Remarks on Jordan Scott's talk

On Saturday, October 3, Jordan Scott gave a talk and facilitated a discussion as part of the Nonsite Collective's Aesthetics as Somatic Practice Curriculum. Anne Lesley Selcer's expanded introductory remarks follow below. This introduction refers to Jordan Scott's book blert, an excerpt of which can be found here.

The content of Jordan's talk are posted as an attachment.

At some point you mention circumlocution, but my mouth just isn’t working today. You say, ‘Looks like a pinnacle kasrt, oolithic karst. A boulder choke of spitzkarren ahead,’ and I trek textured in chomp, rappel lingual, and hiss a plankton paprika into the pitch of long words” (15).

In previous talks for the Aesthetics as Somatic Practice series Amber DiPietra and Norma Cole spoke about a sort of hyper-attentiveness they developed to each lived moment in order to navigate a sort of world not made for their sort of bodies.  Blert enacts the same hyper-attentiveness to each phoneme. “My symptoms are the agents of composition” (65). While the book bobs and weaves through its multi-metaphors, each word seems to be raised, itself a tiny plateau. This constipated rococo coalesces in a sort of anti- lyricism of the stutterer. 

Blert seems to present a back door to Language Writing’s “materiality of the word” by focusing on the physicality of speech.  The text is at once oratory and graphic.  Here, the subject matter is what drives the reading to the surface, from verticality to horizontal.  I find myself reading it with a sort of empathic sub-vocalization. Page 43 gets at how it feels to speak, “How the dining room serves only gelatinous morsels like milkshakes, honey and yogurt, all eager to wheelbarrow glistening mounds of fluency onto your chipped molars, lube and slip and slide like fat suburban men in July into the fertilized throb of your manicured gullet” (43).  Here, feeling is what generates the defamilarization of language.  The body leads to, rather than away from experimentation.  If the “self” is somatically experienced, situated in place via the body, it seems that the stutterer does not have access to the abstracted exchangeability that words provide, that this self is always a particularity, a “local.” I think of an interview I heard with Ariana Reines which troubles the idea of abandoning the “I,” or rather, points out who it is exactly that gets to leave their “I” behind. One sees (rather than hears) the stutter- sees the difficulty, the emotion, the relationship to self and other. One sees the immigrant attempting to assimilate linguistically, the woman speaking publically, the child learning to speak. Their speech doesn’t enter seamless exchangeability. Here, I am interested in how the stutter’s unmet speech target, the energy excess of the stuttered exchange, reverses and reflects (or deflects) its deficit to ultimately fuel artmaking. Difference at the contact point of sociality, at the very point of language itself, redirects sociality into art, speech into writing; the impossibility of utterance spins with the energy of its impossibility into a fecundity. 

I find myself thinking about the prevocal self and wondering if a sustained connection to this old formation of self is common amongst poets, for whom language itself is what is different, and if that difficulty is the line the poet walks, contently teetering.