This was a really fun and successful reading/art show that the New Philadelphia Poets did with Cuddle Magic [terrific band] earlier this month. You can find links to all of the readings [including my own; I read some new poems and the end of the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter of Finnegan's Wake] and Cuddle Magic's spectacular musical performance. Do take a listen!
highwire gallery reading
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
NEW PHILADELPHIA POETS "IN(VISIBLE) KEEPSAKES" at PHILLY FRINGE FESTIVAL
Doing a reading September 4th at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens at 1020 South Street in Philadelphia with the New Philadelphia Poets. More info below:
We're (the New Philadelphia Poets: http://www.newphiladelphiapoets.com) doing a performance as a part of the Philly Fringe Festival September 4th called In(Visible) Keepsakes. The performance is at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens on South Street in Philadelphia. The performance is divided into two parts, the first part being a sort of poetic carnival, different strands and booths set up with members of the group and musicians staging various poetic works...conventional readings, found text verse drama, poetic "ambushes" (unwittingly engaging audience members in conversation which is actually pre-prepared poetry and the poets stick to the "script" regardless of responses). The second part is a collaboratively written poem by the group. The way we wrote this poem is we adopted a guiding theme or principle (inspired by various poems by Robert Kelly, Celan, Artaud, Pound and others): the theme being alchemy as a way of understanding poetic practice, a language community, and social change. We used source text, our own work, and work we submitted from poets and audience members at various readings we sponsored. We then typed out each poem and cut out these individual lines and in a sort of alchemical experiment we are, without any sort of script, each constructing verse or dialogue out of these strips of paper and spontaneously responding using this pile of source text on these strips of paper. We've also gotten some musicians (myself included) to compose a musical prologue and epilogue, with the middle section being a sort of counterpoint and "chorus" of this communally generated found text.
Here's the link for the tickets to the event: http://phillyfringe.com/details.cfm?id=9048
We're (the New Philadelphia Poets: http://www.newphiladelphiapoets.com) doing a performance as a part of the Philly Fringe Festival September 4th called In(Visible) Keepsakes. The performance is at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens on South Street in Philadelphia. The performance is divided into two parts, the first part being a sort of poetic carnival, different strands and booths set up with members of the group and musicians staging various poetic works...conventional readings, found text verse drama, poetic "ambushes" (unwittingly engaging audience members in conversation which is actually pre-prepared poetry and the poets stick to the "script" regardless of responses). The second part is a collaboratively written poem by the group. The way we wrote this poem is we adopted a guiding theme or principle (inspired by various poems by Robert Kelly, Celan, Artaud, Pound and others): the theme being alchemy as a way of understanding poetic practice, a language community, and social change. We used source text, our own work, and work we submitted from poets and audience members at various readings we sponsored. We then typed out each poem and cut out these individual lines and in a sort of alchemical experiment we are, without any sort of script, each constructing verse or dialogue out of these strips of paper and spontaneously responding using this pile of source text on these strips of paper. We've also gotten some musicians (myself included) to compose a musical prologue and epilogue, with the middle section being a sort of counterpoint and "chorus" of this communally generated found text.
Here's the link for the tickets to the event: http://phillyfringe.com/details.cfm?id=9048
Friday, June 12, 2009
UND KRAFT UND SCHMERZ: a Celan translation
AND POWER AND PAIN
and what pressed on
and wavered yet embraced me:
echoing leap-
years,
sprucedrunk, once,
your typhoid, Tanja
the poaching conviction
that there should be another way of saying
so.
-Paul Celan
(tr. Matthew Landis)
UND KRAFT UND SCHMERZ
und was mich stieß
und trieb und hielt:
Hall-Schalt-
Jahre,
Fichtenrausch, einmal,
dein Typhus, Tanja,
die wildernde Überzeugung,
daß dies anders zu sagen sei als
so.
-Paul Celan
Ausgewählte Gedichte von Paul Celan
(alle zitiert nach: Celan, Paul (2003): Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Hg. und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp)
Monday, May 25, 2009
For Memorial Day
This prose poem was originally part of a longer piece. It's no longer a part of that poem, but I wanted to excerpt it here for Memorial Day as means of reminding people of the plight of our troops, coming home from an unjust war they were saddled with by our last President and also as a means of reminding people that supporting the troops does not equate to blind complicity and acceptance of unsound and criminal military or defense policy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The oil fields are burning.
Orange flames pluming from the mouths of wells, lapping
at the feet of a blue-white sky. We smeared our faces with
vaseline.
The brush cannot even survive in the persistent
onslaught of sun, dust, and night-cold. We chew through
the shrink-wrapped plastic, cupping our hands over the
mess kits, but you can still taste the oil, thick in our nostrils.
I might as well have eaten sawdust
or a hand full of plaster. We are animals starving
in the wilderness, scapegoats driven into the desert
to exorcise the sins of this tribe, communicants
deprived of body and blood.
Picking thru the mess kit with a pocket knife.
Everything is the consistency of thick grease and blood.
Saturated with sweat and smoke. We cough thick
gobs of black mucus up through our nostrils and mouths.
Even now, I taste it leaning against the counter,
eating left overs, soaked in nightmare sweat, the sun just
peeling away the black rind of night. I hear them snoring in
the next room.
I don’t know her name anymore. She writhes underneath me,
nails digging into my skin. She draws blood, holding tight, afraid
that “I will leave again.” I am not even there as my
hips spasm and I slowly collapse against her.
My eyes dart through the crowd, my breath quickens.
Hands, feet, and faces, blur into one another, the applause
deafening, sweating beneath their insistent watchful eyes;
“Welcome home!”, my mother cries. I take another sip
of beer and sneak outside for a cigarette, shivering in the
summer heat.
The smoke around my head, heavy in my lungs beneath
the burning wells-- blood, oil, and expectorate coating the back
of my throat again. I gag on the memory, the after-ravages of the
plague. They find me in the grass, on my knees, dry heaving next
to the sandbox. I feel a hand in the small of my back, and shudder
after each convulsion.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The oil fields are burning.
Orange flames pluming from the mouths of wells, lapping
at the feet of a blue-white sky. We smeared our faces with
vaseline.
The brush cannot even survive in the persistent
onslaught of sun, dust, and night-cold. We chew through
the shrink-wrapped plastic, cupping our hands over the
mess kits, but you can still taste the oil, thick in our nostrils.
I might as well have eaten sawdust
or a hand full of plaster. We are animals starving
in the wilderness, scapegoats driven into the desert
to exorcise the sins of this tribe, communicants
deprived of body and blood.
Picking thru the mess kit with a pocket knife.
Everything is the consistency of thick grease and blood.
Saturated with sweat and smoke. We cough thick
gobs of black mucus up through our nostrils and mouths.
Even now, I taste it leaning against the counter,
eating left overs, soaked in nightmare sweat, the sun just
peeling away the black rind of night. I hear them snoring in
the next room.
I don’t know her name anymore. She writhes underneath me,
nails digging into my skin. She draws blood, holding tight, afraid
that “I will leave again.” I am not even there as my
hips spasm and I slowly collapse against her.
My eyes dart through the crowd, my breath quickens.
Hands, feet, and faces, blur into one another, the applause
deafening, sweating beneath their insistent watchful eyes;
“Welcome home!”, my mother cries. I take another sip
of beer and sneak outside for a cigarette, shivering in the
summer heat.
The smoke around my head, heavy in my lungs beneath
the burning wells-- blood, oil, and expectorate coating the back
of my throat again. I gag on the memory, the after-ravages of the
plague. They find me in the grass, on my knees, dry heaving next
to the sandbox. I feel a hand in the small of my back, and shudder
after each convulsion.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
"I Am a Human Being": Using Hermeneutics to Examine Cultural Manifestations of Third Sexes/Genders from Plato to Punk Rock
The difficult and complex questions of gender, sex, and identity is not easily reconciled. Often contested, it is a construct which gave birth to the discourse of feminism, the lesbian/gay/bi/transgendered rights movement (LGBT), and the intersex rights movement. Some have argued that gender is an essential characteristic of existence; indeed it is intimately related to biological sex. Others have contested it is a social construct and as such should be dismissed. The complexity of this debate is by no means limited to these positions, but it is safe to say these are the key voices within it. The problem one faces when talking about gender is not a simple ontological or epistemological problem—it is also an ethical, in fact, highly political question. If gender is a construction and therefore is to be dismissed, how is it that we can construct a community of activists for transgender rights? If it is an essential part of human nature, then how do we account for anomalous phenomenon such as androgyny, drag, transsexuals (TS), transgendered (TG), and even “butch” lesbians and “flaming” gay males? What is at stake if we simply do away with the notion of gender? What further marginalization will result from the insistence that it is a static, constitutive and unchanging component of what it means to be human? How will all of this effect broader conceptions of identity? I’m not sure these questions have easy answers; and I am also unsure as to whether they should.
If we were to be so bold as to suggest a different interpretation of gender—as well as a different conception of its significance, representation, and deployment in the culture at large—we would be forced to deal with these myriad issues: politics, ethics, ontology, epistemology (more specifically medical epistemology and psychology), etc. It is important then to establish a foundation for interpreting gender that is open and dynamic (even if our conception of gender itself is not). We should represent gender openly if we are ever to determine whether it is, in fact a closed epistemological/onto-metaphysical concept or whether our current understanding of it is only one point in a polyvalent horizon. In order to accomplish this we must question the horizon of gender itself (which is not even conceived of as a horizon); in other words, we must question its logic, its representation—i.e., the binary—and do so through a hermeneutical methodology.
Reifying the Binary: Gender, Sex, and Love
Both gender and sex are conceived of as binary structures. Sex is seen as the more immutable of the two—there is male and there is female (and more progressive notions would include the intersexed or hermaphrodite, thus implying a somewhat more fluid ternary conception; however this ternary conception is not our prominent notion of sex). This conception of sex is based upon biology (the presence of a penis or vagina). Gender, then, can be said to be the performative adjunct of biological sex. The masculine and feminine genders refer to activities “commonly” associated with the biological male or female. By implication then, we mean stereotyping. For instance housework is a woman’s job, whereas landscaping is a man’s. If we accept this conception of gender, the androgynous or the transgendered lifestyle is highly problematic. Not only that, homosexuality presents a significant challenge, especially to the humanist model of gender or sexuality as an essential quality. Homosexual behavior would then represent a sort of sexual “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” Transsexual behavior, then, could be said to be an even more radical challenge to both gender and sex: it suggests not only the possible “misapplication” of gender but of sex as well, implying a shifting (though still polarized) conception of both gender and sex1.
This polarization is the root of the problem since it permeates our very social structure. Male/female, complete/incomplete, queer/straight all represent the overwhelming binary structure of society. It is, however, I believe the task of hermeneutics as a philosophical, political, ethical, and most importantly, human endeavor, is to question and challenge the binary which is the logic of exclusion and assimilation. The binary conception of gender insists upon an identity with the corresponding characteristics of the male or the female, the masculine or the feminine. These are the paradigms through which we see ourselves and others. This is why the image of the homosexual or transvestite as the effeminate man is so popular in the literature of sexology in the 19th century (as well as the stereotypes of today). Where this stereotype evolves from is, namely, that view of sexuality which sees sexual behavior in terms of Darwinian survival and thus procreation (Herdt, 27-8). When a man has intercourse with another man, a process of “feminization” occurs on the part of the man who is on the receiving end of sodomy; in other words, he wants to be a woman. The binary notion, however, hermeneutics endeavors to show, is an inadequate model; in fact, there is some historical precedence for this claim in the notion of androgyny, drag, or transgender lifestyles—the in-between of gender which these various lifestyles represent in authentic dialogue suggests that one need not be categorized by the strict opposition between static structures such as male and female. If we begin with looking at cultural artifacts which are designed to challenge the binary conception of sex and gener, we might begin with Plato’s Symposium. In it, we are confronted with a challenge to the binary before Socrates even opens his mouth (he does not offer significant input to the dialogue for some time). It is upon the challenges presented in the historical and philosophical example of the Symposium I will build the rest of argument regarding a hermeneutics of gender.
In Aristophanes’ speech we are given a creation myth central to the Greek understanding of gender and sex (this myth is also discussed in Hesiod’s Theogony). In the beginning, we learn, there were three sexes: the children of the sun, moon, and earth. The male sex was spawned from the sun, the female from the earth, and the third sex (the hermaphrodite) from the moon since it had both the nature of sun and earth (Plato, 31). The male sex had the appearance of two men joined back to back, the female sex of two women joined back to back, and the hermaphrodite a male and female joined back to back. They were all seen as powerful beings and they attacked the gods. Thus, Zeus in his jealousy divided them in half and so human beings wander the earth longing for the other half from which they had been severed. As humans became lonely, they took their genitals and turn them from the insides of their bodies out, so they could attempt to “put themselves back together” when they embraced (Plato, 31-33)
What is interesting is that Aristophanes goes onto tell the company that men that desire after their former halves (another man) are the most respected since after they have been satisfied sexually they can pursue their daily lives while, women who desire men or men who desire women are lustful and sensual due to procreative lust (a refutation of the Darwinian justification for sexual dimorphism). Women who seek other women, lesbians, are hardly mentioned, and heterosexual relationships which result from male or female seeking their other half of the opposite sex are, as I’ve already shown, spoken of scornfully! (Plato, 32) How is it then that the binary can be said to be foundational? Indeed, the first metaphysicians were the Greeks, most prominently, is has been said, Plato himself. However, in Plato’s own sexual cosmology he challenges the logic of the binary in general and our current binary system of sexuality which privileges heterosexual behavior above that of homosexual behavior. Furthermore, men who engage in homosexual love are not seen as essentially effeminate. In fact, their homosexual sex lives are seen as the very reason they are able to remain a productive force in the society. If we view homosexuality as a historical phenomenon then, somewhere there was an inversion of values. Some might say Christianity, others the rise of modern psychiatry. Regardless, what is important is to make clear that the model of sexual dimorphism and binary gender is not a priori or essential at all; it is a construction and thus (thankfully, in my opinion) subject to revision.
Besides this obvious refutation of our current conception of gender identity and sexuality there is a more nuanced statement in the Symposium about these issues. This statement occurs in Socrates’ recounting of his discussion of Love with Diotima. In her explanation of Love Diotima informs Socrates that
With this we encounter a direct refutation of the current model of procreation as exclusionary (that is, the act of creation being an exclusively physical process resulting in the birth of a human child). Our idea of procreation does not include the spiritual or aesthetic; it has no taste for the divine, which is of course in Plato, experienced in beauty. The individual, singular expression of beauty then, as opposed to biology, is the foundation of love, of sex, and of gender. If we remove gender from its characteristic conception as the performative adjunct of sex and instead understand it as performance in-and-of-itself, for-itself then we come to understand that gender is merely an expression of what is beautiful or pleasing—what inspires happiness and is formed in harmony within the individual and then brought into the world through performance. Gender announces, performatively, who one sees her/himself to be. Gender, as a component of self-image and understanding, is part of that which we see when we confront the Other. When we desire someone we desire what is beautiful in them; and thus, what the Other sees as beautiful in her/himself. Desire then is not the longing for power or subjugation, it is instead a longing for realization or the arrival of an event; the event being the arrival of the Other’s disclosure of itself and thus of its beauty. Gender, as performance, as praxis, as activity is one way in which this beauty may be disclosed.
Hermeneutics is essential to this understanding because it informs the Platonic conception of procreation with a dialogical ontology. This ontology is rooted in the “true locus of hermeneutics” or what Gadamer calls “the in-between”(Gadamer, 295). The in-between can be characterized in this instance as the ontological space which exists between the binary opposition of male and female. In terms of biological sex we are confronted with a limitation: a ternary structure of male, female, and intersexed. However, biological sex need not be a definitive characteristic of sexual identity. The sex with which one identifies oneself is not a static structure. Biological sex may be a homogenous entity and due to scientific limitations and a lack of expertise I do not propose to challenge this notion. However, sexual identity is something all together different than biology. Identity is a structure which is conceived in reciprocity and in dialogue: a dialogue between one’s self-understanding and one’s objectification in the world. By objectification, I mean the experiences one encounters as a reality outside of psychic life: economics, culture, religion, and politics. Though not determinate, they are relational. The interconnectedness of our sense of self with the world we inhabit is an integral part of our humanity. Both our identities and the world change with the experiences and conditions we are faced with and the discoveries and revelations we have about ourselves. Identity then is far from a static structure: it is dynamic, fluid, and dialogical. Thus, when Plato speaks of desiring beauty permanently in the Symposium, he does not mean to say that beauty itself is permanent: but rather that we should perpetually seek what is beautiful in all of its many forms and manifestation (human and otherwise). Knowledge of ourselves and others, then, are not condition or determinate types of cognition but rather open networks of deliberation. “[T]he knower is not standing over against a situation he merely observes; he is directly confronted with what he sees. It is something he has to do.” (Gadamer, 314) Knowledge is an activity that yields to understanding which is characterized by phronesis and praxis: practical wisdom and activity. In this way, the activity of understanding what stands in alterity to the binary of male/female—i.e., the TS, TG, cross-dressing, or intersexed individual—is fluid and shifting. The dialogue which occurs in-between the binary is one which is in suspension. The “third sex” or “third gender” notion can be described best by Barbey’s characterization of the dandy (although it is applicable to all the lifestyles mentioned in this paper): ‘the “undecidable sex” (Garelick, 30). One must be able to disclose "beauty" freely in the space left by our suspension of prejudice. Only in this way does understanding occur: by not only questioning what is Other (TS, TG, queer, intersexed, etc) but our own preconceptions.
The undecideability of the dialectic presented in Gadamer’s text is precisely the dialectic conceived of as a dialogue. The person who questions is each and every one of us. We question gender and we question identity and the binary which represents the antithetical concepts of the dialectic. The key is that the question includes both rather than excluding one or the other. The resulting tension of undecidablity can only be relieved by loosening the knot where the binary intersects and becomes entangled and convoluted: the in-between. "Beauty" then, is not self-evident and subject to eternal standards but emergent, a process. It is a spectrum, much as sexuality itself is a spectrum. And the reflection of "beauty" in this sense, beauty as irreducible otherness and difference, as the unique marking of the individual is not a merely aesthetic category. Indeed, beauty may contain within it what is commonly perceived as decadence or depravity.
Dandyism, Homoeroticism, and Undecidability: or the Androgyny of Love
There are further examples of this in-between that I will now offer. Each a distinct historical or cultural phenomenon, but all of them open the possibility for the disclosure of beauty as opposed to categorization, as the paradigm through which we see the world and others.
The first example I would like to offer is that of the aforementioned dandy. Dandyism was a cultural phenomenon which still exerts influence over our notions of celebrity, personality, and aesthetics. In her book Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle, Rhonda Garelick charts the course of dandyism’s relationship with gender concepts, sexuality, and the feminine. The dandy sought a life of idleness which was consumed with how he presented himself. The stereotypical dandy is best characterized by his top-hat, black frock-coat with flowing tails, white gloves, high collar, frilled bows as a tie, often of exotic fabric, various ointments and perfumes and a social attitude focused on achieving recognition. The personality, as a whole, was a performance. The dandy, almost naturally, Garelick argues at several points in her book, is drawn to the feminine. Despite correlations between dandies and “camp” female performers, one of dandyism’s primary representatives—Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly—believed that assistance from women in perfecting the aesthetic sense of style and self-reproduction was unnecessary since the dandy, in certain respects, was himself a woman (Garelick, 25). Baudelaire’s notion of dandyism follows on this theme and anticipates drag, female impersonation, and transgenderism by recognizing dandies as “creatures of disguise and social manipulation” (Garelick, 34). The dandy sought to overcome his own gender, that of the male, not only by adapting feminine mannerisms and sense of aesthetic, but by literally subsuming himself in the character of what was seen as feminine in 19th century France; however, they distinctly identified themselves as male while insisting that the virtues of femininity reached perfection only in the aesthetic and fashion sensibility of the true dandy, a man (this despite great admiration for female performers of the day and iconoclastic, cross-dressing women such as Rachilde2).
The dandy, however, was not outside of the gender spectrum. The dandy occupied the space in between male and female. Dandyism was not a homogenous lifestyle. Former dandies, dating back to the ancient Greek Alcibiades, constituted themselves as singular individuals through self-creation and self-adaptation3 (as well as learning from the tradition of dandyism). It is in this way, especially, that dandyism represents early and subtle signs of a transgendered community. Each individual stands out as a distinct entity, yet merges to form an almost disciplic succession of men inhabiting this ambiguous gender category. The ambiguity and singularity of the dandy are essential to his existence; but so is his paradoxical insistence upon identifying himself with the tradition of dandyism. Thus, one might say the dandy not only represents a challenge to the binary but presents a microcosmic image of the dialogical conception of identity needed to overcome the binary in his own self-constitution. The effeminate dandy did not want to forsake his male identity or capitulate to the standard of feminine identity, but to cultivate a sense of the pleasurable, the beautiful, and the erotic in himself (and in some sense society), and in so doing fall both outside and within the male/female dichotomy without necessarily challenging the social and medical assumption of male superiority .
Dandies did represent an artistic community and their works are inflected with a distinct sense of sexuality. Many dandies were homosexuals or cross-dressers and notoriously effeminate. Their artistry did not separate them from moral condemnation either; indeed their artistry often went unrecognized in mainstream culture (in the case of Baudelaire, Lorrain, and other “decadents”). One need only look at the tragic case of Oscar Wilde and read his heartbreaking disavowal of his supposedly lurid, homosexual past in De Profoundis. Not only that, but several obscenity trials, public scandals, and incidence of base slander were suffered by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lorrain, and even Flaubert (not necessarily a dandy) for depictions of homosexuality, sodomy, cross-dressing, fetishism, or simply iconoclastic portraits of gender identity (as in the case of Madame Bovary).
The cognate sense of inspiration or elation and alienation run throughout dandyist texts and most significantly in the French Symbolist or Fin de Siecle period in both France and England. Notice this piece of verse by Wilde’s contemporary Marc Andre Raffalovich.
At first we notice the capitalization of “They”: the majority which imposes its own vision of the dandy and the homosexual upon Raffalovich, Douglas (Wilde’s lover and compatriot) and Wilde. Their sense of exuberance is tempered by the knowledge that they are neither understood nor accepted. “They think that we know friendship, passion, love!” But this is not joy; it is an invective against their naïve perception of the dandy and the “molly” (or homosexual male). “They” are incapable of feeling or understanding those emotions as Raffalovich can and that is why “It is the sunlight, think They, or the gas”—the “They” remains unwilling to allow the “Other” to disclose its own beauty. While this piece of verse gets to the heart of the aesthetics, fashion, and ethos of dandyism and Victorian homosexual sub-culture, it is laden with a certain grief because it is a beauty which remains excluded: hence, though Raffalovich believes the world is “well lost”, it is “lost” nonetheless.
This tension between acceptance of oneself and the pain of exclusion is also marked in the transcripts of Wilde’s trial compared with his De Profoundis. In his trial Wilde rebelliously champions homosexuality: “the Love that dare not speak its name.”
‘
However, after Wilde’s reputation and career were ruined at the hands of Douglas’ father the Marquis of Queensbury, his family life shattered; he eventually capitulated to the demands of the “They.” It is a clear example of the damage often done those who challenge the hierarchy of sexuality or gender.
The tragedy of Wilde’s self-doubt is precisely the effect that normalization seeks to breed in the LGBT community. Guilt is a powerful, powerful weapon and is utilized through the repression of “deviance” or otherness. Normalization, then, is negative and attempts to squash the dialogical space of the “in-between” by eradiating and homogenizing all space that lurks suspended between the monolithic concepts of binary gender: the masculine and the feminine. This early construction of an aesthetic community and lifestyle, however, survived, and paved the way for Goth, glam, glitter, and punk not only by its staunch courage and rebelliousness, but its passionate pursuit for singular recognition and respect.
Glam Rock & Punk Rock: The “Grotesque” Anatomy of an Artistic, Erotic, and Transgendered Sub-Culture
The risks and sufferings of the modern transgendered artistic community also provide us with a tragic and yet provocative example. In cultural and fashion history, the movement of glam rock was especially powerful in confronting a rigid structure of gender identity with radical cross-dressing, androgyny, and transsexualism. One notable example is David Bowie. Bowie’s notoriously androgynous stage characters Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and even the dandy-like Thin White Duke embodied a rebellious sexual energy and gender identity. Bowie in his performance and lyrics dwelled in the in-between, insisting upon being allowed to explore the full continuum of gender. Throughout his career he has appeared as himself in a typically masculine (though highly stylized) fashion and in full blown androgynous drag. The covers of his early albums depict him as a thin waif and a strikingly girlish figure4. On the covers of Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane his appearance is strictly androgynous and his personality is seemingly morphological: an effeminate/androgynous man playing raucous rock and roll with highly sexual and confrontational lyrics. In the song “Rebel, Rebel” off of the album Diamond Dogs, he sings of the glam rock scene of which he was a pioneer and the awkward and difficult lifestyle that accompanied it.
Just in these few lines we are confronted with the reactions of family and the confrontation between one’s peers in the glam community and one’s own self-identity (an apparent hold-over from the conflicts between mainstream standards, sub-culture standards, and the aesthetic/ethical standards carried over from dandyism of self-creation and fierce individualism). Later in the song, he mentions the drug use prevalent amongst this community of transgednered individuals, a problem still prevalent in the community today according to much of the psychological literature. These themes are tied-in directly to the aesthetic and musical culture of glam on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in the song “Lady Stardust” in which the main character, a ridiculed glam boy, is referred to using both the pronoun he and the title “Lady.”
In a darker vein, forerunners of the glam movement, the Velvet Underground, and their songwriter Lou Reed, were notorious for their graphic lyrics about heroin use, sadomasochism, and deviancy. Part of this “deviancy” is actually a touching song (“Candy Says”) about Reed’s experiences with his close friend Candy Darling, an M to F (male to female) transsexual actress, prostitute, and performer in late 60’s/early 70’s Greenwich Village (and a member of Warhol’s factory). This song documents his impressions of Candy’s journey towards self-creation and the suffering she endured (“Candy says/I’ve learned to hate my body”); a journey cut short when Candy died due to cancer she developed through hormone use. Candy is a character in a later song by Reed “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” from his solo Transformer album as well5. The song tells the tale of the many “deviants” he met in Warhol’s factory: homosexuals, transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers.
One of the most radical and striking examples of the glam/punk movements challenge to homogenized gender identity is Wayne (Jayne County). With her band the Electric Chairs she wrote aggressive punk rock with titles like “Transgendered Outlaw” and “Man Enough to Be a Woman” (which would become the title of her autobiography). She began as a member of the Factory when she was pre-operative (and known as Wayne) and worked in the theater scene of Greenwich Village in the early 60’s. Inspired by glam bands like the New York Dolls and David Bowie and the aggressive music of Iggy Pop and the MC5, she started her own band and quickly became one of the top draws at the punk/glam scenes home bases: CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. After the punk movement petered out, she traveled and worked as a prostitute, eventually earning enough many to pay for sexual reassignment surgery (becoming Jayne). She still performs with the Electric Chairs, her band, and is a performance artist as well. She still confounds people today by presenting as a female and incorporating masculinity into her identity through her music (often Sticky Fingers era Stones' styled vamped up blues rock), posturing, dress, and attitude. Despite the masculine overtones of her art and personality, she still remains and insists on being recognized as, a female.
What the glam and punk movement demonstrates is an aggressive reaction to the repression of self-constituted gender identity. All of these people (Lou Reed, Bowie, Jayne County, the New York Dolls, etc) were attempting to carve out a niche in a world intent upon exclusion. Reed’s parents subjected him to electro-shock therapy and he was (like most glam/punk artists) a notorious drug user with a fetish for speed—his rebelliousness was only matched by his morbidity; Bowie was perpetually a topic of gossip columns regarding his sexuality and often portrayed as a freak or deviant and often lived up to the standard due to his cocaine induced paranoia; Jayne/Wayne County was simply to radical to ever be mentioned in the mainstream media—a former prostitute and drag queen who underwent a sex change is simply too extreme of a phenomenon to be represented and recognized. The glam rock and punk movement was seen as a freakish phenomenon. However, it is precisely this attitude the community was reacting against. Glam rock, popularized by artists like Bowie, T-Rex, and the New York Dolls and later exploited by groups like Kiss and Aerosmith, began as a movement to violently counteract the dispossession of transgendered individuals and other “freaks” and mount a call for recognition.
Glam rock can be said to dwell in the in-between because it did not resort to simply inverting sex roles or aestheticizing their project (as the dandies did). Surely, there was an aesthetic component (Bowie’s stage performances in the 1970’s were notoriously theatrical and lavish), but gender was chosen as the medium of performance. In the face of repression, many of these iconoclastic artists highlighted for the first time (certainly in mainstream culture) the constructedness of gender as well as the repression which the binary structure accorded to it. The in-between of glam rock was non-existent and did not have a distinctly counter-culture voice. The glam rock movement attempted to make space for such a discourse to take place. It provided an area for the arrival of the event of dialogue. More than iconoclastic, glam rock and punk rock invented a new iconography: the trans iconography; one of the first systems of art and representation to give a voice to explicitly trans individuals and issues in popular culture—consequently, glam rock and punk rock were far from popular and often repressed or homogenized at best in the mainstream media. However, this does not take away from the significance of glam’s cultural protest. If anything, glam's significance as a "gender fucking" or subversive LGBT movement is highlighted by even more aggressive tendencies exhibited in punk. Patti Smith's sacramental portrait of male on male rape and of adolescent sexual confusion in "Land" highlights a fundamentally Rimbaudian strain in punk poetics: the beatification of what is ugly and depraved.
Smith's ecstatic sexual imagery (her leering, rhythmic paean to a young girl "humping on a parking meter" in her re-interpretation of the Them's "Gloria") is rife with violence and conflict because it seeks to not only interrogate and explore sexual difference, but to destroy the very concept of sexual normalcy. The symmetry between the anonymous boy "driving it deep in Johnny" and Johnny's revelation of an array of blades beneath his jacket makes this rape or at the very least rough, violent sexual encounter mirror the logic of conquest. But the conquest sought for here is not purely sexual or based on some dimension of social power, but rather, a conquest of self. Johnny's reaction, his lashing out, his fierce self-assertion, his manic energy is a celebration of his confusion and ambiguity (notice, NOT ambivalence). His supplication to his anonymous "lover", is not a sign of weakness; it's not a sign of anything. It is a liminal, undetermined moment. We're not even sure what to call it. All that we know is that when prompted ("can't you show me nothing but surrender"), Johnny is anything but submissive. Johnny, the "pretty boy" is a weapon. His sexual virility is a weapon, an unleashing of great power and energy. It is telling that Smith, a woman who on the cover of the album Horses is dressed in nearly totally androgynous drag, glorifies the sexual potency of this male adolescent through a homosexual encounter. It turns the myth of rock n' roll on it's head (the invocation of the watusi and other popular dances. Smith confounds the expectations of rock history by not playing up her girlishness a la 60's girl groups (who ironically enough, provided ample fodder for the New York Dolls brand of Stones' inspired "cock rock"), by diving head first into avant-garde performance poetry, tough three chord rock and roll, and a decidedly twisted take on the rock n' roll archetype (inherited from the blues) of male sexual conquest. More than a shocking lyrical turn, it is a statement of feminine rebellion and a celebration of the spectrum of male sexuality. It challenges not only the mainstream cultural understanding of women in rock n' roll, but it undermines the notion that homosexuals = sissies. It is Johnny, the passive agent in this homosexual encounter, decked out in a leather jacket, wielding switchblades (a la the "leader of the pack"). "Land", as an artwork is an attack on sexual mores and a fittingly Rimbaudian gesture, eschewing mainstream stereotypes of women and homosexuals and dismantling the iconography and standards of the effeminate, flaming gay male in one fell swoop. One might even say Patti Smith pointed the way toward a new, tougher dandyism.
NOTES
1. It is instructive at this point to refer the reader to Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. This book of case studies in the field of psychopathology specifically regarding sexual behavior, documented the common phenomenon of what was regularly referred to in sexological literature “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” In his text, Krafft-Ebbing encompasses transvestitism, homosexuality, androgyny, and transexualism to two realms of disorder: fetishism and antipathic sexuality or “the total lack of feeling toward the opposite sex.” (p.21) While Krafft-Ebing certainly does not hide his moral horror in these case studies, they are still enlightening. For a more detailed account and characterization of these phenomenon I would recommend case studies 91 (fetishism/acquired homosexuality), 105 (Fetishism, specifically for women’s clothing and cross dressing), 128 (homosexuality; a biography which epitomizes what was seen as the stereotypical gay man, the effeminate male), 129 (a lengthy and illuminating autobiography of a transsexual), 131 (psychosexual metamorphosis), 152 (androgyny), 166 (gynandry—though Krafft-Ebing refers to her as a “man-woman”, from the details it is quite clear that the patient was a cross-dressing lesbian who enjoyed presenting herself as a man). All of these case studies make use of both the language and metaphor of inversion and hermaphrodism and are highly interesting examples of how LGBT individuals were seen by a majority of the psychiatric, medical, and lay community.
2. Rachilde was born a genetic girl in 1860; however her father, disappointed he didn’t have a son, raised her as a boy. This ambiguous and shifting gender identity traveled with Rachilde the rest of her life. She obtained permission to appear in public as a cross-dresser by Parisian authorities when she arrived there from the country-side (it was illegal in 19th century Paris) and her business cards read “Rachilde: Man of Letters.” Her first novel Monsieur Venus explores the relationship between two transgendered levels, one a sadist (a gendered girl presenting as a man) who dominates his lover (a gendered boy presenting as a girl). The inversion of gender labels is common throughout the book (a man is referred to as Aunt and a woman Uncle). She was dubbed “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” by a famous French critic after the appearance of this book. However at 29 she married Alfred Vallete and a year later gave birth to a child, Gabrielle, whom she remained distant from throughout her life. She would go on to found the French cultural journal Mercure de France and align herself with conservative French nationalist despite her former anarchist sympathies. She was a self-professed misogynist and was notorious for “preferring the company of her pet rats to human beings.” (Hustvedt, 1084, The Deacadent Reader)
3. The writings of both Rachilde (see note above for explanation) and Jean Lorrain prove helpful in illustrating these points. It should be noted that Lorrain was said to be openly homosexual, which is true, but more accurately Lorrain (like Rachilde) was transgendered. He wore heavy makeup-up, large rings, painted his nails and when once asked if he ever wished to be a woman he responded: “Yes! For the vice of it!” (Hustvedt, 1079) He was a disciple of Barbey (who coined the dandy as the “undecidable sex”) and was referred as “Monsieur, the slut” by him. Lorrain took pleasure in vice and was fascinated by criminality. Even his presenting as a transgendered artist spoke of his fascination with the feminine: for Lorrain the woman not only embodied sensuality and violent beauty, but the ideal pathology; in the Dictionnaire encyclopedique des science medicales (1864-89) “women” are among the list of medical ailments (Hustvedt, 18). It is likely Lorrain was aware of this since his stories were notorious for their medical, sexological, and pathological detail due to his avid research and interest in criminology and deviance (Hustvedt, 18-19).
4. This is most noticeable on the cover of his 1970 The Man Who Sold the World album where he is sprawled out on a couch in a dress with naturally long, and well styled girlish hair.
5. The entire album is obsessed with morphological identity. Reed has a few songs on it relating to cross-dressing and gender-bending, and even the title Transformer implies this pre-occupation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beizer, Janet. “Venus in Drag, or Redressing the Discourse of Hysteria: Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
--------------. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zinn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Brookner, Anita. “Baudelaire: The Black Frock Coat.” Romanticism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
d’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey. “Les Diaboliques.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York, Zone Books, 1998.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1998.
Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Herdt, Gilbert. “Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders.” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, 1993.
Hustvedt, Asti. “The Art of Death: French Fiction at the Fin-de-Siecle.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories. Trans. Dr. Domino Falls. London: Velvet Publications, 1997.
Lorrain, Jean. “Selections."The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-
de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Plato. “From Symposium.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Raffalovich, Marc Andres. “World Well Lost IV.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Reed, Lou. Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. New York: Hyperion, 1991.
Wilde, Oscar. “De Profoundis.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
-------------. “A Defense of Uranian Love: From The Transcripts of the Second Trial (April
20-26, 1895).” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
If we were to be so bold as to suggest a different interpretation of gender—as well as a different conception of its significance, representation, and deployment in the culture at large—we would be forced to deal with these myriad issues: politics, ethics, ontology, epistemology (more specifically medical epistemology and psychology), etc. It is important then to establish a foundation for interpreting gender that is open and dynamic (even if our conception of gender itself is not). We should represent gender openly if we are ever to determine whether it is, in fact a closed epistemological/onto-metaphysical concept or whether our current understanding of it is only one point in a polyvalent horizon. In order to accomplish this we must question the horizon of gender itself (which is not even conceived of as a horizon); in other words, we must question its logic, its representation—i.e., the binary—and do so through a hermeneutical methodology.
Reifying the Binary: Gender, Sex, and Love
Both gender and sex are conceived of as binary structures. Sex is seen as the more immutable of the two—there is male and there is female (and more progressive notions would include the intersexed or hermaphrodite, thus implying a somewhat more fluid ternary conception; however this ternary conception is not our prominent notion of sex). This conception of sex is based upon biology (the presence of a penis or vagina). Gender, then, can be said to be the performative adjunct of biological sex. The masculine and feminine genders refer to activities “commonly” associated with the biological male or female. By implication then, we mean stereotyping. For instance housework is a woman’s job, whereas landscaping is a man’s. If we accept this conception of gender, the androgynous or the transgendered lifestyle is highly problematic. Not only that, homosexuality presents a significant challenge, especially to the humanist model of gender or sexuality as an essential quality. Homosexual behavior would then represent a sort of sexual “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” Transsexual behavior, then, could be said to be an even more radical challenge to both gender and sex: it suggests not only the possible “misapplication” of gender but of sex as well, implying a shifting (though still polarized) conception of both gender and sex1.
This polarization is the root of the problem since it permeates our very social structure. Male/female, complete/incomplete, queer/straight all represent the overwhelming binary structure of society. It is, however, I believe the task of hermeneutics as a philosophical, political, ethical, and most importantly, human endeavor, is to question and challenge the binary which is the logic of exclusion and assimilation. The binary conception of gender insists upon an identity with the corresponding characteristics of the male or the female, the masculine or the feminine. These are the paradigms through which we see ourselves and others. This is why the image of the homosexual or transvestite as the effeminate man is so popular in the literature of sexology in the 19th century (as well as the stereotypes of today). Where this stereotype evolves from is, namely, that view of sexuality which sees sexual behavior in terms of Darwinian survival and thus procreation (Herdt, 27-8). When a man has intercourse with another man, a process of “feminization” occurs on the part of the man who is on the receiving end of sodomy; in other words, he wants to be a woman. The binary notion, however, hermeneutics endeavors to show, is an inadequate model; in fact, there is some historical precedence for this claim in the notion of androgyny, drag, or transgender lifestyles—the in-between of gender which these various lifestyles represent in authentic dialogue suggests that one need not be categorized by the strict opposition between static structures such as male and female. If we begin with looking at cultural artifacts which are designed to challenge the binary conception of sex and gener, we might begin with Plato’s Symposium. In it, we are confronted with a challenge to the binary before Socrates even opens his mouth (he does not offer significant input to the dialogue for some time). It is upon the challenges presented in the historical and philosophical example of the Symposium I will build the rest of argument regarding a hermeneutics of gender.
In Aristophanes’ speech we are given a creation myth central to the Greek understanding of gender and sex (this myth is also discussed in Hesiod’s Theogony). In the beginning, we learn, there were three sexes: the children of the sun, moon, and earth. The male sex was spawned from the sun, the female from the earth, and the third sex (the hermaphrodite) from the moon since it had both the nature of sun and earth (Plato, 31). The male sex had the appearance of two men joined back to back, the female sex of two women joined back to back, and the hermaphrodite a male and female joined back to back. They were all seen as powerful beings and they attacked the gods. Thus, Zeus in his jealousy divided them in half and so human beings wander the earth longing for the other half from which they had been severed. As humans became lonely, they took their genitals and turn them from the insides of their bodies out, so they could attempt to “put themselves back together” when they embraced (Plato, 31-33)
What is interesting is that Aristophanes goes onto tell the company that men that desire after their former halves (another man) are the most respected since after they have been satisfied sexually they can pursue their daily lives while, women who desire men or men who desire women are lustful and sensual due to procreative lust (a refutation of the Darwinian justification for sexual dimorphism). Women who seek other women, lesbians, are hardly mentioned, and heterosexual relationships which result from male or female seeking their other half of the opposite sex are, as I’ve already shown, spoken of scornfully! (Plato, 32) How is it then that the binary can be said to be foundational? Indeed, the first metaphysicians were the Greeks, most prominently, is has been said, Plato himself. However, in Plato’s own sexual cosmology he challenges the logic of the binary in general and our current binary system of sexuality which privileges heterosexual behavior above that of homosexual behavior. Furthermore, men who engage in homosexual love are not seen as essentially effeminate. In fact, their homosexual sex lives are seen as the very reason they are able to remain a productive force in the society. If we view homosexuality as a historical phenomenon then, somewhere there was an inversion of values. Some might say Christianity, others the rise of modern psychiatry. Regardless, what is important is to make clear that the model of sexual dimorphism and binary gender is not a priori or essential at all; it is a construction and thus (thankfully, in my opinion) subject to revision.
Besides this obvious refutation of our current conception of gender identity and sexuality there is a more nuanced statement in the Symposium about these issues. This statement occurs in Socrates’ recounting of his discussion of Love with Diotima. In her explanation of Love Diotima informs Socrates that
The function of procreation is that of procreation in what is beautiful, and such procreation can either be physical or spiritual […] All men, Socrates, have a procreative impulse, both spiritual and physical, and when they come to maturity they feel a natural desire to beget children, but they can do so only in beauty and never in ugliness. There is something divine about the whole matter; in procreation and bringing to birth the mortal creature is endowed with a touch of immortality. But the process cannot take place in disharmony, and ugliness is out of harmony with everything divine, whereas beauty is in harmony with it. (Plato, 34)
With this we encounter a direct refutation of the current model of procreation as exclusionary (that is, the act of creation being an exclusively physical process resulting in the birth of a human child). Our idea of procreation does not include the spiritual or aesthetic; it has no taste for the divine, which is of course in Plato, experienced in beauty. The individual, singular expression of beauty then, as opposed to biology, is the foundation of love, of sex, and of gender. If we remove gender from its characteristic conception as the performative adjunct of sex and instead understand it as performance in-and-of-itself, for-itself then we come to understand that gender is merely an expression of what is beautiful or pleasing—what inspires happiness and is formed in harmony within the individual and then brought into the world through performance. Gender announces, performatively, who one sees her/himself to be. Gender, as a component of self-image and understanding, is part of that which we see when we confront the Other. When we desire someone we desire what is beautiful in them; and thus, what the Other sees as beautiful in her/himself. Desire then is not the longing for power or subjugation, it is instead a longing for realization or the arrival of an event; the event being the arrival of the Other’s disclosure of itself and thus of its beauty. Gender, as performance, as praxis, as activity is one way in which this beauty may be disclosed.
Hermeneutics is essential to this understanding because it informs the Platonic conception of procreation with a dialogical ontology. This ontology is rooted in the “true locus of hermeneutics” or what Gadamer calls “the in-between”(Gadamer, 295). The in-between can be characterized in this instance as the ontological space which exists between the binary opposition of male and female. In terms of biological sex we are confronted with a limitation: a ternary structure of male, female, and intersexed. However, biological sex need not be a definitive characteristic of sexual identity. The sex with which one identifies oneself is not a static structure. Biological sex may be a homogenous entity and due to scientific limitations and a lack of expertise I do not propose to challenge this notion. However, sexual identity is something all together different than biology. Identity is a structure which is conceived in reciprocity and in dialogue: a dialogue between one’s self-understanding and one’s objectification in the world. By objectification, I mean the experiences one encounters as a reality outside of psychic life: economics, culture, religion, and politics. Though not determinate, they are relational. The interconnectedness of our sense of self with the world we inhabit is an integral part of our humanity. Both our identities and the world change with the experiences and conditions we are faced with and the discoveries and revelations we have about ourselves. Identity then is far from a static structure: it is dynamic, fluid, and dialogical. Thus, when Plato speaks of desiring beauty permanently in the Symposium, he does not mean to say that beauty itself is permanent: but rather that we should perpetually seek what is beautiful in all of its many forms and manifestation (human and otherwise). Knowledge of ourselves and others, then, are not condition or determinate types of cognition but rather open networks of deliberation. “[T]he knower is not standing over against a situation he merely observes; he is directly confronted with what he sees. It is something he has to do.” (Gadamer, 314) Knowledge is an activity that yields to understanding which is characterized by phronesis and praxis: practical wisdom and activity. In this way, the activity of understanding what stands in alterity to the binary of male/female—i.e., the TS, TG, cross-dressing, or intersexed individual—is fluid and shifting. The dialogue which occurs in-between the binary is one which is in suspension. The “third sex” or “third gender” notion can be described best by Barbey’s characterization of the dandy (although it is applicable to all the lifestyles mentioned in this paper): ‘the “undecidable sex” (Garelick, 30). One must be able to disclose "beauty" freely in the space left by our suspension of prejudice. Only in this way does understanding occur: by not only questioning what is Other (TS, TG, queer, intersexed, etc) but our own preconceptions.
Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites. Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that it is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities. Knowledge is dialectical from the ground up. Only a person who questions can have knowledge, but questions include the antithesis of yes and no, of being like this and being like that (Gadamer, 365).
The undecideability of the dialectic presented in Gadamer’s text is precisely the dialectic conceived of as a dialogue. The person who questions is each and every one of us. We question gender and we question identity and the binary which represents the antithetical concepts of the dialectic. The key is that the question includes both rather than excluding one or the other. The resulting tension of undecidablity can only be relieved by loosening the knot where the binary intersects and becomes entangled and convoluted: the in-between. "Beauty" then, is not self-evident and subject to eternal standards but emergent, a process. It is a spectrum, much as sexuality itself is a spectrum. And the reflection of "beauty" in this sense, beauty as irreducible otherness and difference, as the unique marking of the individual is not a merely aesthetic category. Indeed, beauty may contain within it what is commonly perceived as decadence or depravity.
Dandyism, Homoeroticism, and Undecidability: or the Androgyny of Love
There are further examples of this in-between that I will now offer. Each a distinct historical or cultural phenomenon, but all of them open the possibility for the disclosure of beauty as opposed to categorization, as the paradigm through which we see the world and others.
The first example I would like to offer is that of the aforementioned dandy. Dandyism was a cultural phenomenon which still exerts influence over our notions of celebrity, personality, and aesthetics. In her book Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle, Rhonda Garelick charts the course of dandyism’s relationship with gender concepts, sexuality, and the feminine. The dandy sought a life of idleness which was consumed with how he presented himself. The stereotypical dandy is best characterized by his top-hat, black frock-coat with flowing tails, white gloves, high collar, frilled bows as a tie, often of exotic fabric, various ointments and perfumes and a social attitude focused on achieving recognition. The personality, as a whole, was a performance. The dandy, almost naturally, Garelick argues at several points in her book, is drawn to the feminine. Despite correlations between dandies and “camp” female performers, one of dandyism’s primary representatives—Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly—believed that assistance from women in perfecting the aesthetic sense of style and self-reproduction was unnecessary since the dandy, in certain respects, was himself a woman (Garelick, 25). Baudelaire’s notion of dandyism follows on this theme and anticipates drag, female impersonation, and transgenderism by recognizing dandies as “creatures of disguise and social manipulation” (Garelick, 34). The dandy sought to overcome his own gender, that of the male, not only by adapting feminine mannerisms and sense of aesthetic, but by literally subsuming himself in the character of what was seen as feminine in 19th century France; however, they distinctly identified themselves as male while insisting that the virtues of femininity reached perfection only in the aesthetic and fashion sensibility of the true dandy, a man (this despite great admiration for female performers of the day and iconoclastic, cross-dressing women such as Rachilde2).
The dandy, however, was not outside of the gender spectrum. The dandy occupied the space in between male and female. Dandyism was not a homogenous lifestyle. Former dandies, dating back to the ancient Greek Alcibiades, constituted themselves as singular individuals through self-creation and self-adaptation3 (as well as learning from the tradition of dandyism). It is in this way, especially, that dandyism represents early and subtle signs of a transgendered community. Each individual stands out as a distinct entity, yet merges to form an almost disciplic succession of men inhabiting this ambiguous gender category. The ambiguity and singularity of the dandy are essential to his existence; but so is his paradoxical insistence upon identifying himself with the tradition of dandyism. Thus, one might say the dandy not only represents a challenge to the binary but presents a microcosmic image of the dialogical conception of identity needed to overcome the binary in his own self-constitution. The effeminate dandy did not want to forsake his male identity or capitulate to the standard of feminine identity, but to cultivate a sense of the pleasurable, the beautiful, and the erotic in himself (and in some sense society), and in so doing fall both outside and within the male/female dichotomy without necessarily challenging the social and medical assumption of male superiority .
Dandies did represent an artistic community and their works are inflected with a distinct sense of sexuality. Many dandies were homosexuals or cross-dressers and notoriously effeminate. Their artistry did not separate them from moral condemnation either; indeed their artistry often went unrecognized in mainstream culture (in the case of Baudelaire, Lorrain, and other “decadents”). One need only look at the tragic case of Oscar Wilde and read his heartbreaking disavowal of his supposedly lurid, homosexual past in De Profoundis. Not only that, but several obscenity trials, public scandals, and incidence of base slander were suffered by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lorrain, and even Flaubert (not necessarily a dandy) for depictions of homosexuality, sodomy, cross-dressing, fetishism, or simply iconoclastic portraits of gender identity (as in the case of Madame Bovary).
The cognate sense of inspiration or elation and alienation run throughout dandyist texts and most significantly in the French Symbolist or Fin de Siecle period in both France and England. Notice this piece of verse by Wilde’s contemporary Marc Andre Raffalovich.
Because our world has music, and we dance;
Because our world has colour, and They gaze;
Because our speech is tuned, and schooled our glance,
And we have roseleaf nights and roseleaf days,
And we have leisure, work to do and rest;
Because They see us laughing when we meet,
And hear our words and voices, see us dressed
With skill, and pass us and our flowers smell sweet:
They think that we know friendship, passion, love!
Our peacock Pride! And Art our nightingale!
And Pleasure’s hand upon our dogskin gloves!
And if They see our faces burn or pale,
It is the sunlight, think They, or the gas,
--Our lives are wired like our gardenias.
(Raffalovich, “The World Well Lost IV”, 294)
At first we notice the capitalization of “They”: the majority which imposes its own vision of the dandy and the homosexual upon Raffalovich, Douglas (Wilde’s lover and compatriot) and Wilde. Their sense of exuberance is tempered by the knowledge that they are neither understood nor accepted. “They think that we know friendship, passion, love!” But this is not joy; it is an invective against their naïve perception of the dandy and the “molly” (or homosexual male). “They” are incapable of feeling or understanding those emotions as Raffalovich can and that is why “It is the sunlight, think They, or the gas”—the “They” remains unwilling to allow the “Other” to disclose its own beauty. While this piece of verse gets to the heart of the aesthetics, fashion, and ethos of dandyism and Victorian homosexual sub-culture, it is laden with a certain grief because it is a beauty which remains excluded: hence, though Raffalovich believes the world is “well lost”, it is “lost” nonetheless.
This tension between acceptance of oneself and the pain of exclusion is also marked in the transcripts of Wilde’s trial compared with his De Profoundis. In his trial Wilde rebelliously champions homosexuality: “the Love that dare not speak its name.”
‘
The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and misunderstood, so misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest for of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of live before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in pillory for it. (Wilde, 341)
However, after Wilde’s reputation and career were ruined at the hands of Douglas’ father the Marquis of Queensbury, his family life shattered; he eventually capitulated to the demands of the “They.” It is a clear example of the damage often done those who challenge the hierarchy of sexuality or gender.
What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures to realize those aspirations…(Wilde, from De Profoundis, 344)
The tragedy of Wilde’s self-doubt is precisely the effect that normalization seeks to breed in the LGBT community. Guilt is a powerful, powerful weapon and is utilized through the repression of “deviance” or otherness. Normalization, then, is negative and attempts to squash the dialogical space of the “in-between” by eradiating and homogenizing all space that lurks suspended between the monolithic concepts of binary gender: the masculine and the feminine. This early construction of an aesthetic community and lifestyle, however, survived, and paved the way for Goth, glam, glitter, and punk not only by its staunch courage and rebelliousness, but its passionate pursuit for singular recognition and respect.
Glam Rock & Punk Rock: The “Grotesque” Anatomy of an Artistic, Erotic, and Transgendered Sub-Culture
The risks and sufferings of the modern transgendered artistic community also provide us with a tragic and yet provocative example. In cultural and fashion history, the movement of glam rock was especially powerful in confronting a rigid structure of gender identity with radical cross-dressing, androgyny, and transsexualism. One notable example is David Bowie. Bowie’s notoriously androgynous stage characters Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and even the dandy-like Thin White Duke embodied a rebellious sexual energy and gender identity. Bowie in his performance and lyrics dwelled in the in-between, insisting upon being allowed to explore the full continuum of gender. Throughout his career he has appeared as himself in a typically masculine (though highly stylized) fashion and in full blown androgynous drag. The covers of his early albums depict him as a thin waif and a strikingly girlish figure4. On the covers of Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane his appearance is strictly androgynous and his personality is seemingly morphological: an effeminate/androgynous man playing raucous rock and roll with highly sexual and confrontational lyrics. In the song “Rebel, Rebel” off of the album Diamond Dogs, he sings of the glam rock scene of which he was a pioneer and the awkward and difficult lifestyle that accompanied it.
You've got your mother in a whirl/ She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl […] /Rebel Rebel, you've torn your dress/
Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess / Rebel Rebel, how could they know?/ Hot tramp, I love you so!
-Bowie, “Rebel, Rebel”
Just in these few lines we are confronted with the reactions of family and the confrontation between one’s peers in the glam community and one’s own self-identity (an apparent hold-over from the conflicts between mainstream standards, sub-culture standards, and the aesthetic/ethical standards carried over from dandyism of self-creation and fierce individualism). Later in the song, he mentions the drug use prevalent amongst this community of transgednered individuals, a problem still prevalent in the community today according to much of the psychological literature. These themes are tied-in directly to the aesthetic and musical culture of glam on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in the song “Lady Stardust” in which the main character, a ridiculed glam boy, is referred to using both the pronoun he and the title “Lady.”
People stared at the makeup on his face/ Laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace/ The boy in the bright blue jeans Jumped up on the stage/ And lady stardust sang his songs/ Of darkness and disgrace.
-Bowie, “Lady Stardust”
In a darker vein, forerunners of the glam movement, the Velvet Underground, and their songwriter Lou Reed, were notorious for their graphic lyrics about heroin use, sadomasochism, and deviancy. Part of this “deviancy” is actually a touching song (“Candy Says”) about Reed’s experiences with his close friend Candy Darling, an M to F (male to female) transsexual actress, prostitute, and performer in late 60’s/early 70’s Greenwich Village (and a member of Warhol’s factory). This song documents his impressions of Candy’s journey towards self-creation and the suffering she endured (“Candy says/I’ve learned to hate my body”); a journey cut short when Candy died due to cancer she developed through hormone use. Candy is a character in a later song by Reed “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” from his solo Transformer album as well5. The song tells the tale of the many “deviants” he met in Warhol’s factory: homosexuals, transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers.
One of the most radical and striking examples of the glam/punk movements challenge to homogenized gender identity is Wayne (Jayne County). With her band the Electric Chairs she wrote aggressive punk rock with titles like “Transgendered Outlaw” and “Man Enough to Be a Woman” (which would become the title of her autobiography). She began as a member of the Factory when she was pre-operative (and known as Wayne) and worked in the theater scene of Greenwich Village in the early 60’s. Inspired by glam bands like the New York Dolls and David Bowie and the aggressive music of Iggy Pop and the MC5, she started her own band and quickly became one of the top draws at the punk/glam scenes home bases: CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. After the punk movement petered out, she traveled and worked as a prostitute, eventually earning enough many to pay for sexual reassignment surgery (becoming Jayne). She still performs with the Electric Chairs, her band, and is a performance artist as well. She still confounds people today by presenting as a female and incorporating masculinity into her identity through her music (often Sticky Fingers era Stones' styled vamped up blues rock), posturing, dress, and attitude. Despite the masculine overtones of her art and personality, she still remains and insists on being recognized as, a female.
What the glam and punk movement demonstrates is an aggressive reaction to the repression of self-constituted gender identity. All of these people (Lou Reed, Bowie, Jayne County, the New York Dolls, etc) were attempting to carve out a niche in a world intent upon exclusion. Reed’s parents subjected him to electro-shock therapy and he was (like most glam/punk artists) a notorious drug user with a fetish for speed—his rebelliousness was only matched by his morbidity; Bowie was perpetually a topic of gossip columns regarding his sexuality and often portrayed as a freak or deviant and often lived up to the standard due to his cocaine induced paranoia; Jayne/Wayne County was simply to radical to ever be mentioned in the mainstream media—a former prostitute and drag queen who underwent a sex change is simply too extreme of a phenomenon to be represented and recognized. The glam rock and punk movement was seen as a freakish phenomenon. However, it is precisely this attitude the community was reacting against. Glam rock, popularized by artists like Bowie, T-Rex, and the New York Dolls and later exploited by groups like Kiss and Aerosmith, began as a movement to violently counteract the dispossession of transgendered individuals and other “freaks” and mount a call for recognition.
Glam rock can be said to dwell in the in-between because it did not resort to simply inverting sex roles or aestheticizing their project (as the dandies did). Surely, there was an aesthetic component (Bowie’s stage performances in the 1970’s were notoriously theatrical and lavish), but gender was chosen as the medium of performance. In the face of repression, many of these iconoclastic artists highlighted for the first time (certainly in mainstream culture) the constructedness of gender as well as the repression which the binary structure accorded to it. The in-between of glam rock was non-existent and did not have a distinctly counter-culture voice. The glam rock movement attempted to make space for such a discourse to take place. It provided an area for the arrival of the event of dialogue. More than iconoclastic, glam rock and punk rock invented a new iconography: the trans iconography; one of the first systems of art and representation to give a voice to explicitly trans individuals and issues in popular culture—consequently, glam rock and punk rock were far from popular and often repressed or homogenized at best in the mainstream media. However, this does not take away from the significance of glam’s cultural protest. If anything, glam's significance as a "gender fucking" or subversive LGBT movement is highlighted by even more aggressive tendencies exhibited in punk. Patti Smith's sacramental portrait of male on male rape and of adolescent sexual confusion in "Land" highlights a fundamentally Rimbaudian strain in punk poetics: the beatification of what is ugly and depraved.
The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea
From the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating
Another boy was sliding up the hallway
He merged perfectly with the hallway,
He merged perfectly, the mirror in the hallway
The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,
but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically
When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this
Baby mash potato, do the alligator, do the alligator
And you twist the twister like your baby sister
I want your baby sister, give me your baby sister, dig your baby sister
Rise up on her knees, do the sweet pea, do the sweet pee pee,
Roll down on her back, got to lose control, got to lose control,
Got to lose control and then you take control,
Then you're rolled down on your back and you like it like that,
Like it like that, like it like that, like it like that,
Then you do the watusi, yeah do the watusi
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can't you show me nothing but surrender ?”
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,
Taped to his chest there's the answer,
You got pen knives and jack knives and
Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred
Then he cries, then he screams, saying
Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud,
Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud,
And go Johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi
-Patti Smith, "Land"
Smith's ecstatic sexual imagery (her leering, rhythmic paean to a young girl "humping on a parking meter" in her re-interpretation of the Them's "Gloria") is rife with violence and conflict because it seeks to not only interrogate and explore sexual difference, but to destroy the very concept of sexual normalcy. The symmetry between the anonymous boy "driving it deep in Johnny" and Johnny's revelation of an array of blades beneath his jacket makes this rape or at the very least rough, violent sexual encounter mirror the logic of conquest. But the conquest sought for here is not purely sexual or based on some dimension of social power, but rather, a conquest of self. Johnny's reaction, his lashing out, his fierce self-assertion, his manic energy is a celebration of his confusion and ambiguity (notice, NOT ambivalence). His supplication to his anonymous "lover", is not a sign of weakness; it's not a sign of anything. It is a liminal, undetermined moment. We're not even sure what to call it. All that we know is that when prompted ("can't you show me nothing but surrender"), Johnny is anything but submissive. Johnny, the "pretty boy" is a weapon. His sexual virility is a weapon, an unleashing of great power and energy. It is telling that Smith, a woman who on the cover of the album Horses is dressed in nearly totally androgynous drag, glorifies the sexual potency of this male adolescent through a homosexual encounter. It turns the myth of rock n' roll on it's head (the invocation of the watusi and other popular dances. Smith confounds the expectations of rock history by not playing up her girlishness a la 60's girl groups (who ironically enough, provided ample fodder for the New York Dolls brand of Stones' inspired "cock rock"), by diving head first into avant-garde performance poetry, tough three chord rock and roll, and a decidedly twisted take on the rock n' roll archetype (inherited from the blues) of male sexual conquest. More than a shocking lyrical turn, it is a statement of feminine rebellion and a celebration of the spectrum of male sexuality. It challenges not only the mainstream cultural understanding of women in rock n' roll, but it undermines the notion that homosexuals = sissies. It is Johnny, the passive agent in this homosexual encounter, decked out in a leather jacket, wielding switchblades (a la the "leader of the pack"). "Land", as an artwork is an attack on sexual mores and a fittingly Rimbaudian gesture, eschewing mainstream stereotypes of women and homosexuals and dismantling the iconography and standards of the effeminate, flaming gay male in one fell swoop. One might even say Patti Smith pointed the way toward a new, tougher dandyism.
1. It is instructive at this point to refer the reader to Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. This book of case studies in the field of psychopathology specifically regarding sexual behavior, documented the common phenomenon of what was regularly referred to in sexological literature “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” In his text, Krafft-Ebbing encompasses transvestitism, homosexuality, androgyny, and transexualism to two realms of disorder: fetishism and antipathic sexuality or “the total lack of feeling toward the opposite sex.” (p.21) While Krafft-Ebing certainly does not hide his moral horror in these case studies, they are still enlightening. For a more detailed account and characterization of these phenomenon I would recommend case studies 91 (fetishism/acquired homosexuality), 105 (Fetishism, specifically for women’s clothing and cross dressing), 128 (homosexuality; a biography which epitomizes what was seen as the stereotypical gay man, the effeminate male), 129 (a lengthy and illuminating autobiography of a transsexual), 131 (psychosexual metamorphosis), 152 (androgyny), 166 (gynandry—though Krafft-Ebing refers to her as a “man-woman”, from the details it is quite clear that the patient was a cross-dressing lesbian who enjoyed presenting herself as a man). All of these case studies make use of both the language and metaphor of inversion and hermaphrodism and are highly interesting examples of how LGBT individuals were seen by a majority of the psychiatric, medical, and lay community.
2. Rachilde was born a genetic girl in 1860; however her father, disappointed he didn’t have a son, raised her as a boy. This ambiguous and shifting gender identity traveled with Rachilde the rest of her life. She obtained permission to appear in public as a cross-dresser by Parisian authorities when she arrived there from the country-side (it was illegal in 19th century Paris) and her business cards read “Rachilde: Man of Letters.” Her first novel Monsieur Venus explores the relationship between two transgendered levels, one a sadist (a gendered girl presenting as a man) who dominates his lover (a gendered boy presenting as a girl). The inversion of gender labels is common throughout the book (a man is referred to as Aunt and a woman Uncle). She was dubbed “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” by a famous French critic after the appearance of this book. However at 29 she married Alfred Vallete and a year later gave birth to a child, Gabrielle, whom she remained distant from throughout her life. She would go on to found the French cultural journal Mercure de France and align herself with conservative French nationalist despite her former anarchist sympathies. She was a self-professed misogynist and was notorious for “preferring the company of her pet rats to human beings.” (Hustvedt, 1084, The Deacadent Reader)
3. The writings of both Rachilde (see note above for explanation) and Jean Lorrain prove helpful in illustrating these points. It should be noted that Lorrain was said to be openly homosexual, which is true, but more accurately Lorrain (like Rachilde) was transgendered. He wore heavy makeup-up, large rings, painted his nails and when once asked if he ever wished to be a woman he responded: “Yes! For the vice of it!” (Hustvedt, 1079) He was a disciple of Barbey (who coined the dandy as the “undecidable sex”) and was referred as “Monsieur, the slut” by him. Lorrain took pleasure in vice and was fascinated by criminality. Even his presenting as a transgendered artist spoke of his fascination with the feminine: for Lorrain the woman not only embodied sensuality and violent beauty, but the ideal pathology; in the Dictionnaire encyclopedique des science medicales (1864-89) “women” are among the list of medical ailments (Hustvedt, 18). It is likely Lorrain was aware of this since his stories were notorious for their medical, sexological, and pathological detail due to his avid research and interest in criminology and deviance (Hustvedt, 18-19).
4. This is most noticeable on the cover of his 1970 The Man Who Sold the World album where he is sprawled out on a couch in a dress with naturally long, and well styled girlish hair.
5. The entire album is obsessed with morphological identity. Reed has a few songs on it relating to cross-dressing and gender-bending, and even the title Transformer implies this pre-occupation.
Beizer, Janet. “Venus in Drag, or Redressing the Discourse of Hysteria: Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
--------------. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zinn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Brookner, Anita. “Baudelaire: The Black Frock Coat.” Romanticism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
d’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey. “Les Diaboliques.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York, Zone Books, 1998.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1998.
Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Herdt, Gilbert. “Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders.” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, 1993.
Hustvedt, Asti. “The Art of Death: French Fiction at the Fin-de-Siecle.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories. Trans. Dr. Domino Falls. London: Velvet Publications, 1997.
Lorrain, Jean. “Selections."The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-
de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Plato. “From Symposium.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Raffalovich, Marc Andres. “World Well Lost IV.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Reed, Lou. Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. New York: Hyperion, 1991.
Wilde, Oscar. “De Profoundis.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
-------------. “A Defense of Uranian Love: From The Transcripts of the Second Trial (April
20-26, 1895).” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
It Is Miraculous to Sink With the Outgoing Tide: Writing Through the Possibilities for Poetry Post-Bush
1 (Preface)
To consider poetry in an age such as ours seems to be a damned near foolish proposition. Poetry, at least as it is prejudicially portrayed, conveys beauty, truth, and opens “the doors of perception” to transcendental vistas located beyond the realm of everyday cognition and sensation (or so the textbooks and anthologies tell us when they discuss the Romantics or the Metaphysical poets, who, since I was an adolescent, I seem to have an affinity for. This is an attempt to both navigate that influence and separate myself from it. Somewhat. I hope.) I begin by noting that this undertaking is neither narrative nor linear in nature. It is fractured, scattered, and ill at ease. As it should be.
After the election of Barack Obama, we must address the potential erosion of the political movements that developed in response to the Bush presidency. This concern is also part of what poetry faces as it moves forward in, what some hope, is a better, more open, less monological “discourse”. This isn’t to say they will inevitably erode. It’s not as if on noon of inauguration day a movement for peace in the Middle East evaporated, that the movement for economic human rights was eviscerated by the winds of “Change” (big “C”, always). It also means that poetic subversions such as Flarf, or conceptual poetry, poetries that are meant to undermine hierarchies and challenge cultural legibility and legitimacy are now simply a bit too behind the times to be relevant. The precarious economic situation we are faced with today is a stark reminder that beneath the mask of market progress there hides the twisted grimace of economic reality, of the pain and disenfranchisement perpetuated by an economic system built on exploitation and a cultural environment which, for so long, has been inhaling the anesthetizing ether of profit, excess, exploding credit lines and political impropriety. Now, more than ever, poetries built on critique and negation, on subversion and counter-cultural tendencies are needed. We cannot let this indisputably historic moment (and potential opportunity) undercut one of the fundamental tasks of poetry: to re-shape not only the way we conceive of the world, but how we move within it, as linguistic agents, as cultural taste-testers, as political creatures wandering through an increasingly fucked up (for lack of a better term) political landscape. That landscape can be delimited, it’s horizons broadened or narrowed, it’s topography uprooted, and the narratives of it’s myths can be radically altered by these and other “difficult” poetries: whether it be the disparate label of “Language” poetry or flarf or conceptual poetry or radical performative poetries, visual poetries, or reflective visits to the archives of visionary political tapestries such as Ginsberg’s “Witchita Vortex Sutra”, Oppen’s serial explorations of our everyday lives, and Zukofsky’s socialist modernist experiments. What follows here is an attempt at writing through a few of these past, present, and future possibilities and to offer a few suggestions of what these possibilities might have to say to us about capitalism, the canon, and the increasing commodification of our lives and our language at this moment. There are still chains to be cast in the fire.
2 (Text)
Perhaps the sad state of poetry in the “mainstream” of culture is less of a comment on poetry and more of a comment on our culture. If we are dissatisfied with the readability, comprehensibility, and “appeal” of the majority of modern, especially experimental poetic expression, it is not due to any failure of our poetry, but rather due to a failure of our civilization and culture at large. If it is true that “real poetry...brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history” (and I believe it is), this still does not mean that we must wait until history is so far gone as to be doomed to obscurity in order to settle our accounts. Why, after Adorno famously asked, “Can there be poetry after Auschwitz” (or rather proclaimed it was impossible), has no one dared to venture that poetry is impossible after Mi Lai, or Abu Ghraib, or Darfur, or Srebenicia, or Cambodia, or the Congo, or Amadou Diallo, or Katrina, or the war in Iraq, or the AIDS pandemic, or the massacre at Jenin? Ultimately, Adorno’s question was both premature and too late. If we were to ask ourselves if it is possible to write poetry, indeed, to employ art as a valid means of representation after a traumatic or horrific event, then we would find that all art, all poetry, was an attempt to justify its existence in the midst of an atrocity exhibition. It appears as though “that which has happened” is always already happening. In some form, again and yet again. And we would like to think that there is something more to art and poetry than the stuff of distraction, of placidity, of pure reactionary tendencies. The vitality of poetry is directly related to the degree to which it capably and faithfully represents the pieces contained within the atrocity exhibition. All poetry, in that sense, is ekphratic. In this sense, poetry is neither particular or universal, neither private or public, neither political or confessional. Poetry is a searching, an experience of wonder. Poetry is always in between these distinctions. Even the most political, socially minded poem is a confession, and the most confessional poem is a keyhole for political insight. Poetry is always this AND not that. It would appear poetry, at heart then, poetry is and should be fundamentally, a negation. It’s negativity, however, is its freedom, its potentiality.
***
Ginsberg’s evocation of the “holy” in his “Footnote to Howl” is appropriate only in that it is labeled as a footnote or afterthought. That’s all the “holy”, the transcendental gesture can ever be. It is not present or even imminent. It is a nice dream, it is a comforting conjuring trick. Ultimately, the holy, the hollowed, that which is miraculous and beautiful is an odd proposition. One thing we can learn from Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” is that the miraculous, the beautiful is not the hidden core of depravity, perversity, wanton lustfulness, and subversion--these things can be themselves, without qualification, beautiful and miraculous. They call the very terms into question, and this ambiguity and this potential erasure, are the only things which give the terms meaning. This tradition of standing beauty on it’s head dates back to Baudelaire and even further to Catullus. And despite this new era of optimism and hope, we should never forget that our ambiguity is our strongest weapon, as we buttress ourselves against complacency and our “passionate taste for the difficult.” We should always demand that we be given the opportunity to reach into a puddle of gore or a jar of tears or trash heap and find the open hand of the miraculous.
***
The seat of the miraculous is a vomit green couch, rain-beaten and musty on the side of a curb. It is what we uncover in basements. The miraculous is forgotten. The miraculous is not even silent, it is screaming, and ignored. The miraculous is timid when cast over by a flashlight. The keen, sharp, exacting light of analysis cannot shine through the murky pool of the miraculous. We feel its mud ooze between our toes and laugh as the tide spirits away the sand beneath our feet. It is miraculous to sink with the outgoing tide.
Gallery
“What has quite rapidly happened is that Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism. Its attempt at a universal market, transfrontier and transclass, turned out to be spurious. Its forms lent themselves to cultural competition and the commercial interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of schools, styles, and fashion so essential to the market. The painfully acquired techniques of significant disconnection are relocated, with the help of the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as the merely technical modes of advertising and the commercial cinema. The isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, have become the easy iconography of the commercials, and the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and sceptical hero takes his ready-made place as the star of the thriller. “ -Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism
“The word, dissociated from the husk of habitual cliches, and from the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed from responsibility in relation to all possible context; it appears in one brief act, which, being devoid of reflections, declares its solitude, and therefore its innocence. This art has the very structure of suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetic time which traps the word between two layers and sets it off less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as a light, a void, a murder, a freedom.” -Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, on Mallarme’s “typographical agraphia”
“But what about being the bad speaker myself? There’s an experience that could be described as linguistic occasion, of being poised somewhere between “language speaks me” and “I speak language.” It is the flashing across the mind of words which fly into the head as if they somehow must be said. A clump of phrases shape their own occasion, which swells toward articulation.” -Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect
“Because I’m a writer, not a speaker”-Alice Sebold,novelist/memoirist, in an interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (WHYY), October 15th, 2007.
3 (Text)
What they find in poetry is an assemblage of games, cliches, half-truths, suppositions, lists, misgivings, and wishes; they find the very stuff of experience, and that which happens in between experience: the anxieties, ambiguities, fears, and curiosities. The poem is like a photographic negative. Perhaps it is readable, but as a negative is still liminal, still in process. And even if one were to develop this negative, perhaps the aperture was off, the film faulty or overexposed. Perhaps the photograph will be burned, given away, lost or torn. But it is this unknowing that is fundamental to the power of poetry. The poem should always strive to remain a negative. To remain in between nothingness and presence, to be an imperfect signification, a liminal representation, fraught with anxiety and ecstatic possibility. The poem should be an expression “wonder”, of awe-struck, irreducible unknowing. When the “message in a bottle” washes up on shore, we should always consider the possibility that we will be confronted with a blank piece of paper inside.
***
Consider this a voicemail deleted by accident. There is a record of existence. But nothing to speak to it. Where did it come from?
Gallery
“Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything. So every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation.” -Getrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” from Lectures in America
“Let us have theories there and return to here’s hear.” -James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
“[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task, which is to push itself to the origin of language (a task that is by definition impossible); when it strains to “dig” right to language’s possibility; it encounters, a the edge of the inaccessible and forever-concealed gaping, the naked possibility of address.”-Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience
“TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. ...
I have not meant to express my thought but to
help you clarify what you yourself think. ...
You are not any more different from me than
your right leg is from your left, but what joins us
is THE SLEEP OF REASON-WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.” -Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
4 (Text)
Whenever one accounts for desire, manifest or sublimated, one accounts for negation, for lack. Whether it is a desire for freedom or control, for excess or simplicity, desire stakes a claim for “this and not that”; it affirms and negates in a simultaneous action and this simultaneity is its trace. The ability to simultaneously create and negate, to build up and lay waste is miraculous. And it is language which gives us this capacity. As word-bearers, we are uniquely equipped with the tools necessary to inhabit, change, make sense of, and break apart the world. Ultimately, poetry does not strive to satiate desire, or to purely negate, or to purely affirm, but rather to spoil the very notion of purity and satiation. Poetry celebrates incompleteness and slippage. It is by nature a cipher, even in its most explicit moments, the reasons behind a choice of word, and the debatability of a words utility and effectiveness in communicating a given idea, give rise to the potential for negation and slippage. And this potential is our greatest freedom, our greatest hope. Because it’s ever-present possibility should unmoor us from our firm entrenchment in a desire for permanence, for Truth rather than truths, for campaigns rather than moments, for complicity rather than delinquency. These slippages and uncertainties, conflicting interpretations and opaque significations are causes for celebration. The blank piece of paper which greets us inside the bottle (should that be what we find), is not a simple negation, a simple nothing, it is an invitation to scrawl our own message and chuck it back into the riptide, or to simply reinsert the paper into the bottle and pass it along to another intrepid beachcomber. And we do not pass along silence or apathy, but rather a horizon to be delimited and and filled, we pass along our ambiguity, our recognition of absence.Who knows, perhaps while wandering along at low tide, we will find this selfsame bottle, we will recognize it and open it; we will recognize the paper inside as the blank piece of paper we passed on all that time ago, and we will find a message awaiting us. And should we recognize the bottle and the paper within, and find it still blank, we may defer, yet again...or perhaps we will take it upon ourselves to be sure that this unsettled debt can finally be accounted for. After all, we need but a word...
***
We are hybrids you and I. We are Other and Same. We smother one another. It is the same tears we cry. We have dreamed ourselves as aberrations. We celebrate our horrid corporeality. No theory explains us. No scientist will dissect us. Even if one should endeavor, he would find nothing but neurons strung together by ampersands and tightly wound fibers of teeth. And we do not blink.
Gallery
“More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of spirits--this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture-- becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so on ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: you too have weapons.” -Franz Kafka, Diaries (12 June, 1923)
5 (Text)
The canon is an attempt to write a grocery list which will only rarely need to be amended. We will walk into the store and find all of the foodstuffs and household cleaning products we will ever need. And the options and choices will be evident and our decision will simply be a matter of which predetermined product from the limited array of commodities we will choose from. The aisles will be filled with Forms, Ideas, serenity, unity, process, nothingness, Will, the State, anarchy, polit bureaus, freedom, liberty, democracy, caste, god, nation, race, Dasein, essence, existence, facticity, games, capital, labor theories of value, evolution, intelligent designs, apperception, hermeneutics, empire, rebellion, dissent, history, narrative, trauma, witness, differance, the image, the word, the eye (all three), the commodity fetish, the Oedipal complex, anxiety, archetype, artifice, appropriation, translation, mechanical reproductions, biopower, rhizomes, nomads, monads, dereve, Messianic time, fire, rivers, habitus, mirrors, epistemes, gold standards, social credit, theological crematoriums, afterthoughts, insights, dreamworlds, phonemes, primitive utopias, leviathans, genocides, sexes, genders, disposition, afrocentrics, oceanic, feminist, latent bisexualities, semiotics, flags, prophecy, voice, constellations, terror, cruelty, theater, epics, arcades, negations (of negations) [of negations], after-Auschwitzes, death, dying, teleological suspensions of the ethical, eternal returns (both happy and unhappy), genealogies, archaeologies, new urbanisms, old cities, security walls, clashes of civilizations, Lexuses, flatitude, as performance, a dark wood, great refusals, projects, groups-in-fusion, days of rage, summers of love, sons of sams, detournement, deconstructions, aleatoric, cubist Dadas, concrete visual sound poems, realisms, class conscious crapshoots, problems with god, god problems, virgin births, virgin undertakers, virgin afterlife greeters, onto-theological irreconcilable differences, imagined communities, ambiguous genitalia, third ways, fateful triangles even, olive branches. FEMAs, pre-emptive wars, solid intelligences, ideologies, crises, stimmung, metamorphoses, messages in bottles, tuberculoses, turnings, addictions, bad ideas, plowshares, swords, no’s, yeses, raptures, reckonings, towns, countries, peasantries (sans culottes), dialectics, Dianetics, mimetic, close reading, subaltern, post colonial, new historical unpaid tabs.
Lyre Lag
“I speak language.” It is the flashing
than consolation is: you too
have that as long as every word, is twisted in impossible)
; when it strains to what about being
the said.
A clump of phrases fragment on your left,
but what joins reflections, declares its solitude, quite rapidly happened is that Modernism of the inaccessible
and forever-concealed gaping, the occasion,
of being poised infinitum. The only
express my thought
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task,
which it, origin of language (a task that happened is t
hat it is going to go. The word, dissociated
from the definition impossible); when it strains a speaker.
Most especially a remark rapidly happened is
that Modernism quickly lost--
become the easy iconography of schools,
styles, and into the new international
the trained and assured Its attempt at a but to
help your left, but their own occasion,
which swells toward articulation. layers and
sets it off (the head) as if they somehow must have
not a word between two layers and sets declare its solitude, the new
international capitalism.
Its attempt is then freed from responsibility
in relation “I speak language.” It is a light, a void, a murder, its
innocence. This art has the
merely technical modes, recreation
and there is no possible doubt: thing is not colors or emotions
it isolated, estranged images of
It is the flashing across the infinitesimally little help.
More than consolation going to go on
any more different from me to here’s hear.
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its assured technicists,
“dig” right to language’s possibility; stay with the language (happens whether you like it or no.) and fashion, so essential
to the reflections, declares its solitude, and
therefore its as if they somehow must. So every one which is to...
phrases shape their own but what joins us-- a cryptogram more than poetry
accomplishes its task, of significant discconnection
(very structure of suicide): in it, silence
“it strains”
is their characteristic; takes his ready-made place
And so on
as a real thing is not imitation of a cryptogram.
Every word, twisted in no. And what you like is to the origin in one brief act,
as which,is to push itself
to MONSTERS.
More and more which fly into the head
as if cultural competition and the isolated
, estranged images of alienation and being
devoid of reflections, declares its significant disconnection
are relocated, with the help, ad infinitum.
The only easy iconography of the commercials, and
WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE and “I speak: humanity
is anything!
So? and “I speak language.”
It is leg, it is from your left, its anti-bourgeois stance,
the market. The painfully thriller.
The word,
The word, dissociated from the freedom. But
poetic time which traps writes. It is a clump of ready-
made stars and is no possible doubt about it and
that Modernism quickly lost special images of humanity.
to be spurious.
Its forms of advertising and of language (a task that
cliches, and from the technical (described as
linguistic occasion), which cliches, clarify what you yourself think.
the speaker. as writer,
is then freed from theories there or as long as humanity is infinitesimally...
THE the origin of its estranged images of twist the hand
of reflections, which are isolated, estranged images as transfrontier
You are not any the new international poetry void, you are
a murder, fashion!
your right
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task, which
is cultural competition & techniques of
significant discconnection & are commercials, and the lonely, bitter,
being devoid of reflections, is you, too turned out to be
THE SLEEP OF innocence.
This art has the isolated,
estranged images of alienation
poetry c
ryptogram
BE CARRIED
of sounds or colors what is understandable.
Every word, twisted
that speaks me
and
“I speak think. ...
the lonely address.
context; it appears to push itself
like is of infinitesimally LIFE
trained and so on
ad theories there and return to
You, to one is anything.
So I achieved comfortable integration into the commercial
interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of
consolation: you too have weapons. being devoid of reflections,
declare its solitude, and therefore an intellectual of merely technical modes
to go on being as technicists,
as the merely technical modes clarify
TO WHOM
forever-concealed, gaping, the naked
possibility of address. ready-made as
an imitation either of sounds or as the very
structure of suicide:
in it, silence, mind of words which fly as long
as humanity is anything.
Because I’m a writer, not a speaker.
which swells
toward articulation.
Because I’m a writer, as a fragment of a cryptogram
not a speaker.
Language as a
real thing
freedom.
Its
help
its
solitude,
and therefore its innocence.
This art has the the new international
Its attempt at forms lent themselves to cultural competition
the help of the special between two layers
of
words
its intellectual recreation.
Let us have
theories there in it all
the history of commercials,
and structure
and suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetics.
Painfully,“I speak language.”
It is the flashing, acquired
techniques of significant disconnection
and are relocated, with the help being devoid of reflections,
& its solitude, and therefore are relocated, with the
help of the special
speaker:
Language
,reflexes of the writer,
are then freed from
responsibility (
by definition impossible
); when
it strains being the bad speaker ,myself
the language
their advertising and the commercial to “dig”
right, like this,with the language of suicide:
a remark like this: “And so on...”
than as a light, a void, a murder, speak language!
It is the flashing across the mind of the possibility of address.
TO WHOM LIFE IS,
silence, yourself-- the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and POSSIBLE. ...
alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as POSSIBLE. ...
its intellectual recreation.
“Let us have theories there a
nd styles, and/or emotions
offered less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as
the isolated, estranged and
quickly must be said.
A clump of merely technical modes of
advertising with the language, their language
that has come to a speaker. Language as that
which swells toward articulation
the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed.
Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois commercials,
and turned against the speaker.
Most especially language.”
The estranged images-- the commercial cinema-- alienation
shapes their own attempt at a universal market,
transfrontier and transclass, the thriller that is
The word,
dissociated from the husk.
To consider poetry in an age such as ours seems to be a damned near foolish proposition. Poetry, at least as it is prejudicially portrayed, conveys beauty, truth, and opens “the doors of perception” to transcendental vistas located beyond the realm of everyday cognition and sensation (or so the textbooks and anthologies tell us when they discuss the Romantics or the Metaphysical poets, who, since I was an adolescent, I seem to have an affinity for. This is an attempt to both navigate that influence and separate myself from it. Somewhat. I hope.) I begin by noting that this undertaking is neither narrative nor linear in nature. It is fractured, scattered, and ill at ease. As it should be.
After the election of Barack Obama, we must address the potential erosion of the political movements that developed in response to the Bush presidency. This concern is also part of what poetry faces as it moves forward in, what some hope, is a better, more open, less monological “discourse”. This isn’t to say they will inevitably erode. It’s not as if on noon of inauguration day a movement for peace in the Middle East evaporated, that the movement for economic human rights was eviscerated by the winds of “Change” (big “C”, always). It also means that poetic subversions such as Flarf, or conceptual poetry, poetries that are meant to undermine hierarchies and challenge cultural legibility and legitimacy are now simply a bit too behind the times to be relevant. The precarious economic situation we are faced with today is a stark reminder that beneath the mask of market progress there hides the twisted grimace of economic reality, of the pain and disenfranchisement perpetuated by an economic system built on exploitation and a cultural environment which, for so long, has been inhaling the anesthetizing ether of profit, excess, exploding credit lines and political impropriety. Now, more than ever, poetries built on critique and negation, on subversion and counter-cultural tendencies are needed. We cannot let this indisputably historic moment (and potential opportunity) undercut one of the fundamental tasks of poetry: to re-shape not only the way we conceive of the world, but how we move within it, as linguistic agents, as cultural taste-testers, as political creatures wandering through an increasingly fucked up (for lack of a better term) political landscape. That landscape can be delimited, it’s horizons broadened or narrowed, it’s topography uprooted, and the narratives of it’s myths can be radically altered by these and other “difficult” poetries: whether it be the disparate label of “Language” poetry or flarf or conceptual poetry or radical performative poetries, visual poetries, or reflective visits to the archives of visionary political tapestries such as Ginsberg’s “Witchita Vortex Sutra”, Oppen’s serial explorations of our everyday lives, and Zukofsky’s socialist modernist experiments. What follows here is an attempt at writing through a few of these past, present, and future possibilities and to offer a few suggestions of what these possibilities might have to say to us about capitalism, the canon, and the increasing commodification of our lives and our language at this moment. There are still chains to be cast in the fire.
2 (Text)
Perhaps the sad state of poetry in the “mainstream” of culture is less of a comment on poetry and more of a comment on our culture. If we are dissatisfied with the readability, comprehensibility, and “appeal” of the majority of modern, especially experimental poetic expression, it is not due to any failure of our poetry, but rather due to a failure of our civilization and culture at large. If it is true that “real poetry...brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history” (and I believe it is), this still does not mean that we must wait until history is so far gone as to be doomed to obscurity in order to settle our accounts. Why, after Adorno famously asked, “Can there be poetry after Auschwitz” (or rather proclaimed it was impossible), has no one dared to venture that poetry is impossible after Mi Lai, or Abu Ghraib, or Darfur, or Srebenicia, or Cambodia, or the Congo, or Amadou Diallo, or Katrina, or the war in Iraq, or the AIDS pandemic, or the massacre at Jenin? Ultimately, Adorno’s question was both premature and too late. If we were to ask ourselves if it is possible to write poetry, indeed, to employ art as a valid means of representation after a traumatic or horrific event, then we would find that all art, all poetry, was an attempt to justify its existence in the midst of an atrocity exhibition. It appears as though “that which has happened” is always already happening. In some form, again and yet again. And we would like to think that there is something more to art and poetry than the stuff of distraction, of placidity, of pure reactionary tendencies. The vitality of poetry is directly related to the degree to which it capably and faithfully represents the pieces contained within the atrocity exhibition. All poetry, in that sense, is ekphratic. In this sense, poetry is neither particular or universal, neither private or public, neither political or confessional. Poetry is a searching, an experience of wonder. Poetry is always in between these distinctions. Even the most political, socially minded poem is a confession, and the most confessional poem is a keyhole for political insight. Poetry is always this AND not that. It would appear poetry, at heart then, poetry is and should be fundamentally, a negation. It’s negativity, however, is its freedom, its potentiality.
Ginsberg’s evocation of the “holy” in his “Footnote to Howl” is appropriate only in that it is labeled as a footnote or afterthought. That’s all the “holy”, the transcendental gesture can ever be. It is not present or even imminent. It is a nice dream, it is a comforting conjuring trick. Ultimately, the holy, the hollowed, that which is miraculous and beautiful is an odd proposition. One thing we can learn from Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” is that the miraculous, the beautiful is not the hidden core of depravity, perversity, wanton lustfulness, and subversion--these things can be themselves, without qualification, beautiful and miraculous. They call the very terms into question, and this ambiguity and this potential erasure, are the only things which give the terms meaning. This tradition of standing beauty on it’s head dates back to Baudelaire and even further to Catullus. And despite this new era of optimism and hope, we should never forget that our ambiguity is our strongest weapon, as we buttress ourselves against complacency and our “passionate taste for the difficult.” We should always demand that we be given the opportunity to reach into a puddle of gore or a jar of tears or trash heap and find the open hand of the miraculous.
The seat of the miraculous is a vomit green couch, rain-beaten and musty on the side of a curb. It is what we uncover in basements. The miraculous is forgotten. The miraculous is not even silent, it is screaming, and ignored. The miraculous is timid when cast over by a flashlight. The keen, sharp, exacting light of analysis cannot shine through the murky pool of the miraculous. We feel its mud ooze between our toes and laugh as the tide spirits away the sand beneath our feet. It is miraculous to sink with the outgoing tide.
Gallery
“What has quite rapidly happened is that Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism. Its attempt at a universal market, transfrontier and transclass, turned out to be spurious. Its forms lent themselves to cultural competition and the commercial interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of schools, styles, and fashion so essential to the market. The painfully acquired techniques of significant disconnection are relocated, with the help of the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as the merely technical modes of advertising and the commercial cinema. The isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, have become the easy iconography of the commercials, and the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and sceptical hero takes his ready-made place as the star of the thriller. “ -Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism
“The word, dissociated from the husk of habitual cliches, and from the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed from responsibility in relation to all possible context; it appears in one brief act, which, being devoid of reflections, declares its solitude, and therefore its innocence. This art has the very structure of suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetic time which traps the word between two layers and sets it off less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as a light, a void, a murder, a freedom.” -Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, on Mallarme’s “typographical agraphia”
“But what about being the bad speaker myself? There’s an experience that could be described as linguistic occasion, of being poised somewhere between “language speaks me” and “I speak language.” It is the flashing across the mind of words which fly into the head as if they somehow must be said. A clump of phrases shape their own occasion, which swells toward articulation.” -Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect
“Because I’m a writer, not a speaker”-Alice Sebold,novelist/memoirist, in an interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (WHYY), October 15th, 2007.
3 (Text)
What they find in poetry is an assemblage of games, cliches, half-truths, suppositions, lists, misgivings, and wishes; they find the very stuff of experience, and that which happens in between experience: the anxieties, ambiguities, fears, and curiosities. The poem is like a photographic negative. Perhaps it is readable, but as a negative is still liminal, still in process. And even if one were to develop this negative, perhaps the aperture was off, the film faulty or overexposed. Perhaps the photograph will be burned, given away, lost or torn. But it is this unknowing that is fundamental to the power of poetry. The poem should always strive to remain a negative. To remain in between nothingness and presence, to be an imperfect signification, a liminal representation, fraught with anxiety and ecstatic possibility. The poem should be an expression “wonder”, of awe-struck, irreducible unknowing. When the “message in a bottle” washes up on shore, we should always consider the possibility that we will be confronted with a blank piece of paper inside.
Consider this a voicemail deleted by accident. There is a record of existence. But nothing to speak to it. Where did it come from?
Gallery
“Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything. So every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation.” -Getrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” from Lectures in America
“Let us have theories there and return to here’s hear.” -James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
“[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task, which is to push itself to the origin of language (a task that is by definition impossible); when it strains to “dig” right to language’s possibility; it encounters, a the edge of the inaccessible and forever-concealed gaping, the naked possibility of address.”-Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience
“TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. ...
I have not meant to express my thought but to
help you clarify what you yourself think. ...
You are not any more different from me than
your right leg is from your left, but what joins us
is THE SLEEP OF REASON-WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.” -Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
4 (Text)
Whenever one accounts for desire, manifest or sublimated, one accounts for negation, for lack. Whether it is a desire for freedom or control, for excess or simplicity, desire stakes a claim for “this and not that”; it affirms and negates in a simultaneous action and this simultaneity is its trace. The ability to simultaneously create and negate, to build up and lay waste is miraculous. And it is language which gives us this capacity. As word-bearers, we are uniquely equipped with the tools necessary to inhabit, change, make sense of, and break apart the world. Ultimately, poetry does not strive to satiate desire, or to purely negate, or to purely affirm, but rather to spoil the very notion of purity and satiation. Poetry celebrates incompleteness and slippage. It is by nature a cipher, even in its most explicit moments, the reasons behind a choice of word, and the debatability of a words utility and effectiveness in communicating a given idea, give rise to the potential for negation and slippage. And this potential is our greatest freedom, our greatest hope. Because it’s ever-present possibility should unmoor us from our firm entrenchment in a desire for permanence, for Truth rather than truths, for campaigns rather than moments, for complicity rather than delinquency. These slippages and uncertainties, conflicting interpretations and opaque significations are causes for celebration. The blank piece of paper which greets us inside the bottle (should that be what we find), is not a simple negation, a simple nothing, it is an invitation to scrawl our own message and chuck it back into the riptide, or to simply reinsert the paper into the bottle and pass it along to another intrepid beachcomber. And we do not pass along silence or apathy, but rather a horizon to be delimited and and filled, we pass along our ambiguity, our recognition of absence.Who knows, perhaps while wandering along at low tide, we will find this selfsame bottle, we will recognize it and open it; we will recognize the paper inside as the blank piece of paper we passed on all that time ago, and we will find a message awaiting us. And should we recognize the bottle and the paper within, and find it still blank, we may defer, yet again...or perhaps we will take it upon ourselves to be sure that this unsettled debt can finally be accounted for. After all, we need but a word...
We are hybrids you and I. We are Other and Same. We smother one another. It is the same tears we cry. We have dreamed ourselves as aberrations. We celebrate our horrid corporeality. No theory explains us. No scientist will dissect us. Even if one should endeavor, he would find nothing but neurons strung together by ampersands and tightly wound fibers of teeth. And we do not blink.
Gallery
“More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of spirits--this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture-- becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so on ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: you too have weapons.” -Franz Kafka, Diaries (12 June, 1923)
5 (Text)
The canon is an attempt to write a grocery list which will only rarely need to be amended. We will walk into the store and find all of the foodstuffs and household cleaning products we will ever need. And the options and choices will be evident and our decision will simply be a matter of which predetermined product from the limited array of commodities we will choose from. The aisles will be filled with Forms, Ideas, serenity, unity, process, nothingness, Will, the State, anarchy, polit bureaus, freedom, liberty, democracy, caste, god, nation, race, Dasein, essence, existence, facticity, games, capital, labor theories of value, evolution, intelligent designs, apperception, hermeneutics, empire, rebellion, dissent, history, narrative, trauma, witness, differance, the image, the word, the eye (all three), the commodity fetish, the Oedipal complex, anxiety, archetype, artifice, appropriation, translation, mechanical reproductions, biopower, rhizomes, nomads, monads, dereve, Messianic time, fire, rivers, habitus, mirrors, epistemes, gold standards, social credit, theological crematoriums, afterthoughts, insights, dreamworlds, phonemes, primitive utopias, leviathans, genocides, sexes, genders, disposition, afrocentrics, oceanic, feminist, latent bisexualities, semiotics, flags, prophecy, voice, constellations, terror, cruelty, theater, epics, arcades, negations (of negations) [of negations], after-Auschwitzes, death, dying, teleological suspensions of the ethical, eternal returns (both happy and unhappy), genealogies, archaeologies, new urbanisms, old cities, security walls, clashes of civilizations, Lexuses, flatitude, as performance, a dark wood, great refusals, projects, groups-in-fusion, days of rage, summers of love, sons of sams, detournement, deconstructions, aleatoric, cubist Dadas, concrete visual sound poems, realisms, class conscious crapshoots, problems with god, god problems, virgin births, virgin undertakers, virgin afterlife greeters, onto-theological irreconcilable differences, imagined communities, ambiguous genitalia, third ways, fateful triangles even, olive branches. FEMAs, pre-emptive wars, solid intelligences, ideologies, crises, stimmung, metamorphoses, messages in bottles, tuberculoses, turnings, addictions, bad ideas, plowshares, swords, no’s, yeses, raptures, reckonings, towns, countries, peasantries (sans culottes), dialectics, Dianetics, mimetic, close reading, subaltern, post colonial, new historical unpaid tabs.
Lyre Lag
“I speak language.” It is the flashing
than consolation is: you too
have that as long as every word, is twisted in impossible)
; when it strains to what about being
the said.
A clump of phrases fragment on your left,
but what joins reflections, declares its solitude, quite rapidly happened is that Modernism of the inaccessible
and forever-concealed gaping, the occasion,
of being poised infinitum. The only
express my thought
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task,
which it, origin of language (a task that happened is t
hat it is going to go. The word, dissociated
from the definition impossible); when it strains a speaker.
Most especially a remark rapidly happened is
that Modernism quickly lost--
become the easy iconography of schools,
styles, and into the new international
the trained and assured Its attempt at a but to
help your left, but their own occasion,
which swells toward articulation. layers and
sets it off (the head) as if they somehow must have
not a word between two layers and sets declare its solitude, the new
international capitalism.
Its attempt is then freed from responsibility
in relation “I speak language.” It is a light, a void, a murder, its
innocence. This art has the
merely technical modes, recreation
and there is no possible doubt: thing is not colors or emotions
it isolated, estranged images of
It is the flashing across the infinitesimally little help.
More than consolation going to go on
any more different from me to here’s hear.
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its assured technicists,
“dig” right to language’s possibility; stay with the language (happens whether you like it or no.) and fashion, so essential
to the reflections, declares its solitude, and
therefore its as if they somehow must. So every one which is to...
phrases shape their own but what joins us-- a cryptogram more than poetry
accomplishes its task, of significant discconnection
(very structure of suicide): in it, silence
“it strains”
is their characteristic; takes his ready-made place
And so on
as a real thing is not imitation of a cryptogram.
Every word, twisted in no. And what you like is to the origin in one brief act,
as which,is to push itself
to MONSTERS.
More and more which fly into the head
as if cultural competition and the isolated
, estranged images of alienation and being
devoid of reflections, declares its significant disconnection
are relocated, with the help, ad infinitum.
The only easy iconography of the commercials, and
WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE and “I speak: humanity
is anything!
So? and “I speak language.”
It is leg, it is from your left, its anti-bourgeois stance,
the market. The painfully thriller.
The word,
The word, dissociated from the freedom. But
poetic time which traps writes. It is a clump of ready-
made stars and is no possible doubt about it and
that Modernism quickly lost special images of humanity.
to be spurious.
Its forms of advertising and of language (a task that
cliches, and from the technical (described as
linguistic occasion), which cliches, clarify what you yourself think.
the speaker. as writer,
is then freed from theories there or as long as humanity is infinitesimally...
THE the origin of its estranged images of twist the hand
of reflections, which are isolated, estranged images as transfrontier
You are not any the new international poetry void, you are
a murder, fashion!
your right
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task, which
is cultural competition & techniques of
significant discconnection & are commercials, and the lonely, bitter,
being devoid of reflections, is you, too turned out to be
THE SLEEP OF innocence.
This art has the isolated,
estranged images of alienation
poetry c
ryptogram
BE CARRIED
of sounds or colors what is understandable.
Every word, twisted
that speaks me
and
“I speak think. ...
the lonely address.
context; it appears to push itself
like is of infinitesimally LIFE
trained and so on
ad theories there and return to
You, to one is anything.
So I achieved comfortable integration into the commercial
interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of
consolation: you too have weapons. being devoid of reflections,
declare its solitude, and therefore an intellectual of merely technical modes
to go on being as technicists,
as the merely technical modes clarify
TO WHOM
forever-concealed, gaping, the naked
possibility of address. ready-made as
an imitation either of sounds or as the very
structure of suicide:
in it, silence, mind of words which fly as long
as humanity is anything.
Because I’m a writer, not a speaker.
which swells
toward articulation.
Because I’m a writer, as a fragment of a cryptogram
not a speaker.
Language as a
real thing
freedom.
Its
help
its
solitude,
and therefore its innocence.
This art has the the new international
Its attempt at forms lent themselves to cultural competition
the help of the special between two layers
of
words
its intellectual recreation.
Let us have
theories there in it all
the history of commercials,
and structure
and suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetics.
Painfully,“I speak language.”
It is the flashing, acquired
techniques of significant disconnection
and are relocated, with the help being devoid of reflections,
& its solitude, and therefore are relocated, with the
help of the special
speaker:
Language
,reflexes of the writer,
are then freed from
responsibility (
by definition impossible
); when
it strains being the bad speaker ,myself
the language
their advertising and the commercial to “dig”
right, like this,with the language of suicide:
a remark like this: “And so on...”
than as a light, a void, a murder, speak language!
It is the flashing across the mind of the possibility of address.
TO WHOM LIFE IS,
silence, yourself-- the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and POSSIBLE. ...
alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as POSSIBLE. ...
its intellectual recreation.
“Let us have theories there a
nd styles, and/or emotions
offered less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as
the isolated, estranged and
quickly must be said.
A clump of merely technical modes of
advertising with the language, their language
that has come to a speaker. Language as that
which swells toward articulation
the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed.
Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois commercials,
and turned against the speaker.
Most especially language.”
The estranged images-- the commercial cinema-- alienation
shapes their own attempt at a universal market,
transfrontier and transclass, the thriller that is
The word,
dissociated from the husk.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
My Derrida/Celan Essay
Pierre Joris, the excellent Celan translator, poet, and anthologist was kind enough to engage in an extended discussion on my essay below. I feel that it's important to note and encourage you to read it since it makes some very important and justifiable criticisms of the essay. Namely, my choice of translators, and my reliance on that sole source. The translation by McHugh and Popov includes the line "cough-caw's double", a line which they added that does not occur in the original Celan poem in order to make the link to Kafka far more explicit then Celan himself would...
As Joris points out,
"Celan and his parents did not live in Germany, but in Czernowitz, then part of Rumania, today part of the Ukraine. They were not sent to Auschwitz, but to work camps along the Bug river, on the Romanian/Ukrainian border...Landis gets his information via the Popov/McHugh’s introduction where they center on that glottal stop (also the title of their book) by connecting it to the manner in which Celan’s mother is supposed to have died: “from a wound in the throat.” It makes for a nice & tidy connection, but in 40 years of reading Celan and the vast Sekundärliteratur on his work, I have never come across this bit of information. From all we actually know (check, among many others, Israel Chalfen’s biography of the young Celan, or the appendix to the Celan/Celan-Lestrange correspondance, or Walter Emmerich’s book), she died by the traditional Nazi execution technique: the “Genickschuss” — or shot in the nape of the neck or back of the head, i.e. a bullet from behind (even the Nazis didn’t much care to look their victims in the face), and not from the front, as “a wound in the throat” (and thus possibly in the “Kehlkopf”) wants us to believe. An unnecessary little bit of stretching the known facts to prove the theory and justify the importance of the title seems to be going on in that intro.d have. It also included erroneous biographical information in their introduction."
Joris also makes the contention that an overly-psychologized reading of Celan is problematic. It's a thoughtful point and something I've thought of. To read more about Joris' point on the matter and a more detailed discussion of some his other points about my essay in detail you should visit his blog where his article "Celan, Kafka, & the Glottal Stop" discusses these issues.
As Joris points out,
"Celan and his parents did not live in Germany, but in Czernowitz, then part of Rumania, today part of the Ukraine. They were not sent to Auschwitz, but to work camps along the Bug river, on the Romanian/Ukrainian border...Landis gets his information via the Popov/McHugh’s introduction where they center on that glottal stop (also the title of their book) by connecting it to the manner in which Celan’s mother is supposed to have died: “from a wound in the throat.” It makes for a nice & tidy connection, but in 40 years of reading Celan and the vast Sekundärliteratur on his work, I have never come across this bit of information. From all we actually know (check, among many others, Israel Chalfen’s biography of the young Celan, or the appendix to the Celan/Celan-Lestrange correspondance, or Walter Emmerich’s book), she died by the traditional Nazi execution technique: the “Genickschuss” — or shot in the nape of the neck or back of the head, i.e. a bullet from behind (even the Nazis didn’t much care to look their victims in the face), and not from the front, as “a wound in the throat” (and thus possibly in the “Kehlkopf”) wants us to believe. An unnecessary little bit of stretching the known facts to prove the theory and justify the importance of the title seems to be going on in that intro.d have. It also included erroneous biographical information in their introduction."
Joris also makes the contention that an overly-psychologized reading of Celan is problematic. It's a thoughtful point and something I've thought of. To read more about Joris' point on the matter and a more detailed discussion of some his other points about my essay in detail you should visit his blog where his article "Celan, Kafka, & the Glottal Stop" discusses these issues.
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