Behind the Scenes
But What About the Nipples? A Nice Conversation (Pt. 3)
Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had a nice, interesting, and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the second issue of We Are Champion. We thank you all so much for engaging with us on these issues. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 can be found here.
Amy: I want to try to connect such modes of discussion and modes of writing with why we might have an inequitable publishing history by citing excerpts from Joan Retallack’s essay, “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM.” Blake, when you say we’re “just people” or we’re “just bodies,” I think you’re resisting the notion that biology is essentialist and destiny (it’s not) that determines how and what we write. You are, in fact, by default arguing against the primary thread of feminist literary tradition that says women’s experiences have traditionally been ignored and must be heard via the writing and, I suspect, you imagine that writers could empathize their way into such positions and write those realities. Just a guess.
But this notion falls short of what types of writing have been deemed masculine and feminine. I hope Kate jumps in soon because she most likely has more to say on this matter than I.
Kate: I am quite interested in engaging with and extending Cixous’ notion of l’ecriture feminine, of feminine writing, where she sees many male writers as great examples of feminine writing, writing that writes that body, the taboo, that’s emotional, that’s privileged by voice, that writes against the dominant culture (she includes Bernhard, Kafka along with Lispector and Bachmann). So I do in my criticism reclaim writers like Artaud and Rilke – and more problematically Henry Miller and Bataille – as women. A sort of genderbending. And on the flip side I think that there are many female writers, even innovative female writers, who I don’t consider writing the feminine, even in terms of experience or aesthetic (nor should they have to, they have their own deal, I’m just saying what I’m interested in!) And I haven’t read this issue in question of We Are Champion, and isn’t there a possibility it doesn’t have this straight white dude aesthetic? But of course even this issue of aesthetic hides what you, Amy, are troubled with and you should be troubled with – how male writers are seemingly valued more and vaulted more in both the mainstream and any sort of innovative writing culture.
Blake: Coming off what I said above, I think its rather arbitrary to choose gender as the most important factor, and the main one to attend to in a forum, via the fact that our body influences our mind. Of course it does, and that is part of what makes an author’s ID interesting, but to imagine that we have to limit ourselves (yes, limit) to understanding the body via organs to me is really old. It’s also rather a sidestep of the matter itself, which is what the word is: the body speaks for itself. It doesn’t need a canister, it needs a door. Louise Bourgeois’s art is hugely about the body, and yet for her the body is the machinic creator, not the thing itself. The body is there in the fingers, the blood, and sidebar to what comes out, like hair: “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
Amy: Blake, again I ask, why do you think that pointing gender disparity means we must limit ourselves to discussing the fact of gender bias? If anything, this conversation is an attempt to broaden, identify, and dissect the complexities such interrogations entail. It’s not just “about an organ,” which still seems incredibly reductive and only serves to maintain the binary, reductive thinking you seem to want to resist. As I pointed out earlier, there’s much more to gender, how we learn it, speak and write it, what’s expected of us based on it, etc. than whether or not I have a dick. I can’t believe you’re sticking by gender=penis or vagina. It starts with the body, as in, ‘Oh, it’s a baby boy,’ and then studies show that people begin to treat babies more roughly who are boys and the opposite for girls. And so the conditioning goes, from jump: be a big boy don’t cry here my sweet girl get along with everyone and cooperate boy should be adventurous and independent autonomous girl should train as a potential mother to be nurturing kind soft spoken etc ad nauseum—at it’s most basic. Gender starts based in biology but certainly doesn’t stop there. Male modes of behavior are expected, learned and enforced just as female modes are. It’s not fair, nor is it fair that the masculine is supposed to be better than the feminine, but history says conquering the world via imperialist adventures is much more important to write about than detailing and debating what goes into raising children / people. I actually suspect that Bourgeois’s inquiry into “how it manages to survive” addresses the latter mostly-ignored history of people, which is classically thought of as a feminine consideration / female domestic work. Now I feel reductionist, but your continued re-framing down to whether one has a penis or vagina seems to call for such basic explication.
By way of starting to identify the masculine mode, Retallack notes,
“[What is intelligible] is a world authored in the image of Rational/Universal Man—Homo Protoregulator studding a clear and distinct (Cartesian) prose with man’s randy, generic pronouns … We have been presented with a subtle and treacherous ‘text’ declaring itself generic and normative starting point—homogenius, monolithic, active, authoritative… [Judith] Butler sees the generic feminine as subtext, either subjugated or subversive (reactive) to the master narrative.”
Retallack cautions against simply writing within the binary of masculine/feminine, that to simply respond to the normative by attempting to subvert it is to essentially reinscribe/reinforce that binary. [This also speaks to my issue with the Gurlesque as I saw it defined by the anthology, but that’s another story.]
Retallack proposes, “To make real gender trouble is to make genre trouble.” And I think that’s where ‘fringe’ poetry and fiction gets their power. Because it’s easy to look at a list of popular fiction or nonfiction bestsellers and say, Well that book’s about male subject matter like war or adventure, conquering nature or taming the uncivilized; Where are the serious how-to books regarding raising and nurturing people?, etc. But once we enter the territory of certain not-so-popular fiction or especially poetry, the territory is murkier and not so easy to say, ‘Well, that subject matter or that mode of writing is masculine.’
She proceeds,
“Our best possibilities lie in texts/alter-texts where the so-called feminine and masculine take migratory, paradoxical, and surprising swerves to the enrichment of both/n/either, and all else that lies along fields of limitless nuance. This is not a vision of androgyny but of range … For example, the French poet Dominique Fourcade likes to declare that as a poet he is a woman…”
And with apologies for the long quote, a final bit,
“From the end of the nineteenth century to the present the exploding genre (if not gender) project has been located in what is called ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ traditions. Because of the masculinist bias of establishment literary traditions, these labels have often been applied pejoratively to connote the threat of unintelligibility. Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about our present time is that women are finally powerful enough sociopolitically to undertake the risks of this feminine challenge in their own texts.”
That’s a long way into trying to start talking about what I think might be going on via the resistance against pointing out gender disparities, especially as these disparities enter into ‘experimental’ poetries and fictions—and what to do about it. Do they really exist in this realm/on these proverbial fringes? Am I, a white woman currently living a fairly middle class American existence, going to be able to, or even attempt to, write a poetry that does what the poetry of say Thomas Sayer Ellis or Bhanu Kapil does? Or should we find ways to de-prioritize certain voices by getting more, even saturating the literary landscape, of those unusual and mostly-neglected voices out there via publishing, reviewing, discussing, etc?
Kate: We are publishing Bhanu at Nightboat, her fantastic notebook Schizophrene. You might not be able to write the poetry of Bhanu but you can publish Bhanu, solicit the work of Bhanu, write about her works. At Nightboat one of the writers and I joke that we publish the experimental subaltern, but that’s also what really jazzes us and jizzes us and all those things writing is supposed to make you do. And of course you point out something that’s important to remember in feminism, that most of feminism historically has been very white, privileged, middle-class, heteronormative.
Blake: I don’t know what else to say.
Amy: I know that Kate and Blake were originally discussing a poem that was just a string of presumably offensive phrases. From what I read, this type of poem doesn’t shock or undo anything, except perhaps to say words we’re scared to say, diffuse their power, etc. I’m curious why Kate found it discussion-worthy and why Blake found it post-worthy. It sounded just like a bald attempt to thrill or titillate, that fails in my estimation. It reminded me of the masculine-shock mode that’s never really shocked me out of or into anything, though I wonder if women aren’t supposed to be complacent in the face of such work. Or am I just projecting? Can we in fact imitate such poetry and would we? I’m curious to know if we can even identify what modes have tended to be masculine and feminine, and beyond.
Kate: Yes when Blake posted about that one poem he published on Everyday Genius, by Sean Kilpatrick, a really great dialogue I think came out of the debate (but I do think it didn’t get ugly because it didn’t deal specifically with a woman writer or gender). And I really enjoyed dialoging with these other commenters about the poem, which I really liked, but the conversation led to what we expected literature to do anyway, why we read, etc., the value of certain works, and I and others defended the poem against some commenter’s charges of misogyny, stating firmly that that shouldn’t necessarily rule out a work of literature from being exciting or interesting, defending work that comes from anger or the unrepressed, placing it in a tradition of Sade or Artaud or Bataille, writers that have shaped me tremendously. Artaud’s agitation against the patriarchal family, against institutions, Sade’s tracts against the bourgeois. (Point to be made: not all feminists are the same, have one stringent hardline position.) And I didn’t think of the poem in the masculine-shock mode, it’s one thing to say it’s not shocking, or it’s too much a rewarming of before, or that it didn’t interest you, but it’s unfair I think to suggest that I in digging the work am somehow complacent, as I am anything but complacent. And I don’t always read with a specifically gendered body, or write with a specifically gendered body, although out there in the world, in society, I am always gendered, that is the difference. Although I do align myself proudly as a feminist, as a radical feminist, I am a different radical feminist than say Andrea Dworkin. And I also teach women’s studies and gender studies. But I am realizing that at least Second Wave feminism is an ideology, and as a writer I’m uncomfortable with ideology, and in fact wish to dismantle and problematize the ideology, make it messy and subversive and cover it with body fluids.
But I think there’s a huge difference, again, in being an asshole in writing, in writing the unrepressed, and being an asshole rhetorically, shutting down a dialogue. I think that Sade and Miller and Bataille and Celine yes even Artaud and Breton were all huge huge assholes, wouldn’t want to be in relationships with them. But as I said in that discussion I don’t think a major determinant for whether you dig a writer is whether or not you want to be in a relationship with them, or whether they’re humanists even or good people. I don’t expect all the writers that get me off to be ideologically pure. But part of my critical project is to interrogate this complicated relationship I have with these writers, like the male Surrealists, or theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, who in many ways don’t include me as a woman or consider gender. And I feel that a bit as well with the liberatory spirit of HTML Giant – if I say, hey, wait, don’t just objectify women, don’t discount women writers or reduce them merely to their bodies, basically, hey let me in so I can discuss these ideas without being passively self-hating or women hating by just ignoring what’s obviously there, so in my face – then I might be in danger of stereotyped as the humorless feminist. Could I have been more humorous in characterizing what I was offended by? Yes.
Blake: I can only speak about why I like the piece, not its context, because context for me is the least interesting thing. Clearly no writing can be made to please all people or it would be a rather suffering writing, in its blood.
Sean Kilpatrick’s writing in this piece is a series of negation, negation of negation, where the humor is not of shock, as these are all old words, but using the juxtaposition of shifting energy and collage in a way that manages, in my body, to create a silent terror, as I realize I feel nothing from the text, and in the feeling nothing, as the words continue to move and no, not shock, but employ a barrage that has been neutered by its employment as shock, to create a kind of void around the void, a laughing that is dead silent. It’s not even a matter of feeling compromised or hurt by the dead words, but some kind of beaten hysteria buried in there, some kind of mausoleum, like a puppet made of meat, or as came up in the comments, “a balloon animal out of a jar of glass.”
Also: I find the poem, in its blank blank, rather moving, especially in rereading. I also find it really funny in its language, the way it cantakers around like a pile of blood looking for a hole in a plastic floor.
Also: who gives a shit? Why do we need barriers? Why walls? Why shouldn’t something be slathered, allowed to suffer in no suffer? This poem seems to you to make women complacent in it? Then, to me, the poem wins. You can be defeated by this? You can assign it this property, despite feeling nothing? There’s the cash. I don’t know. Why can’t something carry this nasty power? What if Sean Kilpatrick were actually a woman? Would it then be empowering? What if Kathy Acker were a man? What if Acker’s Janey Smith were actually a mental fuckdoll he used to employ his terror on? Would that make the books any less what they are? Would it make them more that?
This deletion want for the power in the blank and in the revulsing that is no longer revulsing but has become a condom on the street, should these words be removed? What kind of power can be written with the removed? I think maybe a lot more than the real. There is a power in the nothing. There is more to shock than shock, and more to language than who had a fuck on who.
I don’t know. Church.
Amy: Let me clarify that I asked if women were supposed to be complacent in the face of the poem; this question was no true commentary on the poem. I haven’t seen the poem; only a few of the “bad” words were noted on Kate’s blog, which reminded me of Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay – that’s why I asked. I don’t usually feel defeated in the face of any poem, and what a weird way to put it: a poem would have the power to defeat anyone? If a poem fails, I’m simply disinterested and walk away. Not much shocks me anymore, even if you wrote a poem about my grandmother’s labia, couched in “humor” of course, which someone did. If anything, I wonder what’s in the psyche of that person that would imagine this would have some special effect on me. Then I wondered what he thought he knew about me that such a boring transparent poem would inspire some reaction like offense or thrill. I didn’t see it as it was intended, I suppose, which was under the ruse of a Flarf tribute or some such claim, which I ultimately grappled with as so much ‘we want our own special important movement.’ But no, I asked if women were supposed to be complacent, not having seen the poem. Please don’t extract an insult from a question; I apologize for not being clear that I have not read the poem.
Roxane: I must say I too found a lot to think about and even admire in Kilpatrick’s poem. The sheer relentlessness of the pace and tone and subject matter created an interesting sense of numbness for me because each line was progressively more horrific. I didn’t really analyze Kilpatrick’s in terms of gender or bodies though certainly there is, in the latter half of the poem, an intense desecration of the fertile female body. I find that really interesting rather than problematic. If we’re not careful, concerns about gender will begin to influence the kind of art that is made. I didn’t read this poem as masculine or titillating and I almost think to suggest that is to be reductive of the work in question in much the same ways we’re asking the naysayers to not be. I absolutely believe a woman could write “fistfucking rules.” In the reading of it, I was more focused on the grotesquerie of the poem as well as the use of language.
Amy: Speaking of grotesquerie, I have my own work to attend, as we all do now, I’m sure. Shall we call it a day? If so, thank you, Roxane, Kate, and Blake for weighing in on what I imagine to be the stirrings of conversations to come. Call it a fourth wave or resuscitation, but I’m sensing we’re at the beginning of a moment and am grateful for the engagement.
Tags: cixous, deleuze and guattari, gender, lispector
Really like what Blake says about the Kilpatrick poem here. I still can’t experience it that way, but I really like reading someone who can. Makes me feel better, and also worse about imposing my won issues on it.
Yes, poems do have the power to defeat.
I find it amazing that he can read so much into the poem. There is literally nothing to the piece. It’s horribly written sentimental muck, and it is the critical elevation of such stuff that really turns me off to a lot of the contemp. online lit scene, honestly.
I’m not personally wild about it, demi, but I think you’re talking out of your ass right now. His reading is absolutely legitimate, and there are others legitimate too.
What if Sean just straight lifted from Acker and made his lines this:
“(s)he commits burlesque diarrheas under the guise of pregnancy”
He didn’t of course, and I don’t care much whether or not he did. My point if I have one is that you can fistfuck a dude if he wants you to and everybody’s happy.
Explain how his reading is legitimate then, Mike, or find some way to defend the craftmanship of the poem. It’s not very good, and Blake’s reading is a sentimental one.
I really value your opinion, Mike, and I have no read Blake’s reading and the Kilpatrick poem like 30+ times now each, to the point that I practically have both memorized. I’ve tried looking at both with a fresh mind, I’ve tried standing up and doing a few jumping jacks before sitting down again with the poem, and yet still I see nothing of poetic value. I read the poem and see only silly Ginsburgian ranting, no signs of even moderate artfulness or imaginative force. I read Blake’s take and it still seems completely foreign, and at the moment I can only conclude that he’s not a very adept reader of poetry. If there is something there, Mike, come on then, help me see it. I’m willing. I love encountering new poetry. I just can’t see the value of this. It seems inescapably sentimental, superficial.
Thinking this over, across the course of the last three days, this conversation has left me a little depressed. Although it’s been really eloquent and roaming, and I think has made more ground than the comment area battles, I sort of think it ends here about inches from where it started really. What I find so — perplexing, I guess, is that there seems to be either this refusal to accept or inability to convey the notion that adopting social awareness in literary decisions does not thereby lead to some sort of tally system, where because you “can’t leave anyone out”, you have to fret over the under-representation of Christians in your sex issue (although that would only be a recipe for interesting if you spent the time hunting and searching a good author that combines those things out). The point here is that it’s not about leaving people out in a specific instance: it’s about the cumulative impact of all those specific leaving-outs, or under-representations, or priorities always going somewhere else first.
I think what Blake says here – “to imagine that we have to limit ourselves (yes, limit) to understanding the body via organs to me is really old” – perfectly captures the sentiment that all the commenters who have taken up the ‘language over body’ position. I agree we want newness when it comes to the body. But see, because reality – not imagination – organises the organs in a particular regime of exploitation and division of labour, no matter how ‘old’ and passe such ideas may seem, they aren’t just dumpable like childhood’s old coats. The argument that’s been made here over and over in various ways by the “body” crowd is that not everyone has the liberty to be free to not understand their body via their organs or what their organs do – so instead they totally disrupt and mutilate and remorph and make the organs themselves. I sense as if there’s too much under-processed Deleuzian theory here. The Body without Organs is a body repopulated with other materials but it also involves deterritorialization, a depopulation of organs and organization. There was good reason Deleuze and Guattari selected Kafka – considered one of the most apolitical authors – to make their case for lines of flight. The line of flight is not just a casting off of limitation but a political labour. They’re quite clear on this. There can be no de-organizing the body without it.
Anyhow, in the end, I don’t think anyone is seriously saying you can’t read the things you like; the question here goes to what constitutes the field from which you select things to your taste. For editors, for writers, for readers, for people who have the time and breathing air to be intellectual without immediate privation, the point the body crowd is making is simply – to reprose a quote from Dennis Cooper that I know has been cited here before – “as soon as you get power, disperse it.”
And yet it seems like we cannot get past this blockage where in saying that ethics asks us to consider the axes of exploitation, it devolves into some caricature of leftism where such an ethics must mean minority roll call. This shows a real lack of imagination. And I guess I wonder whether implicit in all of this is just the fed-up sense that we shouldn’t have to be bothered. And you know what, if that is indeed the attitude behind the language over body argument, fine. Well, not fine, as in I agree with it, but fine as in if that’s the attitude that’s the attitude. But no one’s owning up to that. Rather, the argument being made is language over body and the body poses no challenge to language. So the thing that irks me is that the ‘language over body’ argument wants it both ways: it wants to be done with all this body and ethics stuff because basically it’s over it from the get go and simultaneously assures itself that all of this is safe for it to be over precisely because the ethics of emancipation are already covered, ipso facto, by the aesthetic anyway.
I’ve already argued at length over the last two days about why that reliance on aesthetics as simply being ethical in themselves is a whopping assumption, to say the least, so I’ll only add this one last thing. Basically, in extending difference to the infinite horizons but on a flat plain, in which people are people, bodies bodies, the language over body argument essentially destroys the way the organisation of reality in very real ways by very real systems, assemblages, events, objects and people has tiered and organized difference in all sorts of entangled and complicated and pincer-like ways that are not even. In that sense, this argument for bodily or identity consideration is not at all a matter of limiting ourselves, like limitation were a free choice we autonomously make, whoever or wherever we are, between limiting and not limiting our lives. And I think to accuse people of that is kind of like a cold dose of ‘self-help’ medicine or like telling someone who’s fat that looks shouldn’t matter before adding oh, but I only like you as a friend.
I think we can do better than this. I think we’re already doing better than this, but we can take the better further by understanding the body better in language not just imperialising it – the oldest thing ever – with subjection to the word.
Sorry demi. I mean I’m sort of in the same boat. I don’t personally experience what Blake is talking about either. But I can imagine how a person could, very easily. And part of the whole point of art is that Blake and you and I can all have completely different experiences of the same thing, and the alienation of that experience. Isn’t it wonderful to know people don’t feel or know the way you do sometimes? The best defense of his reading is his reading. And I think you should accept it not because it’s right or because it’s persuasive, but because we should try to accept all readings we can stomach, to expand our stomach, to know each other better, to love each other better.
Well, yeah, I have no problem accepting that that is his personal, sentimental reading of that poem. However, I balk at the idea that his reading—unless someone else helps me out here and helps me “grasp” both his reading and the original poem—actually says anything at all about the poem. Artful readings can enlarge us in the same way that art poetry does, and in my opinion it is not talking out of one’s ass to resist inartful reading, or inartful poems.
Anyhow, I’m high as a kite on newly prescribed antidepressants and decaf coffee, so I think I need to back away from this a little. I’m beginning to obsess over this Kilpatrick poem, and that’s not healthy. Ugh.
Hi,
This has been a really interesting discussion, I’ve followed all three parts. I should probably preface this by saying this is first time I’ve commented here on HTMLGIANT, because I’d heard a handful of secondhand reports about how some of the commentboxes had gotten ugly and misogynistic (the Zelda post) and these secondhand reports from women bloggers I respected were enough to make me feel turned off from spending any time on the site, which was unfortunate because I had a sense this site had lots of good content that would be interesting to me but because of these stories of commentbox misogyny I did not feel like it would be the place for me, the place for me to spend time & energy fending off anti-female or anti-feminist vibes in spite of the other good content. But now that I’ve read this discussion and scrolled through most of the comments and saw that things are not ugly & misogynistic at least in this series of commentboxes, I feel like I can comment and become a more regular reader of this site.
A confession to Kate: I’m seriously under-read on Cixious so did not know she included Bernhard and Kafka under l’ecriture feminine. Where can I find this? This is very interesting to me with respect to “masculine” and “feminine” writing (scare quotes to be taken seriously) because I’ve always considered Bernhard to be uber-male in some ways (the angry isolationism, the ratiocination, the interest in the artist-hero or scientist-hero myth) but also incredibly hysterical, albeit a hysteria couched in the rationalist-gone-mad symptom of OCD ranting. And the unabashed anxiety, which also is shared by Kafka and Beckett. Yet Bernhard’s anxious hysteria is conducted not through the messiness of the body (his male characters seem to be repulsed by bodies in fact) but through an overexactness of the mind, a perfection taken to excess. And this to me seems like a “male” quality. So I find Bernhard to be this fascinating mix of gender-inflected qualities, you could almost symptomize his whole body of work as being a working-through of performance anxiety, this is super reductive of course, but interesting to think about.
Like Amy, I did read the Kilpatrick poem as being something of a Flarf take-off, though more composed-sounding than found. I am really struck by Blake’s reading of the poem: the terror, the blankness, the laughter. This seems like a very accurate way to approach the poem and describes some of my own feelings when reading Flarf poems. The pleasure of being numbed and terrified into blankness. What is going on here culturally?
i’m shocked at how difficult it appears to be for (some) women to read work which is suspected of misogynistic undertones (or something), and yet, not merely be willing to talk about that very work, but go out of the way to do so, in the most superficial way, making it into a larger issue thing without actually having read the work in question. i am not speaking to amy and kate in particular but include them in the general. it’s like when people show up to a sophmore lit class for a discussion of romeo and juliet and all they want to talk about is baz luhrmann.
have you read the issue yet, kate? i’d honestly like to know what you think because i believe there is a lot there to think about in many of the pieces when put into this context (not that i think it can’t be divorced from the context). the question you raised about people not having read it (‘isn’t there a possibility it doesn’t have this straight white dude aesthetic?’) was one of the first things i said when this ‘issue’ came up. and elisa expressed a firm disinterest in reading it. that still seems amazing to me. i’m interested in what is going on here culturally. in that we seem to have little to no interest in critical literary analysis. i mean, that’s not something i do, and it’s not something i want to do, and if it were done i might just say, oh that’s really stupid, but i would rather live in a world where it happens than not, i think.
Really like what Blake says about the Kilpatrick poem here. I still can’t experience it that way, but I really like reading someone who can. Makes me feel better, and also worse about imposing my won issues on it.
Yes, poems do have the power to defeat.
I find it amazing that he can read so much into the poem. There is literally nothing to the piece. It’s horribly written sentimental muck, and it is the critical elevation of such stuff that really turns me off to a lot of the contemp. online lit scene, honestly.
I’m not personally wild about it, demi, but I think you’re talking out of your ass right now. His reading is absolutely legitimate, and there are others legitimate too.
What if Sean just straight lifted from Acker and made his lines this:
“(s)he commits burlesque diarrheas under the guise of pregnancy”
He didn’t of course, and I don’t care much whether or not he did. My point if I have one is that you can fistfuck a dude if he wants you to and everybody’s happy.
Explain how his reading is legitimate then, Mike, or find some way to defend the craftmanship of the poem. It’s not very good, and Blake’s reading is a sentimental one.
I really value your opinion, Mike, and I have no read Blake’s reading and the Kilpatrick poem like 30+ times now each, to the point that I practically have both memorized. I’ve tried looking at both with a fresh mind, I’ve tried standing up and doing a few jumping jacks before sitting down again with the poem, and yet still I see nothing of poetic value. I read the poem and see only silly Ginsburgian ranting, no signs of even moderate artfulness or imaginative force. I read Blake’s take and it still seems completely foreign, and at the moment I can only conclude that he’s not a very adept reader of poetry. If there is something there, Mike, come on then, help me see it. I’m willing. I love encountering new poetry. I just can’t see the value of this. It seems inescapably sentimental, superficial.
Thinking this over, across the course of the last three days, this conversation has left me a little depressed. Although it’s been really eloquent and roaming, and I think has made more ground than the comment area battles, I sort of think it ends here about inches from where it started really. What I find so — perplexing, I guess, is that there seems to be either this refusal to accept or inability to convey the notion that adopting social awareness in literary decisions does not thereby lead to some sort of tally system, where because you “can’t leave anyone out”, you have to fret over the under-representation of Christians in your sex issue (although that would only be a recipe for interesting if you spent the time hunting and searching a good author that combines those things out). The point here is that it’s not about leaving people out in a specific instance: it’s about the cumulative impact of all those specific leaving-outs, or under-representations, or priorities always going somewhere else first.
I think what Blake says here – “to imagine that we have to limit ourselves (yes, limit) to understanding the body via organs to me is really old” – perfectly captures the sentiment that all the commenters who have taken up the ‘language over body’ position. I agree we want newness when it comes to the body. But see, because reality – not imagination – organises the organs in a particular regime of exploitation and division of labour, no matter how ‘old’ and passe such ideas may seem, they aren’t just dumpable like childhood’s old coats. The argument that’s been made here over and over in various ways by the “body” crowd is that not everyone has the liberty to be free to not understand their body via their organs or what their organs do – so instead they totally disrupt and mutilate and remorph and make the organs themselves. I sense as if there’s too much under-processed Deleuzian theory here. The Body without Organs is a body repopulated with other materials but it also involves deterritorialization, a depopulation of organs and organization. There was good reason Deleuze and Guattari selected Kafka – considered one of the most apolitical authors – to make their case for lines of flight. The line of flight is not just a casting off of limitation but a political labour. They’re quite clear on this. There can be no de-organizing the body without it.
Anyhow, in the end, I don’t think anyone is seriously saying you can’t read the things you like; the question here goes to what constitutes the field from which you select things to your taste. For editors, for writers, for readers, for people who have the time and breathing air to be intellectual without immediate privation, the point the body crowd is making is simply – to reprose a quote from Dennis Cooper that I know has been cited here before – “as soon as you get power, disperse it.”
And yet it seems like we cannot get past this blockage where in saying that ethics asks us to consider the axes of exploitation, it devolves into some caricature of leftism where such an ethics must mean minority roll call. This shows a real lack of imagination. And I guess I wonder whether implicit in all of this is just the fed-up sense that we shouldn’t have to be bothered. And you know what, if that is indeed the attitude behind the language over body argument, fine. Well, not fine, as in I agree with it, but fine as in if that’s the attitude that’s the attitude. But no one’s owning up to that. Rather, the argument being made is language over body and the body poses no challenge to language. So the thing that irks me is that the ‘language over body’ argument wants it both ways: it wants to be done with all this body and ethics stuff because basically it’s over it from the get go and simultaneously assures itself that all of this is safe for it to be over precisely because the ethics of emancipation are already covered, ipso facto, by the aesthetic anyway.
I’ve already argued at length over the last two days about why that reliance on aesthetics as simply being ethical in themselves is a whopping assumption, to say the least, so I’ll only add this one last thing. Basically, in extending difference to the infinite horizons but on a flat plain, in which people are people, bodies bodies, the language over body argument essentially destroys the way the organisation of reality in very real ways by very real systems, assemblages, events, objects and people has tiered and organized difference in all sorts of entangled and complicated and pincer-like ways that are not even. In that sense, this argument for bodily or identity consideration is not at all a matter of limiting ourselves, like limitation were a free choice we autonomously make, whoever or wherever we are, between limiting and not limiting our lives. And I think to accuse people of that is kind of like a cold dose of ‘self-help’ medicine or like telling someone who’s fat that looks shouldn’t matter before adding oh, but I only like you as a friend.
I think we can do better than this. I think we’re already doing better than this, but we can take the better further by understanding the body better in language not just imperialising it – the oldest thing ever – with subjection to the word.
Sorry demi. I mean I’m sort of in the same boat. I don’t personally experience what Blake is talking about either. But I can imagine how a person could, very easily. And part of the whole point of art is that Blake and you and I can all have completely different experiences of the same thing, and the alienation of that experience. Isn’t it wonderful to know people don’t feel or know the way you do sometimes? The best defense of his reading is his reading. And I think you should accept it not because it’s right or because it’s persuasive, but because we should try to accept all readings we can stomach, to expand our stomach, to know each other better, to love each other better.
Well, yeah, I have no problem accepting that that is his personal, sentimental reading of that poem. However, I balk at the idea that his reading—unless someone else helps me out here and helps me “grasp” both his reading and the original poem—actually says anything at all about the poem. Artful readings can enlarge us in the same way that art poetry does, and in my opinion it is not talking out of one’s ass to resist inartful reading, or inartful poems.
Anyhow, I’m high as a kite on newly prescribed antidepressants and decaf coffee, so I think I need to back away from this a little. I’m beginning to obsess over this Kilpatrick poem, and that’s not healthy. Ugh.
Hi,
This has been a really interesting discussion, I’ve followed all three parts. I should probably preface this by saying this is first time I’ve commented here on HTMLGIANT, because I’d heard a handful of secondhand reports about how some of the commentboxes had gotten ugly and misogynistic (the Zelda post) and these secondhand reports from women bloggers I respected were enough to make me feel turned off from spending any time on the site, which was unfortunate because I had a sense this site had lots of good content that would be interesting to me but because of these stories of commentbox misogyny I did not feel like it would be the place for me, the place for me to spend time & energy fending off anti-female or anti-feminist vibes in spite of the other good content. But now that I’ve read this discussion and scrolled through most of the comments and saw that things are not ugly & misogynistic at least in this series of commentboxes, I feel like I can comment and become a more regular reader of this site.
A confession to Kate: I’m seriously under-read on Cixious so did not know she included Bernhard and Kafka under l’ecriture feminine. Where can I find this? This is very interesting to me with respect to “masculine” and “feminine” writing (scare quotes to be taken seriously) because I’ve always considered Bernhard to be uber-male in some ways (the angry isolationism, the ratiocination, the interest in the artist-hero or scientist-hero myth) but also incredibly hysterical, albeit a hysteria couched in the rationalist-gone-mad symptom of OCD ranting. And the unabashed anxiety, which also is shared by Kafka and Beckett. Yet Bernhard’s anxious hysteria is conducted not through the messiness of the body (his male characters seem to be repulsed by bodies in fact) but through an overexactness of the mind, a perfection taken to excess. And this to me seems like a “male” quality. So I find Bernhard to be this fascinating mix of gender-inflected qualities, you could almost symptomize his whole body of work as being a working-through of performance anxiety, this is super reductive of course, but interesting to think about.
Like Amy, I did read the Kilpatrick poem as being something of a Flarf take-off, though more composed-sounding than found. I am really struck by Blake’s reading of the poem: the terror, the blankness, the laughter. This seems like a very accurate way to approach the poem and describes some of my own feelings when reading Flarf poems. The pleasure of being numbed and terrified into blankness. What is going on here culturally?
i’m shocked at how difficult it appears to be for (some) women to read work which is suspected of misogynistic undertones (or something), and yet, not merely be willing to talk about that very work, but go out of the way to do so, in the most superficial way, making it into a larger issue thing without actually having read the work in question. i am not speaking to amy and kate in particular but include them in the general. it’s like when people show up to a sophmore lit class for a discussion of romeo and juliet and all they want to talk about is baz luhrmann.
have you read the issue yet, kate? i’d honestly like to know what you think because i believe there is a lot there to think about in many of the pieces when put into this context (not that i think it can’t be divorced from the context). the question you raised about people not having read it (‘isn’t there a possibility it doesn’t have this straight white dude aesthetic?’) was one of the first things i said when this ‘issue’ came up. and elisa expressed a firm disinterest in reading it. that still seems amazing to me. i’m interested in what is going on here culturally. in that we seem to have little to no interest in critical literary analysis. i mean, that’s not something i do, and it’s not something i want to do, and if it were done i might just say, oh that’s really stupid, but i would rather live in a world where it happens than not, i think.
reynard – i should add that i was not involved in the wac discussion here when it occured on html giant, and the issue of WAC being all-male doesn’t particularly fry or at least surprise me. i was asked my opinion of it. will i go out of my way to read it? no. would i go out of my way to read it if it there were more women writers? probably not. what’s been touted from it is the ben marcus interview, and i’m not crazy about the whole ben marcus aesthetic. just not my taste. that’s the honest truth. i also tend not to read too many contemporary short stories by men or women. should i? yes. i am expressing here my extreme limitedness and particularity as a reader. i have an interested in critical literary analysis, but my attention is pointed elsewhere.
roz – i think in newly born women, when she’s having that conversation with clement, she brings up the notion of la genet, named after jean genet (i mean that tells us something there, that her idea of what writing should be is named after a male writer). and maybe then in sorties? she tells us that feminine writing (the name is of course problematic) is first of all privileged by voice….very Bernhard. I think it’s less about content and more about style with her championing of Bernhard.
and i read lots and lots of writing that has misogynistic undertones, some of my favorite writers in fact (henry miller, artaud, nietzsche, sade, bataille)
and sorry for the multiple post reynard but i realized i sounded dismissive and so i just went and read your story reynard…very sick and twisted. good work.
thanks kate, but it wasn’t that i wanted you to read mine in particular, although i would have liked people to notice that words which could be read as anti-female slurs are spoken by a female narrator. and i really do (honestly) think of pretty much all my writing as satirical feminism. but i think jimmy chen’s, chris okum’s, and mark leidner’s pieces could all be read and explored with this same idea in mind. my point is, even if a dude’s writing is masculine, his heart can be in the right place.
also, i feel you on what you said before. i’m sure there are explanations for why people wouldn’t want to read certain things. i just think it’s sort of weird how often it’s been said lately. there were a lot of people in the discussion saying, no i haven’t read it and i’m just not going to. it’s a little disheartening.
reynard – i should add that i was not involved in the wac discussion here when it occured on html giant, and the issue of WAC being all-male doesn’t particularly fry or at least surprise me. i was asked my opinion of it. will i go out of my way to read it? no. would i go out of my way to read it if it there were more women writers? probably not. what’s been touted from it is the ben marcus interview, and i’m not crazy about the whole ben marcus aesthetic. just not my taste. that’s the honest truth. i also tend not to read too many contemporary short stories by men or women. should i? yes. i am expressing here my extreme limitedness and particularity as a reader. i have an interested in critical literary analysis, but my attention is pointed elsewhere.
roz – i think in newly born women, when she’s having that conversation with clement, she brings up the notion of la genet, named after jean genet (i mean that tells us something there, that her idea of what writing should be is named after a male writer). and maybe then in sorties? she tells us that feminine writing (the name is of course problematic) is first of all privileged by voice….very Bernhard. I think it’s less about content and more about style with her championing of Bernhard.
and i read lots and lots of writing that has misogynistic undertones, some of my favorite writers in fact (henry miller, artaud, nietzsche, sade, bataille)
reynard totally got that you were writing from a female narrator. i dug it. i did. have you read movern callar? i love that book, don’t know why just thought of it. also loved the film lynne ramsey did of it. i didn’t read the other pieces because i don’t have time. but i was never consciously boycotting (ha!).
but… i’m not sure i buy into the label of satirical feminism as a sort of explanation for a strain of contemporary indie writing. maybe you can explain it more. i get that you see your work as that, like i see my work sort of as a problematic feminisms, but i don’t know if you can drape a cloth around other contemporary work and call it satirical feminism, in fact i’m having trouble of thinking of work that i would affix with that label. although i’m intrigued…
perhaps we could potentially read works with that idea, but i don’t think it necessarily widely has that intent (like, i don’t think henry miller’s tropic of cancer is a feminist satire. i know this isn’t the kind of work you mean, but just as an ex. could i potentially read it as a feminist satire? sure. and i have actually written about reading miller as a woman, as hysterical, as sympathetic with the whores he writes about. but i don’t think tropic of cancer is really a feminist manifesto. especially when he writes explicity about women writers that no one wants a manuscript from a cold corpse of a whore). i mean, i liked the fistfucking rules poem, but i don’t think of it as a satirical feminism, and i don’t need to reread the work through that lens in order to enjoy it. and i don’t think, say, the posts about women’s bodies that were part of the conversation were satirical feminism, probably because of the responses to it by the author. maybe they were! but if so it was super veiled.
but i also get that it’s disheartening that here is your story in a new journal and all of a sudden people are refusing to read it. as someone who hasn’t been published in many journals, i totally get that. your work has become politicized without your intent. i also don’t think texts need to be pure, can be complex, i think i made my feelings on that really clear in the interview, ad nauseum, and in the discussion on fistfucking rules. and how i think a male writer’s style can be quite feminine, but this is engaging with an old old discussion, on feminine writing, which maybe needs a new name! i don’t also need someone’s heart to be in the right place for me to enjoy a text. i do like writing that has heart, however. i also like writing that’s from the bowels, or the lungs.
although, i do get, i do get the other POV. i mean, there’s a surplus of things to read out there. so we do make some choices when reading a journal, when reading a book, and with contemporary writing i tend to maybe unconsciously or automatically not want to engage with reading journals that i don’t feel a part of. i don’t know if that makes sense. i tend to feel that less with, say, an old issue of the surrealist journal minotaur that’s all dudes.
and sorry for the multiple post reynard but i realized i sounded dismissive and so i just went and read your story reynard…very sick and twisted. good work.
thanks kate, but it wasn’t that i wanted you to read mine in particular, although i would have liked people to notice that words which could be read as anti-female slurs are spoken by a female narrator. and i really do (honestly) think of pretty much all my writing as satirical feminism. but i think jimmy chen’s, chris okum’s, and mark leidner’s pieces could all be read and explored with this same idea in mind. my point is, even if a dude’s writing is masculine, his heart can be in the right place.
also, i feel you on what you said before. i’m sure there are explanations for why people wouldn’t want to read certain things. i just think it’s sort of weird how often it’s been said lately. there were a lot of people in the discussion saying, no i haven’t read it and i’m just not going to. it’s a little disheartening.
reynard totally got that you were writing from a female narrator. i dug it. i did. have you read movern callar? i love that book, don’t know why just thought of it. also loved the film lynne ramsey did of it. i didn’t read the other pieces because i don’t have time. but i was never consciously boycotting (ha!).
but… i’m not sure i buy into the label of satirical feminism as a sort of explanation for a strain of contemporary indie writing. maybe you can explain it more. i get that you see your work as that, like i see my work sort of as a problematic feminisms, but i don’t know if you can drape a cloth around other contemporary work and call it satirical feminism, in fact i’m having trouble of thinking of work that i would affix with that label. although i’m intrigued…
perhaps we could potentially read works with that idea, but i don’t think it necessarily widely has that intent (like, i don’t think henry miller’s tropic of cancer is a feminist satire. i know this isn’t the kind of work you mean, but just as an ex. could i potentially read it as a feminist satire? sure. and i have actually written about reading miller as a woman, as hysterical, as sympathetic with the whores he writes about. but i don’t think tropic of cancer is really a feminist manifesto. especially when he writes explicity about women writers that no one wants a manuscript from a cold corpse of a whore). i mean, i liked the fistfucking rules poem, but i don’t think of it as a satirical feminism, and i don’t need to reread the work through that lens in order to enjoy it. and i don’t think, say, the posts about women’s bodies that were part of the conversation were satirical feminism, probably because of the responses to it by the author. maybe they were! but if so it was super veiled.
but i also get that it’s disheartening that here is your story in a new journal and all of a sudden people are refusing to read it. as someone who hasn’t been published in many journals, i totally get that. your work has become politicized without your intent. i also don’t think texts need to be pure, can be complex, i think i made my feelings on that really clear in the interview, ad nauseum, and in the discussion on fistfucking rules. and how i think a male writer’s style can be quite feminine, but this is engaging with an old old discussion, on feminine writing, which maybe needs a new name! i don’t also need someone’s heart to be in the right place for me to enjoy a text. i do like writing that has heart, however. i also like writing that’s from the bowels, or the lungs.
although, i do get, i do get the other POV. i mean, there’s a surplus of things to read out there. so we do make some choices when reading a journal, when reading a book, and with contemporary writing i tend to maybe unconsciously or automatically not want to engage with reading journals that i don’t feel a part of. i don’t know if that makes sense. i tend to feel that less with, say, an old issue of the surrealist journal minotaur that’s all dudes.
kate i like lynne ramsay a lot but i’ve only seen ratcatcher. been wanting to see that one. i’ve never read alan warner but i read his wikipedia page and anyone with an obsession for can is fine by me.
so, yeah, i know what you mean about putting up the drapes with that idea. and i think that, like all satire, it’s difficult to tell it apart from sincerity and ignorance, etc. so that’s just something i think about for myself. i rarely think about it when i read other people’s work but i do see it appear from time to time. to me it’s a way of treating stereotypes i think, inverting them or mixing them up to explore how arbitrary they are, i think. i guess it’s where my brain was at the time i began taking writing seriously and it’s still there for whatever reason. actually i didn’t think about it at all in relation to this piece until this whole controversy started and then i started reading it differently. but i do think other people’s brains could be hanging out in the same melon patch if you will. could be an interesting anthology idea. i dunno.
anyway i agree with pretty much everything you said. thanks for taking the brain time to comment on this. i appreciate it.
kate i like lynne ramsay a lot but i’ve only seen ratcatcher. been wanting to see that one. i’ve never read alan warner but i read his wikipedia page and anyone with an obsession for can is fine by me.
so, yeah, i know what you mean about putting up the drapes with that idea. and i think that, like all satire, it’s difficult to tell it apart from sincerity and ignorance, etc. so that’s just something i think about for myself. i rarely think about it when i read other people’s work but i do see it appear from time to time. to me it’s a way of treating stereotypes i think, inverting them or mixing them up to explore how arbitrary they are, i think. i guess it’s where my brain was at the time i began taking writing seriously and it’s still there for whatever reason. actually i didn’t think about it at all in relation to this piece until this whole controversy started and then i started reading it differently. but i do think other people’s brains could be hanging out in the same melon patch if you will. could be an interesting anthology idea. i dunno.
anyway i agree with pretty much everything you said. thanks for taking the brain time to comment on this. i appreciate it.
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