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.

 

 

VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #5: BE MORE FOX

 

‘Vulpis the fox gets his name from the person who winds wool (volupis) – for he is a creature with circuitous pug marks [that’s footprints to you and I] who never runs straight but goes on his way with tortuous windings.

 He is a fraudulent and ingenious animal. When he is hungry and nothing turns up for him to devour, he rolls himself in red mud so that he looks as if he were stained with blood. Then he throws himself on the ground and holds his breath, so that he positively does not seem to breathe. The birds, seeing that he is not breathing, and that he looks as if he were covered in blood with his tongue hanging out, think he is dead and come down to sit on him. Well, thus he grabs them and gobbles them up.

The Devil has the nature of this same.’ – From the Cambridge University Library Bestiary.

So today, we’re going to look at foxes. Here “he” is, in a standard pose adapted from the granddaddy of all bestiary texts, The Physiologus, this one taken from our own Cambridge University Library Bestiary. It’s special, isn’t it?

The fox had – still has – a complex symbolic life and imaginative legacy. For the purpose of most European bestiary texts, the fox is allegorised as the Devil, who pretends to be dead to those not fully committed to Christ, revealing his true nature only when the ensnared sinner is past all help. So far, so simple.

But, if the fox is aligned with – or a figure for – the devil, how are we to interpret medieval literature’s most famous vulpine anti-hero: Reynard the (heavily anthropomorphised) Fox? For those not familiar with Reynard, he originated in France, and went on to become a staple of the allegorical folk tale across Europe from around the 12^th Century all the way up to the early modern period. The most well-known version of these tales is the Romance of Reynard the Fox, and it’s quite something. While on the surface these stories are bawdy or comic adventures, they are also marked by a satirical tone, and perhaps an oblique critique of medieval society’s most cherished institutions, particularly within later versions of the tales, where Reynard is used to take pot-shots at the aristocracy and to criticise both political and ecclesiastical disorder or corruption. Although Reynard is presented as sly, amoral, cowardly, and self-seeking, he is also a sympathetic character, whose cunning is a necessity for survival. He represents a triumph over craft and mental agility over the brute strength typically personified by Isengrim, the greedy and dull-witted wolf, and Reynard’s arch nemesis.

Reynard, then, might be seen as a kind of peasant hero, and I think our first useful line of enquiry might be something along the lines of why make this trickster hero a fox to begin with? From there our questions snowball: is Reynard’s ability to broach criticism of the social order connected to his status as a reviled outsider? By voicing dissent through this morally dubious instrument, does the author conceal their own intent and sympathies, addressing, so to speak, two audiences at once? Are the poor themselves considered to be animal-like? To what extent are they encouraged to identify with this foxy figure and his feral hustle?

Some things to think about: while the fox looks weak and small, compared with the larger wolf, his intelligence and daring have ensured his survival. This is as true in real-life as it is in fiction. It was only after the wolf was exterminated from most of Europe that a concerted effort began to destroy the fox. The wolf was effectively obliterated from Europe not only because it was hunted – persecuted – out of existence, but because its habitat was destroyed, because it could not adapt to survive in the new landscapes inaugurated by human encroachment. Foxes on the other hand are superbly flexible synanthropic and commensual animals. Something about Reynard’s anthropomorphic fox-human hybrid seems to signal this closeness.

We spoke before about a synanthropic species being one whose adaptation and development has been driven by the pressure of close cohabitation with humans. Synanthropes play environments and logics hostile to their very existence back against themselves in order to thrive. Reynard as feral survivalist? Let’s have a look at some foxy theory, starting with Moten and Harney, and their blistering ‘The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses’ (2004) which later became part of the book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).

The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

[…]

But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/the%20university%20and%20the%20undercommons.pdf

And while we're chewing on that, I also offer this, from Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M Manifesto (1967):

SCUM will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists […] until enough women cooperate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals, that is, until enough women either unwork or leave work, start looting, leave men, and refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilised society.

https://editions-ismael.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1968-Valerie-Solanas-S.C.U.M.-Manifesto.pdf

We'll certainly be spending more time time with Valerie, but for now, those interested in her life before and beyond the shooting of Andy Warhol, could do worse than to read the biography by Breanne Fahs (The Feminist Press, 2014), and here's a fab essay to get you started:

http://www.breannefahs.com/uploads/1/0/6/7/10679051/2008_feminist_studies_fahs.pdf

Back to Reynard: I’d argue that the above are feral and foxy manoeuvres: circuitous and winding paths to social sabotage, deviancy, sedition. This is feral, squatting sanctioned social structures with her rangy and transgressive strut.

Feral is like Reynard, a kind of posterchild for the margins, a bandit, a rebel, folk hero, anti-hero, upsetter, citizen of the ‘undercommons’. This is also a mode of thinking and writing, what Halberstam calls ‘low theory’, a model of knowledge eccentrically assembled; opportunistic, omnivorous, refusing to confirm – to conform to – the stale hierarchies of knowing that maintain the status and the functioning of ‘high theory’. Feral is insufficiently theorised. Has strange rigour. Is not professional. Not productive. But a bug in the system of ‘reduction and demand’. Feral will indeed ‘sneak into the university and steal’ what she can. Feral as clarion for the spited, the rejected. Feral is a manifesto. A refusal of the binary prescription upon which the entire neoliberal project is founded: where worthy knowledge and culture are extracted, and the dross is discarded as criminality and waste. Feral lives and thrives amid the discards. On the dung heap. In the skip, rummaging among the refuse. Feral as scummy. that is, feral as SCUM, fighting on two fronts: to thrive within a world that does not want her to exist; playing the logics and structures of that world against itself in an act of synanthropic culture-jamming. Her very persistence in this world functions as a form of 'unwork' or fuck-up. When feral writes it is with an avid determination to use every available resource. Feral is the pressured resourcefulness required of those on the margins, it is cobbling and borrowing, scavenging and stealing. Feral is janky adaptation. Feral is make do and mend. Feral is shoddy substance loved into function, can be a mode of research, a way of doing literature, a queer methodology.

Don’t take my word for it. The medieval scholar Jean Scheidegger studies what she calls ‘renardie’ (foxiness), the verbal art reflected in The Romance of Reynard the Fox, which reverses power relationships by flipping assumptions about relative degrees of agency and dynamism, demonstrating simultaneously the ‘lawlessness of writing and its ability to set its own laws’.

To what extent is a feral existence, or a feral scholarship, possible within the space of the university? When thinking about what we can 'steal' for others, do we sometimes lose sight of what is stolen from us? How are the feral absorbed, interpreted and recuperated by the very system they set out to undermine? How are the feral spent and erased? What are the (wilful/ unconscious) failures of recognition that simultaneously assimilate and exclude both feral subjects and feral methodologies. I suggest this essay by Jodie Kim from Wasafiri might provide food for thought:

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/02690055%202021%201918457.pdf

I also wanted to go ahead and share this from a forthcoming thing of mine. it's not very heartening, but it does speak to some of those above issues:

sparks fly at the edge. this is the outcast’s consolation. and yet, even as they keep you at arm’s length, they fold the fruits of that frustrated industry back into their dully functioning centre; use it to refresh and sustain themselves. it is a very particular species of theft, not usually the appropriation of techniques or themes, but the cynical misdirection of effort and energy: you are the allegorical catfish in the cod tank. you keep them just agile and alert enough to stay alive. while the uniquely pressured position of the feraltern subject drives her relentless innovation, rarely will she receive recognition or reward for the same. rather, her work will be mediated, interpreted, and ultimately metabolised into myriad crowd-pleasing imitations. this work will come to overwrite and replace her difficult original, so much so that it will, after a time, define what it means to make art in the manner of x, a category from which our feraltern artist-subject is now effectively excluded. it is not, as has so often been suggested, imitation as the sincerest form of value-neutral flattery. rather, it is a process of assimilation, replication and replacement, a process that is only made possible through the dynamics of hierarchy and suppression that operate between the centre and the edge. elvis presly was not flattering big mama thornton when he stole and warped the alabama singer’s hymn to black female empowerment (‘hound dog’). his very success, his very visibility as an exceptional white, male artist, is predicated on her relative obscurity, on forcing her back to the margins.

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music is the most easily observable example of this trend because of its broad populist appeal, but it happens across all of art and literature. in poetry, the problem is compounded by the fact that feraltern art and its pod-poem replacements may appear on the page as indistinguishable to the naked eye. what is the difference, for example, between a piece of work in which a major (hegemonic) language like english is deterritorialized by inserting into it words, phrases, and structures from a subaltern or marginalised language, and a piece of work in which the language of the feraltern other is pillaged to spice and nourish that same hegemonic language? or, to put it another way: how do you spot a fake? especially if it’s a good fake? especially if the priest-class of critics responsible for adjudicating upon a work, generating the discourse surrounding it, and interpreting it to its readership have a vested interest in perpetuating the fraud?

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fun fact: your agent (urgh) does not love you. your publisher does not love you. their ideal artist is a tragic death (preferably suicide) with an insanely prolific body of work behind them (and to which they have surrendered the rights). these fucks do not want your living body, but its functional ghost, the faked punk of your beautiful ruin. you live in a world and a publishing culture where even your death – especially your death – can be recruited as a unique selling point. people love a dead iconoclast. and of course, there is a date-stamp on their iconoclasm, they may safely indulge its legend, separate from the active political forms of its expression: che guevara, sid vicious, sylvia plath, sean bonney. it looks like zeitgeist. it is, in fact, nostalgia.

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we can be terribly naïve: we like to think that those who profess to care about the work will naturally be invested in the well-being of the body and brain that produced it. nine times out of ten that isn’t the case. when was the last time you were referred to as “a machine”? a phrase that emerges disguised as a compliment, but that betrays the extent to which others are willing to deny you your personhood. of course, you are prolific, but invisiblised inside “prolific” is the sweat, the effort, the unequal labour, the endless shitwork. “prolific” functions as a refusal of the anxiety and disparity that drives being so. if the work is both a psychological compulsion and a practical necessity, then both of these things are intimately tied to your experiences as classed, gendered, and racialised subjects; to the times you have been called lazy or incapable, told that your life only has value if instrumentalised in the service of something greater than your lowly self. “prolific” disappears the hardwired imperative to be incessantly producing, from having to produce in order to maintain a presence, to meaningfully “compete”. to be shy, retiring, slow and considered, all of these luxuries you cannot afford. the feraltern subject will simply not get away with farting out one wafer thin book every three years or so and expecting to have it feted. “prolific” excites jealous comment or sotto voce whispers on the subject of obnoxious self-promotion from the arbiters of a social etiquette that disproportionately favours the privileged. you will be told that you are “lucky” to be “able” to produce so much by those who miss that terrible, imperative summons. and from those who are supported and maintained in the creation of their art. and yes, of course there is a plus side: persistent innovation, constant surprise, ruptures that become pathways opening up all over the shop within feral practice. but it also means that we over-extend to the point of exhaustion, that we live with a constant gnawing dread, an endless obligation to do. where sparks fly, burn-out is inevitable, but of course, they want it that way, don’t they?

Sorry, not very cheerful. But moving swiftly on, let's ask ourselves can writing really be a feral act? And what can poetry borrow back from foxiness? Perhaps in its dynamism, it’s tricksterism, its commitment to ludic forms, a reversal of situations and hierarchies through sleights both physical and verbal. Perhaps in shape-shifting hybridity, in its sense of movement and metamorphosis. Perhaps in its fraught existence inside of a hegemonic or major language? We're going to come back to this a little further down the road, but for now, as a place to start, do enjoy as much as you think you can stand of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature (1986):

https://iberian-connections.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Kafka-Toward-a-Minor-Literature-by-Gilles-Deleuze-Felix-Guattari-z-lib.org_.pdf

And because that's a bit intense, here's a good summary of the key points:

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/minor-literature.pdf

I’m including a link to some fox books I think you might like to check out as well, along with the PDFs where I have those, but part of the “homework” for next term might be looking for more of these, as well as writing either or both:

a)  Your own animal allegorical tale, featuring a feral anti-hero/   A feral manifesto of your own.

 

https://vervepoetrypress.com/product/geraldine-clarkson-crucifox/?v=79cba1185463

 

https://poetryschool.com/assets/uploads/2021/10/Fox-Haunts-Penn-Kemp.pdf

 

The second link is for a PDF of ‘Fox Haunts’ (2018) by Penn Kemp, and I think it’s relevant to how we might invite foxiness into our work because multiple foxes streak through, across and around this work, as ‘both metaphor lurking behind conscious mind and a living creature reclaiming, rewilding our suburbs.’ “Rewilding” is an interesting choice of word. For a kick-off note that active, transitive verb, so different from the conventional memorialising aims and ethics of poetry. Rewilding prioritizes untamed ecological processes in terms of ecological conservation. Rewilding efforts are aimed at restoring and protecting both natural processes and wilderness areas. Unlike environmental conservation (which largely seeks to preserve a singular state of nature through top-down management) rewilding projects recognize that there is no a priori state: the land is always in the process of becoming – fluctuating and historical. When humans aren’t centre stage, writes environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer, ‘the expertise of animals is valued, and organisms and landscapes are given more scope to determine their own futures.’ So, it is a form of ecological restoration predicated on minimal human intervention. This concept has its political analogue in the green anarchist idea of returning to an 'undomesticated' or 'natural' state; it posits a return to nomadic or hunter-gatherer life-ways and forms of social organisation based on spontaneous and fluid cooperation as opposed to stratification and hierarchy. It also emphasises the development of the senses, and the fostering of deep personal relationships with non-human species and the environment.

That’s a lot to ask of a fox, right? So how does Kemp approach this? There are many types of foxes haunting her work: they appear as cultural symbols, folkloric tricksters, as heroes, and villains, but also ass living creature with a life totally separate from humans, a singular being apart from all that we project onto it. One of Kemp's animating ideas or questions is whether we can respect the Other without subduing or reducing it into something we can relate to; whether we are able to honour the fox as something fundamentally different from ourselves. Kemp writes of the fox. 'You are no metonymy for the real.' And her poetic speakers traverse back and forth between fox as autonomous entity and fox as metaphor. In the third section of the book, 'Little Literary Foxes,' poetry itself is imagined as fox-like, preforming a really satisfying inversion of the way in which nature is historically used by literature: 'May you be translated. And remain / entirely your own,' the speaker says to the fox. Which I think is a hope we might all have for our animal others.