A Review of James Knight’s (dis/re)membered (Steel Incisors, 2022) by Dan Caldwell

You wake up and try to get out of bed but you have no limbs. You try to call for help but you have no voice. Something comes to you and starts to speak, the four horsemen’s bard. In its shadowhands  a book. It wont stop. Its voice louder and louder.  

If that’s the sort of thing you go in for, regularly experience, or, who knows, perhaps even enjoy, then James Knight has you sorted. Less like an AI generating nightmares than an AI generating a vortex of existential crises and displaying them à la life’s final flash, (dis/re)membered is a Ballardian grimoire that pairs Cioranesque aphorisms with surreal digital renders expressing the great discomfort of having a body and being in the world.  

It seems that the book is concerned with a mythos of the perpetual fall and all that comes with it. Expelled from Eden with new consciousness and shame, fleshy humanity has not managed to rise from its fall so much as stumble continually as it tries to get up. In trying to rebuild Eden every day  since our banishment we have created a world in which ‘the human body is dimly aware that its constant metamorphoses make it unsuited to its constructed environment’ (7: What Starts as a  Toothache). Knight’s thesis, then, could be read not that we won’t stand up, but that we can’t stand  up. 

It is these stumbles that Knight focusses on in all three sections of the book. And the tetralogy of  trips given the greatest attention are (1) the self-consciousness that comes from being both a  perceiving and perceivable being, (2) the knowledge that everything is in a state of entropy and  decay, (3) alienation from our constructed environment, and (4) how to express not only all of the  above, but the inexpressible.  

Terror Theory looms large throughout the collection, and if I was to recommend anything to read alongside it, it would be Becker’s The Denial of Death. I say this because (dis/re)membered’s strongest entries condense the anxiety that comes from knowing that we are all dying and that  nothing will last. And yet when faced with this, we find that, as the legless figure in entry 6, we  ‘cannot speak’. We cannot speak and yet we can’t shut up (an Irishman with a similar name to Becker touches on this I believe… I can’t go on, I’ll stop right there). We have been bestowed, by  divinity or chance, this understanding, this knowledge of the world, and yet ‘Unable to change its  fatal trajectory, the human body consoles itself with measurements and records.’ (21: The Counting of this Change) Knight’s book reads as a catalogue of these anxieties, of that desire to accumulate  information to make sense of the chaos. Although, as a bandana bedecked man once said,  ‘Information per se is really just a measure of disorder’. Knight himself, and his characters, if they are to be called that, are all painfully aware of this disorder, hence their terror; but of course, they  are in the world and they have to deal with it somehow, so console themselves they do.  

Alongside death anxiety and the endless babbling and cataloguing that arises because of it, there is a  distinct disgust and distrust of the body littered throughout the work. Though of course, as with all  obsessional disgusts and distrusts with one’s physicality, it comes from a dissatisfied veneration of  the corporeal. God is made in man’s image as we are in his. And yet we get none of the ‘perks’. Not that Knight is arguing in favour of immortality or omniscience, he is merely a vector for what arises  from their opposites. Something made clear by the book’s distinct lack of characters with skin or  comfort. Every human throughout the book has either been reduced to its bones, or displays its  muscles like one of Gautier’s anatomical illustrations. His images are peopled with severed beings,  immobile, burning, with nowhere to go but the grave (or the digital void). For 90 pages Knight (Godlike?) plays around with our bodies and the discomfort of knowing their destinies. Expressing  these terrors through language (visual and written) plays into this presented disgust of the body in a  constant state of decay. Since, as with everything else, languages entropy, decay and die, so  expressing these fears with it is as futile as the body’s attempts at survival. Only if they go  unexpressed the pain worsens, it has to come out, and with language’s decay being glacial  compared to the body’s, Knight has picked his battles well, acknowledging that babbling about this  entropy and eventual death is really the best we can do. It is that one grasp at an unachievable  immortality. ‘A human body may attempt to prolong its duration through rough acts of self translation.’ (13: Scaffold of Membranes) 

There are no complaints regarding our lot in Knight’s book, only acknowledgments of it.  Everything is treated with sardonic wit laden with a strong sense of pathos and understanding. Such  as in entry 4 when he describes conception with the aphoristic bite that runs all throughout the  work, putting a magnifying glass on the everyday: ‘The moment of conception is one of routine  anguish, rehearsed in a private theatre’. This ‘private theatre’ he speaks of, it seems to me, is a  microcosm of the millions of private theatres that fill the world as its inhabitants fill their time and  deal with all of the questions and confusion that Knight expresses in (dis/re)membered.

OK so now we’ve got the technical stuff out of the way and you’re 100% going to buy this book  because it is a book worth reading (and this I assure you this is true), it’s time to get into the ‘me me  me’ of it.  

I’m unsure if the visuals do all that much for me to be completely honest. I have a relationship I’m  sure many feel regarding a lot of digital art. A bias from the academy and studying art history  perhaps, or perhaps just a societally ingrained creative elitism. Then, of course, perhaps it’s just a  matter of taste. But as I considered the images and considered my own prejudices, and reflected on  how much they reminded me of what you’d see on a ‘surreal’ or ‘cursed’ meme page, I was faced  with what I felt was their overwhelming ephemerality. Digital art often, I find, lacks what Walter  Benjamin called an aura. That inexpressible quality of witnessing a work of art in the flesh.  Something that wanes as it’s reproduced. Digital art, when looked at through this lens, obviously  suffers greatly, what with its endless reproducibility and lack of tactile ‘existence’. You leave a  gallery and the painting is still there, its physicality remains. Whereas digital art has no physicality  whatsoever, when you close the screen or exit the tab the pixels are gone (remember, I was  reviewing this book from a PDF, not the physical copy that you, dear and forgiving reader, will be  buying after you read this. Not that that changes what I’m saying all that much, since you’re still  looking at a reproduction). And this is a strange phenomenon right? Obviously the pixels don’t  disappear, they remain, you can still access the file, but it’s like when you take a photo on your  phone and never look at it again, or make a note in your notes app and never go back to it. We don’t  really have that same thing with physical (un-reproduced) media for some reason. It may slip from  our mind but it doesn’t disappear into the digital aether. Perhaps this is just me, or perhaps this is  just because the technology is all relatively new and one day comments like this will be a far cry  from future digital natives. But I’m babbling (see, the tangent is relative to the work) so I’ll dig  myself out of the hole. What I’m longwindedly getting at is that what started out for me as a distaste  and critique of the images throughout the book, the everyday nature they had to someone whose  social media is full of similar images, how I felt they were better suited to scrolling by on a screen  than looking at on the page, ended up evolving into the realisation that Knight had actually paired  this style of image with the themes of his book really well. I mean, given that the crux of the work, I  believe, is the terror of knowing we are born to die (fuck it, why not have a Lana reference in here  too), then naturally pairing each aphorism with an image that, to me, conjures ephemerality and  displacement, succinctly visualises the thematic undercurrents of the work.  

This book is worth reading, buy it.