Philosophy: Kristeva, Irigaray, and the feminine Self (1):

Helene Cixous would say that when, “ringing in the Feminine hour … I believe that I can say that I am a woman only because from time to time, I have experiences that belong to that universe.” Karl Marx wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Fredrick Nietzsche went where Marx would not, and existentially pushed the variable of individual will power.

            As Luce Irigaray puts it, “we struggle against forms of others, and we are still subject to conditioned social rules that we confuse with freedom: hence a single sex or gender dominance, which still faces limitations;” transformation starts with rules on language; sexual liberation implies linguistic transformations (Irigaray). Transformation starts with will power to overcome forbidden acceptance of separation. Irigaray emphasizes that discourse is sexed. “How could discourse not be sexed when language is? Just as lexicon is sexed, differences between men’s and women’s discourses are thus the effect of language and society, society and language.” Perpetuated without even realizing it, we need laws to valorize our differences but also to overcome religious and civil myths (Irigaray). Liberating our subjective potential and sexual difference is necessary “as long as sex is for biological continuation, not for cultural praxis.” One has to celebrate higher semblances and spiritual release. He or she cannot be reduced to complementary functions, “don’t restrict yourself to describing, reproducing and repeating what exists, but know how to invent or imagine what has not yet taken place" (Irigaray).   

            It is possible to start and create change with changing everyday language and by paying attention to how we speak and listen to one another. Julia Kristeva in a letter to Catherine Clement collected in the book The Feminine and the Sacred, addresses bald truths: “The bald truths of Marquis de Sade are bothersome. But all religions, using the trenchant effects of language in various and less conscious ways, celebrate the sacred as a sacrifice. They admit that this sacrifice is the one that inscribes language on the body” (Kristeva). Forbidden acceptance seems to root within language and institutional culture, which also format religious beliefs on gender appropriation. Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are two key postmodern philosophers. However, Kristeva and Irigaray, though they are often linked together when academics discuss contemporary female French theory, the two differ from one another (as does Helene Cixous).

            Kristeva and Irigaray stand at different pillars in their analysis. Luce Irigaray stands amongst the crowd within the sphere of her struggling sisters, while Kristeva seems to stand at a platform of scientists, who dissect human society, with medical tools pulling apart male and female identities. Yet both have played significant roles in the protest against the dominant system. Irigaray reinforces that women cannot be gathered into one volume of understanding human gender, “Women are thus in a position of specific exploitation with respect to” exploitation of the body, matter and the symbolic process that governs over the body (Irigaray). On the effects of culture, she notes, “if the unconscious were both the result of the acts of censorship of repression forced upon us in and by a certain history, and also a yet-to-come-into-being, the reservoir of a yet-to-come, your repudations, acts of censorship and misrecognitions, would seem to fold the future back into the past.”

            The folding the future back into the past would reduce the future or the yet-to-be to a subject already subjected to an unspoken language of repetition. The belief and semblance of the individual would be limited from free will and would be seduced into a precondition determining a false truth, or a bad faith, as Nietzsche would call it. Reducing the self to a Lacanian symptom would leave identity in the hands of a mental health institution from a Freudian tower that never understood women or humans from the start. The dominant mainstream indoctrination of defining women and men (and minorities) to limited universals seeks to silence alternative scenarios. Not listening to other perspectives or possible realities, a selective memory, allows language to dominate culture.

            Julia Kristeva alluded this to a masquerade, as with femininity, the masquerade of society wrapped with a political economy, where profit seeking institutions, whether it be fashion magazines, apparel, and consumer corporations, or whether it be the church (more dominant in previous centuries) dominate the majority of society to maintain a false objectivity. This masquerade of false objectivity has for a backdrop a void. For Kristeva, proper nouns and proper names are meaningless. They are an imaginary representation that the institutions of psychiatry and psychology followed in suite of Christianity in denying women of the sacred (Kristeva). “The true-real falls outside the framework of what is considered intelligible or plausible in the socialized space of symbolic order. Like Foucault and his use of the word ‘discourse’, Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ theory focuses on the real outside of gender, race, class, or creed, but on the way individuals and masses have been controlled by these forced outside words over self will, and hidden is the metaphysics of her thesis: exposing the unsaid in the social contract. ... (to be continued)...

AESTHETICS AND POETICS ARE A REVOLUTIONARY TOOL:

In Herbert Marcuse’s Aesthetic Dimension, the philosopher explains the importance of art to the revolutionary process; for him, “Art fights the reification by making the petrified world speak.” Art as art expresses a truth, but a work of art can only be called revolutionary if the prevailing freedom and rebelling forces open the horizon for change, and the liberation is grounded when and where art transcends social determinism (Marcuse).

The postcolonial poetics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, contemporaries of Marcuse, aligned their politics with the Surrealist movement grounded in France in the 1930’s. The two writers from Martinique had been studying in Paris at the peak Surrealist heyday and were moved through Andre Breton’s inspiration of an aesthetics on canvas and poetry displaying a movement using art as a means to fight the violent realism of World War II. Aime and Suzanne’s surrealist innovation helped them ‘enable the transcendence from the sordid dichotomies of the present,’ not just in Europe, but at home in the French colonized Martinique. “Surrealism nourished our impatient strength towards life and a permanent readiness for the marvelous” (Suzanne Cesaire).

In Aime Cesaire’s poetry Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, the poet reflects on his return visit from France to Martinique in 1939. He saw that while the Nazi Army had disabled the French nation in Europe, the French had learned no lessons from the German occupation because those French sailors, thousands of them, who harbored in the Caribbean, remained just as racist and brutally controlling over the native population. The ungrateful refugees could not learn that treating any human, as a second rate human, would not help France overcome fascism at home or their own fascism abroad.

For Aime Cesaire, “Poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of knowledge needed to move beyond the World’s crisis … Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (Cesaire). Poetics is crucial to move forward since the sciences do not always have all the answers to life’s most difficult questions.    

            A fourth contemporary of Herbert Marcuse, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire is Adrienne Rich. Her involvement in the Non-Standardized Woman’s Movement is a third revolutionary act discussed here in where poetics and aesthetics are vital. Quoting W.H. Auden reflecting on her poetry, in her essays entitled What is Found There, “Radical changes and significant novelty in artistic style can only occur when there has been a radical change in human sensibility to require them.” She continues shortly after with another quote by Leslie Marmon Silko, “No need to ever have limited it to so few sensibilities, so few visions of what might be in the world;” limits to gender, sexual preference, race, politics, art, and battle cries cannot remain in a domain with perimeters conscious or unconscious without force. To overcome such limitations, one must be “Shocked out of innocence into politics!” (Rich).

            The Surrealists used shock for such purposes to shock their audience into a new understanding of the horrific present. The surrealism manifested in Aime Cesaire’s work attempted to reclaim an authentic character, his African and Caribbean heritage. Such a process was a detoxification his consciousness needed to emancipate (Rene Despestre).     

              “I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor. It was a weapon to explode the French language” (Cesaire). Aime believes that a civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that it creates is a decadent civilization, while Herbert Marcuse explains that a declining civilization is only capable of producing decadent art. Art with a revolutionary discord creates an emergence of another reasoning. This new revolutionary reasoning defies rationally determinant and dominant institutional sensibility, to create a new sensibility (Marcuse). But this revolutionary attack of accepted diameters is not a pessimistic art, it is not a pessimistic poetics, nor is it counter-evolutionary. Compared to the one-dimensional consumer pop-art that is propaganda to passive acceptance, “It serves to warn against the overly ‘happy consciousness of accepted praxis.' Art cannot abolish social division of labor, but it can disassociate the production process of domination, and it can make conscious the necessity for change” (Marcuse).    

            At the forefront of Adrienne Rich’s message, aligned with her friend and poet Audre Lorde’s title piece Poetry is Not a Luxury, “our move toward Change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Poetry is not a luxury,” because it is our weapon to open the limits of an imposed interpretation of freedom. Poetry and Art have always provided the necessary outlet to deviate from conventional vices. Adrienne Rich in agreement with Cesaire and Marcuse, inspired by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Raya Dunayevskaya wrote of a revolution that while ‘great divides in epochs in cognition, in personality, are crucial,’ we need to understand the moment of discontinuity – break in the pattern – itself as part of a continuity, for it becomes a turning point in history” (Rich).                 

            Adrienne Rich reiterates this in her use of Irena Klepfisz’s poetry, where “from the urban plant that sensualizes the apartment where two women make love, or the fiercely generative tangle of narcissus roots in a glass jar, to a garden of wildflowers transplanted with uneven success … There is a tough and searching empathy, Klepfisz writes sometimes from cities where a windowbox, a potted plant, a zoo, an arboretum become ‘mnemonic devices’ for the natural world” (Rich). These mnemonic devices assist in displacing the flow of accepted understanding, and invent a poetics to alternate what acts pass our understanding eye, much like the acceptance of a clock dripping in a Salvador Dali painting that displaces our understanding of time, or a Hans Bellmer photograph testing our accepted uses of contortioned dolls.  

            A true postcolonial radical will tell you that his country is not yet ‘postcolonial’ because the official apparatus of political, economic, and cultural links remains tied to and with mere alterations to the Western discourse of set footprints and Neocolonial terminology. Aesthetic sublimation can change when the rebellious rebirth of subjectivity invokes a de-sublimation of perception and it transcends to a critical level of awareness. This is where and when the social nexus of submission has been broken (Marcuse). Such spontaneous acts in poetics and aesthetics, not only will liberate former colonies, but also the dominant determination in the developed nations that hold onto limited parameters of freedom on gender, race, sexual preference, economics, and expression. “Life dissipates; its living trace dissolves” (Assia Djebar).  Find the unnamable and Break the nexus. Aesthetics and Poetics are a revolutionary tool, it has assisted passionate voices throughout historic hard times, and it will work as an outlet time and time again.

Part Six: Kathy Acker, Tom Robbins, and Experimental Acts:

People in the living present have to see both lines of yesterday and today, for the ‘past never passes’ as a continuing by-product, and the hybridization of the present harbors the hold on the ship needed to launch an inevitable uncharted discovery tomorrow. Poets like Carla Harryman, Kathleen Fraser, Fanny Howe and Lyn Hejinian experiment with text to “challenge the way we chronicle women’s lives” (Laura Hinton). Such writers, Hinton emphasizes “dissociate themselves from the historical mission of realism.” Can we really know the past, and to what extent, if we do so try to revisit such structures, we are doing so to try to see through a nostalgic fetish, romanticizing the rupture between a then and a now, or the filling in the blanks with otherness.

            Luce Irigaray had a term for this, known as ‘the fecund horizon’. The fecund horizon was a new poetics, un-represent-able by signs, beyond what we currently claim ‘to-be-known’. Eliminating and replacing an indifferent institutional poetics with a more fragmented whole is necessary. Exploring the language of those suffering from dementia subverts the hegemony of standard Western male realization (as well as other cultures’ gender bias) and perimeters are vital. Such prejudice modes of classification leaves the act of escape limited to terms of Freud, Marx, Pope, or Smith. The current condition seems doomed to perpetuate unless a catastrophe is large enough to cripple the mainstream’s false wholesome ‘universalism’, which homogenizes reality rather than creating a veritable basic system and non-hybrid; this consumer globalized level loses dynamic interest and does not preserve multiplicity. “Nothing is played out in advanced!” and nothing should be played out in advance (Felix Guittari).

            Kathy Acker would utilize poetics as means to dislodge language, the very language that sustains and disrupts the representational semantics. As quoted earlier, “Write in order to lead the reader into a labyrinth from which the reader cannot emerge without destroying the world” (Acker).  The legible paradox of unstable fragments, Jahan Ramazani iterates Linda Hutcheon’s point, that irony has the potential transgressive counter-discourse and to unsettle the dominant mode, like Kathy Acker, postcolonial poetics works within the power field but still contests it.  The differences between writers of Postcolonial and Postmodern circles are vast and hybrid, distinct to local histories and yet we are all apart of the same fight to “forge an embodying aesthetic format” that transforms the world to a healthier paradigm. 

Interweaving, ‘fraught with risks’, ‘replicating the binaries’ that are meant to be superseded, and ‘should not rule out over more nuanced understandings’ reading side by side and not in diminished formats of ‘capillary’ falsified networks. Or even yet, as Tom Robbins promotes life and writing:

            “To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must be ready to die. How is that for a paradox? … That is why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and to always cut against the grain” (Tom Robbins, Even Cow Girls Get the Blues).

Like the hipster that Robbins is, his note on poets was that “Poets remember our dreams. But Outlaws act them out” (Stilllife with Woodpeckers). Here poets, like Kathy Acker, do both!

Part Five: Poetics: Carla Harryman, False Knowledge as Displacement:

Carla Harryman discusses in her performance piece Walking Backwards with Maintains, where she read aloud a ‘sacred text’ from the back to the front intentionally incorrect, retracing the previous progression of steps that lead to the Postmodern dilemma. What she comes to conclude is that knowledge is a false discourse. Knowledge is vague and selective in memory. Harryman reflects on Lyn Hejinian’s Writing as an Aid to Memory, and Kathy Acker’s Bodies of Work, and how the two writers “consistently search for ways to dissolve the mind/body split as a means towards individual and social liberation” (Harryman).

A more vivid outside of text reality is in Stephanie Urdang’s account of fighting two forms of colonialism, how the women in Guinea-Bissau fought the Portuguese for independence and at the same time had to fight the conceived understanding the male revolutionaries had of freedom, having to remind them that women are to be included in the new independent nation as active participants. “Women had virtually no mobility, in keeping with tradition, and were less likely to break from patterns set for them by their socialization” in pre-modern, modern, and even present settings. The overcoming of colonialism for women has continually been a two front process: one patriarchal and one racial (Urdang).

The individual and social liberation in colonial and modern times has passed into a dual fight that we still see today. The discourse of false knowledge that Harryman alludes to has left us with uncertainty in postmodern thought. The vague theoretical direction today seems to parallel the segment of Hopi prophecy where the lesson drawn from knowledge imposed upon a population when individuals, male or female, have been linked within a culture not of their own choosing leads to thinning of roots. The Hopi prophecy mentions that once an imposed culture has drastically diluted a previous indigenous culture in the name of progress, it becomes much harder to regain lost knowledge (Thomas E. Mails).

Postcolonial Poetics deals with the loss and hardship of regaining what has been lost in their respective cultures due to European Colonialism, while also trying to create new identities in their new national independence. Reclaiming lost knowledge, but also expanding local thought to not appear in the false ‘primitive-ist’ image that Europe had debased on them and maintains in looking down on tribal spiritualism.

Though the Hopi are not in a postcolonial paradigm, as former nations in Africa, Asia, and South America, due to having their land still occupied by the United States, the knowledge that stems from their traditions have been drained by the progressive notion of modern technology. The Hopi share with former colonial nations, and the Women’s Movement the challenge of creating a space of thought outside the dominant mainstream ‘globalized’ market system. Postcolonial Poetics is affiliated with a lexicon of terms, such as: displacement, transfer, and migration. 

Such context involves writers who aggressively re-orient the imaginative relation with one-self and one’s-beginning and one’s-ending to a cultural, bodily, and psychic past (Ramazani). For many postcolonial writers, such as Edward Said, they associate postmodernism as a lead towards nihilism and internal emptiness, particularly the male-centered postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida. But for Postmodern Female Linguist Poets, such as Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, the dissolving of the current psychic paradigm of nihilism and false knowledge can be actively resisted as they use their writing as a weapon to reclaim memory and liberation. Empty individuals with thin roots and social stagnation need to re-orient their imaginative relationship with one another. Poetics is a form of political theory that can start the process.    ... (to be continued)...

Part Four: Poetics: Carla Harryman, Derek Walcott, Schizoid Conflict:

Schizophrenic webbing of history is Alice Notley’s way of rearranging the perimeters of flat historic male-centered poetics. Postcolonial Poetics have at times, the mind-embattled dilemmas too: “To love the English language yet to hate English Imperialism,” a paradox that Jahan Ramazani discusses in the light of the St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott and his epic poem, Omeros. This parallel is similar with postcolonial writers who love French language but despise French Imperialism.

Abandonment or acceptance of one but not the other, this conundrum of the grieving poet is either victim or resistant. But being caught up in both creates internal and external battles. A Catch-22 of impossible and impassible verbal release, but this post-traumatic limbo has Walcott using old tropes of Greek heroes and ‘tropicalizing and twisting’ them into ‘vibrant new figures’ (Ramazani). His colorful new location still holds onto the old tropes and suffering common pains, leaving a universal definition. Ngugi wa Thiongo would most likely refer to the poetics that Walcott uses, as a work that cannot yet ‘decolonize’ itself.

In order for one to ‘decolonize the mind’, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo predominantly proposes that one must go back and retrace one’s own ambivalence and see why there is such an ambivalence? For some individuals, the semiotic, or even semi-detached, representation has crippled movement and this is due to having conceived a limited form of self-representation. Naive hallmark definitions are not wide enough to encompass the larger majority of diverse native perspectives, and forcing a universal on thought boxes-in growth. Postcolonial Poetics, as with the parallel but different Postmodern Poetics, fight the standard in-the-box perspective that the dominant institution continues to swallow. However some choose to re-dress the old tropes, while others want to deconstruct the mind control. To go outside dominant culture, and ‘motivated by the marginalized sense of being’, pushes certain poetics to remain outsider-art in order to not be capitalized on. Consumer culture manufactures a false sense of consent.

As with the linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent, Postmodern Female Language poets, like Carla Harryman, use a nonlinear/non-literary vocabulary drawn from sciences, philosophy, sociology, and politics (Harryman). Such poets are willing to break all the grammatical and syntactical rules. Breaking these determined rules in a literary format designed by men, which has always been linguistically consciously and unconsciously bias, leads to an enlightenment of how false rules and false restraints control individuals literally and literarily.

While Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Poetics have similar enemies of domination, the gender element seems to come secondary in colonial theory, while gender and racial elements come second to the larger Postmodern/Post-structural movement of Foucault and Derrida. Two oppressive mechanisms of control over others play out. This conflict of interest creates a schizoid pull and push of ‘loving cultural literature’ but ‘hating dominant oppression’, as with those who love the ideals of America but deplore the actions of the American foreign policy; For Carla Harryman, ‘rule of thought’ is not the same as ‘literary convention’. There are limits in decolonizing one’s thought if one chooses to remain in the global community. Harryman’s rule of thought, “is the convention on which the experimental work relies on and what the experimental work cannot question without destroying itself” (Harryman). 

The limit of complex power relations in poetics, in order to impact an audience, has to in some way relate to the very pre-dominance it rebels against. This Catch-22 of internal and external conflict of perception remains stressed in the use of wordage.    .... (to be continued) ....

Part Three: Poetics: Kathy Acker, Alice Notley, and Things Fall Apart:

            If language is a sacred hole, imagine the notion of a yeast infection; this would be in line with the rants of the deconstructionist punk poetics of Kathy Acker. In today’s raunchy Wasteland revisited culture, more so than during Eliot and Yeats’ era, the invasion of language is a continual battle between institutional correction of ‘proper behavior’ of local grammar or fashion, and our personal sensibility. Something outside invading each local hole, and our nervous system has to fight it off like any other infection, even if we dare not speak of it at the kitchen table. Kathy Acker’s Postmodern Poetics would emphasize that language both sustains and disrupts the representational semantics.

            Her revolt is, “Write in order to lead the reader into a labyrinth from which the reader cannot emerge without destroying the world” (Acker, Bodies of Work). In regards to a tumultuous epic, the works of Alice Notley parallels the postmodern poetics of Kathy Acker’s full out call for destruction.  Alice Notley’s anti-academic and spontaneous experimental emergence breaks through masculine epic poetry (Susan McCabe). Her idiosyncratic punctuation, her re-imagined potentials for gendered embodiment, and her thoughts in a post-sexual text disrupt the bias of social order. Set on a new textual body, the poet, whether female or oppressed minority, must, in terms, enter those excluding realms, and “refashion them from within” (Notley).

            The marginalized poet must enter the field as one would a Dante-like journey, an epic like the Odyssey to decentralize the domineering invasion. As Notley says, “a sort of ecstasy of desolation, “ then disembodying from the wasteland of establishment. Antiseptic to infection and composting of old laws, leaving out the back door triumphant, what cannot be spoken, has Notley exploring the “enmeshment of poetic bodily forms” (Susan McCabe). Enmeshment, not to be confused with entrenchment, entrenchment is for defensive measures; enmeshment is an active offensive rearranging and tangling of falsely placed coordinates to knot up discourse for the falsely one-way  ‘capillary network’.

            The confusion between enmeshment and entrenchment is like the line between cunnilingus and anilingus. It is a location of focus. Stretching and expanding the established barriers, the epic journey is to mesh the arrangements of what comes first and what comes after in a disorderly conduct. If one writes in English, one cannot avoid the writers of either offensive action, those writers who came before and those writers who come after. However, those accredited writers who came previously have been indoctrinated into the canon of institutional accepted literature. To read them out of sequence, would reflect that there is a broader spectrum of voices fusing together texts of hybrid multi-dimensional polarities not on a singular path from past to present. The enmeshment is a schizoid battle for representation. A student no longer just reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alone, now the teacher brings with it Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or Edward Said’s essays on colonial intentions. No longer is the student learning in the historic timeframe, which was written first, but is learning them at the same time, and the student is enmeshing the messages. ... (to be continued) ...

Part Two: William Butler Yeats, Postcolonial or Postmodern!

William Butler Yeats can be aligned with Postcolonial Poetics because he was an Irishman overcoming British Imperialism. He can be aligned in the Modernist Poetics early stirrings of Postmodernism with his poems that moved against the grain of institutional thought. Regarding his poem, The Lake of Innisfree, Yeats states that he had “begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from the emotions that rhetoric brings” rather nothing but the common syntax (Norton Anthology). However, Yeats had an internal dilemma in his resistance of the common syntax, when to use it and when not to.

            Will William Butler Yeats eat yeast? Yes, this rising dilemma in his work may contribute to the need to flush the British language with Irish slang and Celtic terms. Like Spanglish today, a hybrid mixing of Spanish and English to bring together the growing communication between communities in the United States of mixed ethnic background; Jahan Ramazani contributes that “In order to de-Anglacize ourselves,” arrest our decay of imperial standards, we must ‘Yorubize,’ Carribeanize’, ‘Urudize’, and numerous other languages of diverse cultures, once controlled by the British, and flush the language with new terms, slangs, and ever expand the dictionary until more words root to hybrid cultures than just that of the Anglo, just as Patrick Chamoiseau suggests with Creole to French. Like Yeats had with Irish and Celtic, the forging of the nation’s collective conscious awakening and reshaping the public’s desire to create a space outside of conquest, overcomes the domination (Ramazani).

            Expanding and flushing vocabulary to adhere to the new global collective is one way of resisting the dominant institution. Ramazani quotes Yeats stating, “Civilization is held together … by artificially created illusions.” Illusions can be ‘skin, race, gender,’ or ‘economic unit’, or ‘fortified nation’; agreeing on disagreeing to interpretations, that is why Ramazani calls on the focus of hybridity. However, Yeats did not step far enough away from the institution that he could not be postmodern, like his contemporary T.S. Eliot and Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, the Modernist dominance was still in full swing in the early 20^th Century.  The century of State-hood and Nation-building was further being developed rather than disintegrating. While most Postcolonial voices emphasize the development of a national identity or language, Postmodernists tend to favor a disintegrating nation in an embrace of a new hybrid. ... (to be continued)...

acknowledgement to Jahan Ramazani's book, Hybrid Muse

Part One: Poetics: PostColonial and PostModern Fem: Finding Linkage:

Postcolonial Poetics in the English language discussed in Jahan Ramazani’s book The Hybrid Muse, in particular, ‘the globalization of English-language poetry’ be it in India, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Kenya, Nigeria, etc; reflects the hybridization of ethnic muses writing within the linguistic contours of their indigenous lexicon, metaphors, rhythms, dialects, and genres to create new exciting possibilities with their resistance. The exposure and flushing the English canon with Third World entries is not just in English but also other colonial languages, like the parallel of Patrick Chamoiseau’s ‘word-scratcher’ of Creole tradition fighting back French. But using English as an example, if the claim that English as a language still oppresses people when the oppressor is no longer physically present in foreign lands, then Postcolonial Poetics and poets struggle and fight back this invisible threat by extending the dictionary of thought, as others would say, ‘displacing the alphabet’. The nature of postcolonial poetics is to displace the alphabet.

            Similarly but differently, yet still a hybridization of thought; Postmodern Female Language Poetics comes into being with the writers’ refusal to naturalize the language of the text (Marjorie Perloff). In particular, Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue’s We Who Love to be Astonished, propose that oppositional poetics from mainstream have ‘roots that lie in the politicized literature of the earlier era,’ but associated more with the abolitionist, labor rights, civil rights, and women’s rights movements than with the accepted institutions of the ‘capillary network’  (Hinton).

            The emphasis of poets, such as Kathleen Fraser, align with continual experiments of traditional marginality where “untraditional woman scientists as an analogue for the experimental woman poet” have been “searching for the element which had not yet been imagined” and has ‘not yet been named’ (Kathleen Fraser, Eileen Gregory). “Dropping into a place beyond” the illusory gesture,” the poet uses codes of sensuous possibilities beyond desire and matter of choice to affectively challenge previous geographical and grammatical borders (Gregory).

            Displacing the language of the dominant grammar and extending the written possibilities to go beyond what has been institutionally limited is a common thread in Postcolonial Poetics and Postmodern Language Poetics. One would dissect the dissent in the word: Antidisestablishmentarianism. Break it down to establish of a stable –ish, like in fetish, but not. A more so called normal or common refusal to change; here, the refusal is to the institution of established literary poetics. A Mentarian ­is someone who represents something, in this case someone who represents the established hegemonic order. But then there is the disestablishment, those mentarians who want to disembowel the whole thing because the false establishment with its false literary legal-codes does not affect nature, because nature is always changing. Language is always changing. But the anti- is there too, to reflect those who are against the natural evolution of change, the conservatives that want to stop the nonviolent protestors; anti-dis- is a double negative. The double negative does not equal a positive, nor can we get too far ahead of ourselves and stretch it to 'anti'-anti-dis-establish-mentarian-ism. The traditionalist or conservative needs to get over it, that social evolution is inevitable, and freedom for growth is palatable outside the institution’s unstable walls.

             Postcolonial Poetics, as Jahan Ramazani begins with, can start with William Butler Yeats as a platform for dissent. Yeats can also be a lead for Postmodern Poetics. This is where Modern Poetics trails towards the post-movements.  (to be continued)...

LINKING POSTCOLONIAL, POSTMODERN, AND FEMINIST THOUGHT:

Trying to find the underlying connection between the Machinic Unconscious, Feminist Theory, and Neocolonialism. Perhaps it lies in the dominating hegemony of the era needing to control the coordinates of alternative innovation. Those who label mind control conspiracies or not, can step aside, and see that the scenarios collect within ‘who controls the information’, and why they are so afraid of the innovative alternative.

Wole Soyinka’s placement of colonial development over Africa in his novel Isara, emphasizes: “They sometimes echo what Mahatma Gandhi says on the other side of the ocean - they are in the same boat as we … One way or another we all have to choose our destiny – ourselves” (Soyinka).

One of Soyinka’s characters states that he “can bomb the English language worse than Hitler,” because the average West African, may be a merchant, an electrician, a farmer, or a grocery clerk; but only very few Average-Joes on an occasion, get to shine in higher political roles, and the Average West African is no more fit to govern his own colonies than the Average Brit is fit to be a member of the parliament and even farther to reach and hold a portion of the British Empire for his own welfare (Soyinka).

The developing nations are still locked into dependent economic factors with their former colonizers and wealthier nations with the global market system tying each younger nation into debt cycles with the IMF, World Bank, and agreements with the World Trade Organization. Never is it Africa for Africa, South America for South America, etc.; our integrated market system limits self-reliance. Dependency on the market system is less stable than first predicted. Soyinka’s character believes that he can bomb the dominant system by actually refraining from trade with the wealthier hegemony in confidant civil disobedience. Refraining would cultivate a better system than dependency cycles.

The modern feminist voice notes, on parallel lines to colonial control, “Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman, as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of too” (Ariel Levy).

Ariel Levy in her text, Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the similarities between an Uncle Tom and a chauvinist pig, whether male or female, in that, one who does not refrain from “trying to reform the perception of normal bounds,” picking up where James Baldwin toted, “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth: the cultural meaning assigned to our broadest human details – blackness, whiteness, maleness, femaleness, and so on.” In order to start ‘Tomming’ we would have to accept that there is such a limited pre-determined culture first (Ariel Levy).

The acceptance of domination would be inherent in something that we –average voices- would not be able to control and we would be unable to choose our own destiny without seeking permission from higher sovereign forces. This would control our gender rights as much as it would control our race, culture, and creed.

A constraint of individuals to oppressive hierarchies and a methodical flattening of freedom lies in that “Freedom consists in a give and take of quanta of deterritorialization emitted by refrains” (Felix Guittari). Felix Guittari believes that freedom is not created by our mere subjectivity, but it is created by an ‘ungluing of the collective history of humanity.' If we take the territory of the global space and deterritorialize our collective, we would be in a healthier place economically and subjectively. Our identification systems, our language, and our forced ‘universalism’, this is not a return to the ‘primitive’, but this would enable separate growth rather than constant competition for the same space.

Localized growth, Africa for Africa, South America for South America, etc. would give them further sustainability, rather than a determined coordinate where the current world order determines coordinates – femaleness, maleness, blackness, whiteness. “These catchphrases, these call signs have invaded every temporal mode, leading us to feel that we are ‘like everyone else’, and to accept the world as it is.  

Refraining from the dominant discourse and reforming the bias image of male over female, North over South, wealthy over poor, would destabilize this false dominant scenario. Are we ready for that sort of change yet? Many of us are.  

--- I am still shuffling my own thoughts to better perceive the possibilities, Food for Thought: (to be continued...) 

THOUGHTS ON FREEDOM: HYBRID COLLECTION

Leafing through Jurgen Habermas’s Unity of Knowledge and Interest, the philosopher states: “Freedom could be explained only by our designating an interest that men take in obeying moral laws. On the other hand, obeying these laws would not be moral action, and thus free action, if it were based on a sensual motive … Of course, reason cannot become subject to the empirical conditions of sensuality” (Habermas). The idea of the ‘affection of sensuality by reason’ in an action subjected to moral laws seems to merely preserve reason from experience. If the experience of obeying laws is more sensually appetizing than disobeying laws, then the mass public of individuals will lean towards obedience because it feels good. “In the dimension of self-reflection, it is in accomplishing self-reflection that reason grasps itself as interesting” (Habermas). So through the act of self-reflection I begin to understand that I have a genuine affection and interest towards following reason rather than madness. But it seems more often, the enticing seduction of disobedience overcomes the fantasies of many.

Slavoj Zizek, in his latest book, Living in the End of Times, reflects on the infamous old Communist tirades against ‘formal’ bourgeois freedom, and even as absurd as they were, “there is a pinch of truth in the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: ‘formal’ freedom is that freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while ‘actual’ freedom grows when we can exchange the very coordinates of our choices” (Zizek). Rather than being determined to choose between only Pepsi or Coke, Democrat or Republican, Capitalist Democracy or Communist tyranny, the people actually get to make quality choices rather than imposed options placed upon them: formal versus actual. The non-negotiable fixtures of branded choices leave freedom yet to be actively reached. “The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of ‘false activity’: you think that you are active, but your true position, as embedded in the fetish, is passive” (Zizek).  

           

As for Theodor Adorno, “A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential of extreme horror at the present time must be bemused by the veil of ideology, that he might just as well stop thinking at all” (Adorno). Amongst his dialects of History and Freedom, we learn that to a certain extent the touchstone of freedom is the Individual, but that “genuine freedom has been degenerated into an ideology” where sovereignty has based the freedom of others always against the offense of apriori (Adorno). The freedom of the Vietnamese was considered offensive in its ideological form to the United States in outset, and hence such acts of ‘freedom’ of US contradiction distorts the meaning of freedom in a genuine sense, and merely became false activity. 

On a slighter scale the outset of freedom does not mean “I will have that’. Freedom lies elsewhere, freedom should allow us on principle to free the world from material want (Adorno). The point, at which ‘want’ can be abolished, would alleviate and elevate the importance of civil and human needs rather than materialist gain. “Growth of freedom is not to be sought in the relations of production, which is the solution preferred by superficial minds, and this does not mean that everyone should have enough money with which to buy a fridge and to go to the cinema, where such transactions increase their un-freedom. Freedom lies elsewhere” (Adorno).

            On another note, Antonio Faundez, the Chilean Intellectual, in a dialogue with the renown Brazilian scholar of education, Paulo Freire, stated: “When people speak of ideology, they wrongly think only of ideas, and they don’t realize that ideas gain strength and are really a form of power only to the extent that they take concrete shape in the actions of our daily lives.”  The ideology of action, not ideas, is power ruled by facts embedded in everyday activities. In following, the irritating author V.S. Naipaul caught my interest briefly in his novel Guerrillas, when I cut-up several parts of the text from the character Roche’s thoughts:

                        "I’ve built my whole life on sand. He had thought of himself as a doer;                                     it surprised him now to be so far from that self, to be a man who                                     waited on events; and the placidity with which he waited on events                                     gave him, as he awakened in the mornings, a sense of alarm, which                                     before dying … And he could neither act nor withdraw; he could only                                     wait. …. He could have blamed the system or to have blamed the world                         for not living up to the system, … Responsibility didn’t end with                                     failure, or with the abandoning of beliefs that had prompted certain                                     actions." (Naipaul) 

Responsibility or inertia seemed to give the character the optimistic sense that if he waited just a bit longer, he would be a part of something that would enable a more genuine action than perhaps just merely building life on sand before the ocean comes rushing in (Naipaul). 

            

Antonio Faundez reflects that the masses continual resistance backs up the dominant ideology to change, where the masses have gotten too comfortable in their discomforts. But change is inevitable. Struggling against the embodiment of testosterone and fashion’s limitation to freedom as youth in revolt stick to merely wearing the Che or Mao or Hope t-shirts. But like the Women’s Suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and previous direct active challenges to the dominant ideology, the social space inevitably changes. The freedom, which we 'genuinely' have come to embrace, has been achieved through direct action and not by waiting around for those in power to gift us.  So then we must question whether freedom is a luxury, a sensual obligation, or a human right to breathe? Or does it lie elsewhere in the undefined?

FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS, IMF, AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION:

In my recent observations of the growing tides of Women’s Rights Issues as the world stage brings to the forefront weekly currents that challenge the Male Chauvinist perspective and the Female Chauvinist Perspective. I recently picked up Ariel Levy’s book entitled Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Contrarily, in the Gaurdian article by Zoe Williams, ‘Feminism in the 21st Century’, Zoe Williams references Caitlin Moran’s newest book, How to be A Woman. Here we see the “disadvantages of economizing on sanitary products – and she is firm, she insists on, this simple definition of feminism. Feminism is just equality. Would a man be allowed to do it? Then so should you. Would a man feel bad about it? No? Then nor should you. Everything else – the pressure to be sisterly ‘When did feminism become confused with Buddhism?’” (Williams).

Yet in the introduction, Ariel Levy states: “Raunchy” and “Liberated” are not synonyms. “If Male Chauvinist Pigs are men who regard women as pieces of meat … Female Chauvinist Pigs,” are women who make sex objects of other women and of themselves (Levy). “How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women?" (Levy). Why did women reach a heightened level of power and voice during the 1970’s, only to find it take a rapid turn during the decades that followed?

In another Guardian review by Miranda Sawyer, Sawyer concludes: “Moran’s final, simple argument, that there should be more of us, more, different women taking up more space and having more power in the world, is spot on. Why should women only be allowed to be seen, and particularly heard if they are deemed acceptable enough to do so?” (Sawyer).

I feel Ariel Levy questions the important point, where the equality of bantering and acting like a pig, is this really equality, and is it "worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we’ve come, or how far we have left to go? (Levy)”

In the last few days, now that the IMF has selected Christine Lagarde for its lead and the people of Thailand have elected the first female Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, this does not mean the Women’s Rights movement has won anything.

The leadership of the IMF has a history of following through on economic policies that have been highly imbalanced that focus more on economic movement in developing nations for import and export gains of wealthier corporate nations. But by focusing more on economics and not favoring social policies, the instability of the market system does not allow women any safer place in the world when poorer nations are trapped into the agreements of the IMF, WTO and WB.

Like Mother Jones had bolstered regarding the new challenges of women in gaining suffrage in 1919, she didn’t want women moving from the slavery of being a house-wife to being a slave for yet another abusive system, the labor market or, even yet, the self-degrading consumer market. 

If Christine Lagarde, leads in an ‘equal fashion’ as her previous predecessors, she will do little for the market system but perpetuate the imbalances. However, as with the new Prime Minister of Thailand’s response, when many have claimed her only success to reaching the office was her tie to her brother, the previous ousted PM Thaksin Shinawatra, in an interview she had reposed: ''I hope Thai people will give me a chance to prove myself'”. We will have to see how Christine Lagarde proves her leadership as well.

Ariel Levy is concerned whether this is the postfeminist world that Hugh Hefner supposed, where the directions of women are to follow in the fraternity party? Either the fraternity of drunken gone-wild or the fraternity of money-boys, who like Strauss-Kahn has multiple faces from IMF cold economic policy or alleged women-izer, rapist, or typical politician.  

POSTCOLONIAL AND POSTSTRUCTURAL ENTWINE

Chaining together the tidbits of parallels in Wole Soyinka's ideas from his novel Isara, with ideas from Felix Guittari’s The Machinic Unconscious the collage of ideas breaks a resembling effect of how power structures have hegemonically controlled language, information, and thought.

Wole Soyinka stated, "The first duty of the Teacher is to replace the 'Educated mind' - which was the same as the 'Colonial mind' - with a 'Cultivated mind'." He begins his novel Isara, with a chapter loaded with metaphor and symbolism, where African nations were dragged into World War II because of Europe’s grab for power and resources to fuel the fighting.

Colonial control remained at a front in the nations south of the Mediterranean Sea. Being educated was still a form of mind control, due to who controlled the education being conditioned onto the local community; this was a specialized indoctrination.   

Adding in, Felix Guittari refreshes that, "There is no language in Itself. Language is everywhere, but it does not have any domain of its own. There are no linguistic universals. … Every signifying statement crystalizes a mute dance of intensities..."

Just as Guittari believes that language is a form of political power control, post-colonialist like Ngugi wa Thiongo, believe that people need to ‘Decolonize the Mind’, while though the British physically left Nigeria, Kenya, and other young nations, by using English as the main communication link, it still is a form of controlling how African groups think and interact. 

In a broader cultural context of human thought in Western Capital social systems, Felix Guittari, follows that we ourselves are "abstract machines, which can always be complexified; but can never be decomposed without losing our mutational specificity." If we can deterritorialize our interactions, we can lead towards a more relative coefficient existence. 

Can we cultivate the mind and decolonize it, without losing our means of cross-cultural understanding and breaking barriers? In an open discussion with Slavoj Zizek and Julian Assange produced by Democracy Now, Assange questions: "Why do they (the power holders) want to whitewash history?” And he goes on to answer his own question, “due to fear and the rattle of how political instability is quite evident."

Zizek adds in: "We are all terrorists only in the sense that Gandhi was a terrorist. He stood up and interrupted the accepted function of hegemony." Once the information is shared and opened to a broader public, there is potential to use public pressure to challenge the hegemony.

Guittari: "Time goes on toward better days or plunges blindly toward unimaginable catastrophes, unless it simply starts to vegetate indefinitely."

Soyinka: “You can take an Isaraman out of Isara, but you cannot take the Isara out of the Isaraman.”