Poetics of Disablement

As a way of introducing tomorrow nite's talk/discussion, "Allegories of Disablement" [see events], as well as being in the general interest of the emerging curriculum around disability and poetics, I'm posting this excerpt from a recent exchange between Robert Kocik and Thom Donovan (the whole text of which will be posted here soon):

<<Every kind of work I do deals in disability. To make matters worse (even richer) I went to the collective’s site and re-traced the history of the disability discourse—combining Amber DiPietra’s “How can we have a dialogue around disability and poetics, not just at the political or social level, but at a generative level--one that begets new experiments in writing? To live with or study disability is to be constantly questioning form and constantly working toward formal innovation—whether that is through accessible architecture or the far reaches of cyber humanity. How can this be translated to syntax and the raw stuff of poetry?” with Eleni’s: “disability founds aesthetics— for all persons, not just those with disabilities. If we became conscious of that, perhaps we might start to see how all our conditions determine our forms...”, and the demand becomes a pan-demand—wanting a way of working in which there’s no discrepancy between activism and formal poetry innovation (which is an age-old imperative) by means of embracing disability (which is almost entirely unheard of).>>

--Robert Kocik

See also the discussion thread beginning with a post by Amber DiPietra:

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/397

Oh, um...Thom--what I meant to say:

if prosody is not manifesting what's going on, then our very range of motion is disabling--restricting us to reactionary, passive or, at worst, victimized behavior--as our forms could then do no more than conserve the restriction. That's a far cry from prophylactics.

Note: This report was first posted as a comment to Rob Halpern's blog, but he suggested that I re-post it as a blog rather than a comment. See also Amber DiPietra's follow-up comment attached to Rob's initial post (http://nonsitecollective.org/node/457#comment-134). -CP

Thom made a disclaimer last night at the beginning of his talk, so I feel permission to do so at the beginning of my report. I'm a composer (amongst other things) and this report will reference that perspective. I feel the need to explain this a bit because I am new to the collective and also because of an experience performing on a reading with poets from the Naropa summer writing program in Boulder a couple weeks ago. Myself, my musical collaborator, and the organizer of the show were all excited about inserting our performance into the context of a poetry reading, but with very few exceptions the poets didn't seem to understand. For whatever reason (and I can only speculate), the majority of the poets left immediately when it became clear that our performance was not poetry, but music. I have taken this as a cue to be more cautious in the future about assuming that the interests of unknown artistic communities will be as fervently interdisciplinary as mine. I hope that my comments relating to music below will be relevant, and I trust that you will make analogies to poetry/poetics (or your own practice/discipline, whatever it may be) for yourself. This is the rambling report of a sympathetic musician-outsider. Read more

Composer Larry Polansky and deaf culture:

"For purely practical reasons, it is not possible for a deaf person to learn to understand spoken English, so it becomes a responsibility to learn ASL," says Polansky. "The kindness and care with which I have been treated by teachers and members of the Deaf community over the years has been extraordinary. I hope I can make a contribution in return by taking a new perspective on Deaf poetry, which despite its importance and longevity in Deaf Culture, is not well known in the hearing world."

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2008/04/11.html

Disability History: Theory and Practice, San Francisco State University, July 31-August 3, 2008. San Francisco State University's Institute on Disability, the Disability History Association, and the Disability History Group of the United Kingdom will jointly host Disability History: Theory and Practice, a conference at San Francisco State University, 31 July-3 August 2008.

During the past two decades, research, teaching, and scholarly publication on the history of disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon have drawn increasing attention. The goal of this conference is to assess the state of the field. It will examine the theory and practice of disability history. And it will explore theoretical and substantive, methodological and practical strategies to promote the continued development and intellectual coherence of this field.

While the more than four dozen papers are diverse in subject matter, we intend that the presenters, commentators, and audience participants will use these historical case studies to open up discussion of broader issues. We will consider how scholars approach the history of disability. What theoretical concepts inform our interpretations? What analytical and methodological tools do we find most useful? How does our work benefit from or contribute to other fields of historical inquiry, such as social history, political history, the histories of class, economic systems, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth? In work that focuses on a specific stream of disability history, such as the history of blind people or the history of public policies regarding disabled veterans, what are its connections to and implications for other streams of disability history? How does our historical research draw upon the more general field of disability studies and what are its implications for disability studies?

The program will include papers on the histories of: Read more

I am entering this discussion within the fibers of personal and professional desire/response/ community discourse.

On one hand, it delights me to know that notes for this discussion on disability/disablement were made during the Movement Research Festival Potluck, though also find admitted irony in the fact that I could not attend it due to my own chronic pain (as disability or from a physical disfiguration that is the disability, who can define which?).

Something that has been a little hard for me to enter in this blog is the technical apparatus of "disability" and its various functions...

I prefer more to find agency in a discussion of the mechanism of suffering, which is a very personal and continuous ____ for one who is disabled.

This ____ is my gift to you, reader to insert whatever word you think fits best.

I think of "place," "ground," "text," "momentum," "test," "dance," "funk," or "motherfucker." For me that is more interesting than this idea of re-invention that we seem to be fantastically splashing around in through this discourse.

I am not saying that it is beside the point to re-work this term, or to create perspectives or situations where this sense of the abled and disabled border is dismantled.

I think that the previous bloggers have done an excellent job of that on the nonsite,

but I AM saying that pain is pain,

discomfort is important information, and that can't be by-passed by a revision of terminology or code.

The most important art that I have witnessed or been a part of has emerged from or addressed

the artist's struggle to overcome suffering,

whether it is rooted in disfigurement,
addiction,
loss of many kinds,
and the awkward place
where a desire cannot be met
but persists in its strength of presence,
like the struggle for identity whether that is maintaining one or uncovering one. Read more

At Rob & Lee's house.
1248 Treat, after stapling Try!
at Cyber Copy, at 16th, then
taking the BART to 24th,
taking 14 books out from the
library & walking down.

Ro Taylor, Rob, Eleni, Lee,
Jocelyn, John Sakkis, Jen Hofer,
A (Chris?), Amber, (a
woman to whom I was introduced but
whose name I forget), (Chris =
a man who the same), Chris
(actually Chris), Stephen Vincent,
Rob (not Halpern but with another
last name I forget), Amy Balkin,
Thom Donovan, Robin Tremblay-
McGaw, me.
All these
sitting in a circle in the
living room, with the sounds of

kids in the pool outside coming through
the the window. Light & light
wind on the trees outside.
(Simonides, before
the palace collapse, whether this is
in Quintilian or Ad Herennium,
I dont know, I forget.)

Poetics of disability.
Amber & Eleni. Health &
fitness.
Pasta, beans, salad,
a piece of cheese on bread,
glasses of wine, a cookie
Amy Balkin called 'solid'.
(And it was.)

Patrick Durgin chiming in on
an internet conversation.
(apropos of Hannah Weiner
read through the filter of
disability studies -- not limited to
body)

"how to not cause further harm"
--Kocik

"epiphenomena of the unmade" --Kocik
(look at notes on Nonsite site)

disability & fitness.
reorient myself to
heed Thom.

"forms can serve scial struggle or
ethical / political dilemmas"

potential bodies.

"the body as a proof that I
was there" *
"parse the body" *

voice & autoaffection.

• Vito Acconci

* (cf. Spinoza :
the body proving to itself that it
exists)

"the performance of the body
mediated by the immediate
threat of harm"
--Martha Rosler

"violence was being conveyed"

BRING THE WAR HOME
(Rosler's photos -- cf.
Tyrone Williams' Aggression talk)

"I'll lock it to itself"
--Rob [name] re: his bike *

[Oliveros, Conrad, Sherrits,
Living Theatre (Dionysus '68)] *

• autoaffection

Time: Tuesday, September 2, 2008 7:30 p.m.
Location: Pegasus Books Downtown, Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
Free
Poets Neil Marcus and Petra Kuppers read from their new book. Cripple
Poetics: A Love Story (Homofactus Press, 2008) follows the movement of
Bay Area poet and activist Neil Marcus and his partner Petra's
courtship through traditional poems, emails, essayistic meditations
and Internet Relay Chat. Through variations in form, these pieces ask
us to think of our conceptions of mobility, immobility, physical pain,
as well as means of travel, touch, and communication. As a part of the
Disability Culture movement, the collection shows both non-disabled
and disabled people how rich the poets' lives are, not in spite of
their disabilities, but with and through them.

CONVERTING NONSITE TO SITE
Robert Kocik

For all designs, see:
http://nonsitecollective.org/nonsitetosite1
http://nonsitecollective.org/nonsitetosite2
http://nonsitecollective.org/nonsitetosite3
http://nonsitecollective.org/nonsitetosite4

I’ve been reflecting on Nonsite---as a direct result of being roiled by watching the DNC on TV (the progressive party of the most promising nation on the planet, if elected, will, hopefully, hang on to the middle-class, have a world-class educational system (just like a real country), get a health care system that is a good as the systems in poorer countries, hopefully slightly curb cozening and privateering, equal pay for same job---the whole list of basic ‘givens’ yet to be achieved---whereas progressive parties (once upon a time) ran on platforms calling for abolition of the presidential veto, disbanding of Congress, rule by referendum, cooperative organization of prisons, confronting the Framers’ distrust of direct participation by the people in making fundamental law, and so on.) And though the DNC has never before been this poised to undercut the empty sense of promise.

The more I think about it the more I feel that the Nonsite Collective runs on aesthetics---and that this specialty is precisely its disability. The most pervasive medium (the sensory---the fact that we are not only acutely influenced by but formed by everything we see, hear, touch, taste) is the medium currently the most disavowed and disowned. What a ‘thing’ to own. We own it. With regard to being positioned and provisioned for accomplishing our collective aims, we’re resoundingly sub underdog. (The Nonsite Draft Proposal [see nonsitecollective.org/draft_proposal] defines our aesthetic aim as actively placing aesthetic practice in relation to catastrophic forms of social organization---like DNC VS RNC?)
Read more

For those of you in the Bay Area:

As part of the Nonsite Collective's "Poetics of Disablement" curriculum, Bhanu Kapil will facilitate a discussion around a short selection from Elizabeth Grosz's *Chaos, Territory, Art,* attached as a pdf below.

Saturday September 20, at 3 pm
935 Natoma,
between 10th and 11th, and between Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART

• For information regarding wheelchair accessibility, please contact rob[dot]halpern[at]gmail[dot]com.

About her approach, Bhanu writes: Read more

In which Bhanu "excavated a space for [this] body" and I stuck my toe in.

Bhanu asked me to speak about “compacted”, I think, because of something I said to her recently in a late night email regarding some piece of language in her forthcoming Humanimal. The word I was referring to in terms of “the compacted” looks like a neologism, when in fact it is an old word originating in another tongue. And yet, I think it has fallen into sufficient disuse as to now be a kind of neologism. The inferred definition (consider definition as that which gives something shape by exacting form out of larger masses of shape), the look and feel of the word, yields a sense of the compressed over time, of that which is overlaid rapidly and lightly like in such structures as wings, and also that which is simultaneously exposed. The technical definition of this word and the biological system it enacts in its sentence sits at an angle to the actual context of the sentence, the words that make images there. It is, technically, a bit out of joint with the sentence which, instead of making it an unsuitable word choice—I think that was the what we were discussing in the email) rather creates the entire quality of movement of the sentence and the sentence’s image—not so much syntactically, but organically. This one word and this sentence are so important because it a gestative moment in the text supporting the central figure—or the central half-figure of a hybrid subject—in the book.

It was easy to speak of this word choice with Bhanu and use my words to refer to it—compacted, and by which I also meant impacted—but outside of that I froze. It is easy for me to plug my words and idea-clusters into B’s work like graphing live tissue from one organism into another. But outside of my body and on their own, these word-tissues shut down, disconnected from a larger living system. Read more

This is a response to Dodie's blog post on the Bhanu talk (Sept 20)

Thank you for this Dodie. I believe the talk was an important one to have and was hugely meaningful to me on a personal level because of my connection to Bhanu’s work, but I think there were conflations that I would not want to see become permanent for some of the very reasons people mention in the preceding comments. (See Dodie's personal blog and cooments to the Trauma entry based on the disability community's take on trauma....http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/2008/09/trauma.html)

As a body worker, Bhanu talks of her work as “a space for healing” and much of in relates to the wounded body in relation to ethnic displacement. Grosz talks about literature as a rarefaction of sensation, either as pleasure or pain. And I was trying to gesture towards ideas of a body (starting with my body I guess) in language, when I spoke of “the compacted”. I was speaking as someone with a disability, but in talking of trauma, I was also in conversation with Bhanu. Throughout the talk, I was aware that what I said could be construed as flattening the one into the other, disability and trauma, but this was not my intention.

Had I been speaking on my own, I probably would have gone the direction of the body, language, sensation and the self in real time (which can sometimes be painful) which for me is a less loaded look at an identity category. Which is not to say my experience at times, has not been linked to trauma, but more truly, it can be categorized as an ambient discomfort. Read more