Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing

Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing



A Manifesto, a poem,
a performance piece, and
an academic article 
Three French Theorists walk into a lecture hall..
(Michel Foucault picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.
Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license
Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works
Barthes says L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur! But who is speaking?
Foucault answers What does it matter who is speaking!?

Enter Cixous: Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!”
“Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.

“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”

Prologue: What is writing?

What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't.


An attempted poetic interlude

Stream-of-Consciousness Internal Dialogue

Writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and
know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph?

There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since Zizek's theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write).
Death of the Author: God and Mother, a Parable

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.

Gender and Genre

All of this brings me back to Amy Shuman's “Gender and Genre,” about a possible “rejection” or at least radical rethinking of academic work and what it means to be academic, what it means for women who have traditionally done “expressive” writing – short stories and fiction, storytelling, to rethink and remake what constitutes academic writing. Is it necessarily less rigorous? What potential do we have to remake academic writing and not have it devalued, like so many things in culture become once they are associated with women and with women's work? Is rigor always to be male-defined? Must we adhere to traditionally “male” academic standards that we had no role in setting, but must maintain, nonetheless? And if we choose to change those standards or to not uphold and maintain those standards any more, will our own work be less valid? What would the new standards look like?

Right away on the first page of the article she talks “how people negotiate the categories that are imposed upon them” . Many of the restrictions of academic writing predate women’s mass entrance into the academy and represent patriarchal categories of what “counts” as academic writing, what “counts” as academic publishing, etc. I have underlined at least half of the first page in the book because it says so much that I have come to love and agree with.

Theories of gender and genre converge in their exploration of the problems of classification and the disruption of boundaries. Genre is often gendered . . . . Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of conventions.
Shuman continues, talking about the way that “genre classification systems could represent the values of a culture ”, and the way that “genre systems are as much about disputes, maintenance, and shifting of boundaries ”. Thus, it is no wonder that feminists coming to academic would question those kinds of boundaries.

Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptualism question the use of rationality in art, and by extension writing, since in conceptualist art the link between the writing and theorizing and the actual making of art is dissolved. For LeWitt, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” The first four sentences are about the connection (or not) of rationality with art:

1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
2. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
3. Formal art is essentially rational.
4. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

Since women have been traditionally associated with irrationality, it seems that avant-garde art, at least by LeWitt's definition, would inherently be a feminine realm. Cixous carries it farther, saying that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. And hence, her own, if illegitimate (in the eyes of men), genres.

The Liberation of the Imagination:
From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman's idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a "feminine writing" and "women's language." Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter's position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based "prisonhouse of language," as Frederic Jameson says. The very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition. Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies. In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else's vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

To remake language to find new
creative imagistic practices of language
is to make resistance possible to move us
toward our vision to have visions
never before possible

I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol LeWitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought. I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

What Do Women Want?

Women want to be avant-garde.
We want to be on the c u t t
i n g
e
d
g
e
of literature, to operate
(within)(outside of) the m a r g i n s.
(That is where we reside anyway.)
We are used to working within that area
and we are
good at it.

We have gotten so used to it that we are not actually considered avant-garde. It comes very naturally to us. This is what Cixous is talking about when she speaks (or writes) of the ecriture feminine. If we are actually paying attention to how we function within society, even at this stage, even in 2016, we have to admit to ourselves that our involvement in culture and politics is still very radical and we operate, when we are being honest with ourselves, oppositionally.

To be a woman writer or artist
is to be truly
and inherently
avant-garde
whether
(you know it or not) (you call yourself that or not).
The Revolutionary Work of Poetry: or, To Destroy Language
"If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution," says John Cage.
My own sentences on revolutionary poetics
1. To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities.
2. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit.
3. As an instrument of "instruction" and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall prey to.
4. The avant garde is the "first wave," the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field.

Ecriture Feminine and the Petit Mort of Writing

One of my interlocutors was talking about dying little deaths, small deaths along the way of writing, this made me think of the petit mort, which is French for orgasm. And as I read Cixous and think about her ecstasy in writing, talking about the flesh at work in a labor of love, I think more and more about the petit mort as a form of women's writing . This is all over Cixous. Her writing is full of ecstatic phrases about what it is to write. She does not fear the death of the author, either actual or metaphorical. Nor does writing, for Cixous, promise immortality. It is an in the moment activity. In “The Author in Truth,” Cixous writes about “striking out for the unknown, to make our way in the dark. To see the world with the fingers: isn't this the act of writing par excellence? ” In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “The text, already the lover who savors the wait and the promise,” she explains. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” . As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh. ” In Cixous' definition of the text, I do not feel the need to repudiate stupid Derrida. I can accept that there is nothing outside of this text, this ecriture feminine in which all things live as long as they live. It is not a hedge against death nor
a headlong dive into death.
It is not about immortality and “what survives.”
Writing is its own joy, its own reward its own pleasure.
It is a petit mort that is meant to be shared.
It is a revolution in language that is meant to liberate.
It is a private moment, expressivist and confessional.
It is everything.


Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 142-148.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 155-164.
Cage, John. M: Writings '67-72. Hanover, NJ: Wesleyan University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. The Feminist Critique of Language. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre,” Bulletin of the International Colloquim on Genre. University of Strasborg, 4-8 July, 1979. Translated by Avital Ronnell. Speech.
Dworkin, Craig. To destroy language", Textual Practice (18)2, 2004, 185-197.
Lewitt, Sol.“Sentences on Conceptualism,” http://www.altx.com/vizarts// Referenced November 27, 2016.
Shuman, Amy. “Gender and Genre,” Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, M Jane Young, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. p. 71-88.

Death of the Author: God and Mother, A Parable

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.

Cross-Genre Writing and In-Class Performance/Presentation

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
____________________________________


Women Writing Culture was a book used in my feminist ethnography class at NYU. That was a very important book because it showed examples of women writing ethnography as stories, plays, and poems. It talked about the fact that often male anthropologists were off talking to the men of a community who gave the “official” story of their tribe, village, or group while their wives were talking to the women, getting information on their day-to-day lives and writing it up as short stories. At NYU, we were actively encouraged to play around with genres and in fact, my department chair gave a reading of sonnets that she had written in response to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. It always disappointments me when I am in a program that discourages such experimentation and that is why I wanted to take that freedom when it was offered in this class.

I was using the poetic technique, which I have often seen in prose as well, of numbering items to make it cohere, turning back on itself, without having to have formal transition. Because I had a limited amount of time, and because I was working with disparate theories and incidents that would all come back around to the main point, I decided on that format. It was a very conscious decision once I wrote my initial text.

My reading of the text was a performance in itself, meant to be like a lecture. When I directed a play at Scott Community College, a version of Antigone that I had put together myself from Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and Kurt Schwitters, I had the academic chorus instead of a Greek chorus, reciting lines from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim¸ asking how psychoanalysis would be different today if Freud had started with Antigone rather than Oedipus. Drawing from that experience and the “performance of academia,” that is why I decided to stand up and read the text. Also, as I write this, I think about how much academic work was not necessarily published as a text initially, but as a speech, a class, conference proceedings, etc., including Saussure’s Course In General Linguistics, much, if not all of Lacan’s various Seminars, Derrida’s “Law of Genre,” etc.

I really took umbrage at the comment, made later, that my presentation was personal expression, but by then we had moved on and I didn’t feel like bringing the conversation back to my “lecture.” I do, however, want to defend it. I dislike most poetry that is solipsistic, that deals purely with the feelings of the author and nothing else, and I also dislike teaching theories that focus only on interiority and self-expression. As Kirsten and I were saying, we have a student who comes into the writing center who was obviously taught using those kinds of theories in the 1970s and thinks that writing is only about his impressions and ideas, and we are having a hard time getting him to see that yes, it is that, but it is also much more than that, especially at the graduate level. So that kind of “self-expression” talk tends to really push my buttons.

While my presentation had much of me in it, and much creativity, I also had a lot of research and a lot of other people’s ideas. I cited Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, and Derrida as well as some lesser-known theories. I also cited primary research I have been doing for several years into different ways that we can help students by not only giving them alternative assignments, but alternative ways to complete those assignments, like my spontaneous research. Surrealism is very interested in consciousness and in unconscious processes. That is why the Surrealists were so interested in Freud and so disappointed when he did not reciprocate their feelings. I believe such concerns are very neglected in educated students and I look to my own levels of interest/disinterest, my own areas where I have divided attention and trouble getting my own work done to think about ways to help my students. Many people in graduate school are “model students.” That’s how we got this far. Most of us are teaching students who are not “model” student or who live in less-than-perfect situations that do not allow them to get their work done. So I ask myself how I can use my own barriers, my own divided attention, combined with my interest in creative writing and in surrealism, to help my students to get their work finished?
I also disagree with the comments that genre is important because it helps us to know how to read a text. After I had thought about that for a while, I came to the conclusion that it is not genre that tells us how to read something, but it is the content itself. If the content is all focused on dog obedience, for example, you can use poems, stories, and research to explain dog obedience to a reader. And in this post-modern world, authors do that all the time! It seems to me that it is only in academic writing, not popular writing, that genre is insisted upon. Corporations use actors to help with their corporate training. They do use poetry and short stories to promote diversity. And three articles that I use in my English and speech classes talk about the value of storytelling to help people learn. Outside of academia, people push the boundaries all the time, using humor, poetry, and storytelling to train and get their points across.

Partially, I take blame myself for people not “getting” what I was talking about. I feel that if you are going to do something that is unusual, you need to prepare people for it somewhat. When I do an avant garde performance at an open mic, for example, I will give the audience an instruction not to “overthink” the poetry and try to figure it out, but just to roll with the images. So in retrospect, I might have done this with my class presentation – given them a line or two of instructions. I guess I thought they would “get” what I was trying to do rather than being adversarial. That might also mean that I was attacking some very closely held beliefs that they have about genre.

_________________________________________________

Here is my class presentation:

One Day in the Life of French Theory
Featuring non-French actors

Michel Foucault is collecting objects and placing them – on the wall, on the table, etc., asking himself where these go in the oeuvre. Maybe picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.

Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license

Takes a large stack of paper out of the trash and holds it up for the audience to see.

Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works

He sits down at that point and starts going through it.

Barthes enters the room.

Barthes: L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur!
He looks through a book and then declaims/asks: Who is speaking?

Foucault: What does it matter who is speaking!?

Enter Cixous:

Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!” Mutters to herself: “Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.

“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”

Foucault and Barthes either look up and listen, then all continue with what they are doing what in the background. Cixous begins reading her book (Coming to Read) semi-silently to herself while Barthes is flipping through his book (Image, Music, Text) occasionally muttering something out of it. All three fade off as Laura begins.


Prelude:

I. The Law of Genre, or Genre’s Genre

Since the beginning of time, a student paper might read, since the invention of the alphabet, since humans began to carve sentences into stone, put ink to papyrus, they have questioned the nature of writing and of those who write – the author.

I am always trying to subvert academic writing whenever I get the chance, to cross boundaries. To risk annihilation, to risk death. To risk, as Hamlet puts it, those thousand natural deaths that flesh is heir to.” As an author, one who lays her ego on the line to be examined, challenged, refuted, ‘tis a consummation I do NOT devoutly desire, but to which I subject myself, nonetheless.
Derrida says I shouldn’t mix creative work with academic work. His “Law of Genre” states, “I will not mix genres. Genres are not to be mixed.” But Derrida is a postmodernist. Of course genres are to be mixed. Unless he is being ironic. Unless he is pulling our legs. Moreover, it is impossible to mix genres because ultimately the original genre becomes very pregnant, giving birth to a new genre. This is what happened when we mixed drama and poetry, poetry and storytelling, o or most recently, fiction and nonfiction. They resulted in the separate genres of poetry and drama, of poetry and fiction, of creative nonfiction. Perhaps that is the consequence that Derrida is talking about. It is not dangerous to mix genres at all, but very thrilling. But then Derrida goes on to talk about the genre of genre and all of my imaginative imaginings go out the window as I becoming once again confused and numb. So let us move on before we all succumb to that fate.

II. The Death of the Author

In thinking about the “Death of the Author,” I now see that death everywhere. I see it in all writings and I think about it in my own writing. What does it mean? I don’t take it as a literal death nor a hedge against death, although many have talked before about how at least as an author you have a chance to be remembered, to live on. But then I think about my own writing, and when I am done writing a piece, I can admire it, love it, cite it, quote it. Not, I think, out of a sense of narcissism, although that is always possible. But because I, as a writer, die when the piece is completed and I, as a reader, am born.

Cheryl Walker says that Barthes’ “Death of the Author” seems more extreme than Foucault’s “The Author Function,” but I do not see it that way, because Barthes, as our textbook tells us, was caught in the shift from modernism, with its ideas of liberalism, to post-modernism. Thus, with the “Death of the Author” comes the birth of the reader, and that is certainly a way of democratizing reading, of taking it out of the hands of English departments and critics and those “in the know.”

III. Dividing Attention

There are also several points I want to make with this presentation. One thing that as a performer I am interested in is divided attention. What do we pay attention to and what falls out? What do we tune in and out of and what do we sacrifice by our choices? In today’s society, we are faced with this all the time, even as we read. I also want participation, which is akin to Barthes’ “Death of the Author.” The reader (audience) participates in making meaning (performing). It is not just a passive activity. It is never just a passive activity, a past-time, a pass-time. To read is to participate. To read out loud is to perform.

IV. The Oeuvre

Then there are the questions of what goes into the oeuvre, as Foucault asks, and for this occasion, I have written a poem, called Foucault’s Laundry List: (Clear throat)


Nietzsche’s Laundry List

How am I to exist now that I am
Alone in this world
A character without an author
Without a function I am adrift afloat
No god to tell me what to do how
Am I to distinguish from
What is good and what is merely
The Detritus of history?
O, Pirandello, o Barthes and Foucault. Who
Will lead me down the proper path, show me
The way, teach me to distinguish between
Hemingway’s hunting license or
Stephen King’s parking tickets or
Nietzche’s laundry list:
Suit coat
Dress pants
Socks and garter
Bear skin
Tiger paws (with claws)
Straight jacket
Flattened bowler hat
Paper pulled from pockets full of notes and numbers
The stardust from infinite far away planets
Oh, who will tell me what it all means
And if it is collectible part of
The canon.


With the internet, we no longer have to make choices about what goes into an oeuvre. We can very well include Nietzsche’s laundry list to his oeuvre, his collected works. There are writers who have included only margin notes, without the original text. There are authors who create their work by blacking out part or most of the text. Andy Warhol used to buy things, towels and underwear and clothes, and send them straight to a storage unit to become a permanent part of his “collection.” The internet affords us the “space” to collect everything that might some day become useful to us.

V. Ecriture Feminine

I am also interested in feminine writing, which Cixous, as a “second-wave” surrealist (and there are 3rd wave surrealists too practicing right now), contends can be nonlinear and embodied. I want to show all of this even as I comment upon it. I want to make my academic work poetic, a performance, to make my teaching work surrealistic, to make my poetry and art academic. What does it mean for Cixous to talk about an embodied writing? There are people who practice what is called somatic writing, writing from the body. But I don’t really know what that is. But I have, with my illustration, the performance before my piece, to show, not tell, to have an embodiment of what Barthes, Foucault and Cixous are talking about when they talk about authors and functions and writing.

VI. Surrealism and Teaching

I have developed a series of writing assignments for my students that are inspired by surrealism. I have them do “chance operations” in organizing their work, randomly rearranging their paragraphs, which they are reluctant to do at first, many believing the way they have written their paper is the most logical way. This allows them to see other ways that they might have arranged their writing. I have often done this with my own academic writing and found it to work better myself. (I NEVER ask my students to do anything I haven’t done first. ) I have them do “spontaneous research” in which they dive right in to the middle of an article, randomly pick a paragraph, and write in response to that paragraph. I have them write with their eyes closed as a warm up, which they are also resistant to at first. However, as with Cixous’ feminine writing, ecriture feminine, I have noticed a gender gap, with female students being more open to this than my male students.
As a teacher, I am reborn a reader once more.

VII. Dare to Suck

As one of my poetry colleagues used to say at the open mics in Minneapolis, you have to “dare to suck.” I am taking that challenge to heart. I know that all writing is rewriting, may be rewritten one day for a future audience, and so I have faith my oeuvre may contain my ecriture feminine, with all of its glorious mistakes and successes.

I have embraced failure. This is either going to go magnificently or fall on its face. I am ok with either. I will lose a little sleep if it falls on its face, I will toss and turn for a night or two, feel foolish, and get on with my life.

What is Writing?

So I am writing an "academic poem" for my writing studies class. It will be a very long poem/academic paper, although we don't really speak of epic poems anymore, since this won't really tell an epic kind of story. But it will include a lot of little stories about Cixous and Kristeva and Derrida and Barthes and many others. Here is the beginning of it, which is just kind of a riff for now.




Prologue: What is writing?

What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't there are moments,
says the artist Kiam Marcelo Junio, an artist from Chicago, says that there are moments
when we forget ourselves, they are only moments but they are perfect
moments when we forget ourselves drop our facades because writing although
it is expression is also an unnatural act . We do not naturally create texts – only now
we do. We do because it is all we know, so perhaps Derrida, loathe
as I am to admit it might be wait for it . . .
right. Maybe there is nothing outside the text because we can't remember
anything outside the text it's almost the way we can't remember
(according to the god people anyway) paradise eden there are
no perfect moments only text. But I digress . . .
Kiam Marcelo Junio . . . Chicago artist . . . says that there are moments when we forget ourselves
and lose our sense of self- consciousness and just exist

But writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph or six stanzas if you will.

There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.

And so again, I will say, what is writing? Like Amiri Baraka once said, I think, of what use is
poetry? At least, a poet friend of mine in Minneapolis, J.
Otis Powell! With an exclamation point in his last name
used to recite a poem that he said was based upon Amiri Baraka's question of what
use is poetry ? Or as Paul McCartney, in the song Mrs. Vanderbilt,
(which is on the album Band on the Run) says “what's the use of anything?”
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of
the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write)(rite).
Death of the Author:
God and Mother

Think of the “death of the author” in terms of religion and childbirth,
which are not so far apart and which have been in the West,
uniquely masculine / feminine realms.

Death of the Author:

A Parable

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” (42). As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh” (41).

A Joyous Nonsense/Non-sense: The speech of schizophrenics

Jameson called Surrealism “schizophrenic speech.” Jameson, like Freud before him, was baffled by both Dada and Surrealism and their attempts at nonlinear thought and speech to express the unconscious and to get at the unconscious, to free us all, particularly from the confines of so-called rational scientific thought .

I want to write something meaningful about
Surrealism something academically valid not to make myself a known entity employable or a respected scholar but because surrealism is meaningful to me, it makes me happy and it makes me feel liberated and I want other(s), maybe even big Others to feel liberated and feel the healing hands of Hannah Hoch or Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann and some other Dadaist or Surrealist with an H name so I can get good aliteration at the same time, be poetic, while I also tell you some very smart things about Surrealism.
They say writing about Surrealism is like dancing about architecture except that once I looked it up on Google the actual quote is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I could try to make the connection between music and Surrealism. They both work on an unconscious level. See, it didn't even take me long. But I am a lousy dancer and I don't know how to dance about architecture, although I know many good dancers and they tell me that dancing about architecture is actually a pretty good thing to do. I trust them.

What is Writing? (Revisited)

What is writing?

Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instruction manuals, business reports, resumes and cover letters, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context. For me to teach my professional writing or tech writing students to express themselves would be absurd and useless to them,

I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.

The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter. But being raised in a literate household within a literate society, I also am/have become someone who thinks by writing but who also rehearses and composes out loud, so the process is more symbiotic for me than privileging one over the other at this point.

I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s “what is an author,” which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.” Barthes’ Death of the Author also then gives rise to reader-response theories as well, which I, being an aberrant reader of books, pieces of theory, and of all media, tend to appreciate. Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.

Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that when I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. Which I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate. The Dadaist, the Surrealist in me loves to digress. There are few things as gratifying as a good, well-placed digression in writing/on the page.

I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis, author of Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.

Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.

In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my beliefs about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer/theorist in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.

What is Writing?

Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instructions, business reports, resumes and cvs, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context.

I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.

The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter.
But I don’t much care for Derrida. I can never tell if he is serious or not and I tend to think that when others think he is serious I think he is just messing with us and does not mean to be taken very seriously at all. I think I just knew too many pretentious English majors in the 80s running around and talking about Derrida.

I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s what is an author, which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.”

Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.

Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that wheln I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me yesterday as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. When I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate.

I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis in Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.

Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.

In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my belies about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.

Notes on my preliminary statement on spoken word poetry, politics and postmodernism

Feedback is greatly appreciated!



Of all literary and written theatrical forms, including plays, monologues, short stories, novels, creative nonfiction, etc. poetry has the most freedom to be non-linear in form. It is not tied to a plot or a theme and is not even tied to sense-making, as seen in Jabberwocky and in Dada and zaum poetry.

In a culture such as the United States in which almost (if not) all communication is intended to persuade such as advertising, partisan political campaigns, the politicizing of television news, or even to colonize the mind, as in highly normative television shows and media that portray wealth, money, and power as the greatest value, are the messages of performance poets who attempt to present “political” or “social” themes in their work really getting through? Or are they just preaching to the converted? What would happen if instead, performance poets in trying to be political, focused on liberating the minds/consciousness of their listeners by taking the freedom that poetry affords: not by presenting what is already known or thought to be known through narrative, but in presenting the unknown through the use of form and language.

1. I will look at the goals of several avant-gardes, specifically Russian Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets for practices that might be adapted to contemporary spoken word performance, by which I mean specifically the performance of poetry. I will be looking specifically at Surrealism and the Language Poets through the lens of postmodern theory, contending that these two avant-gardes have the most to contribute to performance poetry in their experimentation with language.

a. One of my contentions is that Dada/Surrealism was postmodern from the very beginning, hence the Marxist rejection of their work as well as their failure to mobilize revolutionaries until the Negritude Poets in Haiti. Jameson referred to the Surrealists and duplicating schizophrenic speech, but he also said the schizophrenic speeches was one of the markers of the postmodern era or condition, which would seem to suggest, whether he meant to or not, that Surrealism itself is inherently postmodern.

b. I will talk about the goal of Russian Formalists’ goal of defamiliarization, using poetry to make strange that which we take for granted, as Barthes would say, that which has become naturalized.

c. The Language Poets have a little more straightforward lineage with Kristeva and postmodernism and take semiotics as the subject itself of much of their poetry.

d. My point is not to proscribe one type of writing to be used in performance poetry, but to suggest some goals and ways those goals have been achieved by poets who seek to have a political end to their poetry.


2. While it is not possible to prove a political effect, I will use semiotics, with the cornerstone being the theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, to talk about the politics of resistance in poetry. I will talk about Kristeva’s four signifying systems. I will discuss Barthes’ use of myth and the power of poetry to confront myth as well as his discussions of the reader/audience as a shared creator in meaning in an open text.

a. I will also do some extrapolating of psycho-linguistic theories, which would have appealed to the Surrealists and which, although as-yet untested, might shed some light on the effect of non-sense to reshape our thinking .


3. I will look at Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as the backdrop to talk about aspects of an image-based culture and the ways in which poetry plays into this and also the ways in which poetry can confront Spectacle.


4. Finally, I will look at some examples of contemporary performance poetry through all of these lenses. Because poetry slam is the most dominant form of spoken word poetry, and because it is not possible to talk about spoken word without being asked about poetry slam, I will look at some slam poems that have won the national slam over the years that have a political or social theme to them as well as to some contemporary avant-garde performance poets.

a. I will look at the potential of performance poetry to keep the text of a poem open rather than fixed, allowing for a kind of experimentation and continual rewriting consistent with postmodern theory. One poet that I will rely on heavily for this is Tracie Morris, whose poetry is different with nearly every performance and who, herself, came up through slam poetry.

b. I will look at several modernist assumptions underlie much current spoken word, including the question of authenticity in poetry slam “voice” which often assumes a unified, authentic self as a form of “truth telling” and the solitary genius of the poet which is manifested in the largely 1-way communication from poet to audience. While there are attempts at reversing this through audience response and the points given at poetry slams, the truth is that there is an emphasis on “showing your love” to the poet onstage (especially since the poet has apparently “poured their guts out” on stage) and the fact that there are rarely poems that receive less than an 8 in a 10 point scale. This would seem to indicate that the “communication” from audience to performer is not really so reciprocal. I will look at how the avant-gardes mentioned above can complicate these assumptions.

Words Got Me the Wound

Part two, and the meat of my presentation, which also forms the crux of my argument. I still have to edit it down.



Words Got Me The Wound and Will Get Me Well

With some reservations in mind, Barthes explains how modern, anti-language poetry, occupying “a position which is the reverse of myth,” can intervene against the mythification of language.


[Poetry] tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. . . . .The subversion of writing was the radical act by which a number of writers have attempted to reject Literature as a mythical system . . . some went as far as the pure and simple scuttling of the discourse . . . as the only possible weapon against the major power of myth.”


Looking to several different literary movements, including Russian Formalism, Surrealism, and more recently, Language Poets and the Umbra Poets, we can see wrestling with language in an attempt to confront these kind of forces. Formalism predates of course, Barthes and Debord, as does the heyday of Surrealism, although several of the founding Surrealist poets, including Breton, continued to practice into the 1960s and 1970s and there still exist a great number of surrealists worldwide who carry on the mantle of language experimentation.


The Formalists looked at poetry through the lens of linguistics, rather than the usually-employed analytic tools of psychology, history, culture or aesthetics. Without knowing what we now know about how the mind processes language, without a mediated culture like ours, they nonetheless saw the tendency for conceptual processes to fall into ruts, rather than original ways of thinking. One of their primary concerns was the way in which “as perception becomes habitual . . . our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic.” The antidote as they saw it, was an estranged language that would keep one alert to perception. “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ . . . to increase the difficulty and length of perception.” By doing so, “art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” “And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war.” “The language of poetry is, then a difficult, roughened, impeded language . . . attenuated torturous speech . . . poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech.”
Inspired by Freud’s work, Breton and the Surrealists were interested in the liberation of the imagination and toward that end, sought ways to circumvent rational thought and delve into subconscious.


“[T]he mind released from all critical pressures and from academic habits offered images and not logical propositions . . . in which we discovered a universe unexplored up to then.”


The Surrealists are best known for “psychic automatism,” which unlike the numbing “automatism” spoken of by the Formalists, was a method that “made possible informative reconnaissance into the poetic domain.” Breton made it clear that the object of his investigation included language itself. Despite its subsequent influence on visual art and virtual disappearance from literary history, Breton makes it clear in his manifestos that it is thought, first and foremost that Surrealism is concerned with. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.”


For the Umbra Poets and the Language Poets, what’s important is not a transparent language, but making obvious and transparent the self-conscious nature of meaning production. Andrews looks as the way in which “Political writing . . . unveils, demystifies the creation and shape of meaning.” Recognizing the struggle for meaning that occurs in the de-formation of myth, “reference . . . is to be seen as the result of a conflictual social process in which various interests compete with one another in order to assign particular values to particular signs.” Language Poets attempt to confront the trappings of myth and spectacle, of ideology and relationship, focusing instead on Barthes’ call for a “fissuring.” Identifying meaning itself as a construct encourages the reader or the audience (in the case of performed poetry) to challenge the universalized, naturalized assumptions behind the word, and consequently, the very social formations that they find themselves within. In Clarence Major’s work, “we see an insistence [also] on the ‘arrangedness’ not only of the poem, but of language inside and outside the poem as well as the reality to which language and poem are commonly said to refer.”
If spectacle offers slick surfaces, easy meaning, and commodified relationships, then a writing that implicates the reader in the process of making meaning is one that stands in opposition to spectacle. If the spectacle is ultimately the relationship itself, then the reader-writer relationship is critical, not merely the one-way transmission of meaning from writer/performer to listener/audience/receptacle. The audience cannot merely be a “fourth wall” on which to be splattered with meaning, like graffiti, a poster, a billboard. When not everything is given outright, then a relationship is created with respect for the reader or audience member who brings something to the relationship as well. The hierarchy is collapsed and reader and writer stand on an equal social footing. Bruce Andrews’ “Text and Context” emphasizes “unreadability” as an element that both requires and teaches “new readings.” These new readings, which must be computed, rather than being able to draw on stock images and prefabricated chunks, keep us awake to language, wake us from the sleepwalk of automatism and help to inoculate us from the de-formed and seemingly naturalized discourses of myth and spectacle.


Spoken word poetry sits in a very unique position as both a literary and performance genre. In Barthes formulation poetry is possibly the only genre that can take on myth, partly because of its imprecision and therefore its inability for its meanings to be stolen and deformed. As a performance form, spoken word is dynamic, able to be written and rewritten with every performance, either spontaneously or rehearsed. The meanings can be drastically altered and even interrupted within a performance. On the other hand, the immediacy of the performance can also bring about in the performer a desire to be liked, not to be rejected by the audience, which means the danger that the poet will play it safe. I have seen and talked to poets who will not do their more challenging literary work because they want to be liked, not to mention understood. They pull out tried and true audience pleasers, not works that will leave the audience scratching their heads. At a poetry slam I attended at the Nuyorican Poets Café, in fact, much time was spent encouraging the audience to “show their love” for the performers, rather than expressing themselves about the work. Where audience expression was encouraged, it was to show their dissatisfaction with the judges for not giving high enough scores. It wasn’t so much about challenging the audience, but getting the audience on the side of the poets. This can leave a poet wanting that positive attention all the time and thus play it safe, relying on humor and heavy on pop culture references, easy to identify (and identify with). When the work is more serious, it tends to be taken from the headlines or from the poet’s own personal experiences. There is, to be sure, a diversity of styles in spoken word poetry that range from the quotidian to the very wildly experimental, which is as it should be, for a variety of reasons. I don’t mean to proscribe exactly what poets should be writing about or in what style, or to suggest that all spoken word poets need to become Dadaists. But at the same time, there are pitfalls we should look at in spoken word, ways in which such work may play into the very thing that poets are so often fighting against.


It is precisely because of its immediacy of form, though, because it is a relatively unmediated form, and because it carries with it the freedom in language that poetry inherently has, that spoken word poetry has the power to challenge both myth and spectacle, to be imaginative, and to set off in the reader a creative or imaginative reaction beyond what we have ever experienced. The poet has the power, as Barthes said, to point not to the referent of language but to the thing itself. It also has the power to point to nothing itself, to nothingness itself, and moreover, to the unknown. It has the power to make connections that we may have never made before, and in doing so, to get us out of our ruts, our slogans, our clichés in thinking by encouraging to think, literally to use our brains, in entirely different ways. Not in the ways of lazy language, prefab chunks, but to use our brains in entirely different ways and to get out of our conceptual ruts and perhaps reconceive of the world. Avant-garde work has often been considered art for art’s sake. But Breton and many other avant gardists and experimental poets, have known for decades that it was not necessarily so. It was and is highly political in its desire to change consciousness—not just consciousness about a particular issue, but all of consciousness, consciousness in general. The fact that it may lack political content per se does not make it apolitical. Helene Lewis makes a spirited defense of the political side of Surrealism, for example, when she writes “[t]he Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” This is anti-myth and anti-spectacle before Barthes or Debord and the goals of Surrealism, particularly as outlined by Lewis, are still current and relevant, even if some of the methods of contemporary Surrealists have changed.


Poetry is a literary genre, but also a visual genre, for the poet creates images in the readers mind. And the spoken word poet can not only create images, but sounds, both musical and bruitistic, in the ears of the audience. It also has the freedom from the constraints of story, character, and plot that other literary and performance genres have. Spoken word poetry works on us on a number of levels and carries with it the potential of its own genre, as a literary form, as well as other genres that act on other areas of the brain. It can give people what they already know, and thus fall back on familiarity and habitualization in language and thought, or the poetry can challenge them, literally, to think for themselves when they listen by offering what is unfamiliar and totally new.

Spectacle and Language

Ok, this is a conference presentation I'm working on that also contains a lot of the work I'm doing for my dissertation. This is the first half to two thirds. I'm still working on the poetry section. I'd love to know what you think. Particularly, since I just finished rewriting this section, I'd love to hear opinions on whether or not the examples seem relevant. Tell me what you think!


Spectacle

Guy Debord outlined a society of alienated social relationships mediated by images known as the spectacle. Debord defines the spectacle as a totalizing system, discussing under its aegis everything from celebrity culture to avant garde art to concepts of time and history under the spectacle, as well as the commodification of every day life. Whereas in Barthes’ conception of myth, the interests of the class in power, are made to seem universal, natural, and “just the way it is,” the spectacle “manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond all dispute. . . . it demands . . . the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.” Not only does the spectacle in this case naturalize its own interests, but it also demands passivity, and through it, “the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,” ultimately serving as “total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification.”


The spectacle itself is not the image, or even the media, but the media is a part of the spectacle and as such, “presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.” Debord describes this aspect of the spectacle as “the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.” He goes on to explain that “due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” We no longer have only three television channels to watch, in which to have our gaze concentrated, but there are still cultural icons created by television, movies, and magazines which all the people in given culture or society know about.

The ubiquity of Angelina Jolie, for example, on magazine covers, in movies, on television gossip shows, etc. means that it is virtually impossible for anyone in America not to know who she is. The ubiquity of many of these American media in other parts of the world means that she is known throughout the world. Anything that happens in the American media happens in all media – magazines, television, the internet, etc. In this way, the public’s gaze is kept up on things that the media deems important. And celebrity reigns high on that scale as beautiful, rich people who supposedly embody the dreams of Americans and keep up the appearance of the rags to riches, American Dream. For those who claim to hate celebrities, there is room in the media for them to be mocked and made fun of, particularly if they get too big and need to be taken down a peg, like Britney Spears. Praise or criticism doesn’t matter to the spectacle. What matters is the focus of the public’s attention on what it deems important. The spectacle functions as what media analysts have called a feedback loop, a symbiotic relationship between culture and marketing, or between the interest that the public has and what is presented in the media that feeds back into the public, albeit in a slightly altered form.


Consumption of Language


We are exposed to an intense level of linguistic activity (talking, reading, watching television, browsing the internet, listening to the radio, etc.) on a daily basis. Assuming an average day of 8 hours of such activity, we are exposed to 72,000 words a day, or 504,000 words each week. Thus, we are forced to process language in as shallow, quick fashion as often as we can, saving our more advanced linguistic resources for the most complex mental and linguistic operations. “There is growing evidence that the process involved in ordinary language comprehension is in fact fairly shallow . . . Some linguistic expressions . . . are retrieved from the memory . . . [in] prefabricated chunks, and others . . . must be computed . . . .”


We can, I think, extrapolate from this some ideological implications. In a world saturated by mythological and spectacular images and statements, it is not possible to linger over every expression and analyze its ideological basis. Furthermore, the constant repetition of slogans, jingles, clips from television shows and movies, etc. ensures that those items will eventually be stored into prefabricated units. Consider how common the “Got Milk?” campaign has become and how often “Got _____?” has become used in other contexts. A prefabricated phrase so simplistic, yet so ubiquitous, can even be pushed to the forefront of our warehouse of stock phrases and in some situations, might become the first thing we think of when we’re searching for the right phrase. There are several sites that have the phrase “Got Blood?” ranging from a Halloween site advising people how to make fake blood to an anti-war magnet that has “a picture of George W. Bush with a red mustache like the Got Milk Ad.” PETA ran a series of ads entitle “Got Beer?” I can tell you from my media class that when we do culture jamming spoof ads we have a high number of “Got _________” ads. It’s a pre-made, easily understood piece of culture that they can draw upon.


There are Facebook sites with names like “I speak movie!” and “I memorize and recite movie dialogue for fun and everyday conversation.” The description for “I speak movie!” says “This is a group for everyone who realizes that the best dialogue EVER happens in the movies and can fluently speak movie in any situation.” The wall posts consist mostly of people reciting movie dialogue for their own amusement, with occasional posts or commentary by other people, but largely it is not interactive, but recitative. We hear things like this all the time—people inserting conversation from Seinfeld or Family Guy. Sometimes they quote it, and sometimes they just pass it off as they’re own thoughts or comments. How many times have you heard “show me the money” or “you had me at hello” or a myriad of other well-known movie lines used in everyday conversation? It’s sometimes used to be funny or clever, but it also constitutes and shortcut to conversation, hence a shortcut to thinking. The availability of the prefabricated chunks forecloses the need, and hence the opportunity, for more advanced linguistic procedures that would lead to more original forms of expression. And once again, we see as Debord indicated, the media has acted as a unifying aspect of spectacular society, providing us this time with not only images of ourselves reflected back to us, but the very language, in the form of dialogue or slogans that we can use as prefabricated chunks. There is no longer any need to think critically or creatively for ourselves.

The Liberation of the Imagination as a Political Act and Spoken Word Poetry: Introduction

This is one possible intro to what will be my dissertation/book on the liberation of the imagination as a political act in spoken word poetry. Please feel free to comment liberally, tell me what I've missed/overlooked, what's not clear, etc. I've tried to answer all of the criticisms my committee has made of my work and I'm a little bit fighting for my academic future here.

Thank you. Please drive through.



Many artists and writers want their work to be political in some fashion, to change the world, to have an impact. Moreover, most, if not all, artists and writers, want their work, their art form, to be relevant. There have all kinds of warnings over the past 15 (or 300) years that poetry is in danger of becoming irrelevant. No one reads anymore, no one reads poetry anymore, etc. etc. These questions – of the relevance of poetry, of the political relevance of poetry, have been one of my major obsessions of the past 15 years. What is it that poetry offers that no other artform does? Why read and write poetry in an age of novels, short fiction, flash fiction, of creative nonfiction, memoir or autobiography, biography, journalism, etc. What separates poetry from these forms in and what way poetry can poetry do something that no other artform is capable of doing make it a) relevant and b) political, ie, c) politically relevant?


Over the past 15 years, I have devoted myself to studying these questions, both formally in graduate school, and informally, through my own studies, through talking to poets in person at open mics and online through blogs and email exchanges.


I don’t mean to proscribe creativity here, although I’m going to inevitable sound like I do. There are a lot of good and useful goals to poetry. There are many reasons and many arguments for all kinds of poetry. I myself like the occasional love poem, lyric poem, or epic poems. But what I am going to discuss here is how poetry can liberate the imagination and in so doing, make itself politically relevant. I feel strongly about this and so I will at times make pronouncements (which I will try to back up with theory) which may sound exclusionary, showing work which fails in specific ways. For example, work that is easily read. While some may argue that such work has layers of meaning to it, which it no doubt does, it is on the surface easy grasped and most people will not delve any further into it, simply enjoying it on a surface level. This is doubly so when the work is read outloud or even performed, as in spoken word poetry, which is the style or incidence of poetry that I am investigating.


Some may argue that spoken word poetry itself does not have “a” style, something with which I am also inclined to agree. However, I will argue here that spoken word poetry has a “dominant style,” particularly that which has been influenced by poetry slam. As the dominant style of spoken word poetry, then, I will deal in part with poetry slam and poetry slam style as it tends to show itself, recognizing, once again, that are always exceptions to the rule. It will be some of these exceptions that I will be exploring, in contrast to the rule.


What I will be arguing for instead, is work that automatically, immediately confounds rationality and may or may not be something that the reader can “figure out,” but cannot be immediately grasped in any way at all. As such, I am not really interested in what the message or meaning of poetry is, but the way in which it subverts expectation in meaning, either in the writing of it or in its performance. Thus, for example, much of Tracie Morris’ work may seem to be straightforward and “readable” on the page, but in performance, she disrupts those meanings. It is the disruption of meaning that I am interested in, rather than the meaning itself. Edwin Torres’ work, which I will be investigating in some depth, is a particularly rich site, as both writes work that is not immediately graspable and performs it in a sometimes equally befuddling manner.


One of goals is to suggest one future path for spoken word poetry in general, for spoken word poets who desire for their work to have a political edge. And part of that is to identify what is and to point out how the past (in the form of these avant gardes) may be prologue in terms of what could come next in spoken word poetry. One of the mythologies of spoken word poets is that they are “street poets,” unschooled in formal or “academic” poetry. This is most heavily promoted by Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club and Marc Smith of the Green Mill in Chicago. The truth is that there is both truth and falsehood to the premise. Many many poetry slam participants, past and future, either had their MFA’s at the time they were competing in slam. Many others went to school to get an MFA after being introduced to poetry through the slams and so did not study poetry initially but were turned on to it through the slams. And still others remain “street poets” eschewing any kind of training or education in poetry, preferring to learn from other poets “on the scene”. Whatever the case, I would encourage spoken word poets to investigate these avant gardes. Tracie Morris herself has said that she was introduced to Kurt Schwitters, author of the Ur Sonate, by Torres and found Dadaism to be particularly fruitful as a spoken word performer.


In the course of my work I am going to refer to several avant-garde schools of poetry, including Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets. I have been challenged and asked why these avant-gardes and why subject yourself to the baggage that the avant-garde carries. My response is that these particular avant-garde poetry movements have articulated things which are useful and yet which have not been fully employed or investigated. It seems that every 20 or 30 years a group of writers goes back and tries to rehabilitate the avant gardes that came before them, never really gaining widespread acceptance and remaining a marginalized voice in the wilderness, crying out for revolutionary poetics and making moderate headway at best. I’ve always been interested in what I consider to be incomplete revolutions in literature, asking myself what aspects of this or that particular theory of literature has failed to be “pulled forward,” or put another way, what was ignored or left behind, but which still has relevance. This has been my quest for probably 20 years or more and continues to be the focus of my work.


To critics who would say the avant-garde is a white institution, I would argue that is more a “whitewashing” of literary history than anything, on “both” sides of the literary aisle. There have been a number of people of color involved with the goals and practices of these avant garde movements, as I will show. Clarence Major and Russell Atkins were doing work that was very similar to what the Language Poets were doing. There were any number of artists, particular in Latin America and the Francophone Caribbean (such as the negritude poets) that were in line with the politically liberatory aspects of Surrealism. And contemporary poets like Edwin Torres continue to keep alive the work of the Russian Formalism while working within the framework of “spoken word,” having come up through the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s.


It has taken me a long time to realize what my methodology was, to see what it was that I was doing instinctively, and make it conscious. My methodology is multivarious, with one part being less prominent than the others. First, I am looking at the claims of these three avant-gardes, particularly through the lens of Barthes and his piece “Myth Today.” Next, I am looking at specific poems and poets, adding to Barthes, Kristeva and her four types of signifying practices: the metanarrative, which is close to Barthes’ conception of myth, the contemplative, narrative, and the text. Along the way, I will be referring to theories of how language is processed, drawing on theories of cognition, both linguistic and psychological, to think about how disrupting the normal processes of language and understanding can, in fact, get us out of what is known and easily processed and move us forward in our imaginations. Sometimes I will be taking, for example, cognitive theories of how language does work and thinking about how we might subvert the working models of language and understanding and what that might accomplish. It is not my goal here to undertake new experiments at this time, but to work with what currently exists and apply to semiotic understandings of language.


Finally, I will be to a very small degree, reporting on “ethnographies” of the dominant places of spoken word poetry. It is not possible to be at every poetry reading on every occasion, but having attending the seminal, or germinal, if you will, places of poetry (the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York and the Green Mill in Chicago) as well as a number of other site in Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, I feel that I can report on what are some dominant streams of Spoken Word poetry and some aspects of the hosting and the audience reactions, as well as how those two things work in tandem with each other. This is the limit, however, of my ethnographic inquiry and I make no claims, nor do I find any claims possible, as to the “completeness” of this research.