This is as disjointed as my mind currently....what follows are some scattered thoughts on issues that arise in Bhaba/ Deleuze & Guattarri, and how they might relate to texts we’ve read thus far in this class, and last semester in Johannes’ workshop. I must also confess that I have been in various states of travel for days without access to these texts and so my observations are based on the impressions they have left.
-“mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate....which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.” This brings to mind Reines’ Cow, particularly the sections after the white space, the “other side of the animal,” wherein the poems are made up of stolen language defining processes of meat processing and definitions of terms relating to such, all language & knowledge unknown to the majority outside of the industry. On the level of tone these poems challenge disciplinary powers as they are made up of technical language but their placement in the book brings them into a discourse against an Empire of the Body emblematic of the meat industry.
-And what if Chelsey Minnis has been colonized by poetry....thinking of the Prefaces (I think 1& 13 are in Gurlesque antho), their beauty lies in their lack of depth. The poems are poems talking about poems with utter disdain (“I have a wonderful quality that is like swan shit on marble”) and they do not attempt to make grand/ luxurious metaphors, but revel in simplistic language and syntax. “mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask.” The preface poems have no identity beyond the poet’s obvious disdain for herself as poet/ poetry. The irony requisite to Bhaba’s mimicry is abundant. Poems luxuriate in their status as poems while simultaneously rebelling against paradigms essential to poetry. This is the double vision of the colonial subject.
-And does Collobert Orbital function for us as English readers as within a major or minor literature? French→Swedish→English. French they say is a minor literature within a major, under the right circumstances. Do the private utterances of Collobert fulfill this? Thinking back to the English translations of her journal, thoughts were disjointed in such a way that power structures inherent in language could be said to be disrupted...i seem to recall a form of unpunctuated sentence fragment, components of which combine to create their own unique machine. And so does Jonson’s creation, where Collobert’s reconstituted, re-retranslated words emerge from each other fluidly and precisely.
-Ronaldo Wilson certainly presents a case of “language robbed of its mythic power.” Derogatory words for different groups of people are bandied about as I remember (fag, nigger, etc) such dehumanization occurs. These two identity categories that Wilson occupies (black & queer) serve as “a continuum of reversible intensities.” The importance of each identity category is constantly in flux such that “there is no longer a subject of the enunciation, nor a subject of the statement.” Identity becomes like D& G’s circuits that make up a collective assemblage. The language is not figurative but “a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.”
- How does one “oppose the oppressed quality of (a) language to its oppressive quality...linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape.”? In their conclusion to chapter 3 D&G are advocating utilization of the polylingualism of ones own language. In thinking about this practically with English, issues of authenticity are swinging through my mind, like how it would be taken if I were to adopt a black Southern vernacular in poetry, along with some Spanglish, Boston accent, Minnesota accent, etc etc etc. Would the use of these Englishes be a colonization on my part, having no authentic racial/ regional etc connection to them? Would the inauthentic use of the language of the minor literature undermine its power?
Like CJ I'm mentally all over the place, and humbly offer a couple of brief and, probably, embarrassingly inarticulate formulations; but here goes--
ReplyDeleteD&G on Kafka:
I read this as mostly a kind of 'exampling' of the theory crafting of the opening 'rhizome' chapter--really, as per my original interpretation, this could be done with any body of work (or any single work) or really anything that is open to a kind of interpretation, and what isn't really? The notions around the rhizome could just as easily be present in an informatics classroom studying the landscape of user interfaces on contemporary cell phones (how they connect / don't / affect each other / don't / infinity). After all it seems what we're talking about here is a machine, into which one might drop Kafka or cell phones or whatever; it doesn't even seem quite so important how the gears turn so long as they are (the mental gears, at that, etc.) In this way I can appreciate CJ pulling in various texts in his post.
Not that the discussion specifically of Kafka isn't interesting, it is--I'm wholly unequipped at the moment to go start quoting and all of that because I think it's all beside the point, but David Foster Wallace had a great short talk-turned-essay about the humorous frustrations of trying to show his students just how funny Kafka so often was--that 'door' in D&G lingo just wasn't there to them, and why it wasn't I think is what would be really interesting in the D&G lens.
D&G on minor literature:
Oh boy.
I’m mostly going to let go the second characteristic of minor literature put forth here, mostly because while I’m not tired of arguing the finer points of notions that lean so heavily on an idea of intrinsic political agency, I continually get the feeling others are and the discussions don’t tend to move interestingly or into productive zones. I do find the idea interesting, and the language especially so here—that to the ‘major literature’ social milieu servers ‘as a mere environment or background’—what an assumption! And it follows according to them, then that minor literature, being ‘cramped’, then ‘forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.’ Forces! This seems ironically oppressive to me, this boxing in when one would think a minor literature interested in either tearing the box to shreds or persuading that it was never there to begin with. We’ve got to assume a cramped space; what a handicap that one might impose from the get-go.
And this gem of course: “The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensible, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” It’s probably enough to say that to my mind this is a very contradictory idea, given that with all this ‘common action’ being constituted it seems strange to also say that in this way the individual concern is magnified when it seems everything being said is championing the collective force alone, not only in potential ignorance to the individual ‘intrigue’ but even perhaps actively disregarding it! This doesn’t even touch on that implication here of what’s being said about the ‘story’ (or lack there of) existing in bland stillness inside of the individuals of the major literature.
The third characteristic left me feeling dumbfounded. There seem to be great lengths being gone to make a turn of everything toward signs of strength and efficacy, but I read it all as one very insulting statement after another. Once again there seems an air of boxing-in, of reduction to the point of losing all intriguing complexity, of blurring the image of all individual pixels—that is, we’re all of us comprising this singular image, never mind if any of you care to have this done to you or not: “What each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement.” This is supposed to be a freeing, powerful idea? Shall we even tread into the conversation about ‘talent’? Don’t worry you of the minor literature, your talent is scarce if it exists at all but that’s okay! We don’t need talent or ‘masters’, that’s for Those Guys—we’ve got The Collective Cause! It seems disingenuous for there not to be an admittance that The Cause probably finds a lot of its anger (if not at least occasionally its entire raison d’être) in the desire to see a promotion out of the ‘minor’ literature onto the Podium of Masters. I’m all for arguing against Masters (or gatekeepers) as long as there isn’t the implication that what we’d really like is to be Masters ourselves (or have the gatekeepers be the ones we prefer).
ReplyDeleteThis danger (or put another way, hypocrisy) seems to get some attention at the very end of the chapter—in response to it (i.e., ‘how many movements have the same single dream of being the status quo’), we get this mantra: “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor.” I can’t blame anyone for this notion because it seems the only scrupulous one available. The problem is that I can’t see it as anything but an impossible position. If one doesn’t seek to grow, what’s the point in all this talk of collective intrigue and strength anyway? If being minor is the preferred position, if you’re already in the minor literature, you don’t have to do anything to stay there. Is the idea to be taken ‘seriously’? This begs the question of how one is taken seriously while remaining genuinely ‘minor’. It also begs the most important question—why care if you’re taken seriously if you believe in what you’re doing? We’re hammered over the head with the idea that only the minor can be ‘revolutionary’, a dangerously simplistic idea that fails to properly give a conversation to the reality (at least the only reality I’ve ever seen or understood to pan out) that anything can be overthrown by whatever coup might be necessary, but it never quite seems to pass that a genuine vacuum is left in place. Revolution always seems just as dependent upon the ‘alternative’ as to whatever it is that needs overthrowing. X Regime for Democracy, Realism for Surrealism, whatever. By rebelling / revolutionizing at all how does any minor position ever make the honest claim that they aren’t proposing themselves as the alternative that once no longer in a position to rebel (read: now major), they aren’t just as justifiably overthrown by whatever the minor realm consists of (or, as it goes, whichever minor sect or movement for whatever myriad reasons gets enough traction for actual coup’ing)? There’s nothing less revolutionary than being an easily-recognized cog in the cycle. ‘But we’ve the real and best ideas!’
So did the last guy.
It seems a bit unfair to give such a brief mention to Minnis, but I feel I’ve rambled long enough now and I want to wrap this up. I just mean to say that this is generally while I feel so often so deeply unsatisfied by Minnis’s ‘debasing’ etc., all the accurate things CJ described very well for us. Not because I don’t think she should, not at all. The Masters are great, sure. We’re also lucky in some ways that they have graves these days, and we’re all quite the better for it to piss on those graves once in a while, or to piss on cap-P Poetry while we’re at it; it’s a good thing to not think too highly of anything at all times—it’d be hard to argue that it would be. But I’m unsatisfied because for one thing, like the above discussion it to me feels a bit sometimes like the debasing is what we now feel so highly off at all times, to continue the logic (i.e., now the shit on the marble is the status quo, which really means it’s just the new marble with a velvet rope around it; reminds of Banksy street art pieces being torn out of the concrete and put up in museums). This is to say it’s unsatisfying because it doesn’t answer the ‘What next, then?’ question; we’ve pissed in the grave—good on us, now what? There’s also, now that I think about it, something interesting in the accusation that Minnis is ‘doing nothing new’ when she does these things. Of course we’re all so cleverly trained to say ‘But NOTHING is new, it’s all been done and said.’ Quite right to say, too. But does the act itself state that it IS indeed new? That is to say, revolutionary is synonymous with ‘new’, with ‘innovative’. I’m not sure there’s a right end to be standing at in this very specific debate, but I wonder if there’s something to it, the doing of something with the implicit draw of the ‘revolutionary’ act if something is already standing on quite well-tread ground. Can we even say something is ‘debasing’ unless we’re ready to defend that it’s ‘new’? Can it be predictable and still be ‘rebelling’? What a question! There are very predictable rebellions (in fact most would seem to be) so perhaps I’ve answered my own question and not so politely re-re-restated my unsatisfied readings of Minnis, but obviously I’m one of many so I’m curious how this resolves for others.
ReplyDeleteK I’m done now. Guess that wasn’t so brief at all. Apologies.
In thinking about the issue of sound/intensities—as well as CJ’s question of what an American minor literature might sound like (in addition to the examples offered by Deleuze and Guattari) (or rather, the possibility for almost—though not quite the case with this example--a kind of polylingualism within one’s own language)—I couldn’t help but think of Abe Smith’s Whim Man Mammon (here I might suggest that Smith’s work presents a “blur” of languages: vernacular, commercial, etc.)--whose title suggests desire passing through lines as well as a kind of deterritorialization. (Here is a link to the text and reading of the title poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20366-- I think most of us have heard him read in one form or another, but just in case; certainly his reading style is affecting my sense of his work). Although not all of Smith’s poems necessarily fit Deleuze and Gauttari’s description of a language “torn from sense, conquering sense, brining about an active neutralization of sense”—here is an excerpt from one that comes close, I think:
ReplyDeleteSPIKE FACE CROW
come out of no
and right hand
sky go down
den den time
time swallow horse
time swallow hollowness
crow carry shell
water to pine
is ten then sixteen waiting for wing torn
slicked out
flanks of river
cut sheet
bit the shell until the snow
o deer
[…]
This poem reads to me as a sequence of “vibrating intensities” (22). The tongue-twisting quality of the poem (and most if not all of the poems in the text) accentuates the deterritorialization (away from the territory of food) of the mouth, tongue, and teeth, that Deleuze and Guattari identify as occurring whenever these body parts “give themselves over to the articulation of sound” (20). Just as with the example Kafka’s text, we’ve moved from “senses” to “sense” to “sound”—each of these becoming deterritorialized, until there is only enough sense to “offer lines of escape” (22). Smith’s language is as urgent and exuberant (just as Deleuze and Guattari tell us in their discussion of Kafka that “metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor,” we have here a “distribution of states” along the range of the word(s)—a vectored kind of metamorphosis enacted through this strangeness (though perhaps, too, this is less a kind of “willed poverty” and more of an overdetermination, ultimately) (19).
In thinking about Bhaba’s mimicry, I wonder if we couldn’t think of Nick Demske’s Nick Demske as a kind of “double articulation” (and threat to disciplinary powers---as I might argue that his work “cross[es] the boundaries of the cultural enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning” (122, 130)). Demske’s name repeats itself in the text as a “figure of speech” and a kind of glitch. Demske’s text occurs in at point of crisis (or in/post-crisis wherein “your combustions lack spontaneity, /Nick Demske”)—perhaps at the “crossroads” where Bhaba sees mimicry as becoming visible “at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed.” Demske’s text is simultaneously coy and vulgar, flexible and rigid (operating with strict form in mind—but swerving and contorting within that form). ( I apologize for jumping ahead—maybe we can return to the relationship(s) between these texts next week?)
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ReplyDeleteThis might be something of an addendum, but in considering this concept of a minor literature as a kind of rhizome, I was reminded of Tom Leonard’s 1969 poem “A Priest Came on at Merkland Street”—subtitled, “A very thoughtful poem, being a canonical penance for sufferers of psychosomatic asthma.” (Here is a link to TL’s reading of the poem: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Leonard.php ).
ReplyDeleteWhile not composed in the Scots dialect (as many of Leonard’s poems are), this poem is rhizomatic—composed/comprised of circuits and intensities (the materiality of language is crucial to the text). The poem unfolds as its speaker rides the train around Glasgow and is compelled by the appearance of a priest to obsess about his own mortality. As the two sit face to face (and without exchanging words), their voices crowd each other (“oh no/ holy buttons/ sad but dignified/ and sitting straight across from me/ a troubled soul”—here they become almost indistinguishable—and I’m reminded of Hawkey’s point in the introduction to Ventrakl about this process of voicing over). The speaker attempts to “drown” the priest with deterritorialized music, which bubbles to the surface of the page as the language repeats and glitches itself with nervous energy (the speaker is made partial machine by the voice of the priest speaking through/to him as he convulses with repetition of penance: “how many times my son/ and a button under your left arm/ how long ago was this/ and a button in the back of your head/ press to bless/ and a tape recorder in between your ears”). Eventually, (material) sounds (“tick tock/ tick tick”) vibrate through the planes (into tics?) and the speaker disappears (“brackets watch him he has a stoop and funny eyes”).
1. when I was younger I knew some yiddish. my paternal grandmother’s family were gypsies, violinists, klezmer-musicians, specifically. my grandmother was born in brooklyn and did not grow up speaking yiddish but she knew yiddish because she just knew it. there’s a tradition in that part of my family – when you turn ten someone hands you a violin and you go into a room and you have an hour or so with it and when you come out you are expected to be able to play it because it’s “in the blood.” our approach to “learning” yiddish is much the same. you’re just supposed to feel it, to know it – I don’t know if this is, as D&G perhaps suggest (25), a function of the nature of the yiddish language, a result of leftover gypsy magic. I “learned” the language at my grandmother’s kitchen table. she would mostly sing and sometimes talk for hours until I could sing and talk with her. I remember one night when I was eight or nine we stayed up until two in the morning singing the song “bei mir bist du shoen” over and over again, in yiddish, sometimes in english, but mostly in yiddish. I remember being really aggravated by the english “translation” of the song because it wasn’t really a translation so much as a futile and ultimately unsucessful attempt to translate the title – essentially, the english version goes something like “bei mir bist du shoen means [insert inadequate english variation on the phrase with the same metrical pattern as the yiddish verse].”
ReplyDelete“In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy.” – Homi Baba (131)
the whole point of the song, in yiddish, is that you just have to sing the song because there’s no other way to express the sentiment. the form of the song, the musicality of it (both the literal music-as-played-by-instruments & the musicality of the language) is the only machine through which the content can be understood.
2. D&G say that writers are machines, experimental machines. machines that just know how to do what they do & cannot help doing them but are constantly compelled to experiment with different ways to do the thing they do. in all three of her books, chelsey minnis poems about poems & poetry but enters the poeming through different points of access. in zirconia she’s a show-off girlprodigy machine that makes sparkly but ultimately worthless things. in bad-bad she’s a drunk&jaded&educated slutty&sweet&decadent machine that makes blowup dolls for hotshot profs to fuck. in poemland she’s a minimanifesto machine. I recently purchased a machine that makes minimuffins like paninis. it’s a similar apparatus. the poems in poemland, like the prefaces, “lack depth” – as cj notes. they mimic themselves & they mimic the language of Poetry. they are ambivalent & cute & diminutive. they are their very own minor language. to read them you just have to know how to read them. to make muffins in my muffinpress you just have to know what a muffin is, essentially. the machine knows how to make the thing. to read poemland one must merely know what a poem is; the poet-machine has made a book-machine that makes poem-machines that know how to speak a language that can be understood if one can “feel it in the heart,” like yiddish.
“A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.” – D&G (16)
ReplyDelete3. music should swell up out of nothingness. sound is a line of escape from nothingness. sound which mimics itself &/or which mimics the sound of an authoritative or “major” language, like Poetry, which is an ubermajor language made of other authoritative languages. sound which is cute-ified, diminished, repetitive, metrical. pure meter, by which I mean meter which exists but is not “formal,” is form taken to such an extreme that it reverberates to a “reversible beyond or before” (D&G, 22) – a moment of becoming itself. it is pure energy. energy which can be weaponized by being made minor, language which can be used as a tool for the revolution, to take down the major language, the authority, the establishment, from the inside.
“use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.” – D&G (26)
even if the cry is indecipherable or maybe better if it is so. if poemland is the cry of being colonized by Poetry, a desperate syntactic shout. if the writer-machine is supposed to make bombs out of phonemes. if Poetry has been so shattered that it’s majorness is only the husk of a shell which lacks the potential to explore. well, then, it’s a battle-hymn, but not of the Republic.
4. “the literary machine is a relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come.” – D&G (18)
make weapons, not words.
I hope you’ll forgive the minor existential crisis. I seem to be caught in a place between the structural and the internal, but seeing nothing between. Jen’s post tipped the scale for me. (Thanks) Reading the poems she posted aloud and hearing the sounds bounce off one another made me think of this arbitrary circular hole…. the mouth or the rhizome. Are the sounds that come in and out of our mouths meaning and the words themselves secondary? I found the D & G article about Kafka illuminating themes that I have been writing about lately.
ReplyDeleteSo much is hinged, so much on the circularity of time, of self, of language, become black spaced tic falling off a tock and swallowed into a throat or an ear canal, changing itself and spit out again. Am I ultimately just the sounds I utter? Or is who I am in dialogue with the posture of my body?
As stated by D & G’s discussion of how Kafka used the body and it’s posturing signals of the self’s interior. So little of what we communicate is through words, but we put so much power into them.
Language has and still is a means of control, of abuse and exploitation. I found the ideas on mimicry extremely empowering. It pulled me out of my own language/identity rhizome just a bit. If indeed mimicry is another thing entirely, in the hands of the oppressed, it can become a revolution. The language of the colonized can be used against the colonizer. I like very much the idea of the Queen’s English being used to topple the Queen. This idea is really going to change the way I teach about language by looking at any significant social movement or revolution and finding the shift in language that in some way sparked action. I’ve always considered language in some way a colonizing weapon, structural oppression. Bhada has given me something new to think on as language once assimilated, away from the original becomes something else entirely. Just as sound once it leaves the mouth or page is also something entirely.
I’d be pleased with myself if I wrote “minor literature.” I want my poems to be “cramped,” I want the individual to be obliterated, I want politics. Hunter S. Thompson said that the impetus of politics is control of one’s environment. I want to control my own surroundings. I don’t want to be surrounded by people who encourage Libyans to revolt against Qaddafi who said, “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution.” In this quote, Qaddafi, the individual, overwrites himself. He is no longer a person with one opinion, one sexuality, one type of favorite candy. Qaddafi has rendered himself multitudinous. He is an assemblage of abstract concepts. What is resistance, liberty, glory, revolution? These concepts are endless. By associating himself with these Qaddafi is discarding “the individual concern” of major literature and hitching himself to a plurality of concepts that are constantly deterrtoralizing and reterritorializing themselves.
ReplyDeleteRevolution belongs to the Americans who disobeyed King George III, but it also belongs to the Nazis who throw out the weak and instable democratic parties in Berlin. If Qaddafi is this – “revolution” – then Qaddafi is a dichotomy. I love dichotomies – competing interests. They’re mysterious and hard to understand. I don’t want to be comprehended. I don’t want my rhetoric to be regulated by therapists. Michele Foucalt would be proud of me, because I refuse to confess. When you tell someone something, you place your rhetoric – the contents of your utterance – in their power, because it’s their interpretation, their response that you want. But who are they? Why should I talk to any humans? Alexander Pope says they’re small and blind. Schopenhauer says they’re a mistake. Why would I want to interact with such blemishes?
With minor literature, one needn’t worry about being understood. It’s out of sight. It defies empirical observation. It’s a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its burrow, a third world, a desert. It’s an empty place, which means anything can happen. An empty cup has a lot more potential than a full cup. A full cup could contain Diet Coke, which grosses me out, while an empty cup could contain Punch Juicy Juice, which brings me joy. The potential of negativity, of nothingness, compels me.
Also, I like Minnis as mimicry. I think it shows a certain power in her poetry that she incorporate the typical traits of a girl – poems about pink things and caramels and puffy sleeves. It demonstrates she not afraid of confrontation. Like Reines, she’s not saying, “Stop these stereotypes.” She’s saying “I’ll show you what these stereotypes can do.” And they’re quite violent. She’s knocking down clothing lines and pull old man beards. The girl is not a stagnant character. She is an other. She may seem to be recapitulating the typical gender characteristics, but really she’s doing something different. It reminds me of Lacan’s idea that Bhabha cited: mimicry is “camouflage.” She’s employing the guiltless diction in order to provide cover for her violent actions. She’s duplicit, she’s deceitful. Usually these concepts are presented as un-admirable. But are they? In a world, where according to Foucault, power and regulation is everywhere, then maybe it’s best to a have a mobile rhetoric so as not to be circumscribed and limited.
Trish: "Am I ultimately just the sounds I utter? Or is who I am in dialogue with the posture of my body?"
ReplyDeleteor maybe are the sounds you utter the products of your body which is a machine that is meant to produce sounds? not dialogue, but a kind of birth, or afterbirth -- sound like the afterbirth of a word?
When I was reading I began thinking about the body as a machine especially with all the machine-machine-machine in the D&G – and how sounds can become indecipherable then they become a sort of noise in the brain – maybe like white noise? But maybe more like the sounds at the beginning of Tool’s Die Eier von Satan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htxZZKv4pMw&feature=related which I think is meant to sound machinic but obviously rhythmic – for some reason I’m also thinking Nine Inch Nails though I can’t place a specific song in my head – I want to say Purest Feeling (even though it’s so pop-y) or Supernaut…and
ReplyDeleteKMFDM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4-bUYU3BH8
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvcP63nQR-w
Ministry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q495K2aEN0&feature=related??
Notice how they’re all industrial bands? And maybe like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum for their performativeness… and how sound becomes noise when it becomes intranslatable or mixed in the brain which then reminded me of Jessica Lewis Luck’s job talk on sound and how the brain translates language v. sound – and what happens when language and sound mix. Maybe these bands have been colonized by machines – or the sounds of machines and thus have become machines so their songs sound like machines (huge generalization but you get the gist, yeah?). Perhaps in order to listen to such music the mind must make a distinction between music and noise and so the listener engages as a machine to enjoy such machinic noises? Perhaps they are nothing beyond machines (which I’m also thinking like huge factory machines- mechanized plants that make cars, etc. also mister rogers picture picture).
Then I was thinking about infections of noise – Bjork in Dancer in the Dark – how the factory she works in creates rhythms which makes music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-15u6J_PmT8&feature=related so the factory becomes a site of unintelligible machinic noise which creates music – I think the opposite of or unlike the infection of industrial music. Instead of the infection causing the music to become a machine and make machine noise – the infection creates rhythmic music. I guess along the same lines – a lot of Bjork sounds machinic too – the music video for All is Full of Love is important here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA&feature=related where the body is robotic and being cared for by machines – creating a lot of tension between the visual of machines and the sound of the song – and between the title and the robotic face of Bjork singing at you – robot-machine sex? Which I guess also goes to mimicry – as the robots in the video – which seem so human – aren’t human at all but mimicking them. Though I’m not quite sure where to go with that yet…
My comment will be up after class. My apologies for my lateness/franticness.
ReplyDeleteI’m sorry for the late posting. Reading these articles stirred up so many things in me, and it took awhile to write about this. I hope I do not sound too self-absorbed in discussing my experience. I’m just excited to see some connections.
ReplyDeleteKafka, injury, animalness
I loved Kafka when I read his stories in Korean and even more in English. But Kafka was one of the writers that half-baked theory in my head ruined for me during undergraduate; his writings were used for psychoanalytic reductive reading in lit classes, his narrative became something people called “conventional”, using <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2112#comic/”> conventional strategy of symbols </a> which you didn’t want to be associated with if you were a serious writer, and my my, Kafka did not write in English so what we were reading was counterfeit anyway. In undergrad I resisted anything that was translated; I had to read things ORIGINALLY written in “pure English” that must carry the essence of English-native speaker’s language, which I needed to learn. I needed to find well-sealed-package of pure language I can imitate without worrying about picking up some pesky tone of translation. I wanted to speak pure English, and in my imagination, with a click I would be speaking English, with another click, I would be speaking in Korean. But it wasn’t as easy as that; language, sound contaminated each other; going back to Korea, people ask me whether I was born in Korea, because my Korean sounds unnatural; and my English is still crippled. Foreign sound injured both master’s language I wanted to obtain.
The idea of “jouissance that defines and negates us” that Lee Edelman talks about in No future would have been helpful; but then, I was obsessed with positive signifier that will let me identify two exclusive things; one, American speaking in standard English, two, Korean speaking in standard Korean. I even wrote a short story about a white girl at frat party in as “standardest” English as possible(pardon me, that was the most “whitest story” I could imagine). I wrote a poem about kimchee because that’s one positive marker that defines “koreanness”. food and body. And this had to be a serious talk. No jokes plz.
That’s what I found satisfying in Theresa Cha’s Dictee, the imperatives in standard English that forbids and mocks gurgling noise immigrants make, their attempt at speech, and her tracing of Korean history, things that happened in her origin, Korea. And for same reason, I disliked the section in French, what does French has to do with Korean/American exclusive dual identities? But now I think that was the part where things were actually happening, the nebulousness that prompts escape from that binary.
I think I was not the only one who felt identity worked in the way of binary; in the high school where there were two African Americans and three Asians total (everyone else, rich rich white kids), you were either this or that. There was a Korean American girl who was in junior high, who literally would run away whenever she saw me. I was a contaminant from her supposed “motherland”, she did not want to speak or engage with me to remain on the realm of standard English, and, well, white, essentially. The face of native terrifies her; the language of immigrant—my stuttering English undermines the master’s language she is trying to master, my supposedly more “correct” Korean than hers puts her into shame. It’s all about shame when it comes to injury, crippledness.
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ReplyDeleteChristianity, encountering “your people”:
ReplyDeleteAnd the funny thing is, that was not the first time I saw this kind of avoidance happening. I went to a church where there were many “study-abroad-students” studying in the US or Canada. They would engage with one another in their secret language, English, proudly, and did not engage with the people who only speak Korean. This is where theater entered the space, the theater of hierarchy, speaker of English, speaker of Korean.
The idea of clean cut is represented in decapitation of Korean statues: there has been rampant damaging of the statues that represent Korean shamanist mythology done by Korean Christians. We have to cleanse ourselves from the past, the korean signifiers, eliminate positive presence that indicates the other side we want to forget about.
Mimicry& costume
It is the shame that threatens both mimicker and master’s voice. When I speak in exaggerated Asian accent, goofing around, it was the most Texan, whitest kid who would get offended. He said I was embarrassing my people; what my people? Hongkong-ese (she refused the term Chinese) girl’s British and Cantonese accented English perplexed many people, its nebulous indeterminacy. Indeterminacy was enemy of the idea of complete transformation which was required for minor speaker. Performance is never enough, or actually is sacrilegious. “Repeat after CNN news that you are watching even if you don’t understand” (actual exercise in one of my English class), “speak only to white american when you get to the U.S. “(actual advice I got as I left Korea; a mother of the other Asian in texan high school requested that I don’t hang out with him so he can learn proper English): it is totally political when the topic is authenticity.
Korean churches forbids the early-morning-prayer-session that resembles shamanistic tradition of morning prayer, but people still speak in tongue in such unseen manner like they are possessed by Shamanist gods. You can’t repel, you can’t be cleansed. The mask of complete (western) christianity breaks at every chance. Like at the end of the Metamorphosis: back of insect-Gregor cracks, and it is the crack that liberates him from the thoughts of “I used to be a human not insect”. The haze of indeterminacy enwraps us all.
I apologize for the massive lateness of this. Everything happened at the same time and so this weekend was sort of a nightmare and I’m only now starting to catch up with everything. Okay, so, on to the post.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much in these readings that, like CJ and Ryan, I feel like I could start from anywhere in these works and get to something worth saying (I feel like starting from multiple places and poking about in the pathways of the rhizomatic bodies of these works is probably the only halfway decent way to approach texts without so many levels and points of interest, really). But I’m finding as I re-read the essays and take note of all the little stars I scrawled in the margins to mark meaningful sections that there is one idea which sticks with me above all others, one short idea in the D&G to which I keep constantly returning, turning and turning the short sentence over in my head: “…since it is actually through voice and through sound and through a style that one becomes an animal” (7).
I want to talk about this idea. This idea fascinates me. Everything I’ve been doing lately revolves around this one statement. It’s like I’ve been writing these ridiculous Lohengrin poems just so I could get my head into the space of statement. I didn’t even know I was writing toward this end, and here they are, throwing the idea out there like it took them no effort to come up with it. Maybe it didn’t. Damn them.
So I’m going to talk about this statement, and the idea of “becoming-animal” and what it means to me and my poetry in this workshop. (This might be violating some unspoken blog rules, because I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to be analyzing the text or drawing some far more distinguished literary connections than ones to our own work, but I also feel like the way I relate to and come to understand the texts we are reading for this course is not always on a perfectly scholarly level. Sometimes I just find something applicable, and that sort of personal connection has had a much more profound impact on my methods for writing and thinking than purely academic responses.) So the rest of this is probably going to be massively self-centered. No need for everyone to read it.
Anyway, the idea of the “becoming-animal, a becoming-inhuman” as a concept in and of itself is as unstable as everything else in D&G and in a way, it defies any attempts to define it. Although our thoughts and our literature and theory can exist in a hole-filled, deterritorialized continuum in which meaning and what-is-not-meaning, signified and signifier (the enemy!), become insignificant and perpetually shifting (machine-like, taking in, changing, producing without ceasing), we do not, physically, live in a world where such is considered the day-to-day reality. In the physical world in which we live, some things (at the very least) must remain stable in order for life to operate. Red at a traffic light must mean stop. Left, right, and the cardinal directions must remain static. A dog cannot be musical; a cockroach cannot be a man. If something changes it must always, always change into something else. There is no in-between. In our day-to day existence we do away as quickly as possible with the moments between transformations; we strive to avoid being without a job, we curse the commute, we loathe the practice necessary to become adept in any given field. A book is only conquered when it has been finished. A snake in the process of shedding its skin is horrifying; a caterpillar inside its cocoon ignites a primal fear, no matter how much the viewer like butterflies.
ReplyDeleteWe are a species driven, at least in my opinion, to an end—we want to (we must) finish the tasks set out before us, for the day, the week, the school year, the work year, the span of our lives. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I imagine the reason “What is my purpose in life?” has always existed as a question is because many human beings want a purpose to fulfill as quickly as possible and scratch off the list. The hero always gets a prophecy so he knows everything he has to do before he dies. We live and then we die. All of our movie monsters are immortal because there is, at the heart of it, nothing more terrifying than something with no end, something which is in a constant state and not moving toward a conclusion or a stable stage of existence. Even fairytales which heavily feature transformation are limited in scope—the character will change one time or ten but will always change successfully from one thing into another and back. The man BECAME a beast; the beast then BECAME a man. I could give a thousand more examples, but then this really would become rhizomatic.
What I mean is that, philosophy expounding aside, we’re not built to conceive of or easily exist in a world of “becoming”—we can handle “will become” and “became,” but we cannot manage a world in which things are in-between, neither one solid thing nor another, shapeless or perpetually shifting. For all our theory, we cannot logically approach a world which cannot be defined because all of its objects and subjects are in a state transformation, non-being.
How frightening would a world like that actually be?
When I saw Lohengrin for the first time, I saw at the Viennese Staatsoper, and I was so sick with whooping cough I spent a majority of the performance desperately trying to keep myself from making any noise by fiercely pinching my lips together. It was an avant-garde production using bizarre black-light architecture, huge lego-looking props, and a cast with numerous blind singers, many of whom wore costumes which meant to make them look like birds—but instead made them look monstrously deformed, creatures half way between two different existences, with human mouths appearing from bird feathered throats and fingers hanging out of the ends of wings. At the end of the play, when Gottfried is supposed to have his heartfelt transformation back into a man, a naked, unpainted wooden doll was lowered to the stage via a massive rain drop, and everyone sang joyously as blind Elsa clung to the grotesque, immobile puppet they were pretending was her brother.
ReplyDeleteDear god. It was the stuff of nightmares. The transformation into and out of the swan was never shown, and in the end the transformation seemed incomplete, hanging in the air, the body of the wooden doll even less her brother than the swan might have been and no indication if consciousness had been preserved across these all these transformations or if the transformation would ever finish, ever cease really. The entire production had the terrible, lingering sensation of being completely in-between, heading somewhere but with no real intentions of ever reaching it and with no ability to return to where it came from. This particular production of Lohengrin WAS D&G’s idea of the “becoming in-human,” the process of constant change and motion—not being stuck between two things and in a resting state there but in a machine-like, automaton-like production, changing and changing and changing—and the poetry that I am writing stems out of that both directly and indirectly. The actual production of the opera is one significant level, but beyond that, what I’ve become fascinated with is the idea of “becoming” itself, of existing in this world that D&G put forth where everything is in a state of perpetual motion and transformation, becoming without ever settling into something that can be defined and understood—left and right meaningless, the train a caterpillar and then that something else and then that something else. The heroes don’t know when they will be finished or where they came from the first place or maybe even that they are heroes or will be heroes or won’t. Nothing stable. Nothing safe.
And having gone on about that for much to long, I’ll finish up with, sort of, what I was first interested in originally: this statement about “through voice and through sound…one becomes an animal” (7). This statement is the central focus and idea toward which I have been slowly pushing in my most recent poems and one I hope to expand on in the future: why is the role of Gottfried silent? Why is the one to whom the most bizarre and terrible events of the story take place not given a single, insignificant line? There’s something, of course, very helpless in that, a sign of his inability to act on his own, but more than that, it seems to say something about his humanity (and lack thereof, perhaps). D&G insist that is through sound and style that “one becomes an animal,” changes from one shape into another, from a familiar form into the Other—if it is only through sound that such a transformation can take place, does Wagner’s Gottfried ever transform at all? Does he remain human because he does not deny his human existence, does not decentralize sound from himself as Kafka’s musical dogs or Josephine the mouse? Is his transformation into the other incomplete because the opera refuses to give him voice, and can his transformation back into a man be taken seriously if he does not speak? What would he say if he could? How would D&G perceive the lack of sound here, in terms of their theory?
ReplyDeleteI don’t have answers yet, but I think that dark, theoretical, diffuse and chaotic place is where I want to get my poetry from, and what is driving me right now is the labyrinth of entrances into the hollowed out shape that is this beloved and really terrifying opera.
Treasuring this particular concept of D&G’s forever, I think.