Adrian Veidt: Beat Poet.

I’d like to respond to Marc’s comment on Garret’s ‘Who owns the Watchmen’: there, Marc notes that rather than nodes of

 intelligibility, the welter of cultural signifiers in V for Vendetta makes the central character unintelligible. V “is an overflowing conduit of signification organized around the same traumatic senselessness,” Marc writes. “It is here where the work of resignification runs into the unconscious and the abyss of the other's desire: there is simply something about V which consistently escapes our understanding, something we cannot fathom.”

We can extend Marc’s idea that the heteroglossia (in Garrett’s term) makes V unintelligible with Veidt’s viewing of multiple television screens in Chapter XI. This reflects a Burroughsian abstraction of disparate materials that results in a premonitory truth because it suppresses rational thought: “[William S. Burroughs] suggested re-arranging words & images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through ... An impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally.” “...Meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence.” We sense this is beginning to describe not only Veidt’s careful watching of a bank of TVs, but also the Watchmen itself. Veidt begins to describe a form of cognitive mapping of a totality unavailable to any one perspective: “These reference points established, an emergent worldview becomes gradually discernible amidst the media’s white noise.” This is Veidt’s idiosyncratic position as watchman, but the truly disturbing aspect is not its investment in non-rational ‘analysis,’ but its perfect analogy with early religious interpretation: “The method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards...”. Watchmen generates radical undecidability in the best surrealist tradition since we can see Adrian Veidt as both sensitive cultural analyst, divining hidden significance with ingenious clarity, and psychotic modern-day shaman, seeing just what he desires in a pile of strewn intestines.