VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS: BONUS ROUND!!!! COMPOSITE BEASTS AND ‘MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC KNOTS’

 

Hello everyone and welcome to a strange wee bonus posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other.

After our conversation last session about the hydra (thanks again Sylvie, for a stellar poem), I went away thinking about our fabulous and impossible animal symbols, starting with the seven-headed hydra-like cobra of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army). Briefly, for those who might not be familiar, the SLA were a hard-left, anti-racist vanguard movement in America during the 1970s. They were committed to direct action and what they saw as revolutionary violence. You might know them best as the force behind the kidnapping (and subsequent radicalisation) of heiress Patty Hearst. If you’d like to know a bit more, the links below will take you to a couple of useful resources, one a brief history of how the movement emerged:

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00782.x

And another, placing it in the context of its time, linking them to the development of other vanguard movements across the world, including the Angry Brigade, here in the UK:

https://my-blackout.com/2018/09/16/the-angry-brigade-communiques-and-documents/

But our interest in the SLA really begins with their use of the seven-headed cobra, and with this opening salvo from their manifesto, the catchily titled ‘Symbionese Liberation Army Declaration of Revolutionary War & the Symbionese Program’:

The name “symbionese” is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body.

 

It’s the idea of ‘a body of dissimilar bodies’ that really struck me. In the context of the SLA this refers to the symbiosis, or bringing together, of various left-wing struggles – feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, etc.– but also to the spontaneous and autonomous functioning of individuals and small groups, working separately, disparately, but towards the same radical and collective ends. Yet the ‘dissimilar bodies’ are also the literal bodies of those involved in the struggle: racialised bodies, gendered bodies, classed bodies, queer bodies, imprisoned bodies, and those bodies marked by the military industrial complex. While the biological figure for political movements is an old one, I’d argue that it in this instance it is performing highly specific work: summoning those bodies abjected by difference, and foregrounding the obtruding presence of those the state in its majesty prefers not to acknowledge, or regards merely as surplus or as waste. The idea of hybrid bodies, especially within the context of black struggle, also gestures to white hysteria surrounding miscegenation, as well as to the idea of queer contagion.

The seven-headed cobra is both abject and spectacular. To the SLA’s establishment enemies it represents a form of threatening feral excess. Not merely a serpent (the most persistently reviled of all literary and symbolic animals), but a mutated and “unnatural” version of the same. And yet, among its members and to those sympathetic to its aims and objectives, the cobra has positive connotations, each head representing one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith). The SLA featured this image on their publications. The image has also been linked to ancient Indian seven-headed nāga, half-human hybrids that inhabit the netherworld – a potent allegory for the revolutionary underground if ever there was one.

 

All of which leads me back to animals, and to what Donna Haraway, writing in When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) calls our ‘becoming with’. Haraway argues that every organism is connected, bound together in what she calls ‘material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another’. Body of dissimilar bodies, right? A connection that is prior to the individual organism because every individual organism is constituted in and through ‘intra-and interaction’. In other words, all organisms are constituted in relation to many others, blurring the lines between an individual and a community of diverse organisms (pp.3-4).

Haraway’s way of thinking has implications for politics and for the way we look at (and write about/ with) animal others. She posits an ‘intra-action’, or an ‘encounter’ between human and nonhuman organisms from which we might learn ‘an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness’ (p.90). The aim of such an ethics is:

The coming into being of something unexpected, something new and free, something outside the rules of function and calculation, something not ruled by the logic of the reproduction of the same (p.223).

 

So far, so fabulous, but my mind was already away off down another impossible animal rabbit hole, pondering first, these guys: alternately the lavender rhino (1974) and “Progress Shark” (2022).

The former became a symbol of gay resistance in 1970s Boston, and in the picture you can see them imagined as a parade float at Boston Pride in 1974. Two Boston artists, Daniel Thaxton and Bernie Toale, created the rhino for a public ad campaign helmed by Gay Media Action-Advertising. Toale explained that the rhino was chosen because “it is a much maligned and misunderstood animal” and that the colour came from the mixture of pink and blue, a symbolic merger of the masculine and feminine. The rhino featured in ads that were meant to encourage the visibility of the LGBTQ community in Boston. There’s an article about the history (and controversy) of our big lavender friend here:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/06/03/lavender-rhino-gay-resistance-boston

The latter, you may already be familiar with. They are, of course, Sydney Museum’s unofficial mascot for Australia’s month-long WorldPride Festival this year: a ten meter model of a great white shark, clad (obvs) in rainbow Lycra. Described as “absurd and wonderful”, the statue, dubbed “Progress Shark” has gathered legions of fans and a good deal of social media notoriety. You can read more about them here:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/feb/17/progress-shark-sydney-worldpride-2023-icon

 

They’re relevant to us because they provide a useful lens for thinking about the ways in which animals are recruited as symbols for human relations and human concerns. In the case of the lavender rhino and “Progress Shark” I actually quite like them because they do gesture towards their own artificiality and highly constructed nature. They don’t pretend to represent the actual animal, and in some ways I think they offer a commentary on the act of representation itself. I don’t know if you can see in the photo, but the sign around the lavender rhino’s neck says: ‘A lavender rhinoceros is not imposerous’ – as in a cute misspelling of ‘impossible’. I think this speaks to the trope of queer ‘emergence’, the idea that queer bodies and communities are impossible under prevailing conditions of neo-liberal homophobia, yet always being born, belonging absolutely to the now, creating themselves a new each moment. The lavender rhino posits a queer futurity in which ‘absurd’ or unlikely bodies and relations might indeed come to the fore, expanding the canon of the natural, and forcing the unhomely home to make room for them. “Progress Shark” is slightly different: the great white is typically represented as predatory and threatening, but its appearance in western language and culture tie it to qualities heterosexual men have traditionally admired, identified with, and sought to emulate (aggression, domination, individualism, etc.). In shifting the scope of that identification to include queer traits and embodiments, “Progress Shark” points to the absurdity of identifying oneself with an animal at all. In their ostentatious Lycra one-piece, “Progress Shark” makes a mockery of our heteronormative projections, using ridicule and joyous campery. So, in a nutshell, I like both these symbols because they provide scope for thinking critically about the ways in which nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of (human) gendered identities.

As Margot Noris writes in the fabulous foundational animal studies text Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985): ‘It seems that nowhere in literature are animals to be allowed to be themselves, to refer to Nature and to their own animality without being pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory (invariably of some aspect of the human)’ (p.17). This is true, but I think there’s still a value in figuring the non (and post) human. Such figures can perhaps point to the tangled nature of everyday life, compelling us toward more generous – what Haraway calls ‘polite’ – relations with animal others. Here’s Haraway again this time in Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (Routledge, 1991): ‘forbidding comparative stories about people and animals would impoverish public discourse... But   not   just   any   story   will   do’ (pp.106-107).  Figures cannot categorically belong to the polarised camps of predator or prey, human, or animal, but instead might be compounds of natures and forms.

It occurs to me that this is a useful moment to bring in some zoopetics: asking us to look beyond the metaphorical, symbolic and allegorical meanings of the literary animal; to see them not as ciphers for the “real” or intended meaning of a text, but as active agents and potential collaborators within a text.

For those who have never encountered it before, the term ‘zoopoetics’ was first coined by our old friend Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham University Press, 2008) and he used it to talk about the pervasive presence of animals in the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka identifies animals as ‘repositories of the forgotten, and an integral part of his writing is the revelation of that which has been forgotten, an operation that is inseparably connected to the notion of animal. Derrida’s conception of zoopoetics requires attentive listening in order to reveal what has been forgotten or repressed. With me so far?

The field of zoopoetics has been increasingly theorised since Derrida, and a really useful thinker here is Aaron M. Moe who, in his 2012 essay ‘Zoopoetics: a look at Cummings, Merwin, & the expanding field of ecocriticism’, he states that it is: ‘best understood as a poetry that revisits, examines, perplexes, provokes, and explores the agency of the nonhuman animal.’ Humans, Moe states, are not the only beings who exhibit agency within their environment. Further, language, for Moe, is no longer a hallmark of human exceptionality.

Animals, according to Moe, communicate not only with signs but also through their embedded capacity to use gestures. In doing so, animals take parts in the process of ‘bodily poiesis.’ If we're truly attentive to the ‘gestures and vocalisations of nonhuman animals’ then the poem can be a kind of ‘multispecies event’, where the presence of the animal has shaped and is inscribed upon the poem, perhaps through the way sound is pattered and carried in the poem, how an animal's movement might be part of the structure of the text, the kinds of ‘words’ an animal might think in.

That’s quite enough of that, but if you wanted some more, here is a link to Moe in all his glory:

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/moe.pdf

You might also want to check out his 2013 book Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lexington Books, 2013).

But for now, our takeaway is that the literary animal is a place where language and the material world; the body and the text, the animal and the human are all entangled. It's a really complex and fraught intersection, and art is never engaged in value-neutral representation of the animal, but involved and enmeshed in metaphor, myth, hierarchy, embodiment, materiality, all in contention, all jostling together.

 

[DRAMATIC PAWS]

 

Okay, one more. Not a fabulous nonnormative animal, but still a pretty marvellous one. Meet Loukanikos, the Greek “riot dog”. Loukanikos “participated” in almost every anti-austerity protest in Greece. He was commonly known for joining protests, barking at police, helping in street battles with the Greek police as well as participating in anarchist rallies and picket lines. When he died, he received a tremendous public out-pouring of grief and sympathy, and his image became symbolic of the anti-austerity movement. It could be suggested, in fact, that grieving the dog became a way to express solidarity, to coalesce around a beloved figure; and to mourn also the unrealised aims of protest, which would include a world more generous, tolerant and fair to human and nonhuman subjects alike.

Can our animal figures enact a solidarity? What about our strange animal amalgams or hybrids? The ‘composite beasts’ of the bestiary? I’ve been thinking about a few of these, in particular, the manticore, who’s image opened this post. Not unlike my favourite resident of the bestiary – the hyena – the manticore was thought to be able to change sex. An occasion for anxiety in and of itself, the idea of “unclean” sexual transformation also functioned as a way to code and abject racialised others. Here’s a quote from The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun (2021):

Eating the flesh of humans, in particular, signalled both monstrosity and inhumanity. […] for instance, a manticore wears a Phrygian hat— often interpreted as a sign of Jewishness— as it devours a severed human leg. […] The scholar Peter Hulme suggests that cannibalism has often been imagined as a category diametrically opposed to humanity, a barbaric other against which human civilization strives. By featuring an allegedly Jewish hybrid beast consuming human flesh, a bestiary could portray a non-Christian figure as a violator of the fundamental taboos that defined humankind (pp.73-74).

This depiction of the manticore had me thinking about other literary and cultural cannibals, particularly the Irish, from as early Strabo, Greek geographer and historian, during the reign of the Roman empire:

Besides some small islands round about Britain, there is also a large island, Ierne, which stretches parallel to Britain on the north, its breadth being greater than its length. Concerning this island I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants are more savage than the Britons, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy eaters, and since, further, they count it an  honourable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them, and openly to have intercourse, not only with the other women, but also with their mothers and sisters; but I am saying this only with the understanding that I have no trustworthy witnesses for it; and yet, as for the matter of man-eating, that is said to be a custom of the Scythians also, and, in cases of necessity forced by sieges, the  Celti, the  Iberians, and several other peoples are said to have practised it. (Strabo 4.5.4)

Through to our favourite bête noire Edmund spencer, and this happy character, Barnaby Rich, an English writer and a soldier who served in Ireland, writing in 1610 in his odious A New Description of Ireland:

the time hath been, when they lived like Barbarians, in woods, in bogs, and in desolate places, without politic law, or civil government, neither embracing religion, law or mutual love. That which is hateful to all the world besides is only beloved and embraced by the Irish, I mean civil wars and domestical dissensions. The wild Scythians, do forbear to be cruel the one against the other. The Cannibals, devourers of men’s Flesh, do learn to be fierce amongst themselves, but the Irish, without all respect, are ever more cruel to their very neighbours. (Liz Curtis, ‘Nothing but the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism’, Information on Ireland, 1984).

The idea of the uncanny cannibal composite (try saying that fast) as both a representational and rhetorical construction that threatens even as it justifies the oppressor’s binary constructions of superior/inferior, strong/weak, intelligent/foolish, male/ female, etc, has been much on my mind, and I’ve been wondering about how to write through these ambiguous polymorphous figures, who seem to embody the mixture of human and animal forms or capacities that Haraway and Moe cite as potentially liberatory.  We’ll put a pin in that for now, and return on Wednesday with Claude Cahun, performativity, creation and destruction, but I’ll leave you with a poetic attempt on a manticore, and the prompt to uncover a composite figure and write through them.

VULGAR ERROS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #8-9: EMBODIMENT

 

Hello everyone and welcome to our eighth posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other.

For the last couple of weeks, we have been thinking about performing the feral on page, stage, and everywhere in between. This week’s IRL session will be a little different, in that the main focus will be on your own writing and the ways in which we might develop that towards a performance, individually and collectively.

With that in mind, I’m going to kick off with a couple of quotes and a list of propositions for discussion, beginning with Antonin Artaud, writing in The Theatre and Its Double (1938):

An idea of the theatre has been lost. And as long as the theatre limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms, it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them. At the point of deterioration which our sensibility has reached it is certain that we need above all a theatre that wakes us up: nerves and heart. (p.84)

And later on:

It is in order to attack the spectator's sensibility on all sides that we advocate a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators. Also, departing from the sphere of analysable passions, we intend to make use of the actor's lyric qualities to manifest external forces, and by this means to cause the whole of nature to re-enter the theatre in its restored form. (p.86)

Full text here:

https://www.mccc.edu/pdf/vpa228/the%20theater%20and%20its%20double%20-%20artaud.pdf

Many of you may be familiar with Artaud, and this notion of the Theatre of Cruelty or the Theatre of the Cruel, but for those of you who are encountering this idea for the first time, it is, briefly, an avant-garde theatre practice originating around the nineteen-thirties, and its intention was to break from traditional “Western” modes of theatre. It’s a mode predicated upon assaulting the senses of the audience. It often incorporates or evokes aspects of ceremonial experience in the form of a communion between actors and audiences; it uses gestures, sounds, non-realist scenery and lighting to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into fresh (ethical) attention. For that reason the Theatre of the Cruel might prove useful for thinking about feral performance, with its incorporation of abject spectacle. I'm especially interested in this idea of 'nature' re-entering the theatre in its restored form, because here's that pesky nature/ culture divide again, with Artaud proposing a form of theatre practice that he claims subverts or disrupts that. What would that look like? Is it tenable? Desirable? Did nature ever meaningfully leave the theatre to begin with?

Some other things to chew over: when we think about “cruelty” in this context, we are not necessarily thinking about sadistic or top-down emotional and spiritual violence, rather those embodiments and affects/effects that break the passive contract between artist and spectator, a sort of unremitting nerve-jangling agitation or provocation. The Theatre of the Cruel calls violence into presence, but often to subject it to interrogation and subversion. And here’s where I want to introduce the idea of burlesque, exaggeration, or comedy as methods through which such an interrogation might be possible. Perhaps by exaggerating situations just enough to distort the trauma of their referential violence, or the impenetrable aura surrounding their status and power. Or because comedy itself is an undervalued/ devalued (feral) form within the cultural hierarchies that ascribe relevance and worth to aesthetic modes. To quote from Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond, writing in ‘Not It, or, The Abject Objection’ in Abjection Incorporated (Duke University, 2020):

Comedy – no matter how graphically violent, offensively crude, or vividly grotesque – has the power to present even the most disturbing content as entirely unserious.

and from Lauren Berlant, writing in her essay 'Comedy Has Issues' (2017) stating that:

[…] comedy’s action produces anxiety: risking transgression, flirting with displeasure, or just confusing things in a way that intensifies and impedes the pleasure.

Here's that essay:

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4471605/mod_resource/content/0/BERLANT_NGAI_Comedy_has_issues.pdf

In other words, as Hennefeld and Sammond note 'comedy is not reducible to an escapist flight from the traumas of brutal reality […] As comedy expands to encompass the anxious and horrible, it signals the abjecting of a tidy poetics of being, of anything ever again being “just a joke.”' (p.7)

For example (on the page) the “Hairy Girl Suite” of poems by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, where beauty regimens are put under the microscope to such an extent as to render the familiar uncanny. Lozada-Oliva describes hair left on pillowcases or strangers getting bikini waxes on the family dining room table in such extreme detail that our ideas about beauty themselves become strange and disgusting to us.

https://www.mccc.edu/pdf/vpa228/the%20theater%20and%20its%20double%20-%20artaud.pdf

Or (on stage/ in performance) we might think about performances incorporating abject fluids, violent slapstick (from the commedia dell’arte to Saturday morning kids’ cartoons), crude bodily humour, particularly when thinking about female or queer corporality.

I might also be worth thinking about how laughter, in its communal form can, as Sara Ahmed notes in Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), have a coercive element that may force bodies into false and constrained senses of affective intimacy. What does it mean for subaltern, feraltern or powerless subjects to be compelling that response in others? Does it depend on who we are performing to or at? How does this destabilise or uncomfortably enmesh the performer within existing power dynamics?

But I also want to think about forms of theatrical and performative confrontation that don’t arise from (nervous) laughter.

I have a link to some stills from the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s 1973 work, ‘Rape Scene’, which should only be viewed if comfortable. Investigate them if and when you choose, but be aware the content is graphic, violent and potentially distressing. I’ll go ahead and briefly describe the work: it’s a performance piece, using the artist’s own body, she turned her apartment into a crime scene, draping her nude body covered in cow’s blood limply over a table in her tiny kitchenette. Mendieta created the work in response to the rape and murder of a fellow University of Iowa student, and to more broadly interrogate both gendered violence and bystander passivity, which she felt was perhaps amplified and recapitulated in art and in artistic representations of women in particular. Although the work was recorded on camera, its initial reception was as a live performance piece, so spectators were encountering Mendieta’s prone, vulnerable, and abjected body in a live setting.

 https://www.cristintierney.com/exhibitions/47/works/artworks-2295-ana-mendieta-untitled-rape-scene-1973-estate-print-2001/

There’s a lot to unpack in this work, not least that sense risk and vulnerability on the part of the artist. One of the things that most forcefully struck me was the discomfort for the artist, what that performance extracts from her, psychically and bodily. If you remember back to our first session on performance, we looked at Phelan's notion of performance as a continuous 'spend'. I'd like to add to this something from our old friend Georges Bataille, in 'The Notion of Expenditure' from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985):

The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice. (p.118) 

This idea feels really central to any consideration of a feral poetics, which is irrational, excessive, exhaustive and exhausting. Remember Joyelle McSweeney of 'necropastoral' fame? Here is the outro from her essay 'Expenditure, Or why I'm going to die trying' from The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2015): 

Which is all to say: I may be writing a maximal, dandified, camp, ill-gendered, millenarian text, for the sentences run on past health to Death, a region in which the most blasphemous rituals take place, and they require an undue attention to style, flair, garments, gestures rather than actions and plot, descriptions only of things that never were, an uncanny transporting voice not tied to any body, around which flesh accrues and decomposes, a text that does not choose life but might acquire it alongside death. (pp.162-163)

Let’s come back to this thought as we develop our own poems, but for now I want to return to Mendieta, and the way in which her art speaks to how tragic female death is often utilised as a narrative motor, a dramatic climax, or as a sublime expression of tragedy within art and literature. I want to place this notion of ‘use’ against feral’s exorbitant expenditure, which I offer is of a completely different order. I think drilling into that difference in discussion is potentially really useful.

DISCUSS!!!

 I also wanted to consider Mendieta’s work more broadly, and the use of her own body, particularly within her ‘Siluetas’ series which she was working on from 1973-1978. I will go ahead and share some of these images, but there’s also plenty more for you to investigate yourself:

https://blogs.uoregon.edu/anamendieta/2015/02/20/siluetas-series-1973-78/

‘Siluetas’ was a long-term project with over 200 silhouettes in all. Mendieta photographed her silhouettes created from and disappearing back into the earth over time, documenting their ephemerality and presence via absence. I think what’s compelling about these pieces is the way she uses this rich, symbolic visual language to enact affinities or non-instrumental relationships between the human and non-human world. There has been some contemporary criticism of her work that centres on Mendieta reinscribing a kind of essentialism, aligning the feminine with the “natural” world, but is that what’s taking place, and do we necessarily see this as problematic? As fuel for thought, I offer this observation from Jane Blocker writing in Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performance, and Exile (Duke University Press, 1999): ‘Mendieta [invoked] the earth precisely because of its antithetical relation with the nation, precisely as a tool to combat its ideologies.’ In other words, “nature” or “earth” emerges as a form of belonging that supersedes and challenges the idea of the “nation” and its narrow political categories.

Something else I’ve been thinking about in relation to Mendieta’s work is how the English language is such a weirdly noun-heavy, binary-producing machine. As Robin Wall Kimmerer notes in Braiding Sweetgrass, in English, ‘you are either a human or a thing’ (Milkweed Editions, 2013), and language very much encourages us to conceptualise the non-human world as exploitable or discardable objects. In verb-centred languages, such as Kimmerer’s native Potawatomi, ‘be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible […] in a world where everything is alive.’ (p.55). I think Mendieta’s practice is germane to the practice of the feral because she is using the performing body to overcome that gulf between self and other and the instrumentalising dichotomy between human and nonhuman. About her practice, and in particular with regard to her sense of being exiled from her Cuban homeland, Mendieta explained:

My exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and nature has been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence. The making of my Silueta in nature keeps (makes) the transition between my homeland and my new home.

I’m thinking about the gaps and silences within our own writing, and how our performing bodies might be used to bridge those gaps, and maybe establish new forms of relation. For example, I’m interested in a performance practice and a theory that turns the idea of transness in an anti-identarian direction, to – as Aren Z. Aizura puts it, writing in the ever-popular Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2013)  – attend to ‘where and how bodies escape or act clandestinely outside those categories — and at moments in which the categories of immigrant, transgender person, man, and woman become incoherent and inconsistent’ (p.135).

Not unconnected to this thought, next week we’re going to be looking at the work and embodiments of surrealist writer, artist and queer resistance fighter Claude Cahun. But I leave you with a prompt, a wee bit from my own writing and research around embodiment, failure, and stupidity, elaborated from last week's notes. 

Prompt first:

Write a poem that in some way embodies the 'Theatre of the Cruel', through use of an undervalued/ devalued form such as comedy, through slapstick, schlock or abject spectacle. OR write a poem where spoken lyric language is undercut by or intersects with non-verbal gesture, sound or image.

And last, this nonsense:

unless. unless we no longer choose to measure “success” on their terms. unless we decide we are done with “success” altogether. unless, like the anecdotal chess playing chicken, we don’t compete with our oppressors, but kick over the pieces, shit on the board, and strut around as if we’ve won. “poundland academics” will jam and mangle, they will spite the inherited notion of status contained within the practice of arts and culture, and they are not interested in the aims of instrumental eloquence or mastery. they are, in fact, feral.

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the chicken is not the target of that joke. you might think she is, but she’s not. she can’t be. she isn’t subject to the logics of the game to begin with. she can’t “win” by shitting and strutting, but she can’t meaningfully “lose” either, because neither of those words, nor the meaning-systems that produced them, are relevant to her experience of the world. the chicken is our hero. she is gleefully indifferent. the loser in that analogy is the petit ahab attempting to prove their mastery over an animal by subjecting her to the limited metrics of human judgement. don’t get excited, but i’ve invoked the chicken for a reason, as an exemplar of the “dumb animal”, where “dumb” is used to equate silence with “stupidity”. of the animal industrial complex’s many casualties, chickens, i think, fare worst. constructed by western culture as “naturally” expendable and forgettable, they are consistently framed as mere utility stock, to the extent that language makes no effort to conceal the animal behind the meat, to spare our ethical blushes by transforming her into an absent referent. no, ‘chicken’ refers both to the living animal and to her flesh. this over-determination of chickens as mere food even while alive contributes to their maltreatment and trivialisation as a species. even within discourses that theorise animal sentience and advocate for nonhuman personhood, chickens function solely as a comparison to those animals (whales, dolphins, chimpanzees) that demonstrate the consciousness and mental ingenuity upon which basis rights ought to be awarded. a related and equally insidious strand of thought suggests that farm animals being ‘bread to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency’ as mere ‘creations of man’ are exempt from the category of the “natural” that affords their wild cousins the smallest morsel of moral consideration (1949). funny, isn’t it? by which i mean screamingly frustrating. that those animal qualities deemed to confer a modicum of ethical considerability are the very qualities with which heterosexual men – as Karen Davis notes – have traditionally identified, admired, and sought to emulate, even as they pit themselves against, subjugate, and destroy those same animals? (1995). the qualities of “stupidity and dependency” on the other hand, have been naturalised as belonging to women, forming the logical basis (and the justification) for their historic mistreatment and oppression.

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 but “stupidity” is far from being an innate characteristic. it is, rather, a construct that society both punishes and naturalizes in women, and denies (or recuperates as charming vulnerability) in straight white men. Halberstam suggests that male stupidity is the goofy grin that masks the will to power; that it masquerades as the fulfilment of feminist critique (clueless male requires omni-competent female badass to educate and civilise him), which in turn conceals the inequality that structures male-female relationships. and yet, stupidity and failure also offer a means of resistance, can be productive of: ‘a certain kind of absence—the absence of memory or the absence of wisdom— [that] leads to a new form of knowing. stupidity conventionally means different things in relation to different subject positions; for example, stupidity in white men can signify new modes of domination, but stupidity in women of all ethnicities inevitably symbolizes their status as, in psychoanalytic terms, “castrated” or impaired. in relation to the theme of productive failure, stupidity and forgetfulness work hand in hand to open up new and different ways of being in relation to time, truth, being, living, and dying. […]’ (2011). what the world calls “stupidity” can, in fact, function as a space of non-rational relation in which the continuous inscription of hierarchy can be fruitfully disrupted. i mean, why would we denigrate impaired function when “functionality” itself is geared towards producing such horrible, life-denying results? the smooth and malignant operation of the late-capitalist death machine. in other words: be more chicken.

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or not. but it is worth interesting ourselves in “stupid” forms of cultural production: with the disavowed and disreputable, with slapstick and schlock, with the queasy, cringeworthy necrotised kitsch of queer style.  with how classed, gendered, and racialised is, for example, our notion of “good” prosody, “good” art. let’s consider the exclamation mark, with all its thrillingly ambiguous expressive effects; an over-the-topness that conveys both volume and intensity. a shout. a slap. it’s tabloidy, unprofessional, a kind of gutter punctuation. it belongs to popular culture, it’s tacky, proletarian, and camp. a typographical hyena that no one knows how to read: a threat? a warning? a joyous whoop? but where in elite literary space is it allowed to live? here’s some snobbery for you: ‘except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.’ from fowler’s modern english usage. or, my absolute favourite: ‘so far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. it is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading “laughter” to a studio audience.’ from Miles Kingston, writing in punch. and seeing as how poetry and comedy have been dragged into this, let’s consider poetry and comedy: undervalued/ devalued (feral) within the cultural hierarchies that ascribe relevance and worth to aesthetic modes. to quote from Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond, comedy in particular – ‘no matter how graphically violent, offensively crude, or vividly grotesque – has the power to present even the most disturbing content as entirely unserious’ (2020). or, to quote from Lauren Berlant ‘comedy’s action produces anxiety: risking transgression, flirting with displeasure, or just confusing things in a way that intensifies and impedes the pleasure.’ in other words, comedy is not reducible to an escapist flight from the traumas of brutal reality, rather ‘as comedy expands to encompass the anxious and horrible, it signals the abjecting of a tidy poetics of being, of anything ever again being “just a joke.”’ (2017). stupidity in its purest form has a weird transformative power, can render the familiar uncanny, can dwell in such extreme detail or approach from such counter-intuitive tangents that our most cherished ideas become strange or disgusting to us. this unsettling shift in perspective is something that both poetry and comedy excel at. both – to quote Andrei Codrescu – ‘sabotage the narratives of Archives in ways that would allow the Archives of Amnesia to pour through into the present.’ (2013). by ‘Archives of Amnesia’ Codrescu signals the ‘history of vanquished’, a history that exists only its erasure, that is written out of the official archives. he considers that a straightforward telling of this history might in itself constitute a recapitulation of the violence inflicted by the initial erasure because of the ‘inevitable anger, horror, and helplessness that follows the restoration.’ instead, Codrescu concerns himself with amnesia, stating that it is ‘more important an art than total recall. amnesia shapes the few remembered or misremembered scenes into whatever you’re going to make. the kind of remembering that interests me is anamnesis, which is an intense flashback. such a flashback is generally devoid of facts because it has room only for feeling’. anamnesis is the involuntary revival of memory provoked by a particular signal – a sound or a word out of place – it is surprising, disorienting; it cannot be mastered, disciplined, or trained to walk at heal. it is not amenable to rational argument, it will not conform to orderly linear narrative habits. it dwells in the distraction, the glitch, the segue, the ramble, the lame-brained misread, the error, the inappropriate guffaw, the awkward silence, the tumbleweed dad joke; in registers of ostentatious self-ridicule, gathering nervous laughter to itself in the form of queer affirmation.

VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #7: SNAKES ON A PLAINT

 

Hello again everyone and welcome to our seventh posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other. This week we’re going to talk a little bit more about feral performativity, attempt to define feraltern “style”, and take a brief look at the complex and disturbing world of medieval snake lore. All of which may sound unrelated, but trust me, there is a connection (shout up when you spot it).

Here is today's talk in video form, for those who can't wade through the blog (or have missed my enormous moony face):

https://youtu.be/a7HV05_grkk

Okay, so last session we talked about some of the ways that the feral or that feralness might be performed on page and stage, and I was thinking about that over the weekend, when I read the following in the brilliant The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life by Anahid Nersessian (University of Chicago Press, 2020), talking about Keats’ use of catachresis:

Now, Keats’s catachreses are inescapably poetic, and no one would recommend them to any kind of far-reaching anticapitalist analysis. As Keats himself so often insists, he begins from the assumption that art is a palliative and not a diagnostic tool. The questions he wants to ask of the world— about pain, about death, about grief and cruelty and distress and waste on an unimaginable scale— are not questions he deems soluble by poems. His purpose seems rather to acclaim life’s capacity to defy its forcible metamorphosis, and to do so by pitting rhetorical misuse against economic abuse […] Catachresis cuts at least three ways. It is a positive dereliction, a winning effort at going against the grain; it is a mistake; and in any case it is a disturbance, even, as some commentators suggest, an act of violence or an offering of injury (pp.96-97)

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/10.7208_9780226701455-005.pdf

I was really struck by that, and by how well it chimes with the notion we are trying to develop of a feral practice. It recalled simultaneously Halberstam’s notion of queer failure or stupidity in The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011) as productive of:

a certain kind of absence—the absence of memory or the absence of wisdom— [that] leads to a new form of knowing. Stupidity conventionally means different things in relation to different subject positions; for example, stupidity in white men can signify new modes of domination, but stupidity in women of all ethnicities inevitably symbolizes their status as, in psychoanalytic terms, “castrated” or impaired. In relation to the theme of productive failure, stupidity and forgetfulness work hand in hand to open up new and different ways of being in relation to time, truth, being, living, and dying. […] Stupidity is as profoundly gendered as knowledge formations in general; thus while unknowing in a man is sometimes rendered as part of masculine charm, unknowing in a woman indicates a lack and a justification of a social order that anyway privileges men (pp.54-55).

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/9780822394358-003.pdf

So “stupidity” is far from being an innate characteristic. It is, rather, a construct that society both punishes and naturalizes in women, and denies (or recuperate as charming vulnerability) in straight white men. Halberstam suggests that male stupidity is the goofy grin that masks the will to power; that it masquerades as the fulfilment of feminist critique (clueless male requires omni-competent female badass to educate and civilise him), which in turn conceals the inequality that structures male-female relationships. But can stupidity and failure also offer a means of resistance? And by embracing feral can we escape our limited destinies as productive workers, model citizens, or ideal consumer subjects? Can we meaningfully reject that statically perfected individual self as our highest form of cultural aspiration, move towards a hyenic grammar of irrational possibility, articulate a radical salvation that escapes the toxic logics of competition and success?

It might also be useful to think back to our session on the necropastoral and negative capability; to feral opening up a place of discomfort and doubt that allows us to sidestep both cynical acceptance and saccharine naivety, to dodge the prescriptive pressures of Instagram optimism, or the despairing resignation to – in Halberstam’s immortal words – the ‘menu or the gift shop’. Here’s my hot-take from the on-going research, which I offer as provocation for general discussion:

what does it mean to embrace feral, to be embraced by feral? – doggy pong, hot breath, rough tongue – are you afraid? face to face with the wealth of her negative affects – the disappointments, the rage, the isolation and anxiety – do you run a mile? or do you see the opportunity to puncture and to interrupt the malign functionality, the manufactured consent of contemporary life? for example: heterosex as the trite condition of limit that produces womanhood. to fail this framework is to be unwoman, animal, thing. feral is the thingness that haunts both her acceptable form, and the acceptable forms of her feminism, organised around accommodation and concession as opposed to rejection, mutation and militant refusal.

All of which might usefully bring us back to poetry, and to Nersessian’s reading of Keats, in all his hyperbolic excess. Her argument is that for Keats inelegance and misuse (of language, syntax and grammar) become a kind of method, and it’s a method predicated on a poetics of failure. That’s really interesting to me because I’ve been wondering to what extent all poetry is a form of failure, and I’ve been thinking about something Aimé Césaire writes in ‘Poésie et Connaissance’ (1945): ‘La connaissance poétique naît dans la grand silence de la connaissance scientifique’ (poetic knowledge is born in the silence of scientific knowledge), which is to say poetry can access ways of knowing otherwise unavailable to instrumental rationality. There’s a specific anticolonial context here, with poetry aligned with the desires, expressions and possibilities of a free humanity, and science as an agent of conquest and control. In this formulation there’s a promise that poetry might wrest or wrestle language away from dominant meaning systems, that it might open up new forms of perception and social relation. What do we think about that? Can a poem achieve this by jamming, by mangling? By failing at the aims of instrumental eloquence and mastery? By spiting the notion of cultural cache or status contained within the practice of arts and culture?

To return to our earlier sessions on representation, perhaps we’re not trying to reconstruct what we see/ hear/ experience/ think in some kind of – to quote Robert Smithson – ‘ideal language’ but to ‘reconstruct one’s inability to see’. Or, is the doing of poetry an endless disruption of any smooth, coherent display of identity?

https://www.artforum.com/print/196907/incidents-of-mirror-travel-in-the-yucatan-36477

We’re leaving that thought there a moment because I want to briefly share something I’ve been working on as an elegant segue from misuse, incompetence, failure and stupidity into snakes and snakiness. This elegant segue begins with a video or two Watch as much or as little as you feel you can stand of these in your own time. The cringe factor is HIGH!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p04t5m5YyuM&t=7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAq639wsjZM&t=316s

Okay, that’s quite enough of that. I made a couple of these wee things with Zak Ferguson, an author, artist and videographer at Sweat Drenched Press, and as you can see there’s quite a lot about it that’s “wrong”. It’s badly framed, aesthetically unappealing, incompetent, amateurish, “cringeworthy”, cobbled, glitchy, silly… But what you may be more surprised to know is that we did that on purpose. The janky materiality of the production is, in fact, an intentional and constitutive part of its feral performance. But why would someone make something that’s deliberately shoddy, and what’s with all the snakes?

So, last question first: snakes have quite a starring role in the collection of poems I’m writing inspired by the Cambridge University Library bestiary, not just because I think they’re fascinating (which they are) but because they are so variously and disproportionately represented. That very compulsion to itemise, catalogue, name and nail down bespeaks a real discomfort. And no wonder, I don’t think there’s any other animal that carries such connotations of deceit, temptation and sin as snakes and serpents. In the bestiary they are aligned with death and bodily corruption, with “unnatural” sexual and reproductive practices, and of course they are explicitly linked to Satan through scripture. The CUL bestiary records and reproduces some incredible snake lore, one of my favourites being from Ovid: ‘the spine rotting, Marrows of humankind do turn themselves into serpents.’ Which speaks not only to a horror of physical decay, but to this idea of original sin: of a corruption that is inborn, ingrained and never fully assuaged in human beings. Another fun snake “fact”: that certain serpents are ‘brought forth in violence’ and ‘bring forth violence […] both parents perish, the male when he copulates, the female when she gives birth.’ This story in particular is one of many used to allegorise the faithless, deceiving nature of women, a misogynist logic in which the CUL bestiary is by no means unique. While there are a few hybrid serpentine women in this twelfth century Latin text I really became fascinated with their representation in a much earlier work, the Liber Monstrorum, which is an eighth century compendium of fantastic beasts. And it’s a book that begins with this surprising opening gambit:

Let each judge for himself the following material, because throughout I shall paint a little picture of a sea-girl or siren, which if it has the head of reason is followed by all kinds of shaggy and scaly tales.

As Frederika Bain notes in ‘The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other’ (2017):

this relatively straightforward description [of the siren] is coupled […] with ambiguous descriptors that associate the siren with both “shaggy and scaly” [hispidae squamosaque] characteristics, as though she were potentially mammalian or reptilian as well as or instead of piscine. In this passage the narrator figures the siren’s biformity as a metaphor for his own work, which he promises will combine reason— that which is clearly visible and comprehensible, like the human half above the water— with the strange and phantasmal—that which mysteriously hides in the deep, like the fish’s tail (pp.17-18).

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/melusine.pdf

As Bain notes, monstrous hybridity is primarily the realm of the female in medieval bestiary texts: there are many more animal–women than animal–men, and:

hybridity is frequently used in the medieval misogynist tradition to figure human women’s negative traits: duplicity, mutability, and the unequal yoking of rationality or control to the lack there-of. […] the lower bodily stratum of women, be they fully human or part animal, is figured as bestial and infernal, at the same time that the upper portion may be reasonable and amenable to virtue. This metaphorizing movement points to a common conception of woman as Other—yet not wholly other. (p.18)

Which leads me to my favourite medieval snake-woman: Melusine/ Mélusine (pictured above). For those of you not familiar with the legend, here’s a brief outline of the tale as popularised during the 14^th and 15^th centuries by the Jean d’Arras’ romance, and elaborated in multiple subsequent traditions:

Melusine is the daughter of the King of Scotland and his fairy wife. In her youth Mélusine entombed her father in a mountain (for ambiguous reasons) leaving her mother both heartbroken and pissed off. She cursed Mélusine, and as a result she was condemned to transform into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.

Mélusine leaves her home and settles by a stream in the woods where, one day, she meets the nobleman Raymondin. Raymondin is distraught because he has just killed his uncle in a hunting accident. She consoles and advises him, and he falls in love with her. When he asks her to marry him, she agrees, making miraculous promises of prosperity and happiness for their family and his kingdom (which she fulfils). Her one stipulation is that he must promise to leave her alone every Saturday, a condition he swears he will abide by.

The couple is married for over ten years during which Mélusine provides Raymondin with land, wealth and power. As well as heirs. Depending on the version of the legend, all or most of the children are deformed in some way, but crucially, are still accepted and loved by their parents. One day, however, Raymondin’s family begins questioning why Melusine must have Saturdays to herself and why she never attends Mass with the rest of the family. Raymondin asks himself if Mélusine is unfaithful to him. He gives into his insecurities, spies on Melusine one Saturday while she is bathing and learns her secret. In a fit of rank ingratitude, he then denounces her as a “false serpent” publicly. His betrayal means there is no hope of her living a normal life again.

So, she flies out the window in the form of a dragon (or, in another version, leaps into a river and swims away) only returning to visit her children. In some versions of the legend her departure brings blight, famine and destruction to the land.

What fascinates me is the ambiguity of the legend is in terms of how we read the figure of Mélusine. Is she a victim? A hero? An evil enchanter? Her story also reminds me a little of the legend of Medusa, who is treated less ambiguously by art and literature, and often emerges across visual representations as either weirdly sexualised (as in Luciano Garbati’s still pukesome cod-feminsist ‘inversion’ of the myth) or as a deformed cautionary grotesque (Caravaggio, Reubens, etc. ad infinitum). Medusa, lest we forget, was a rape victim who was punished (by another female, Minerva) for being raped. Because her rape defiled a holy site, Minerva transformed Medusa’s formerly beautiful hair into a nest of snakes, and any man who looked upon Medusa would be turned to stone. Medusa’s assailant, Neptune, who was Minerva’s uncle and the god of the sea, escaped unharmed (yay, patriarchy!)

What I love about Mélusine is that despite her abjection (and rejection) she maintains a level of autonomy. Her feral snake-like properties – as the CUL bestiary reports ‘always angular and never straight’ – allow her to negotiate the mortal human world and ensure her survival despite her ‘cursed’ condition. Her serpentine form, in fact, is the instrument of her escape after she is denounced and ejected by the kingdom she helped to prosper. Mélusine is, I think, a complex and powerful figure. She is a supernatural founding mother, and her resistance to normative ideologies and forms enables her to both accumulate power and maintain independence. Furthermore, her preservation of agency and influence turns upon her ability to manage degrees of visual access, her continuous movement between disclosure and concealment. We spoke in the last session about performativity and masking, and I think those discussions are really relevant to the story of Mélusine, not only as an abject animal hybrid, but as a non-normative body whose otherness is accessible and invisible – invisiblised – by turns.

So… my ‘snake’ video and the poems that produced it are about performativity and masking. They’re also – crucially – about what happens what the mask slips, the performance stutters, or is refused altogether. We asked ourselves if incompetence, glitch, ugliness, tonal inconsistency, cringeworthiness, all of that Keatsian ‘misuse’ could be deployed as a tool to destabilize and reinvigorate poetic method. After all, as working-class, queer, neurodiverse and disabled artists, our ability to inhabit elite literary and intellectual space is often predicated upon “passing”: on concealing or minimising the aspects of ourselves that impede the smooth functioning of culture, the confirmation of status, and the transfer of knowledge. Something we talked a lot about is the way in which the space of the page within print and publication cultures often works to irradicate difference through standardised typography, lineation, and an insistence on “correct” spelling or “good” prosody. We became interested in how other forms of the work, including its performative and aural/oral iterations can undercut or complicate that kind of homogeneity, so we advocate for a kind of art and poetry that is both hyenic (more of that anon) and snaky.

In the next session we’re going to talk about embodiment and look at visual and sculptural forms from the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, poetry and portraiture from the queer surrealist resistance fighter Claude Cahun. We might also get into a discussion on weasels. As a little taster I leave you with these images, and the following prompt:

Write a poem that in some way ‘fails’, perhaps by exceeding the bounds of taste and style, or by wilfully glitching rules of syntax and grammar. A useful place to start might be a ‘do not’ list for poets, or a list of words that are seen as “inappropriate” or “cliched”. Google abounds in these. What does it feel like to use language “wrong”? Is it harder than it looks?

Or, you can write a poem that responds in some way to a snake legend of your own.

Ana Mendieta, from her Silueta series (1973-1980)

Claude Cahun, “Que me veux-tu?” (1928)

 

VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #6: FERAL PERFORMANCE/ (PER)FORMING THE FERAL

 

Welcome (and welcome back) everyone to what is now our sixth posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other.

This week I want to start thinking about performing the feral on page, stage, and everywhere in between, and also to hear – at least hear about – some of what you’ve been working on over the break.

I’m going to start, though, with these quotes from Peggy Phelan, writing in Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993): ‘Performance resists the balanced circulation of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends’. And later, from the same text: ‘Representation reproduces the Other as the Same. Performance, in so far as it can be defined as representation without reproduction, can be seen as a model for another representational economy, one in which the reproduction of the Other as the Same is not assured.’

How do we feel about those statements? What are their implications for a feral poetics? I don’t know about you, but the second quote reminded me powerfully of something Juliana Spahr writes in The Transformation (Atelos, 2007), which I’m also sharing my dodgy PDF of:

When they talked about poetry and the island with their friends, they could often be heard declaiming to anyone who would listen that nature poetry was the most immoral of poetries because it showed the bird, often a bird that like themselves had arrived from afar, and not the bulldozer.

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/The_Transformation.pdf 

It’s that ‘bird like themselves’ that reminded me of the Phelan quote. We’ll not get too bogged down in the politics of representation (again), but I do think it’s interesting that Phelan signposts performance or performativity as a possible solution to the ethical dilemmas of representing the (feraltern) other. I’ve been writing a little bit about this, but I’d be interested to know what everybody else thinks of this idea, and how we collectively feel about this notion of performance as this excessive, inexhaustive energetic spend.

So, a bit of context and explication of Phelan: just as Judith Butler is suspicious about the presumed benefits of establishing rigid identity categories, Peggy Phelan is suspicious of political visibility as efficacious or desirable for the subaltern other. She argues that minoritized groups often fall victim to their own public representations, which contribute to rather than subvert dominant ideologies. As an accessible for instance we might think about the way in which black film actors are forced into a continual re-inscription of black suffering and trauma through the rolls available to them in mainstream (white) cinema, which naturalises the idea of the black body as inherently persecuted and suffering. Phelan is really riffing on Edouard Glissant’s notion of ‘opacity’ when she reminds her readers that there is real power in remaining unseen politically, and argues for a performance strategy that privileges disappearance, anonymity, fugivity and concealment as a way of imagining a place ‘outside’ or at least ‘on the tenuous edges of legibility’.  Glissant is one of my all-time favourites, and here he is in his Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997), talking about how we should:

agree not merely on the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.

In case you were wondering, Glissant defines opacity as a species of unquantifiable alterity; a diversity that exceeds any attempt from the outside to impose categories of identifiable difference, and thus resists the [colonial] hierarchies such absolute othering implies. Further he claims that opacity exposes the limits of representation itself, and thus the failures of any cohesive and totalising claims of “identity” as a lens through which to understand the myriad perspectives of the world, its political processes, and its peoples. For Glissant transparency, that is the act of defining, categorizing and authoritatively representing movements, others and selves, is a species of barbarism. And I think that’s really relevant when we’re talking about the feral, and the various historical projects of collection, separation, and classification that culminate in the museum, the gallery, and the zoo, by way of the Wunderkammer, the circus, and the freakshow.

Okay, so it’s just briefly worth stating that neither Glissant or Phelan are saying performative identities are false; they do not mask or obscure the “real” self (whatever that is). Rather, they challenge the coherence and rigidity of the presumed real.

But how does performance achieve these aims? What does a feral performance look like? Are there some bodies and voices that cannot help perform ‘feral’? How do we avoid becoming trapped in an exhibition of grotesquery or suffering, or in the imitation of well-worn tropes?

ON STAGE

 

Doing feral on the stage we might think about: 1) the way non-verbal sounds and gestures limit and shape the narrative being spoken. Gesture, after all, is both language and a failure of or substitute for language: an embodied act that constructs both subjectivity and social identity every bit as surely as accent or grammar, yet an act arising from bodily impulse. 2) we might think about how conscious and choreographed these actions need to be. Reading your work to yourself do you become aware of making any gestures you had not noticed before? 3) how is meaning being made? Through narrative and dramatic realism, or through the rhythms and sonic textures of verbal language as much as from semantic signification? Are you playing to sound or sense? Corporal or verbal articulation? Can you oscillate from one to another to create tension between communication and resistance to disclosure?

Not to keep banging on about Deleuze and Guattari, but I think Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature (1986) might be useful here, specifically their notion of a ‘minor literature’, and the way in which it operates to ‘deterritorialize’ a major language. Acts of deterritorialization involve a disruption to the signifying aspects of language, and a making strange of typical signifying regimes. Let’s take Shelta as a for instance: a “gypsy cant”, frequently described in pejorative terms as being less a language than a tactic. A poem might choose to relish and replicated (within the contested territories of the English language) Shelta’s varied linguistic parries and evasions, making use of reversal, metathesis, affixing, and substitution. It transposes consonant clusters, prefixes or suffixes groups of sounds with Irish words. It incorporates Romani, Polari, and slang. It is also spoken fast, has its own clipped and cantering rhythm, its own terse, t-stopped, compressive poetry. Most utterances are spoken so quickly that gadje might conclude the words had merely been garbled. So, a poem that evokes Shelta can play with sense, with tempo, with disclosure and resistance, can create stutters or ragged seams in the instrumental eloquence of hegemonic English.

Or, more relevant to us perhaps, we could invoke the animal cry, as deterritorialized noise. That certainly disrupts in the best most feral sense language as semantic signification, as well as orderly habits of representation (what being human looks like). 

Are we creating choreopoems (a series of poetic monologues accompanied by music and dance movement)? Are we doing performance art? Can a reading by performative? I would suggest that any iteration of a work that somehow exceeds the bounds of narrative language is a kind of performance, but that a feral performance is excessive in very particular ways, demanding a model of listening and reading that regards the poem as neither discarnate idea nor stable artefact, but as a deeply material, serially embodied, improvised event.

ON PAGE

Okay, here’s something to think about: the space of the page has long been taken for granted as blank, while text is privileged as the agent of signification. But what is the space of the page? What are the invisible architectures that construct (and limit) the possibilities of the text? Is a page any inscription surface? Does every inscription surface carry the same weight and status? How does the feral approach the scene of writing? What are the stakes involved in such an action, and what are her strategies?

So, we might: 1) gather text from a plethora of disparate sources (for example of a scientific journal concerned with the classification of animal subjects, tabloid stories about “feral” youth, and a long Romantic poem reflecting on sublime Nature), and deploy techniques of erasure, fissure and palimpsest to distort and disrupt these accounts of the natural. Registers collide, grammar is riven, abbreviated, stripped of sense, and physical breaches appear between and within words, forcing difference and doubt into the homogenous structure of the printed text. 2) we might write poems mobilize missingness: transforming blanks or gaps into the empty stages upon which shattered subjectivities or extinct animals might be registered and felt. 3) we might work to consciously incorporate the interplay between orality and literacy, writing, in the words of Harryette Mullen ‘for the eye and the ear at once’, striving to create a space that is ‘neither completely spoken nor completely something that exists on the page’, to play with the conventions of orthography, pronunciation, and socially determined meaning.

As an aside, you might be interested in Mullen’s work, which emphasises the ephemeral and impermanent nature of the aural while using her text to enact and critique language’s relationship to authority and coercion in both its written and spoken forms. For Mullen, authority is inscribed across multiple linguistic registers, and language is in a constant state of fraught negotiation inside of competing and conflicting systems: ‘speak this way or you will not be employable ... you can’t hang with us if you talk too proper.’ For Mullen, language is implicated in a series of power relationships; it exerts a violence and a pressure with which her texts flirt, debate, and then ultimately resist. Mullen rejects the privileging of written text,  and the subordinate position in which traditional literary studies have held oral transmission; the tendency of its scholars to use literature unreflectively as a model for language, to construct grammatical rules on the basis of written texts alone, and to study the meaning of words exclusively through print media. However, she is also consciously engaged in demonstrating that – to quote the great Evie Shockley – ‘the codes of oppressed people also have their aesthetic basis’, and that their discourses are every bit as ‘rich’, ‘aestheticized’ and ‘metaphorical’ as those of white western literary cannons.

Here are some relevant links and references:

Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (Graywolf Press, 1991)

http://www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/trimmings-by-harryette-mullen.pdf

Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2011). Shockley describes not a ‘Black Aesthetic’ but a ‘black aesethtics, plural: a multiferous, contingent, non-delimited complex of strategies that African American writers may use to negotiate gaps or conflicts between their artistic goals and the operation of race in the production, dissemination, and reception of their writing.’ To ‘race’ we may also usefully add ‘class’ and ‘gender’ and the multiple conflicts provoked at their intersection. Innovation, In Shockley’s analysis, is driven by these conflicts.

https://transaestheticsfoundationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/shockleyevie-renegade_poetics-introduction.pdf

What else? How about translation? Collage? Shifting the poem from the page to other media and spaces? Into other dialects and language that would seem to distort or degrade them? As an example, how about Sean Bonney’s cycle of poems ‘Baudelaire in English’ (2011), which samples – in the words of Esther Leslie – ‘the original historical energy of the poems […]and releases it into the frenzy of the present. Bonney’s rendition of Baudelaire’s spleeny thoughts transports them into a contemporary idiom releasing something apt from them, something that hits out at the present. The poems cannot be rendered in the traditional format of lines and stanzas. They are graphic, concrete’.

https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/9258/

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hanging over this notion of feral performativity is the idea of “unnatural acts”, those “acts against nature” often so zealously legislated against. What kinds of acts inspire such moral outrage? Queer pleasures, certainly, and a motley assortment of other human practices. Something for us to think about is how entangled the nature/culture divide is in this issue, and how it quickly generates a bizarre paradox: on one hand, it is clear that humans are understood to be the actors, those who commit these “acts against nature” from the outside. The crime is against Nature herself. Nature is the victim, the injured party. Yet, on the other hand, the humans who commit “acts against nature” are said to be behaving like animals. Which is it? You can’t be guilty of damaging nature from without while being reviled for becoming (regressing) to a natural state.

Perhaps the real crime is the breach of the nature/culture divide itself, not merely ruptured under the force of our queer acts, but its very foundational logics short-circuited, proven false.

We’ll come back to this next time (along with snake women of the Middle Ages). But for now, I want to set this week’s prompt:

a)       Devise a poem for a feral performance.

b)      Create a poem using appropriation and collage.

You may also want to check out:

Ntozake Shange, For Coloured girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (PrenticeHall & IBD, Reprint edition 1997)

Peggy Phelan, ‘Dance and the History of Hysteria’ Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture and Power ed. Susan Leigh Foster (1996). 

Also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge, 1993). Phelan and Butler share the notion that women have been historically erased by being visible (embodied) but voiceless, so that any attempt in practice to resist this must begin with understanding the connection between body and voice.