Our class’s (often intense) refusal of or disinterest in Flarf kept on returning to me as I read for this week, especially in light of the general acclaim for Rankine’s Citizen. While she uses similar techniques, and even had poems anthologized in Against Expression, her work uses these techniques like quotation to very different ends. While Flarf might be imagining the ways in which the white-collar labor class has been controlled, managed, and exploited, the poems we read did not seem to engage with embodiment, a theme that has emerged in our class, as much as materiality—the materiality of paper or of words, shuffled and googled. Anthony Reed writes that the postlyric operates in the “vertigo” created by being confronted with “the [surplus] appearance of black bodies where they are not expected” (107). Where Black “originality” is being consumed as labor or as entertainment, the vertigo of being confronted with the Black body creates a space for a postlyric that plays between embodiment, the social, and the personal. The Situations videos and the art/media images throughout Citizen force an engagement with bodies, in particular the “surplus” Black body. I wonder if the Flarf we read often did not seem powerful or interesting because it lacked an engagement with embodiment?
Looking in particular at Rankine’s World Cup Situations script/poem (pg 120), I’m interested in the differences between this script and the other Situations texts presented in the book, which are typographically more straightforward, and in the close relationship between the text and the video, where stills of the insult and headbutt proliferate across the page, rhyming with the slow-motion visuals of the video. Here citation—of Zidane, Ellison, and Fanon, to name a few—is placed alongside images of bodies in motion and in relation, as the players speak to each other, move toward each other, and ultimately Zidane hits the other, striking him to the ground. With the insertion of these stills, words like “But at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution…” (a citation of Frederick Douglass), followed by the stills of Zidane headbutting Materazzi, animate the stills, as the images follow and respond to the words. Rankine’s “script” enacts the interplay of script and performance, words and embodiment, turning the vertigo of being confronted with the “surplus” of Blackness into a headlong charge. She writes (that James Baldwin writes), “The rebuttal assumes an original form./This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful” (128). The play of “rebuttal” and “headbutt” asks the reader to find the beauty in the “endless struggle,” in one body crashing against another, in “the living motion” (128).
