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.”