Too Drunk to Speak:

alcohol as subversive technique.

In 2003, Forced Entertainment put together a cd-rom of "documentary footage, fiction, home-movies, sound, show-clips, anecdote, theory, interviews and text by Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment." Far from presenting simply a scrapbook of the group's history, Imaginary Evidence toys with the conventions of the cd-rom, zeroing in on embodying Forced Entertainment's preoccupations rather than simply explaining them. Exemplary of this is a clip on the cd-rom of Cathy Naden excised from My Eyes Were Like The Stars.

For the index of the cd-rom, Forced Entertainment spills its guts out onto the computer screen in that oh-so-postmodern form, the constellation. Terms, themes, tropes appear in proximity but not necessarily in connection to one another, except for the arrows connecting them, whose authority seems provisional at best. No other, more permanent map seems possible despite the best minds of our generation constructing theories of information management, preparing all of human knowledge to be displayed graphically, coherently, legibly. Forced Entertainment mocks legibility, mocks the possibility of coherent organizational strategies even in forms (the cd-rom) that implicitly yearn for transparent interfaces, legible to the point of disappearance. Ultimately, Forced Entertainment mocks the very idea of coherence, not only in representations of systems of information, but also human coherence: Cathy Naden's coherence.

Under the heading "alcohol," there is a clip of Cathy Naden lying in bed, laughing, trying to talk, giving up, smoking a cigarette, thinking, being drunk. The annotation to this clip explains that it's part of a larger project in which monologues are delivered with some kind of impediment, Cathy's being alcohol. The clip is as much about forgetting, about giving up, and about not caring as it is about delivering any performance at all. In the main constellation screen of the cd-rom, alcohol points to both "the borders of language" and "failure." Here, then, is the embodiment of how alcohol facilitates an entrance into both the borders of language, and failure.

"After all the shows that played with acting drunk, it seems kind of fitting that sooner or later there'd be drunken acting." Cathy isn't pretending that she can't quite manage to deliver the monologue, she really can't. Forced Entertainment, and Tim Etchells, come again and again to the idea of drunkenness, of people being drunk, of the possibility (perhaps) that there is some intrinsic connection between alcohol and now and stories. Cathy, here, embodies this impulse: any story she could possibly be about to tell only matters because she is too drunk to tell it, she is the sad possibility that maybe the only thing anyone can do is get so drunk they can't talk, and then they'll be having a good time.

This clip is more beautiful, more affecting, perhaps more important because of it's lack of voiceover narration. This clip of Cathy being drunk defies the logic of the cd-rom as much as the "index." The point of any cd-rom, implicitly or explicity, is a collection of information to be accessed, interfaced with, by the user. Even within the structure of this cd-rom, Cathy's clip seems to be an anomaly. The other clips purport to give us some insight into Forced Entertainment's history and working process, often accompanied by the guiding voiceovers of Tim Etchells, the company's director. Here is a clip that fails to give us even that. All we see is a woman, lying in bed, laughing. The clip lacks the cues from the other clips that signal "performance": there is no apparent stage, there are no other performers, Cathy isn't even sitting up. As the clip goes on, the possibility that there might be something she's trying to communicate dissipates, and the viewer becomes aware that she's not even trying anymore. The position of drunkenness as an impediment to anything vanishes, because the possibility of the monologue ceases to exist. Drunkenness exists then only for itself, quietly subverting the logic of the archive, the logic, even, of Imaginary Evidence.