Too often, I think, we forget that the theorists and critics that we read are real people in actuality (then again, we can talk about what it means to be "real", etc etc. I digress). One of my favorite bits of theoretical debate is what is known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate, where on Dutch television, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debated on what is human nature. As far as I understand it, this debate is well-known among scholars of Foucault and Chomsky, but I've never heard it mentioned in class (this one or my undergrad theory course).
This is only a brief excerpt of the full debate and perhaps the only widely available video of the debate.
One thing I find fascinating about this debate is that in the transcript, is that Foucault prefaces his entire argument and statements with "If you don't mind I will answer in French, because my English is so poor that I would be ashamed of answering in English." So his entire dialogue is in French while Chomsky replies in English. Yet, despite this difficulty in language, the two theorists seem to come to a mutual understanding somehow of what they are discussing.
The discourse that follows from this debate is well documented in The New Press' edition of "The Chomsky-Foucault Debate," as Chomsky and Foucault both wrote articles detailing the points on which they disagreed. Their discourse really continued past the televised debate and didn't end until Foucault's death.
I just wished to share this with the rest of my fellow theory classmates, in case you didn't know about it already. It's one of my favorite bits of theoretical discourse.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Cyborg Identity: So Much to Gain, but What is Lost?
From the vantage point of 2011 it's clear that Donna Haraway's ideas have seeped into the general public consciousness. Consider three of the most critically and popularly successful female music acts of 2010/11:
[Of course it begs the question: did Haraway foresee the commodification of the cyborg figure?]
But it's impossible not to ask: is this what Haraway had in mind when she wrote "The Cyborg Manifesto?" Declaring that "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" and that the figure of the cyborg represents is "a creature of the post-gender world," Haraway calls upon the cyborg as a model for feminism (or, more specifically, materialist feminism) in the late 20th century and beyond. Radically deconstructing the traditional Cartesian concept of the unified self, Haraway call the cyborg "a kind of disassembled and reassembled post-modern collective and personal self." What's immediately striking about Haraway's ideas is how freeing they immediately seem, how they seem to offer a great deal of individual agency--we can construct and reconstruct our identities as we best see fit!
And yet… despite agreeing with many of Haraway's ideas about the formation of identity and recognizing that identity is indeed a jumble of heterogeneous parts that each of us bricolage in various configurations as we best see fit, there's something intensely disquieting about Haraway's ideas that I admit I sense much more than I can put into words at this point. For one--and I recognize this is pretty much an inevitability anytime the word "manifesto" is invoked--I can't help but feel a bit skeptical of the extremely optimistic position "The Cyborg Manifesto" takes. Nowhere does Haraway consider for any length of time the potential downsides of taking on this kind of role, the great potential, but also the great risk that breaking down the boundaries and hierarchies between machine/human, animal/human, etc. entails. As she expresses it, it can only lead to positive things.
But even more than that, even though Haraway insists that "coalition" will indeed form via "affinity, not identity," I can't help but wonder if as much as creating new and (hopefully) more meaningful communities, there's also the risk of alienation, of creating identities so specialized and particular that what becomes lost is the potential for community, or more specifically communities large enough to resist and offer respite from the restricting forces of historical and cultural hegemony (something we're witnessing right this moment with the OWS Movement).
This all comes back in the end, I admit, with something I've been wresting with the last few weeks as we've taken on Butler, Gates and others--I've been completely haunted by the Angela Davis's words that concludes Thompson's essay on Anna Deavere Smith and I keep returning to it after everything we read on issues of identity and identity formation. Thinking of gender, race and sexuality as tropes, thinking of identity as something that can be "disassembled and reassembled:" I keep thinking that these theories are all fine and good, but how well do they or can they hold up when the rubber hits the road, when they slide off the page and enter the real world? That's why I responded to Davis's statement that while "we have to find different ways of coming together" (which itself echoes Haraway's sentiments), communities should serve as anchors and "rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move into other communities, to understand and learn" (137). Implicit, of course, is that in the midst of (necessary) exploration, there's always community--whatever that community might be--to return to. And that's just something I just don't see much of in the figure of the cyborg, itself evoking a sense of indestructible, impersonal individuality.
Stop Telling My Words What To Do
One thing I noticed in regards to Cixous' "The Laugh of Medusa" and Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" is the instruction in which the authorial voice poses on the reader. With Cixous, she says "I must write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man." The didactic nature of Cixous piece is apparent, obvious, and the purpose of the theory to take away of "écriture feminine" of "women's writing." But Cixous contradicts herself when she says that both men and women can produce écriture féminine. What is women's writing if not produced by a women? Doesn't the entirety of literary western canon fall into some sort of écriture féminine if you make a strong enough argument for it?
I recall in my undergraduate literary theory course one student had a big problem with the theory of écriture feminine because after a while, all the authors and works of literature we chose to definite as such were all written by men, similar to Cixous's examples in her "Laugh of Medusa." But to that, I argue there's something flawed in the premise that something written by a woman is inherently feminine, or that you can tell it was written by a women. We're essentializing the product of someone's imagination to correlate merely with their genitals. How would something written by a tranwoman or transman be perceived?
Essentialism is something Barbara Smith does as well; in that there is something that all critics need to have and be familiar with if they are to be "Black feminist critics." With Barbara Smith's "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism", she acknowledges the space that black women occupy in being ignored by "all segments of the literary world - whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian - do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist." Smith is responding to a view that the feminist movement represented the perspective of white, middle-class, heterosexual women, and that the civil rights movement was made of black men. But the major thing that struck me with her article the way it seemed to instruct how to be a "black feminist critic" : "Before suggesting how a Black feminist approach might be used to examine a specific work, I will outline some of the principles that I think a Black feminist critic could use" (2229). Despite the suggestive tone Smith frames her principles, I felt that Smith was saying this is how a Black feminist critic should be.
Why must theorists and critics tell women to do anything at all? Isn't this command just as bad as the men and people in power declaring their own will over that of women and female-bodied persons? It reminds me of Luce Irigaray's "This Sex Which is Not One" in which she says that in order for "woman's development" to take place, the "renunciation of heterosexual pleasure" must happen first. She acknowledges this stance as problematic and understands that even is all women were to "expand their autoeroticsms, [preserve] their homosexuality" that it still wouldn't solve all the problems that sexism and that elevation of the phallus seems to brine and that having a "matriarchy" does not solve the problems of a patriarchy. For if there is a matriarchy, there is still something being given elevated status over the other.
I recall in my undergraduate literary theory course one student had a big problem with the theory of écriture feminine because after a while, all the authors and works of literature we chose to definite as such were all written by men, similar to Cixous's examples in her "Laugh of Medusa." But to that, I argue there's something flawed in the premise that something written by a woman is inherently feminine, or that you can tell it was written by a women. We're essentializing the product of someone's imagination to correlate merely with their genitals. How would something written by a tranwoman or transman be perceived?
Essentialism is something Barbara Smith does as well; in that there is something that all critics need to have and be familiar with if they are to be "Black feminist critics." With Barbara Smith's "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism", she acknowledges the space that black women occupy in being ignored by "all segments of the literary world - whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian - do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist." Smith is responding to a view that the feminist movement represented the perspective of white, middle-class, heterosexual women, and that the civil rights movement was made of black men. But the major thing that struck me with her article the way it seemed to instruct how to be a "black feminist critic" : "Before suggesting how a Black feminist approach might be used to examine a specific work, I will outline some of the principles that I think a Black feminist critic could use" (2229). Despite the suggestive tone Smith frames her principles, I felt that Smith was saying this is how a Black feminist critic should be.
Why must theorists and critics tell women to do anything at all? Isn't this command just as bad as the men and people in power declaring their own will over that of women and female-bodied persons? It reminds me of Luce Irigaray's "This Sex Which is Not One" in which she says that in order for "woman's development" to take place, the "renunciation of heterosexual pleasure" must happen first. She acknowledges this stance as problematic and understands that even is all women were to "expand their autoeroticsms, [preserve] their homosexuality" that it still wouldn't solve all the problems that sexism and that elevation of the phallus seems to brine and that having a "matriarchy" does not solve the problems of a patriarchy. For if there is a matriarchy, there is still something being given elevated status over the other.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Exploring the Metaphors of Gilman Via Cixous
Even though more than eighty years marks the distance between Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I found Cixous’ description of the imprisoned/oppressed universal, yet individual, woman in a phallocentric culture (who writes…or, should write!...in order to declare her self), beneficial in articulating the metaphors implied by the wallpaper, the woman writer, and the woman behind the wallpaper in Gilman’s short story. In the story, as the woman writes, from the confinement of her attic room (a former nursery), with bars on the windows, and a gate in front of the door, she begins to see the yellow, irritating wallpaper differently, particularly at night, noticing the peculiarity of the “sub-pattern” from which the “formless sort of figure” (1533), eventually, a shape “like a woman” (1535), emerges. She initially wants to escape from this figure, but, ultimately, she sets her free and, essentially, becomes this woman (1540-1541). “ Cixous’ descriptive phrases, such as the woman who is “led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism” (1943). The woman has difficulty speaking her self—especially to her husband—and can only express her self through her secret writing – an occupation which her husband and his sister strongly disapprove of. Cixous talks about how women writers have been deemed “‘silly,’” and that writing in secret does not promote good writing (1943-44). Additionally, there were several descriptions of woman given by Cixous that specifically resonate with the woman and her alter ego who escapes from the wallpaper. Cixous writes “The little girls and their ‘ill-mannered’ bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes—there’s not end to it—for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock” (1944). Such a description accurately portrays the way we see the woman who writes internally seething in anger towards her husband’s consistent inability to hear her (to recognize her subjectivity/selfhood), matched with the way the woman in the wallpaper shakes the bars of her confinement: the outer layer of the wallpaper (which could arguably be read as phallocentric writing or control, see Gilman p. 1536). Another description given by Cixous of the women wandering “around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing” (1944), also directly links up with Gilman’s story and the yellow line on the wall that circles the room (1538). Again, Cixous counsels woman to “Break out of the circles; don’t remain within the psychoanalytic closure. Take a look around, then cut through!” (1958), which is exactly what happens in Gilman’s story. One last comparison (even though there are so many more), the “within” that Cixous talks about also seems to manifest in the woman in the wallpaper (Cixous 1953). The only thing that I am not sure matches up so well is the end result. Is liberation for the woman in the wallpaper a good thing, or a bad thing by the end of the story? Are the woman who writes and the woman who emerges combined into one, or does something else happen to the woman who writes? Is she punished for writing? For Cixous, writing is, without a doubt, a positive act: “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (1946), but I’m not so sure it’s a positive liberation for Gilman—there seems to be consequences.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Hegemonic Incorporation: Is There Ever a Way Out?
In the essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" Raymond Williams takes up the much misinterpreted Marxist idea of determinism and the effects such misunderstandings have in cultural studies. In particular, he makes the distinction about how it is not merely ideology which orients society toward particular practices and beliefs but a hegemony which "incorporates" people by somehow appearing to be "reciprocally confirming", despite the fact that these beliefs may be totally alienating. At first this idea seemed identical to Althusser's process of the subject's interpellation into the state, but I'm now thinking that it's not because where Althusser claims a person is "hailed" or called out to Williams is saying that hegemony confirms notions of identity that are already in place. I'm not sure what to make of this because I don't really see how this can happen without ideology. I can see an example of this kind of hegemonic confirmation in the ways conservative politicians who back big business and make stringent cuts to funding social welfare institutions are able to secure the votes of blue collar, low income people by manipulating notions of freedom and democracy to appeal a sense of patriotism; essentially they get people to vote against their own interests by subverting those same interests. Obviously, this is a discussion for another day but I feel like it encapsulates this idea of incorporation Williams is talking about
As far as this idea of "alternative" and "oppositional" lifestyle and the essay's ending notion of society being influenced by art and art being influenced by society is concerned I couldn't help but be reminded of Meryl Streep's epic and unassailable "ceruleon sweater" speech from the movie The Devil Wears Prada", and since the Benjamin article deals so muc with film I thought it even more relevant to share it:
Those last few lines of Streep's really illustrate the fluidity of the relationship between life and art and also the sort of trickle-down nature of hegemony which is somehow reciprocal:
"That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of stuff."
Anne Hathaway's character, for all of her opposition to fashion, is both implicated within and perhaps even a prodcut of the system she opposes-- an idea I find as fascinating as it is horrifying.
Race Relations and Gender in American Politics
In light of our recent discussions on race relations and gender and the cringe-worthy sexual harassment debacle surrounding Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, I thought I'd share this NYT opinion piece I came across today. On another note somewhat pertaining to our discussion of gender last week, I think it's been really interesting to listen to the attacks that have been leveled against this fourth woman Sharon Bialich in an attempt to discredit her allegations. Honestly it's been shocking to realize that women in the workplace in 2011 are STILL going to potentially be cross-examined and looked at as suspicious for, say, going to dinner with a male superior. If you have time the piece is short so check it out!
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/the-cain-scrutiny/?ref=opinion
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/the-cain-scrutiny/?ref=opinion
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Power and Identity, Gender and Performance
Judith Butler’s article The psychic life of power was the most interesting from this week’s reading. The article in a way summarized the nature of relationship between us and the external power that in turn shape us and make us “perform” certain aspects of ourselves. Butler mentions, “Power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (Butler, 3). I find this fascinating. As Tauva mentioned in her post, is there nothing natural in individual’s identity? This question goes all the way back to Lacan’s argument that we form our identity in relationship to others. The mirror image has a lot of truth in it. We look into the mirror and find the “other” in that image. And as we live our lives, we continuously find the “others” images to shape ourselves. Even the others’ image seeps into our language. In Korea, many of the middle school and high school demand that they wear uniform. This uniform is a lot like the Japanese uniforms and Korean society has taken this image of their school uniform as our norm. A lot of Japanese language and music had become one with Korean language as well after the colonization. The external power had been in some ways, “internalized.” I agree with Tauva’s question: is there anything natural about identity and how it’s formed? Is identity a form of collage and performance we adapt from the external powers? I was also blown away by the idea of gender as an imitation of representation. Performing drag does not necessarily mean that you are homosexual and I think this was very true. Then in terms of assuming this “other” role, who can really say what is the true nature of someone’s identity or gender or sexuality? I also found it very interesting that even in homosexuality versus heterosexuality that power relationship is played to sustain each other’s identity. Butler argues, “For a gay or lesbian identity position to sustain its appearance as coherent, heterosexuality must remain in that rejected and repudiated place. Paradoxically, its heterosexual remains must be sustained precisely through insisting on the seamless coherence of a specifically gay identity” (Butler, 149). The power and the subject intertwine and form this strange coexistence that creates each other’s existence and help sustain it. I see an endless circle of repetition. But in a way, a very fascinating repetition.
Renee Gladman and New Narrative
So, first some things to know about Gladman. She is firmly GenX, born in the early seventies. From the South, as in The, as in Atlanta. She went to Vassar (philosophy) and went to New College (poetics) (that school that doesn't exist anymore, which is sad) and now teaches at the one MFA program that I wanted to go to but knew I never had a chance (though, she wasn't there yet at the time): Brown. Oh, she is African American. And lesbian. Totally experimental. I know most of this because I already knew it because I am writer-in-love-with her. I know some of it because I have teachers who know her because she is definitely a fellow of the New Narrative school of writing. Specifically, Dodie Bellamy taught her at New School. Camille Roy included her in the anthology of essays about New Narrative, Biting the Error. I have worked with each of these writers a lot since as early as 2003 and 2005 was the first time I read Gladman.
What the hell is New Narrative? Well, that is complicated. But, generally, it is writing in a style related to or actually writing from a particular group of San Francisco prose/poets of the late seventies into the eighties. It is decisively queer in nature, if not literally so. It is always other. It need not be from that time period. The real defining characteristics is narrative attempting to undermine the typical hierarchical, controlling characteristics of narrative. That is, the New Narrative writer sees traditional narrative as of the system and definitionally oppression. It is too Anglo, too male, too straight, too Protestant, too law abiding, too linear, too English speaking, too logical, too "realist", too capitalistic, too consumerist, too detached, etc. All of these poses presents a false and alienating narrative moral stricture upon the reader. New Narrative tries to break that. Bunch of commies, socialists, Buddhist, anarchists (little 'a'), punks, etc. and et al.
How? Well, lots of ways, actually. Such an aesthetic purpose, it turns out, allows for a very wide range of style. Sort of makes sense: let us break up the system; there are many ways to break the system. Strategies can look like an unblinking "I" (Robert Gluck, Eileen Myles) or very personal and yet clinical language to tell almost rumor-like stories (Pamela Lu). It can include a consciousness picking away at itself and its memories and their validity (Kevin Killian, Lydia Davis). It can include the grotesque and the found in the middle of critique and sex (Bellamy). Extreme metaphor and almost inverse language poetry (Carla Harryman). Or, as with Gladman, the use of the sentence to impart mystery in sense of self, time, location, and others. Many more, sure. But you get the idea.
Here are some money quotes from various reviews of three of Gladman's works that I have chosen to concentrate on.
Juice, the first, was published in 2000. It was the first work by her I read. Loosely, it is about a woman, you do eventually get the sense of her gender, ethnicity and sexuality, searching. A lost city. A lost self. There is shifting, movement, myth and losing myths. Lovers and familial. I have always suspected, since before I knew anything about her or that she was from Atlanta, that it was about San Francisco and Atlanta (I grew up a bit there myself).
The Activist was published in 2003 by Krupskaya, on a year when Kevin Killian (Dodie Bellamy's husband) was an editor, so you see how this all is related. Loosely, it is about a journalist reporting on a group of activists. Only nothing is really certain. A bridge may, or may not, have been exploded. The group may or may not have demands. It is a critique of the war mongers of the state, but clearly of activists with no clear point too. And definitely, perhaps most bitingly, of the media use of passivity in attempting to communicate reality. As with Juice, the book is distinctly about a place, though the place is not named specifically and even in the world the maps of the place keep changing and the activists are unable to read where they are at. This parallels some shenanigans with street signs changing in Juice. Definitely, I felt the first time I read it, San Francisco. But then, she had moved. Maybe it is Boston or Providence?
Finally, The Event Factory is the first of a trilogy of sci fi books. I mean this loosely. It is about a linguist who travels to a city, Ravicka. Everyone is leaving. Though there are some coming and going. She has difficulty communicating directly even though she speaks the language. There is some revolutionary stuff again. And she has great difficulty finding the downtown. Everything is slippage.
"Gladman's text is ... made up of beginnings—of appearances—that do not develop in expected hierarchical or chronological ways, but instead open into the disappearances in which the text abounds. While Gladman's appearances and disappearances do not conform to normative codes or systemic modes of thought, such systems are often alluded to..."
"each of the prose poems that comprise Juice has at its center an inexplicable appearance of absence, disappearance, displacement—one that might encompass private as well as public, and internal as well as external, loss—whether of a culture, a community, a relationship, a period of memory, a sense of self."
Rust Morrison, epoetry.
"The Activist is almost too explicit for allegory. It is practically a direct metaphor for current circumstances in the United States, where the book is set. And yet, it explores ideas that go far beyond the current situation and are applicable to any case in which civil liberties are at issue and a government is trying desperately to support its own agenda at the expense of the truth. It peers insightfully into the activities of activists and discovers their strengths and shortcomings."
David Harris, Bookslut
"In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)"
"The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23)."
Paula Koneazy, Taurpaulen Sky
"Unlike the shattering of a planet, Event Factory presents a world simultaneously exploded, particulate, and intact. The novel's narrator, an expert linguist and tourist, deplanes in Ravicka a stranger, and despite weeks or months of interpersonal disjunctions and a vague, nearly-lethal survival exercise, grows no more integrated. She remains other, and though she occupies Ravicka and is known to Ravickians, the world they engender is out of her reach. Its meanings are too fluid to grasp. Even as she waits for understanding, waits for something definitive to happen, the city-state grows and changes."
"Not only does Gladman multiply possibilities by addition, she subtracts in a wildly generative way as well. When the narrator attempts to explain her experience with the agents in Ciut Centali, her escape, and her time with the city's other revolutionaries, she says, "I argued... that it was possible to tell a story without explicit details, that this was even the better approach. How else to get to what is hidden?" Though reminiscent of Ashbery's "The New Spirit"—"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way"—it seems Gladman's narrator is implying a particular detail, a particular event, a particular needle in a particular, and exponentially reproducing, haystack. Where Ashbery abandons the general glut of details in favor of lack's simplicity, Gladman's narrator is leaving out a very specific injury. More importantly, even if there is no such injury, the process of leaving-out so specifically even a nonexistent entity engenders a specific field of absence. By breaking the world of Ravicka, the world of Event Factory, into told and untold, existent and non-existent, Gladman cultivates new and more fertile terrain in the interstices and overlaps."
"Whether or not, "the event of sleeping on the grass,"—a scene of loveless, mechanical sex—is the absent injury, it nevertheless forms the tonal fulcrum of the book. Prior to it, the narrator is a happy tourist, attempting relationships across the chasm of the Ravic tongue's gymnastic physicality. She visits buildings and talks to people, using the language, if somewhat imperfectly, as a tool. Afterwards, all such differences are conflated. People are buildings to be excavated or evacuated. People are parts of speech. She says, "The hotel became a sentence I struggled to complete. My friends there, adverbs. In Ravic, however, there are no adverbs." She becomes solitary, and her friendships dissolve."
Tom DeBeauchamp, The Collagist
"There is a pervasive sense of urgency among Ravickians yet none seem deeply bothered, just lonely and disconnected and constantly in motion."
Michael Davidson, The Open End
What the hell is New Narrative? Well, that is complicated. But, generally, it is writing in a style related to or actually writing from a particular group of San Francisco prose/poets of the late seventies into the eighties. It is decisively queer in nature, if not literally so. It is always other. It need not be from that time period. The real defining characteristics is narrative attempting to undermine the typical hierarchical, controlling characteristics of narrative. That is, the New Narrative writer sees traditional narrative as of the system and definitionally oppression. It is too Anglo, too male, too straight, too Protestant, too law abiding, too linear, too English speaking, too logical, too "realist", too capitalistic, too consumerist, too detached, etc. All of these poses presents a false and alienating narrative moral stricture upon the reader. New Narrative tries to break that. Bunch of commies, socialists, Buddhist, anarchists (little 'a'), punks, etc. and et al.
How? Well, lots of ways, actually. Such an aesthetic purpose, it turns out, allows for a very wide range of style. Sort of makes sense: let us break up the system; there are many ways to break the system. Strategies can look like an unblinking "I" (Robert Gluck, Eileen Myles) or very personal and yet clinical language to tell almost rumor-like stories (Pamela Lu). It can include a consciousness picking away at itself and its memories and their validity (Kevin Killian, Lydia Davis). It can include the grotesque and the found in the middle of critique and sex (Bellamy). Extreme metaphor and almost inverse language poetry (Carla Harryman). Or, as with Gladman, the use of the sentence to impart mystery in sense of self, time, location, and others. Many more, sure. But you get the idea.
Here are some money quotes from various reviews of three of Gladman's works that I have chosen to concentrate on.
Juice, the first, was published in 2000. It was the first work by her I read. Loosely, it is about a woman, you do eventually get the sense of her gender, ethnicity and sexuality, searching. A lost city. A lost self. There is shifting, movement, myth and losing myths. Lovers and familial. I have always suspected, since before I knew anything about her or that she was from Atlanta, that it was about San Francisco and Atlanta (I grew up a bit there myself).
The Activist was published in 2003 by Krupskaya, on a year when Kevin Killian (Dodie Bellamy's husband) was an editor, so you see how this all is related. Loosely, it is about a journalist reporting on a group of activists. Only nothing is really certain. A bridge may, or may not, have been exploded. The group may or may not have demands. It is a critique of the war mongers of the state, but clearly of activists with no clear point too. And definitely, perhaps most bitingly, of the media use of passivity in attempting to communicate reality. As with Juice, the book is distinctly about a place, though the place is not named specifically and even in the world the maps of the place keep changing and the activists are unable to read where they are at. This parallels some shenanigans with street signs changing in Juice. Definitely, I felt the first time I read it, San Francisco. But then, she had moved. Maybe it is Boston or Providence?
Finally, The Event Factory is the first of a trilogy of sci fi books. I mean this loosely. It is about a linguist who travels to a city, Ravicka. Everyone is leaving. Though there are some coming and going. She has difficulty communicating directly even though she speaks the language. There is some revolutionary stuff again. And she has great difficulty finding the downtown. Everything is slippage.
"Gladman's text is ... made up of beginnings—of appearances—that do not develop in expected hierarchical or chronological ways, but instead open into the disappearances in which the text abounds. While Gladman's appearances and disappearances do not conform to normative codes or systemic modes of thought, such systems are often alluded to..."
"each of the prose poems that comprise Juice has at its center an inexplicable appearance of absence, disappearance, displacement—one that might encompass private as well as public, and internal as well as external, loss—whether of a culture, a community, a relationship, a period of memory, a sense of self."
Rust Morrison, epoetry.
"The Activist is almost too explicit for allegory. It is practically a direct metaphor for current circumstances in the United States, where the book is set. And yet, it explores ideas that go far beyond the current situation and are applicable to any case in which civil liberties are at issue and a government is trying desperately to support its own agenda at the expense of the truth. It peers insightfully into the activities of activists and discovers their strengths and shortcomings."
David Harris, Bookslut
"In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)"
"The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23)."
Paula Koneazy, Taurpaulen Sky
"Unlike the shattering of a planet, Event Factory presents a world simultaneously exploded, particulate, and intact. The novel's narrator, an expert linguist and tourist, deplanes in Ravicka a stranger, and despite weeks or months of interpersonal disjunctions and a vague, nearly-lethal survival exercise, grows no more integrated. She remains other, and though she occupies Ravicka and is known to Ravickians, the world they engender is out of her reach. Its meanings are too fluid to grasp. Even as she waits for understanding, waits for something definitive to happen, the city-state grows and changes."
"Not only does Gladman multiply possibilities by addition, she subtracts in a wildly generative way as well. When the narrator attempts to explain her experience with the agents in Ciut Centali, her escape, and her time with the city's other revolutionaries, she says, "I argued... that it was possible to tell a story without explicit details, that this was even the better approach. How else to get to what is hidden?" Though reminiscent of Ashbery's "The New Spirit"—"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way"—it seems Gladman's narrator is implying a particular detail, a particular event, a particular needle in a particular, and exponentially reproducing, haystack. Where Ashbery abandons the general glut of details in favor of lack's simplicity, Gladman's narrator is leaving out a very specific injury. More importantly, even if there is no such injury, the process of leaving-out so specifically even a nonexistent entity engenders a specific field of absence. By breaking the world of Ravicka, the world of Event Factory, into told and untold, existent and non-existent, Gladman cultivates new and more fertile terrain in the interstices and overlaps."
"Whether or not, "the event of sleeping on the grass,"—a scene of loveless, mechanical sex—is the absent injury, it nevertheless forms the tonal fulcrum of the book. Prior to it, the narrator is a happy tourist, attempting relationships across the chasm of the Ravic tongue's gymnastic physicality. She visits buildings and talks to people, using the language, if somewhat imperfectly, as a tool. Afterwards, all such differences are conflated. People are buildings to be excavated or evacuated. People are parts of speech. She says, "The hotel became a sentence I struggled to complete. My friends there, adverbs. In Ravic, however, there are no adverbs." She becomes solitary, and her friendships dissolve."
Tom DeBeauchamp, The Collagist
"There is a pervasive sense of urgency among Ravickians yet none seem deeply bothered, just lonely and disconnected and constantly in motion."
Michael Davidson, The Open End
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Is _____ a Trope?
As I was reading the final section (pp. 2551-2553) of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in our anthology, I was struck by the connection Butler’s idea concerning the performative nature of gender makes with Gates’ conception of the performative nature of race (which we talked about last week), so much so that I was wondering if particular sentences describing or defining gender in Butler’s text could still make sense if one swapped out the word “gender” for the word “race.” Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but is race not written on our bodies by culture/history in the same way that gender is (Butler 2543-2544)? This prompted me to consider whether or not all aspects of identity are performative (and if not all, then most, but then which elements of identity are “natural”?). This growing inquiry, which is not, obviously, fully developed in this blog entry, finds another foothold in Thompson’s article “Is Race a Trope?” (from which my title finds its source), when she explains how the theatrical work of actor Anna Deavere Smith performs diverse characterizations of not only race, but “ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions” (127). Is there nothing natural in individual identity? Are all of the various pieces of identity listed above not inherent in individuals, but indeed constructs of culture/history/society, and thus always changing as time marches on? Is nothing about identity fixed and concrete? Of course, it is all a matter of opinion in regards to which theories one prescribes to, but it is an interesting existentially phenomenological discussion.
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