Abigail Lee – ENGLISH 890S-01 Contempory Literature and Digital Media

October 22, 2017

The Headbutt

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).

October 15, 2017October 15, 2017

[Insert here] intersections of work and racialized Empire

The Line Between Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots and Mocking Those Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots

These projects confirm [Moten and Harney’s] argument in [The Undercommons] that critiques of the [university] and demands for “better [universities]” dating back to the 1960s have been “absorbed…comfortably into the warp and woof of contemporary [university] discourses,” such that “programs presented under the rubric of [academic] enrichment are also methods of [academic exploitation].” In order to reverse the “bad dialectic” in which “quality becomes quantity as the call for better [teaching] is translated into a requirement for more [teaching], [their] book argues for a politics oriented around demands for “[stealing from the university]” that might then allow people to seek out [each other in and] beyond [the classroom].

pg. 762, Bernes, “Art, Work, and Endlessness”

Are All Flarf Artists White?

[Empire] allows for [racism] to become an infrastructure rather than a personal, face-to-face relationship. Recognizing this history should lead us to be skeptical in the face of claims about the emancipatory possibilities of [any] technology. [The idea of Humanity], as my narrative has it, was the fruit of a counter[Black] turn from the very beginning. Attention to this history can show us how many of the values attached to [subjectivity] have their roots in the defeat [of the colonized people’s] resistance.

pg. 766, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”

Too Real

“A [post] like [mine] demonstrates, through its tedious unreadability, how utterly menial, mind-numbing, and uncreative [critical] work really is while, on the other hand, revealing how little it takes to make such routines seem [important]. The most charitable reading of the “[theoretical] turn” in [literary criticism] is that it marks a moment when the aura of fun, fulfillment, and creativity suddenly vanishes, and what remains is the endlessness of the [White male thinkers] and [their] technicized cognitions. Refusing the supplemental enjoyment of [life], [theorists] of the sort we’ve examined render visible the exhaustion, boredom, and inanity of much of what we do for [class], but [they] also mark, at the same time, the cynical zero degree of resistance to [Empire].”

pg 779, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”

Or Sol

Title [it] Artwork Endless, poetry among jasper.

Note, here! There are pictures of baby ducks

on the other end of words. A saint,

holding up one side of the blind.

Nostalgia was so revolutionary! Art now is the world

it once opposed.

Takeaway weeks–

we should not demand less.

How long pages,

how many pages

after the return.

Note of explanation: I took what I wanted, made words to fit inside the words. Ensuring none of it was truer than that, I printed it on paper made 68% of joy and 39% bluster. Questions of empire I left to the troll under the bridge who waits for children who are already afraid. Like a good girl, I wrote what I was told. Like a good girl, I used my fun for nothing. How to ask, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” when “feel” is a dirty word, how to wonder not-alone in this only world. Of course I googled it:

how not to be

how not to be shy

how not to be nervous

how not to be depressed

how not to be awkward

how not to be jealous

how not to be a tool of exploitation in an exploitative world

September 24, 2017September 24, 2017

Oryx as Oppressed, Oppositional Consiousness

Thank you, Hannah, for your thoughtful post about Oryx and obsolescence. I, too, was taken by her as a character, and wondered about her place in the narrative. I focused on her role as the interpreter between the Children of Crake and the neocapitalist system that created them.

I want to bring in a text that we have not read for this class (apologies!), but one that is in direct conversations with readings like Mark Goble’s “Obsolescence,” and to an even greater extent, Walter Benn Michael’s “Posthistoricism” from last week. The text I’m referring to is Chela Sandoval’s Methodologies of the Oppressed. To briefly—and, I’m sure, reductively—summarize it here, Sandoval argues that Benn Michaels, Jameson, and others have persuasively diagnosed the issues of the contemporary late-capital age, but where Benn Michaels sees diffuse, neocolonial, identity-instead-of-ideology postmodernism as intractable, and “difference” as exchangeable and flattened, Sandoval reads against and under this movement, arguing that oppressed peoples (and she writes specifically of Third World Feminists), have been living under these neocolonial conditions for much longer than “First World” peoples, and that oppressed groups have developed effective strategies for manipulating and understanding these neocolonial conditions. She sees believes that by taking up strategies of oppressed groups—“oppositional conciousnesses”—we can find positions both inside and outside the postmodern neocolonial state, and thus find a position from which we can critique the system that encompasses us.

I bring this up because this gave me a possible answer about Oryx’s role in the text and her importance as a go-between from the scientists and the Crakers. To me, it was crucial that she was the only character we see from “outside” the system of labs and Compounds. While there are certainly Pleebs and others in the book, they are not individually described, and their backstories and conciousnesses are not explored; they are simply the lowest rung of this Compound-ing, engineering society. The fact that she is the only central character marked as non-White is also of note to me, and her backstory, as Hannah elaborates, clearly places her as part of the oppressed peoples that Sandoval focuses on; through flashbacks and Jimmy/Snowman’s prying, we see that she has lived and been conscious of a system in which humanity is always already viewed as excess, and she knows that the system has no care for her as a Subject. For me, this explains why she is so uninterested in Jimmy/Snowman’s questions about her past; on page 117, Jimmy insists to her, “Why won’t you tell me?” and she responds, “Why do you care.?…I don’t care. I never think about it. It’s long ago now.” She—because of her terrible history of abuse, rape, and commodification—sees the neocolonial age they are part of for what it is, and realizes her position within it.

Jimmy finally realizes the obsolescent quality of the lists of words he repeats, thinking, “There was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them” (261). Immediately after realizing this, a procession of naked young girls like Oryx parades before him, and he thinks, “There was something—a threatening presence—behind the trees. Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger…,” noting that “the girls,” unlike himself, “had a ruthless wisdom” (261). Oryx is the mediator between the Crakers and the humans, and her eye is the portal through which Crake enters the Maddaddam Internet world, because she can see her “Humanness” for what it is—oppressive. While Jimmy/Snowman (“Whiteman”?) clings to his obsolete words and ideals, Oryx existing on the “bleeding edge,” showing the reader connections “within a global ecology,” revealing “the extreme disposability of the recently outmoded,” as she sheds her pasts and communes with possible futures (Goble 162).