willingness and resolve to work which is dependent mostly on our psychological orientation at that point in time. Granted the ideal conditions, we may still fail to work if only because our internal apparatus is too jumbled or distracted by other matters. It also depends on which work we decide to do; for me, there are moods that are more conducive to working on a particular project than another. I fall into modes and moods that make academic exposition more thrilling and easier, whereas at other times I feel the need to temporarily abandon a deadline for an essay or a particular novel in favour of matching my current mood with a particular project. I may have every intention in the world to finish an essay, but my mind is not willing to think in those terms at that moment, so I spiral off and write a poem instead, or tackle one type of novel over another. This is precisely why I may have 50 or so projects on the go simultaneously: each project complies with a particular mood and mode of thinking. On some days, we feel like having vodka, on other days we want beer instead, or coffee, or that one type of food would satisfy us better than another. It is the same with these many projects. I find that there is something pragmatic about that given that I can never have an excuse not to produce; should I not be in the mood to work on novel x or essay y, I can work on poem z or novel g or essay t, and so forth. The more projects I have, the better I can tinker with each of them, maximizing upon a particular mood/mode rather than to remain idle. To force myself to work on something I'm just not in the right frame of mind to work on will only result in frustration since my heart just isn't into it at that point in time, therefore anything that would be produced on behalf of that project would be of lower quality.

This question of audience is a keen one that I perhaps do not think too much about. Is it not better to construct rather than seek a particular audience? I think of this only because the readers for my work, for another's work, do not yet exist. I also believe that it is up to us to open up new zones for expression that have not yet been filled rather than to merely situate ourselves in an already established milieu. These established milieus are already zoned out, parceled according to a set of rules that may try to organize and marshal our creative endeavours in ways that unduly distort the "free flight" of our ideas, or slow down our intensities. To be honest, I'm a bit of a mis-fit in my productions, and my rather schizo-type multiplicity of writing modes ensures that I cannot be simplified as being any one type of writer since one mode may seem to contradict another of my modes, etc. And, to be frank yet again, my work is not read very much. I find the audience assumptions of my very person to be a source of frequent frustration and humour, for my occasional writing comportment seems to express the very opposite of my upbringing. Namely, I get labeled pretentious and bourgeois, an academic bully, etc., when the truth is quite different: I am actually enthusiastic about concept creation and fascinated by language. As to the bourgeois label, this is perhaps the most risible given my actual history, although many wouldn't suspect it by the little unrevealing lines of the CV. No, I grew up quite poor, attended quite rough public schools, and any sort of knowledge I may have acquired along the way was a direct result of my willful action. Statistically, it was more likely that I would have ended up with no education, perhaps on the public dole, a petty criminal perhaps, but instead I dared to challenge the statistical assumptions by taking out heavy loans to attend university and make my way through a series of degrees and foster my own drive for knowledge. I cannot recall any such encouragement from anyone to enter university, or to read literature, or appreciate visual art - that was primarily self-derived, but not as a means of changing my "class status", but as a free spirit, a pilgrim among those things that enthralled me. Long periods of starvation, poverty, and a raft of the most depressing jobs populate my past, but I am proud to say that I can work well with my hands if need be, not limiting my potential to be both a physical and knowledge worker. As far as audience is concerned, perhaps this would set me up to have the ability to act as some kind of blue collar romanticist spokesman of a sort, tailoring my work to the disenfranchised, but I do not feel that is my calling for that would only further solidify a tragic binary between types of labour and the class values imputed to them. Besides, what can be more offensive than speaking on behalf of someone else? I speak on behalf of myself, and myself alone, which is all I am entitled to do. I can speak of my own particular conditions and make reference to my own struggles, my own belief set, but to say that I can represent a group of people is reductionist and insulting. Moreover, it would make those people de facto constituents of my own message, and no one has ever asked me to represent them.

As for my intentions to create a work, those are several. I admit to a very strong ambitious streak where I struggle to be heard, but heard on my own terms rather than to serve myself up to a pre-existing milieu. There is also the intangible and inexpressible feeling I get in creating something, the closest I can approximate to a feeling of motherhood, perhaps. Most times, I create freely with no audience in mind and I just follow where my thoughts take me. In recent years, mostly due to external pressures like finance and reputation, I have found that I've been more driven to publish, which has both positive and negative effects on my production. What is missing in this series of possible intentions is that perennial desire to express oneself, which is there, but I let that go unstated since it is perhaps far too universal an aspect attributed to artistry. Art is communication, communication is fraught with risk that we must accept (to be misunderstood, which is always going to be the case when we are dealing with the rule of possible communicative failure). Art is a risk-taking in many ways, ways that exceed not being "understood" - it is a risk with time, a risk of self, a risk of possible failure pending what conditions one sets between what will be considered success and failure. To say that something published is a symbol of success for the work is a lowering of the bar since there are plenty of things unpublished or rejected that are great (or will be great in a future audience's eyes) while what goes published may actually be subpar, repetitive, and cliche. Publication is far too commonly made the litmus of value for artistic work, as is audience appreciation since there are a lot of things that a majority thinks is valuable, but that is ad populam. In the end, perhaps it is the satisfaction of the artist who feels that the risk was high enough that can be the judgement of success. My intention is this risk, but also that I work, that it is a worthwhile thing for me to work on, that it somehow exercises my little talents and forces me to become enriched by the very process of it.

FS: Your fascination with language is completely evident to the individual with an average ability to discern your public/published writings. The commonality, a brand of thesis perhaps, is that your writings dictate an obese spectrum of textured (a delving takes place, a need from the reader to move intellectually beyond mere topographic starting points) texts, anomalous in their innate species, compared to much of what is written in modern poetry. Therefore, if a label must be present, indeed yours is a ‘specialized’ writing, and can posit beyond italicized scrutiny of subjective [mis] or [attempted] complete understanding, though rare, hence descriptive connotations such as “pretentious and bourgeois”, though these pejorative interpretations are or can be misleading into universal wrongness.

I’d like to move now into the subject of publications, in which you have many (your current state is at 602) individualized poems, academic papers, prose, reviews, etcetera, —what is the process of your sending submissions? Journals typically state in some fashion “read what we’ve published to ascertain our tastes”—and therefore, submitters have to investigate to a degree of ‘pleasing’ and morphing into a journal’s aesthetic. What are your thoughts on ‘themed’ journals? Too, what is your reason(s) for submitting work?

KXF: There are two ways in which I sometimes like to characterize what you call my "specialized" writing. One of which is in utilizing language in such a way as to perform a "gavage", inflaming its components to produce new connotations, a derecho of neologisms and translinguistic puns that will challenge the task of reading and comprehension. The other method is akin to forming a topiary in my prose writing - ever since I evicted myself from my previous "arthouse" brand of experimental writing and moved into my new digs in producing a seemingly more straightforward yet still sophisticatedly-intact prose. The topiary function emerges here in such a way where my shearing of the textual shrubs conform to an overall vision for my little textual garden to take, pending the voice of my particular project. No longer do my "character studies" take full priority over plot-based narratives, but rather there is a horticultural merger of the two into a sheared sort of harmony. The topiary of my new mode of novel-writing (novels that have yet to make their public rounds since they are under consideration or are just nearing completion) allows me to view the novel from both vantage points: from the Gestalt of the garden in its totality and in the insertion of flowery details where I am feverishly working to alter the relationships between matter. For example, why default to the flat description of a sodium light shining on a street when one can change the relationship to speak of how it curdles upon a ribbon of crumb-cake road? Or, instead of "the pub's special menus were written in grease pencil", we could convey the same with "the special menu's options slashed into place by a drive-by neon haste." I know this are particularly flaccid examples, but you get the idea. I think that one of the noble tasks of the prose writer is in re-envisioning the verb-noun relationships, especially if the description has usually called for rather inert and stationary descriptions can be re-presented in terms of action, motion, in uncanny methods of describing some particular detail or another. As I "landscape" a story, I am always returning to fine tune those descriptions, those events of dialogue, embroidering or inscribing a kind of arabesque within even the most mundane events that populate a character's life.

As to submissions, I do freely admit that this is carried out sporadically. For me, it takes time away from writing, and so I may get into a burst of submission activity perhaps once a month rather than spread this out on a daily basis. I did not start submitting with any regularity until late 2003 when my publications were well below about 100 or so. My earliest publication was in a Xeroxed college poetry zine in 1995, and I never submitted enough to get over 4 or 5 publications a year. In fact, I published absolutely nothing in 2000, and only ramped this up by 2004 when I moved to London, Ontario when I clocked my record for the year at 31. Last year saw a burst of submission activity when I added another 244 to the CV, and this year is already standing at 149 at latest count. What I have noticed, even though there are many publications on fledgling online journals and blornals, is a sharp spike in commissioned and solicited works. If I had to put a dollar value on the money I made on writing last year, it would be about 3 grand - a seemingly modest sum, but a veritable fortune for an emergent writer. I appreciate being targeted by those who would solicit my work either to give a lecture or write catalogue copy for an upcoming gallery event, for it has the overtones of being "on assignment" with just enough creative latitude. As for themed journals, I can fully understand why they want to corral a certain type of work under some rubric - it truly depends on whether it grants creative interpretation of that theme, or if it is a kind of throttling. Themes are just one of the few methods for a journal to distinguish itself in terms of its content from other journals. I do try to conform to the esprit of the journal's theme, but also believe that I have the freedom to submit a piece that can challenge the thematic rather than become a lost pattern in the thematic wallpaper. There is a compromise to be made between the editorial demands of the journal and the writer's own integrity and creative trajectory, and I would like to think that my accepted pieces are less morphologically coherent with the journal's theme than it is a variation of that theme.

When it comes to my motives for submissions, it usually centers around a desire to share and express my work, but also as a means of increasing my writing opportunities. Having an available body of work - eclectic and varied as it can be - allows a potential solicitor to inspect my "record" and make a decision if I would be a suitable pen to the task. The desire to make my work as public as possible has several benefits, and one of those has been in connecting with like-minded writers in a global community. I am not a believer in "nationalized" literature any more than I can tolerate overly regionalist literature that seems to impose an arbitrary sentimentality and historicism on matters that smack of tourist marketing. I just so happen to live in a country that desperately tries to govern according to a nationalist literature mandate, but it seems mostly to laud mediocre repetitions over experiment. In CanLit, for example, the field is chiefly dominated by a sentimental retrospective of poets that emerged in the 1960s or by the CanLit elite that have erected a kind of fortress against the emergent writers who refuse to play by the unwritten rules.

On the subject of online versus print journals, I have much to say. I'll be teaching a course next winter on the phenomenon of digital publishing, so I don't want to say too much here about that. However, as more writers and even reputable journals of long-standing turn to the virtual for their various reasons (outreach and lower production costs being among them), I am disappointed with some of our national arts-granting bodies who take an elitist and narrow view of online publication, consigning it as being of lesser value than printed matter. Not only is this view archaic, but may portray a kind of inveterate classist mentality, and is not in accord with the facts. An online journal may in fact have a higher readership than a printed journal, for one. Secondly, the buried assumption that there is no editorial quality control over content is fallacious reasoning since it presupposes that all editors of online journals have no discretion, or have less discretion than print journal editors on the basis of lower financial risk. Last time I checked the rules for the Canada Council for the Arts, I believe it still did not regard online publications as credible publications. Of course, my complaint about that particular granting body does not end there, for there is another rule in place that plainly states that applicants cannot be full time students. This was presumably put in place on the grounds that there would be double-dipping; that is, an MFA student would get funding for a project through their university and would recycle the project proposal to get funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. That, of course, is not fair play, but what of the students who are in a degree program that has nothing to do with the arts? What if a student is in biology and happens to maintain an artistic practice on the side? When I posed these answers to a representative of the Canada Council for the Arts, I was told that a full time student would not have the temporal resources available to commit to maintaining a viable artistic practice. The logic of the statement was fairly bent, for I responded to this logic in a way that I have still not received a reply. I said that, according to this argument, a full time worker in any industry or even a stay-at-home parent would not be eligible to apply for a grant, which is certainly not the case, and so it seemed punitive to me for them to exclude students.

FS: You have been very successful vis-à-vis, as a whole, receiving publications within the wide realm of your literary and academic endeavors. Your submission methodology of sending many pieces out at once is an active concept that I’ve become familiar with when talking with other artists. For indeed, the process of submitting, the ascertaining and following various interpretational guidelines gnaws away at the mind’s time spent within the imagination construct of positing writings.

I’d like to now, Kane, finish with a dialogue regarding your academic milieu, one involving a doctorate in Theory and Criticism as well as two degrees in the vast subject of philosophy, as well as your instructorship in various courses such as Propaganda in Print and Visual Culture, A Brief History of Social Networking, and others. The core, here, the magnitude of your educational background is an obvious influence over your artistic endeavors, and without needing to mention, but will, your academic writings. The causational reasons for studying these subjects, how did this begin? Too, what value is found and subsequently designed upon in how you present a college-level course? Can you explain the gift(s) if in existence, regarding the dialogical aspect alive in this type of intellectual setting? And as a finishing query: Beyond your current state of artistic and intellectual undertakings, what would you like to accomplish in the future concerning these activities, —are there segregated paths you’d like to explore?

KXF: Derrida's statement of cross-contamination is useful here, and by that he means that there is no philosophical text that is not itself also literary, and no literary text that is not in some way philosophical. I would like to think that I draw upon the knowledge base in general, across a variety of disciplines and modes of expression, in both research and instruction. I find there to be a rich confluence in the multidisciplinary approach. Of course, I should say something about my educational background, itself a long story that I will try to keep brief here. My childhood passion was for geology and paleontology, and I can recall the long treks I would make along the riverbank (before it was rehabilitated to guard against erosion) and its rich black and brown shales studded with the pyritized nautiloids and the infinite moultings of trilobite pygidiums of the mid-Ordovician. Mostly peudogygites species of trilobites with the rare delight of encountering a full triarthrus specimen. There could have been no better thrill in this solitary childhood of opening leaves of shale and reading their historical contents like books, or overturning a stone to watch the live theatre of centipedes, ants, and wood lice scurrying over their own furrowed trails at different speeds of locomotion. Of course, being among the statistically poor with its equal statistical likelihood of remaining in that economic holding pattern, my access to educational resources did not match my bounding curiousity. Our elementary schools would march us to the cafeteria to write province-wide tests as a means of determining the educational level of children in terms of reaching certain targets. The tests - which involved all the basics of math, English, and so on - were compiled by the Ministry of Education and the results fed into some machine to determine which regions were under-performing. The results would also appear on our private school records which we could only access when we reached the age of majority. I would discover much later that my English language scores in vocabulary and comprehension during grade 2 was operating at a grade 12.3 level, but such a statistical deviation would have been lopped off to obtain a more standard mean. The elementary schools I attended simply did not have the resources to accommodate advanced learning, so I grew incredibly bored and hungry for challenges, engineering self-directed research projects.

Given my childhood predilection for the sciences, which ranged freely across chemistry and entomology as well, it would be considered an irony that I would end up in the imbricated domains of literature and philosophy. I entered university at the age of 21 (after taking a year off to write poetry which was particularly bad in its apish tedium), and registered as a film major. That would not last long as I was seduced by philosophy having already in my last year of high school devoured works by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, or whatever other texts I would purchase for under a dollar at the Salvation Army. To say that I was somewhat rebellious in my undergraduate program would be a bit of an understatement as I challenged some of my professors more staid in their opinions, much to the detriment of my grades and funding opportunities later on. It was in second year that I met the professor who would later be my mentor and supervisor during my Master's degree, Bela Egyed. Bela was a tall, bearded, and highly temperamental scholar of an academic pedigree that is becoming rarer. He was a serious reader, and yet very theatrical in his instruction. Like most undergraduates, I was taken with a rather unserious reading of Nietzsche, seeing Nietzsche as an icon of revolution that fit well with my somewhat naive sense of rebellion. It is the same with those who are enamoured with Marxism, or its caricature, as a means of indulging in thinly veiled rejections of a bourgeois upbringing. Well, I had heard Bela's course on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer was a "must-attend" course, and I asked him if I could take it even without the prerequisites. I think he may have been tickled when I encountered him at first with the ambitious largesse of my statement of wanting to start a revolution in philosophy. His words of advice, which I still heed and convey to others to this day, was "in order to understand Nietzsche, you must read Kant and Hegel, and read them seriously" (insert thick and austere Hungarian accent here). Bela's German Idealism course was by far one of the most rigorous and demanding courses in the program, with the highest fail rate belonging to symbolic logic (which he also taught). I would become aware of a political schism in the department, repeated across most philosophy departments across the continent, between what was called analytic and continental (European) philosophy. I sided with the latter given that it provided for more creative latitude and multidisciplinary approach. During that time I was introduced to, and fell headlong into devouring, the works of Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Kristeva, Bataille, Borges, Celine, Heidegger, Husserl, et al in a mad frenzy of that sharpest of learning curves. I read with desperation and celerity, absorbing all I could and trying to process the connections post facto. My eclectic reading program made me appear as being thoroughly undisciplined, but it was a discipline of a different order.

Of course, I was punished for my views, and I leave out here the grievous anecdotes of my conflicts with the analytic philosophers. I published my first refereed article in fourth year undergrad, which was a bit of a coup motored by my arrogant "why not?" attitude since it was this daring to challenge norms that had allowed me to achieve - how can I say? - statistically improbable things. I returned to do my Master's in philosophy with Bela and discovered that this was where my philosophical education would come to an end, at least institutionally. There simply was no one in my chosen field who could work with me at the doctoral level. Through a colleague (who was also one of Bela's students) at a Deleuze conference, I learned of a very ambitious multidisciplinary program called The Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. That was where I met the scholar and imminent supervisor who would also play a formative role in my academic development, Calin Mihailescu (a move from Hungary to Romania, it would seem). His tireless style and limber aptitude to be as lateral as well as rigorous resulted in sometimes eight hour classes threaded with humour and clever wordplay. The program itself was a wonderfully active refuge for those of us "continentals" who were being rejected or turned out of philosophy departments.

My pedagogical method is perhaps a balance between my two supervisory influences: on one hand a very serious and rigorous instruction matched by an energetic and lateral vertiginousness which culminate into a theatrical performance. Be it that I am doing a reading, giving a course, or doing a public lecture, each of these things I see as performative. Hard concepts I try to thread with the mnemonic device of a clever anecdote or joke, riddled with relevant contemporary examples. My students are my collaborators, and the mix of being intimidating and approachable has made my courses somewhat popular. The sharing of knowledge is an exciting game of discovery, so I never saw the sense in becoming one of those dull authoritarian and soi-distant professors dictating from the same yellowed lecture notes written decades ago. In my view, the students pay for instruction, and to dress up education in the flashy garb of theatricality will have much more resonance.

The courses I have so far designed has kept a keen eye on what is of interest to today's students. Hence, propaganda is a relevant and sexy topic, just as my course on the brief history of social networking provides students with a better understanding of the online social venues they occupy. In future, I will be teaching a course on the digital publishing phenomenon as well as a history of museum culture. All of these are united by certain historical and philosophical interests of mine, funneled into a study of contemporary media. The unit I currently teach for, Media, Information and Technoculture (MIT) under the Faculty of Information Studies (FIMS) is, in my view, a refreshingly dynamic and multidisciplinary program. Since it is a limited enrollment program with a very high competitive rate to get in, I am usually assured of having serious and interested students who will no doubt go on after their degree to prove the high value and versatility of this program. As for other courses I dream of teaching, I'd like to delve more into visual art as well, especially in terms of the abject body, a history of portraiture and its relation to ego (mis)representation, and the blurry conceptual divide between tackiness and taste.

If my teaching and research is a theatrical event, it is also a narrative one. Gaining fresh student insight into various topics is a great reward, and I am almost too commonly surprised by their ideas as they develop these in the many writing assignments I quite insistently require in my courses. I see academics and literary practice as all emerging from the same zone which requires creativity, experiment, and rigour.

As to my future plans, my Great Hope is to develop both my career streams, if not occasionally branch out into visual arts, film, whatever strikes my fancy at the time. I would like to continue doing research, including another idea I've been tooling with on a Deleuzian examination of bipolar disorder (and, hence, courting psychology). I would like to turn my dissertation on oncontology into its own stand-alone academic book, increase my teaching obligations in the hopes of one day (with any luck) securing a tenured full time professorship. In my literary practice, I would like to continue publishing more books in different voices, different "genres" and modes, freely following that wandering path of developmental experimentation that will bring me to a place I-know-not-where. In sum, I would not be comfortable being reduced to one thing, one career. If my approach is wildly multidisciplinary, I would like to continue pursuing this trajectory of the "why not?" in such a way as it will show fidelity to a practice that is always multiple and in accordance to abolishing these specialized impediments of disciplinary barriers. Perhaps it is my yet to be extinguished voice of youth speaking, but I may still actually believe that I can do just about anything with a bit of effort, skill, and dedication. Besides, why be one when one can be many?

Read work by Dr. Kane X. Faucher published in Counterexample Poetics HERE and HERE.

This interview took place electronically between May 21, 2009 and June 14, 2009.