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.