Dear All,
First, thank you, everyone, for sharing your thoughts regarding the ash. To further elaborate on the relation between submission (laying bare to) and offering care, thus perhaps as result receiving unanticipated care in return, I posted below my lecture notes from this past week. I really appreciate the honesty, conviction, and directness that we brought to the conversation—though difficult, though not completely pleasant, this is a real conversation, nothing (or not much) hiding. It means that for you these stakes are real and high, and as such you are thinking/feeling carefully about the urgency of your actions, what they mean Thank you. Remember, the choice to wear this collective scar is your choice; I hope for at least the sake of broadening your experience, you take that leap. If you do, record this experience: notes, notes, notes, as CA Conrad reminds us in his (soma)tics, or: translate this poetic life onto the page so that others may share in–at least–its remains, its coded afterlife, so that readers may re-vivify it.
Apologies for shifting gears suddenly, but I want to say that we really must, this Saturday and the following Thursday, get down to our collaborative work, really hit the ground running, and in addition, meet with one another as collaborators outside of class as much as possible. Seminar conversation was much needed, so no regrets, but now more than ever we need to a) make sure to get the proposal drafts and finals in, and b) work together to realize these performative pieces during end of week 8 and week 9. Things due or to note of:
1) Proposals & Sat: because of a shift in schedules (due to yesterday’s conversation), I’ve pushed back due dates on proposals, but these dates are FINAL. SATURDAY is a precious working day, so PLEASE BE IN CLASS. Sophie and a couple others are due downtown for the Middle East solidarity mural, which I hope we’ll all check out sometime this spring; other than these absences, I’m expecting you in class on Sat.
—DRAFTS DUE SAT: Please send (as attached) drafts in to me (if you haven’t as group already) so I can meet with each group on Saturday. I’ll also meet with you the following week, but this Sat is crucial – the first time we can sit down together and I can hear what you’re doing and you can hear from me my take on your proposals. BRING PRINTED OUT PROPOSALS SAT.
—FINAL PROPOSALS ARE DUE TUES, WEEK 7, BY CLASS-TIME: PLEASE SEND FINAL PROPOSALS TO ME AS ATTACHED WORD FILE, DOUBLE SPACED, 5-8pp (quick turnaround from when draft is due, b/c you’ll have had meeting with me, comments & peer review of the work almost all Sat, and all of this should be tweaking, streamlining, etc., unless we decide otherwise on Sat–unless we realize the draft is simply too problematic to fix and needs re-write, or the piece itself is too murky or vague, etc.)
–POTLUCK! Remember, those of you who volunteered to bring food for Sat, we know who you are…. Seriously, a reminder to bring something for all. I’ll bring plates, etc., etc., and Elizabeth will be there carrying them 2/3 of the way to the room, as usual, but then she’ll stick around for collaborative group meetings as well. Yay!
2) Cara Benson reading/talk, please attend: This Thursday, May 13, 8pm, E1105
3) Web Journal: please post your work to the web journal/blog that Becca set up. Keep the work coming. Some really quite good work already up. Don’t, however, let this stop you from sending me the work too. Remember, by end of quarter you will have received comments from me on a) your proposals, b) your larger individual and collaborative writings (e.g., derive), c) yr performative collaborations, and d) yr write-ups / essays on 1 of yr peer’s collaborative pieces (due at end of quarter).
4) Groups have shifted since last week (slightly). If you are not in a group, that is due to not seeing you in a while, and so you will need to figure out with me asap what your plan is.
Thanks again. Lecture notes below.
Solidarity,
David
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Lecture, Tues Week 6: Sign, Ritual, & Performativity
Here I’m drawing a connection between the personal & cathartic acknowledgment of really feeling one’s woundedness with collective action, responsibility towards others and responsibility towards the coterie, those for whom new interactions based in some heightened relations have resulted. A connection between activism and one’s personal stake in it. Or poetry and one’s stake in making poetry. Or again, the leap from the coterie or bond of the small group with shared & intimate knowledge (knowledge as action = a shared way of relating) as a sort of beginning of a process of radicalization.
What to do with the felt responsibility to activate that special knowledge/sense we derive from this very private experience? Once realized, “new” social relationships / ways of interacting change us: do we have a responsibility to do something with that change? Do you have any responsibility at all? Or is keeping this to ourselves OK? This is the crux of the challenge (our challenge to ourselves), that of whether, now laying bare to one another and receiving that care and submission in return, we can move outward and manifest these interactions as embodied relations, poems embodied. And like poems, we do not anticipate reciprocity (active reading, remaking, conversation that is beyond the surface) but make a leap of faith that some form of reciprocity will come. This is fundamentally difficult, indeed outright scary. Public vulnerability as an aesthetic practice cuts deeply. It unearths in us what the stakes of our relations–our public utterances–are, even if often dormant.
–NONSITE AS A FOUNTAINING OF NOVEL COMMONS—ALL ABOUT NONCATASTROPHIC ORGANIZATION—SHALL WE SAY ‘SALUBRIOUS’ ORGANIZATION, OR FORTUNATE OR BENIFICENT ORGANIZATION, OR ARE WE ALREADY REFERRING TO IT SIMPLY AS AESTHETIC ORGANIZATION (BY CONTRASTING AESTHETICS WITH CATASTROPHE)?
–Kocik, as adding to Nonsite curricula:
Post-fire ritual I come back to Kocik, a vital question he poses to Nonsite Collective:
Anyone can carve out a commune or overlay a community. But a commons? A shared, outdoor resource…how could this be built? Of course the definition of a commons can be extended to include any heritable public good…but, to be precise, a commons is/was a piece of land owned by one person yet open to others for purposes of subsistence. Strolling, for example, though perhaps the exercise of a traditional right, is not a matter of livelihood. Thus a park is not a commons. A wildlife refuge is a commons…but for flora and fauna alone.
Can the body under siege be a commons? Or be a metaphor that helps drive the making of a commons?
I wrote on the blog when setting up the readings for this week:
I take “the abject” to be that which we narrate to be so, and as such, not an essential or ontological quality or characteristic of any particular person or group, but rather, as a term that describes a material fact of how we think of/describe persons. Therefore, I may use this term to describe a space that we can all potentially inhabit, a term that can equally apply to each of us, thus none of us. For our purposes, though, I will talk a little about “abjecting” the self as a way to recognize that the self is also other, that it is not an “it” but rather multiple (self and other are not mutually exclusive), that this causes in many of us (especially those within a cultural majority) a kind of horror or nausea. I’ll lean on this term in talking about how poetry’s work helps facilitate (potentially) such a process of recognition (a step in the politicizing of–even our private/very personal–languages, use of signs, the written, etc).
Today I want to suggest that one building block for any commons (at least in the way Kocik is putting it—that which realizes omitted social services), begins with the body and it’s environment, and makes use of a strategic abjecting, an unearthing of the paradoxical structure of the self as constructed and constricted by the language that are in us but not ours:
From Bergvall: To observe one’s body is to lay siege to it. Even for a limited period of time, devising specific rules to regulate one’s behaviour, demands great effort of concentration as well as a capacity for physical exertion of a kind which can threaten, or indeed collapse, a sense of personal safety. Especially if one has laid no or few provisions. The writer’s body finds itself dismantled, brutalised, shook up, helpless, useless puppet, prey to disorganised ideas. Yet to place one’s body at the centre of writing’s work indicates a methodical and pragmatic interest in forms of awareness which are not primarily, or solely, linguistic, nor it follows, poetic. In this begins the thrill, and the threat.
This also has to do with pain. ‘Some people hurt’. What is being observed is the way pain registers. How it travels and what it does. The effects of pain on awareness and on perception is what drives many of the writings of Henri Michaux, ‘physical pain creates disconcerting perceptions’, and certainly also that of Weiner’s The Fast: ‘I wasn’t sure when it was but the pain began’ (5). To acknowledge pain, physical as well as mental, is to acknowledge what is at the boundaries between speakable and unspeakable. Pain sets the boundaries of the body. Lost in pain as one is lost in one’s body, physical pain escapes language, or is at one of its outer (inner) frontiers.
It’s this last part, regarding the frontiers of language, that I find interesting – maybe enough to exploit what I take to be a problematic understanding of the private and of the body, the body as ENCLOSED and TERMINAL, that which has a specific location. Not sure that it does, or if it does, then we have no real handle on what the body is, let alone how “mine” relates to “yours”
Read from Occultations:
the writing of occultations began as a subtle loss of motor function, which followed a sudden loss of balance. in late 2004, while it was becoming clear that the iraq occupation was going to last a long time (along with the bush regime), questions of domestic surveillance (just how are we being watched and how much?) began to more publicly meld into questions of outsourcing law enforcement and the supression of information (just who is watching us? and how are we watching one another? in what capacity / to what end?). nearly at the same time, while working as a labor organizer and as performing artist, this so-called body began to underline its own becoming, showing itself to be as degenerative (or as on-the-move) as our supposed rights. this head would fall to the side. these arms wouldn’t move as quickly or as accurately as before. what strange processes were at work here? what i could not see or feel was what was really happening, said doctors. and what was really happening was programmed before i was born, they said.
the body as occulted and occulting metaphor, that evidentiary “social becoming,” which both makes perceptible and hides (at once) its histories, identities, and vulnerabilities–this is more than “merely” metaphorical. finding myself increasingly closed off from what, in the early part of a life-long illness, i called “primary” information sources, i.e., being part of a news story, being involved (in the case of labor activism, lgbt rights campaigning, or anti-war activism) rather than getting information online or in the newspaper, and “closed off” from particular activities i had taken as primary to at least one identity, i asked not: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? but: in what ways has this so-called body always been a site of occultation, a deluded witness, where my understanding of agency has been predicated on layers of mediations much thinner than anything here should allow for?
to frame things this way is to think of the body, or poem, as shorn predicament, where its languages, this predicament’s public utterances, are not only muted and constricted and shaped by the catastrophes of late capitalism, but are also in some ways necessarily complicit in the making (narrating) of catastrophe. as locus of where the felt and yet to be felt touch, the body becomes associated with the wound, its constant chatter the reaction to, and evidence of, its violation or deletion, such that the mythos of body-as-enclosure is either reinforced or, at least temporarily, obliterated. to choose to speak or to say under such conditions is supposedly to choose to act in this way instead of that, but choice here becomes part of the predicament: there’s an open question as to whether under constant surveillance, this degraded motor of constant utterance, the becoming subject, can meet Kocik’s ideal of taking its-self as -selves, a desiring multiple, capable moving outside of its (their) usual environs, habit(at)s, poetic quarters, and make new (and usefully new) behaviors.
and yet i take it as imperative that the question of capability, hence one formulation of agency, be temporarily suspended, that we lay bare, as poet rob halpern writes, to the possibilities that suspending a “proprietary relation to one’s own enclosed individuality” might afford us (from “reading the interval, reading the remains” in kari edwards: reflections on the life and work of kari edwards, litmus press / belladonna books). or in any case that we must act under the assumption that we can make new behaviors however confined or vulnerable our situation becomes. when poet and activist allison cobb reads from the poems of guantanamo at public gatherings, i am viscerally reminded that if the tortured prisoner of occupation can assume the responsibility of putting voice to occulted atrocity, then so might any of us act. and so a couple years into the writing, after performing the fire ritual with kythe heller that became transit described just below this, other urgent questions, many of them informed by nonsite collective’s discussions on agency and somatic practices, began to emerge. i mention again one of these: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? where by “good” i mean this body’s (bodies) potential as site(s) of resistance and re-narration. as i got deeper into occultations, i felt a growing sense that what this body-poetic might be good for is a blanket unknown, and should be, cannot help but be: as kocik notes, to conceive of new functions entails active construction of new behaviors.
the way i’m framing things here relates to questions many of us are often after, those regarding the use value of “art” or “poetry,” in what ways our work (our bodies) can be sites of resistance, parts of an array of realizing new social relationships thru radical re-narration. in thinking about the ways our pubic utterances, our aesthetic practices, both hide and make perceptible occulted phenomena (including the utterances/practices themselves), i began tracing out what i called (to myself) body maps and distraction zones. i was, and am still, interested in mapping social catastrophe thru bodily response, doing so thru various language games. in occultations i focused on this shorn predicament in relation to the larger sociopolitical frame as a problem regarding how to imagine mapping a so-called body’s invisible alleyways, its (their, as after all, “the body” should not presuppose locational or temporal unity) hidden, often invisible “marks,” marks left by social forces not benign. i started (and this shows up overtly in “modular arterial cacophony”) with the mody-as-map, and the body-map-as-abstracted constellation of differences, or, an abstracted commons. and where, crucially, a commons becomes tenuously alive, an organism or life-force,thru, at very least, the right to or making space for difference, not “commonality.”
the first move in the age-old game of exclusion is the use of the term “is.” and often when i encounter the term “commons” or especially “community” i hear so much weight being put on “is,” the definition of the commons in fact pivoting around identification rather than something else. so, in seeking to write a necessarily damaged, yet potentially usefully damaged, commons, i wanted to excise such weight of identification as much as i could, and where i would in false consciousness, i didn’t, but rather tried to heighten its use, especially thru the use of pronouns., case, and conflicting the overall gendering of the text.
My writing this obviously is influenced by Weiner here, but unlike Weiner I am interested in duplicating, or making large and overt the very constrictions of language, those structures that deny you access or give you access in normalizing ways that which is truly phenomenal, the ability to feel and transmit that feeling to another in some at least muted or damaged way:
Judith Goldman writes of the political subversion in Weiner’s work that:
Attentive rituals as attentive to the body’s complicity in naming, thus reducing the subject (attention to normative language’s power dynamics, see, for instance, her constant return to playing with the term “obey” or “to obey” in “March” of “CJ”):
I want to suggest, however, that in naming the phenomena by which words were given to her to be seen “clairvoyance,” Weiner alerts us to the peculiar status of her texts without allowing us to medicalize and dismiss them. For her poetry, arriving from elsewhere in ordinary language, can only become deviant if we decide to make it so from the outset. Indeed, Weiner creates not only an enabling, but a strikingly innovative and important position from which to write: she engages the occultations entailed by linguistic abstraction and signals that she is enabled to do so through a banalized version of the occult. However nonvolitional, clairvoyance is a technique for estranging the normalcy that mystifies us. And Weiner’s tactic of reverse discourse, one that appears to trade the blindness of a delegitimized epistemological position for the insight of an idealized and rarefied psychic state, also opens onto paradoxes of reading and writing that her radical, language-centered poetics confronts.
In fact, the reversals of Weiner’s discursive practice take place on a number of levels, constantly spoiling assumptions about and built into language, yet conscious that our escape from these assumptions is comprised and compromised by language itself. In taking the unusual dictation of clairvoyance, Weiner inverts the apostrophe of lyric poetry and externalizes poetic agency, locating it in mediation. Seeing words clairvoyantly illustrates the mediating tension in language that plays out in syntactical structures, disciplinary mechanisms that echo institutional relationships. Further, rather than performing as a privileged, gendered proximity to authentic knowledge or as a vitiation of a gendered position of knowledge, as it has done traditionally, clairvoyance instead functions as a reflexive figure about figures of knowledge. Weiner dissects a grammar of epistemology that presupposes and incorporates differences as differentials in power.
Weiner’s poems go beyond leveling or neutralizing gender (if such leveling can really be possible) to undermine the norms of meaning the code would prescribe, precisely through the strategic deployment of gendered terms.12 “chw Pirates,” for instance, defies the normative gendering of “pirate,” ridicules the vestigial and haphazard quality of gender attribution to objects in English (as with the feminization of ship).
And so even here, in The Fast or in The CJ, the inner frontiers of the sayable and what and where the body is in relation to other bodies (a political and ethical question, not a philosophical problem per se) are deeply politicized—Weiner’s bodily experience within an environment is circumscribed, penned in by the normative structures of everyday English, of naming and gendering:
From inner frontiers to outward construction of the intimate, we have Darragh, whose work doubles as poetic text and agit-prop, turns the inward pain outward by LITERALLY performing said work in the hospital ER ward:
Sci: Let’s rehearse again what we’ll say if we’re ever pulled in to see a doctor.
Fi: [pointing to his head] Doctor, as you can see, I’m losing my hair in clumps.
Sci: [as the doctor] I can see that. Have you been in chemotherapy?
Fi: No, this is from sleeping rough for months near a dump with depleted uranium dust.
Sci: [voice deepens with “professional concern”] There’s no proof depleted uranium is dangerous. You have HPLBB – Homeless Person Lack-of-Bed Bugs. I’ll give you a referral to a shelter.
Fi: But doctor, I’m too sick to keep a bed at a shelter. The random rashes I have make them fear I’ll make everyone else ill. They’ll just refer me back here.
Sci: [pretending to rummage through a drawer of pharmaceutical freebies] Don’t actually take these. They are for “show & tell” for the shelter director. Go and itch no more.