Body

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Community

(Community: a somatic practice whose stakes are those of the whole body.)

Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested that the only thing we, as finite beings, share in common is the very thing we cannot share: death. At the transfigurational limits of bodies and persons, the community of beings who die is the only community there is. This is a community based on a shared vulnerability to precisely that which threatens to undo us.

One way into this understanding of community is thru its etymology. According to Emile Benveniste, the etymon 'munus' refers to a gift: “if munus is a gift carrying the obligation of an exchange, immunis is he who does not fulfill his obligation to make due return […] Consequently communis does not mean ‘he who shares the duties’ but really ‘he who has munia in common.’”

Glossing this passage, Malcolm Bull writes, “A community is therefore ‘a group of persons united by this bond of reciprocity,’” and he goes on to imagine the gift at the lexical center of community paradoxically as the “gift of death,” which I understand to be the suspension of a proprietary relation to one's own enclosed individuality, and compensation for all the social and psychic energy otherwise invested in "self-preservation."

In a situation where one is not afforded legal protections — say, by a commonwealth or nation state — or, when one is excluded from the law governing recognized persons, the only thing one has in common with others is an equal lack of protection, and exposure to potential harm.

In Hobbesian terms, the “gift of death” might refer to that proverbial "state of nature" where one's right to bodily integrity is not ensured by a sovereign. In such a state, the individual remains vulnerable to others who might kill it with impunity. That is, with no statutory writ of habeas corpus, anyone might claim your body as their own.

But just as this situation of community of those with no commonwealth in that mythic state of nature might cause you irreparable harm, there are other ways of imagining becoming undone, perhaps by way of unanticipated care when the gift is indeed reciprocated, and the vulnerability held in common trust.

To be immune, then, would be to deny the gift and its obligations, to make oneself resistant to care, as if such resistance could render oneself impervious to death. By contrast, to be in community would be to give up the terms of one's transcendence -- all those meanings which conceal a property logic of enclosures and contracts -- in order to risk creating new terms of well being through the relations we might otherwise want to be living.

Community affirms a lack of immunity to forces that could do violence to oneself. It is an absolute risk.

Condition(s)

Form is never more than condition(s) passing as body

armature
habitus
proprioception
porosity
aporia (from poros, channel or passage)

humoral
vital
subtle
acute
chronic
biofrequency
resonance

what makes you "the environment"

visible > stigma
invisible > metaphor

what tempts you to pass

what tempts others to pore over you

disfigurement / figurative

what makes a doctor get on the table and pull up the sheets

the degree of sweetness in the urine

"clinical intimacy" (Robert Gottesman, Poetry Center, 5/9/09)

identity or refusal of/refraining from identity
crisis / research

everyone's improv / refrain

everyone's sensitivity syndrome
concurrent
rrheic
on the road

what method obscures: what method cultivates

stateless
status
update
intimations of a polis
apolis

Embodiment

vessel
soma
slave
fantasy
the enfolding of sensation into a body schema
boundary
(s/m) mastery of temporal and spatial coordinates
kinesthetic sphere that extends into universal desire
an erotics of tissues
lips
speak
opening tender
touch
phantasmatic identification with wholeness
hole
practices of emptying and filling
language tracings on the inside of skins
word clothes
projections
the agency of surface
blood pulse
grating bones
a huddling in darkness, at night
Open

Immunity

Concluding pages of Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air, trans Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles (2009):

The observation that life is always life-in-an-environment – and hence also against other environments – triggers a perpetual crisis of holism: humanity's old-fashioned propensity to submit to local totalities as if to benevolent loca gods is divested of all orientational value, since the surroundings have themselves become constructs, or are recognized as such. So, in the age of atmospheric toxins, strategies, and hidden agendas all such quasi-religious consenting to place one's trust in one's primary surroundings – be it nature, the cosmos, creation, homeland, situation, etc – takes on the guise of an invitation to self-harm. Advancing explication not only forces a semantic change in the meaning of naivety, it means that it becomes increasingly in-your-face, and even objectionable: the naïve, nowadays, is that which encourages sleepwalking in the midst of present danger. Having become aware of the primary and secondary greenhouse effects, living and breathing under open skies can no longer hold the same meaning as before. From the open-air homeland that mortals have had since time eternity, something uncanny, uninhabitable, unbreathable was withdrawn. Ever since Pasteur and Koch discovered the existence of microbes and had it established in scientific publications, human existence has had to be prepared to take explicit measures for symbiosis with the invisible – and all the more so to prevent and defend itself against microbiotic competitors that have now been identified with precision. As of the 1915 German gas attacks and their allied retaliations, the air totally lost its innocence; as of 1919, portions of it could be gifted as "ready-mades"; and as of 1924 it could be used as a means of executing delinquents. With the press' Gleichschaltung during the World War, civilian communication was attacked from the ground up: signs themselves became sullied and compromised by their involvement in warmongering deliria and psychosemantic arms races: the critiques of religion, of ideology and of language have declared vast parts of our semantic environments to be intellectually unbreathable zones – from thereon in, the only responsible thing to do seems to be to dwell in places that analysis has evacuated, reconstructed and re-approved for habitation. Even the Mona Lisa smiled differently after Duchamp planted the beard on her.

Under these conditions, immune systems become a subject for debate. When everything is latently able to be contaminated and poisoned, when everything is potentially deceptive and suspect, neither totality nor the possibility of being a Whole can any longer be inferred from external circumstances. No longer can integrity be thought of as something that is obtained through devotion to the benevolent surroundings, but instead only as the individual effort of an organism's concern with demarcating itself out from the environment. This paves the way for a new motif of thought without which the modern economy of ideas would be inchoate: namely, the idea according to which life insists less on its being-there, by its participation in the whole, but instead by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal of participation. To describe this as the fundamental thought for a post-metaphysical or differently-metaphysical civilization is not saying too little. Its psychosocial trace manifests itself in the shock of naturalism, a shock whereby the culture that sheds biological light on itself learns to pass from a fantasmatic ethics of universal, peaceful coexistence to an ethics of the antagonistic protection of the interest of finite unities – a learning process in which the political system has had a manifest lead ever since Machiavelli. Such an ethics can only be consolidated through a fundamental mediation on the sources of immunity.

Kinesthetic phantom self

The collective body of physiological abilities no longer possible that haunt a self in real time. This haunting can impede adaptation or can be used, channeled, as a six sense, to fortify. Flexibility, reflex, sturdiness, even speed and agility can be negotiated through incremental, ephemeral means—a harnessing of the phantom.

The haunting of fantasmatic embodiment, the traces of (eye) movements and information on dreams and desires. Sci-fi films. Sci-art practices. Reading a book with its heft in my hand and feeling different sand in my fingers. Bodily fantasies that create adaptive phenomenologies: can they be radically Open, and allow for political positions that play into the space of the Deleuzian virtual (ref. The Scar of Visibility)?

Metamorphoses

to tell of bodies
transformed
into new shapes
you gods, whose power
worked all transformations,
help the poet's breathing,
lead my continuous song

--Ovid

see Robert Kocik on phenotypic plasticity (transfiguration without transcendence: "prosody acts directly on social and natural selection," etc.)

Patiency

Agency’s inversion and complement. Located in a situation of suspended action, patiency nevertheless contests impotent privacy and docile quietude.

Also, "patient." Unlike the overvalued social agent whose aims and intentions are determined in advance by codified coordinates of possibility, the patient’s receptivity moves her to do what can’t be done within any given field of pre-coded possibles. The patient is receptive to things unavailable to the false immediacies of commonsense.

The patient may live under a kind of house arrest -- the enclosure of use -- "this achievement of the housed" (Oppen).

The patient paradoxically submits to the material conditions of mistreatment (conditioned material), in the interest of receiving unanticipated care.

A poetics of patiency would be a poetics of receptivity, reconceiving the terms of use in a world where value has been subsumed by the instrumentality of exchange, a kind of propioception whereby relation with the world is established thru the senses as they struggle to become their own theoreticians (Marx).

A poetics of patiency would correspond to a scene of interrupted agency and a deeply ambivalent, if not traumatic relation to one's lost autonomy (social/political/bodily). (see Baudelaire's prose poems, particularly "The Artist's Confession," "Crowds", "Lost Halo".)

cf. OED: Patiency: The quality of being acted on. Chiefly in contrast with agency. 1832 J. BENTHAM Fragment Ontology in Wks. (1843) VIII. 207/1 No one exhibits more of agency, no one more of patiency, than any other. 1949 D. G. JAMES Life of Reason iii. 119 Perception is certainly not a mechanical patiency of the mind. Its etymon derives from classical Latin patientia : endurance, endurance of pain, forbearance, tolerance, persistence and shares it shares the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek suffering, or pathos.

Also: PATIENT b. Grammar. Designating or relating to a grammatical patient (sense B. 4b). 1939 L. H. GRAY Found. Lang. xii. 374 A distinction is drawn between the ergative case as the logical subject of a transitive verb and the patient case as the subject of an intransitive verb.

to lie, in a white space, terrified, following the push of liquids through clear channels, though skins and membranes. to feel terrified, lying, pushing to follow the liquids though membranes and skins into clear channels. to feel the clarity of channels liquefying terror's push right through the skin. To feel no skin, actively. To embrace a membrane between feeling and articulation.

Prosody

Robert Kocik writes:

Defining ‘prosody’ is obviously a never-ending process for me. Usually I don’t define it. Prosody simply envelops, emanates...originates me.

At the same time, prosody is a word that can’t really be used in common without some degree of defining. Prosody is of course the elements of composition familiar to poets (stress, pause, pitch intonation, and so forth). More primarily, prosody is how language communicates other than semantically—aside from, beneath and beyond the actual meaning of the words. It is that which words say without actually saying it (and because they haven’t actually said it).

There is a Sanskrit word that is synonymous with an important aspect of prosody. This word is ‘dhvani’. Dvani can be loosely translated as ‘suggestion’ or ‘evocation’. It’s the central element in Indic esthetics. Through dhvani speech communicates what it does not actually say. A word’s ability to communicate more than it actually says is part of the word. This excess is, in this way, itself part of the word. It can be questioned whether that which words communicate beyond themselves exists at all without the words that suggest it. In any event, the excess as part of words communicating more than they say can be carried to infinity.

And infinity found through prosody is healing.

For Eleni and the Poetics of Healing symposium I’ll be presenting a few elements of prosody (such as phoneme, meter, word, beat) at such a rudimentary level that these elements become in themselves ‘healing’. This I’ll call ‘primeval prosody’. By ‘primeval’ is meant ‘immediately so’ or most currently. Oddly enough, Eleni and I never use the word ‘healing’ in relation to poetry. This time around I believe we’ve agreed to speak of the most important matters in as obvious a way as possible (perhaps as a form of healing in itself). I’ll be using the word ‘healing’ with regard to prosody as often as I responsibly can.

Somatic Practice

1. Any physical activity—whether it is routine and functional (sitting and posture) or artistic or athletic—that is enacted with a kind of mindfulness, the intention being to integrate body and mind in this doing.
2. Commonly associated with such “alternative” health practices as yoga, massage, and movement therapies.

and with practices beyond the agenda of health? Different intelligences, attention to the creativity of breath and space and weight and time as they intersect in an active bodymind.

accessible

That which fosters different modes of entrance or participation

That which makes itself permeable to different modes of translation and reception

That which allows for play across different sensory, performative and linguistic modalities

feeling(s)

What are the emotional costs of writing, posting, discussing? What are the physical effects of typing, screen-reading, public textual display?
How can a glossary witness or acknowledge or mark the emotional labor of collective writing/private writing, or else mark its in/ability to do so?

Are you tired?
Are you overwhelmed?
Do you experience fear?
Anxiety?
Joy?
Expansion?
Do you feel included?
Do you feel excluded?
Do you lurk, and how does it feel to have the activity named that way?
Do you feel tricksterish and ready to hack into this text? How does it feel to have the activity named that way?

How do you experience the writings you read here? How would you experience them differently in real-time, embodied exchange (around a potluck dinner, in a home, with a dog, as we did, a few hours ago)? In what way is an online glossary an embodied exchange, what is marked, what is not, how can these boundaries come into serious play?

What is emotional difference? Cognitive difference? Physical difference? What is the distance between sameness and difference? What is at stake in claiming difference? Can a 'we' give space and scope for the spatiotemporal intense reality of feelings in individual members of a collective?

Affect/Emotion
Kinesthesia/Proprioceptive Experience/Linguistic Calibration/Sensory Immersion

here-to-there

Any logistical mode—especially those most commonplace, nuanced and necessary for shuttling the body around a personal or public space. As in swinging the foot over the side of the bed or taking MUNI to BART to a plane. The many tiny movements needed by the mind to move the body and the different degrees of effort or intricacy involved for various mind/bodies.

How is one’s writing practice impeded, facilitated by or indifferent to this mode?

How can the body move the mind? How can the two be thought and experienced together? How can the deep structure of feeling of habituated movement become permeable to reflection and creative play?

Compacted notes

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.

And the body itself is what shuts me down entirely. A fear of the reductive, as in—there is nothing to “my ideas” of compacted/impacted because their mystery can be explained away by my direct lived experience. That is, a notion of the “compacted” comes from the definition that I have taken on in the physiological. Here are the parts of speech.

Age2, my toe swells up and turns red. I begin to limp. A doctor dismisses it an tells my mother I am looking for attention (How does a body look for attention aside from ego? This is question I want to explore later.) But I stop—walking, crawling, crouching, running, climbing, and sticking my toes in my mouth as toddler s are prone to do. I grow skinnier around all the extremities and the joints that move them puff up, become inflamed. I am host to an autonomic form of childhood arthritis. Or, I am host to my self, which happens to want to much on the cartilage cells. When the cartilage is eaten away, the body runs of scar tissue, knees ankles, hip and neck use it to pivot on—but scar tissue is less thick. It is corrugated and grows irregularly. It can be worn down by persistent movement over time into something smooth, but ultimately, functions as a fixative. It is the body preserving itself in the form left to it. And like with a fossil, all the best information is stored inside of hard structures in which one living part retains its definition by being replaced by another kind of organic matter. As a post-diagnosis child, I found new ways to move. I was carried—across backyards and parking lots, in high school and college—upstairs and through large dark indoor spaces. In SF, I am carried by a machine and so, one could say I have gained my independence. But at the cost of the social-construction of look away kind of etiquette (i.e. if it rolls and talks, it must be robot). My body, in an urban environment among strangers, ceases to engage others in movement (i.e. please move out of the curb cut so I can pass does not compute). But it does make me aware of other bodies disconnected from the overall body system.

And so for me, there is:

Compacted as the many layers within a structure maintaining their integrity, while also being inherently movable, portable
--to be physically moved by another person
--have this experience often enough and also infrequently enough that is jarring and familiar

Impacted as in one thing lodged or stuck with force into another.
--Not necessarily a foreign agent but a part of the body (including the mind) that becomes disjointed or skewed in such a fashion that it impedes itself but also articulates itself
-- as in to be tightly packed together, also—a contract or agreement

A body which functions as a question mark, curvature and uncertainty motored by a small wheel beneath
with symmetries being shoved inward

What has remained most mobile in me was thought and language. So much so that it becomes over run by the amount of logistical slack it has to take up i.e. how much time will it take me to cross this room or put on these socks. And if I sit in this chair, can I get out of it again? But while thought was bounded by physical experience—if not in content than at the cellular level, the way a plant or animal’s growth is tempered by its domain, language remains unbounded. There is always the potential to harness more and new energy from someone else’s language and that explains why I always prefer reading to writing. There is nothing much I want to express. I want mostly, intrinsically, in terms of what my body wants, to experience different options for movement and skimming left and right along a page made sensate by someone else is my biggest opportunity. Plot and action are such great facilitators of movement. Scenarios are limiting. Momentum comes out of variations of pressure, release, valves in the push pull of receiving sensation from other texts.

What derails me from my own language, as in compacted/impacted is not that it is too personal or autobiographical, but only the fear that it is. That in exploring it, I will be run into the obvious gutters of pleasure and pain

To write about pain or pleasure, so much emotional language is impacted in those concepts that they actually repel any real sensory communication. They impede the formation of words/language/books that can explore the liminality of sensation, of sensations still unnamed but intrinsic, not to humanness, but sentience I would say. Of the body, self and other bodies as interwoven and interchangeable subjects and objects that make any real movements through a substratum of sludgy impulse-habit, a snail’s progress, head-foot first, through a moment just before and just after a process of mineralization begins, a moment before and after bone mass that supports and connects organisms in a reader and across readers.

I am thinking toward a kind of sensation fieldwork in which the grid of circumstances and subjectivities around sensation are documented. To truly write inside one’s own sensate bubble going away from abstraction and invention and toward distillation and intensification which does not mean that writing on sensation would be expository or representational or solipsistic in the normal sense. Such writing would require the formation of a new language, just as experimental writing always does, but it would also mean a pivoting off of and a touching back to old tropes, fragments of and instances of familiar language because those instances of language, when used in the a certain context, are valuable for the kind of sensory charge that they have accrued over time.

This seems to me to be a way into writing about social work and activism and identity and gender and ability. To write about it through the body because one’s body is the site for all fieldwork. The body is not personal or owned. It is a sensate lens.

[ ]

The disabled body is the site of its own ghosting in that one is compacted/compounded in status and ability by ones limitations ands needs and all the personal, social or political work that goes into those concerns. Also compounded and compacted by the highly visible nature of one’s apparent efforts—the dragging leg will be read as effort, agony, or a blank in order to make it interpretable or appropriate. Meanwhile, the disabled body is cut of from the realization of its form’s function in the world “compact” comes from a pervasive physiological experience, my own. It also comes from the charge of its opposite, as in, my experience of being thus compacted there s my experience of being loose, floating, dis-integrated not so much in terms of my place in the world (because my mind; my views, my ideas, my social or familial connections can make that mesh) but in terms of my body’s relation to the world. Disability is less like being an Other in relation to a group but being an Other in relation to Self, to internalized group ability.

[ ]

I think of the other, more functional version of the word disable in our society. It means to stop the code, to break the chain of computation, to disable and allow for your own programming, a different kind of conveyance than what has been set up….To write new code at the most autonomic level and allow for greater of syncing across physical histories.

Compacted/impacted is also being completely contained while witnessing that container as one in a set of shifting exteriors to other containers.

Disability and Poetics

I was going to add this to the agenda, but I wasn't sure about how that worked since I cannot attend the Sunday meeting. I thought it could live here for now and I will re-post it again later when there is a meeting I can go to.

In June, the Bay Area will be treated to year 27 of Superfest, the longest-running disability film festival in the world. This year, films from 60 international entries were narrowed down to a select few.

Last weekend, I attended the Dance Under Construction conference hosted by UCB’s Theater, Dance and Disability Studies Departments. Academics and artists from all over the country came to discuss how integrated dance and new explorations with differently abled bodies are reshaping the core aesthetics of performance arts and creating a fresh movement vocabulary. The Bay Area is at the heart of this, with AXIS Dance Company residing in Oakland and Dandelion Dance Theater in San Francisco.

Each year, since 1986, the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in conjunction with the San Francisco Arts Commission holds a juried exhibition of visual art made by blind or low vision artists. Gestural, kinesthetic and tactile process unfolds through sculpture, paintings and even photography.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area, home to the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement in the 1970’s, today remains one of the most accessible cities for the disabled in terms of transit, policy and programming. The Bancroft maintains an impressive written and oral archive of the movement while UCB and SF State offer departments that figure prominently in the burgeoning academic discipline that is disability studies.

So, I suppose my question is—how does all this energy and innovation translate into the poetry community? In conventional literature, disability is shackled to outmoded tropes (the saccharine triumph stories and the throwbacks to telethon pity). It goes without saying that experimental poetry can do better—but what does such a poetics have to gain by examining and embracing disability studies? 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?

I see projects around disability and poetics as being endlessly expansive, rather than reductive (the way that some efforts to name and highlight identity groups in the arts or social sciences can be). People with disabilities are not easily lumped together; even those who have the same kind of impairment differ widely from one another. And it is a time-based category. You may have been disabled at one time in your life and you will most certainly, to some degree, become disabled in the future. One can easily make voyages out of dialogue about disability and poetics into notions about the phenomenology of embodiment. When I say embodiment as an extension of disability, I mean also multi-faceted investigations of body, space and community and I think of works by Eleni Stecopoulos (Autoimmunity), Robert Kocik and Eric Greenleaf who recently presented together at The Poetry Center.

Mostly, I would love to see all this happening in practice rather than theory—the theory will follow from that. For instance, poets working with disabled dancers in local troupes or texts that are reframed through a disability perspective. (I may do a project in which I ask some of Bhanu Kapil’s questions from Vertical Interrogation of Strangers as I work wit teen girls at the annual Juvenile Arthritis retreat.)

I need more ideas and more feedback. Please comment with any suggested reading, projects, persons to interviews, groups to form, etc etc. What will an investigation of disability and poetics look like? Strange, asymmetrical, twitchy and enlivening, I hope.

NONSITE || Bhanu Kapil on *Poetics of Disablement*

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: << I've been reading Elizabeth Grosz on sensation and futurity: "There is an involuted and oblique relation between the energies of sexual selection...the attraction to and possible attainment of sexual (though not necessarily copulative) partners -- human and otherwise -- and the forces and energies of artistic production and consumption" (from *Chaos, Territory, Art*). That the intensity felt in a body is part of what allows it to extend into a territory or cross between domains - - acts of pleasure, acts of sexual selection, as analogous to the process of making transgressive works of art. Not sure. Am thinking about immigrant bodies, refugee bodies, bodies made hybrid by divergence on a continuum from prosaic (the South-Asian grad student) to traumatic. Have been thinking about numbness, about hyper-vigilance, about what happens to the flow of "energies of sexual selection" in a body that's at the limit of possible sensations. This as depending too on class status. On how desirability is worked out in the port of arrival. My question, then, for writers/artists working through a poetics of disablement -- towards hybrid works, in particular -- is there any language we can think through together, about the experience of hybridity/fusion in the body -- and how might this affect our transgressive relationships to the space of the book, the territory of document, our ability to attain the kind of couplings/intensifications/resonant physical gestures that further the limit of what a book is? I feel as if there is another kind of book I am only beginning to imagine. What about you? I didn't meet you yet. Other aims: I'd like to ask Amber Di Pietra to say more about the hybrid body as "compacted." >>

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Poetics and Disablement [2]: Notes for an Emerging Project

I prepared the following notes as part of my introduction to Thom Donovan’s talk, “Allegories of Disablement,” on July 23, 2008, which took place over a potluck dinner last nite, with 18 people in attendance. I’m posting these notes here for comment and elaboration as they might contribute to a description for a new Nonsite working group / curriculum.

As I mentioned last nite, it’s been exciting to see this discussion around “poetics and disability” emerge, not only because of the obvious value of its content, but also because it illustrates how the provisional and still fledgling framework of the collective really can enable a self-organized curriculum to take shape organically. Following the various threads of the discussion has been like watching an amphibious discourse emerge from the marsh, as it imagines its own terms, problems and questions without recourse to sanctioned coordinates of knowledge to measure the success of its becoming.

Amber DiPietra began the discussion by pitching an inquiry in a post dated 5/04/08, responding to a call for agenda items for the Nonsite meeting that month, and this was quickly followed by posts by Eleni Stecoupolos, Patrick Durgin and Robert Kocik (excerpts of which appear below). This immediately suggested the sort of traction necessary to sustain some generative work around Poetics and Disablement. Thom’s talk last nite no doubt extended this, pointing toward areas for further research, collaboration and event planning. (The text of Thom’s talk will be forthcoming here).

I’m wondering if the following notes can contribute to the process of generating a description for such a curriculum, which will require some collaborative writing. Please respond with ideas/suggestions as to how we might amend this proposal, as well as any thoughts about how such a project might take shape: reading groups, events, discussions.

**

Poetics of Disablement: Notes//July 23, 2008

“My sense of community began to take on the limitations of real bodies.” --Bruce Boone, from *Century of Clouds*

It’s always the body that promises our relations, while severely limiting them. The body is always a limit: promising communion, while disabling that communion in advance. And if the body is the horizon of what can be said and experienced, the life of any community is always constrained by the lived realities of whatever bodies comprise it.

How do we live those limits differently? How do we talk about those bodies and perform those realities in such a way so as not to reiterate those limits and their corresponding social constraints, but rather to trans-form them?

My longing to relate and to be related to runs thru all of yr bodies, if only because I want you to care for me: in opening my self and my body to care, I imagine making myself “patient.” As the inverse of an over-valued, able-bodied agency, “patiency” becomes agency’s complement, which is anything but a submission to passivity.

The patient overturns our understanding of the passive, by becoming able otherwise.

De-activating our ability to behave instrumentally for socially over-coded ends, discharging our function as meaningful agents, we might take leave of that submission by yielding to the promise of unanticipated care (an idea inspired by Robert Kocik). In other words, rather than submitting to our disciplined training to expect hostility, we might become patients, whose unexpected receptivity to a disabled social ecology moves one toward doing what can’t be done within any given field of pre-coded possibles. This is the power of our im-potence in a situation that detrimentally determines our abilities, whose limits are given in advance.

"Ability" and "disability" are already compromised terms. Nevertheless, they inform and impact the shape of our thought, which materializes thru restricted forms, and whatever resistance to those forms. These are constraints that have become our consciousness of ABLENESS: able-bodiness, fitness, ecological success. And yet, these constraints — limitations on our ability to move, think and speak — disable us in the name of ability itself: the rule bound terms of social selection which are anything but natural. So what would it look like, as both social and aesthetic practice, to “overcome fitness” (Robert Kocik’s term) — together with the over-valuation of so-called able-bodied agency. What would it look like in practice, to affirm that we still don’t even know what a body can do? How do we explore the relation between poetics and the exceptional capacities, aptitudes, and senses that every body potentiates and acquires when charged to overcome the so-called fitness for life that underwrites normative social ecologies. How might artistic practice, as it converges with social practice more generally, potentiate the undoing of biopower that has hard-wired dead language (“disability”) to the body?

--RH

What follows are some excerpts from the the discussion on poetics and disability as it has emerged thus far:

Amber Di Pietra:
“In conventional literature, disability is shackled to outmoded tropes (the saccharine triumph stories and the throwbacks to telethon pity). It goes without saying that experimental poetry can do better—but what does such a poetics have to gain by examining and embracing disability studies? 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?"

From Eleni Stecopoulos
"It seems to me there’s little consciousness of the difference of bodies, in terms of disability, and sensitivity, and illness, and conditions—-and how these differences can be both subject to, as well as transform, factors like access and form. Access, movement, form, symmetry are seen as transparent; anything that might diverge from the assumed forms gets rendered as invisible. It’s the aesthetics that, perhaps most tragically, are invisible—-what aesthetic challenges and innovation arise from conditions. We will all become disabled at some point. Constraints lead to rather than impede aesthetics. That’s not to say that art is a symptom or a product of the condition, but it does mean that conditions and aesthetics are sympathetic and this sympathy generates experiments and evolutions and revisions and reconfigurations."

From Patrick Durgin:
"I think it's important for 'crip culture' and the rest of 'us' to witness that the issues that many radical modernist poets work through are sophisticated renderings of issues at the heart of disability studies. In other words, disability culture needs to historicize itself with a wider lens.

Physical impairment is not reductive. It is reductive, though, to define 'impairment' on the basis of existing notions of the physical, especially since the going model of disability is the 'social' model, and there is already a vocal minority within disability studies and the DRM concerned with notions of the psyche. Hence, 'psycho-social' disability is a timely way to call for definitions of "embodiment" and subsequently 'impairment.' In short, the focus on physical impairment has become reductive."

From Robert Kocik:
“If you’re looking at your hand, it’s hard to reach for an object. Without reaching for an object, it’s hard to know where your hand actually is. If you have to look at your hand as you reach for an object, you’re still disabled.”

“I think disability is shared because ability is so extremely unexplored that we have no reference. (The alien uniting all humanity as one—our own risen humanity!) Ability viewed as some ‘norm’ is certainly necrotic.”

“The predicament of poetics engaged with disability theory: how to not cause further harm. If our bodies and our works are not experienced as epiphenomena of the unmade (assuming the inverse), living and working is unaesthetic and terminal. Impractical is the norm. I’m considering calling the norm eternal disability.”

Send KSP Your Vertical Answers

I wanted to make a quick clarification. At the potluck on Wednesday, Thom mentioned that I was doing a project around disability using the questions that structure of Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. This is my personal angle, but in general, the project is meant to spark up some liveliness around Bhanu’s work as we await Humanimal (forthcoming from KSP in Winter 08).

Everyone is invited to participate, even if your interest is not disability. My aim was also to introduce the idea of interactive blog features in honor of KSP’s new web site. See what you make of it here: http://www.kelseyst.com/news/index.php/2008/07/13/your_vertical_answers/

1. Who are you and whom do you love?
2. Where did you come from/How did you arrive?
3. How will you begin?
4. How will you live now?
5. What is the shape of your body?
6. Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?
7. What do you remember about the earth?
8. What are the consequences of silence?
9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
10. Describe a morning you woke without fear.
11. How will you, have you, prepared for your death?
12. And what would you say if you could?

2 Articles by Patrick Durgin on Disability and Poetics

1. Psychosocial Disability and Post-Ableist Poetics: The “Case” of Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journals
2. Post-Language Poetries and Post-Ableist Poetics

Texts are included as attachments below.

Attachment	Size
postlang.pdf	179.23 KB
The "Case" of Hannah Weiner.pdf	1013.65 KB

Raúl Zurita at the School of Nursing: The Poetics of Healing

As part of the Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice, a series of events sponsored by The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (curated by Eleni Stecopoulos and supported by the Creative Work Fund), Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, together with translator William Rowe, and trauma therapist Dr. Nuri Gene-Cos, read at UCSF, the busy medical school and teaching hospital high on Parnassus Heights, in San Francisco.

It was bizarre losing my way in the halls of the School of Nursing as I went searching for this lunchtime poetry reading, and that feeling of dislocation had me thinking about all the ways poetry’s place gets “fixed” within a system of social value -- a system ensured by hardened divisions of labor that keep the “culture work” of poetry at some remove from the body work of medicine.

Zurita at the Medical School defamiliarized poetry’s proper context, and dislodged it from its contained site. Indeed, the reading drew attention to the ways context often works to normalize, discipline, and neutralize poetry, if only by determining its proper venues. That afternoon, in the School of Nursing, poetry was suddenly framed by a medical profession that would otherwise seem to be uninterested in it. As commonsense goes, medicine heals the body's pain whereas poetry does little more than lend expressive voice to the suffering of the individual "soul" (personal expression, and the like). But if the experience of suffering is poetry’s reason for being, how can it be healed without poetry sacrificing itself?

So much for commonsense. The Poetics of Healing is successfully challenging such limited views of poetry's relation to bodies and pain. What if poetry were understood to do something more than merely express personal suffering? How might poetics and healing inform each other in ways that refuse to identify poetry with the pain of the individual who sings? These seem to be among the questions guiding this series of events.

Zurita read from his recent book INRI (Marick Press). It’s a long poem that does the seemingly impossible work of finding adequate language and form for the brutal events that resulted in “the disappeared” under Pinochet, and it does this work without recourse to the cathartic, and without the default poetics of the merely expressive. Here’s a page from the poem:

You can hear whole days sinking, strange sunny
mornings, unfinished love, goodbyes cut short
that sink into the sea. You can hear surprising
baits that rain with sunny days stuck to them,
loves cut short, goodbyes that not any more.
Baits are told of, that rain for fish in the sea.

The blue brilliant sea. You can hear shoals of fish
devouring baits stuck with words that not, days
and news that not, loves that not any more.

It is told of shoals of fish that leap, of whole
whirlwinds of fish that leap.

You can hear the sky. It is told that amazing
baits rain down with piece of sky stuck to then
upon the sea.

These fish will go on to become tombs for "strange baits," the strained phrasing of which pushes the poem outside the range of the normally voiced. Similarly, "not any more" slips in between impossible syntactic conventions, exceeding the nonsense of grammatical error to become part of the poem's sustained ideolect, exquisitely poised on the verge of failing to sound the sense of social catastrophe. Too bad the Marick Press volume is not bilingual, but Will Rowe's translations no doubt register the poem's difficulties.

Zurita’s reading was a remarkable event, and the ensuing discussion around issues of catastrophe and poetic form was unusual for its interdisciplinary tenor, combining a concern for the poem with a set of reflections on the trauma of our barely acknowledged complicity in social crises of every sort.

Two Open Letters on Disability Theory

here is a link to a brief exchange Patrick Durgin and I had last fall regarding Tobin Siebers' Disability Theory, in case it can add anything to the curriculum on Disability & Poetics at Nonsite. I will try to farm these materials to a "curriculum" page at Nonsite's website when I can. for now here's a link to Wild Horses of Fire, where the exchange is currently archived:

http://whof.blogspot.com/2009/02/to-patrick-durgin.html

Converting Nonsite to Site

CONVERTING NONSITE TO SITE
Robert Kocik

For all designs, see:

http://nonsitecollective.org/node/778
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/779
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/780
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/781

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?)

The Collective, by means of exceeding innovation, replaces the current political creed that assumes values are more electable than issues with the proposition that aesthetics are more direct, more penetrant and effective, faster acting than politics.

Doesn’t it?

Last Spring I mentioned to Rob that the Draft Proposal for the Nonsite Collective can be read as architectural specification (that is, beyond the simple reading of his structural metaphors as literal---“building a shared vocabulary”, “constructed response”, “framework”, “self-organizing”, “conversion of non-site to site”). In addition to the content of the Draft Proposal, the Collective’s activity over the last year can also be interpreted as further design specification.

The Draft Proposal’s challenge to architecture (as its opposite, as a veiled negative) is manifold. How build a building that remains visible? How build a building that remains abstract? How build a building that remains metaphoric (or most potent---a building that goes against its own realization by magnifying---not using up---potential)? How build a building that is not pigheaded...that is not inherently (as establishment, as intractable, as wasteful) working against us? How build a building that is our continual legibility?

Last night I finally got around to drawing the first traces of a possible buildable nonbuilding that stems from Nonsite purpose. First traces are a matter of roughing out volumes that correspond to intangibles. To say the least, many issues arose. I’ll make an attempt, below, to recount what came up for me as I worked on the drawings. Clearly a collective would best be designed collectively (as the Draft Proposal states: conversion of the non-site, beginning with itself). It is in this light that I offer these initial traces. If only as a metaphor for others, I’d hope that this process of architectural conversion (of nonsite to site) might become an exhilarating means for revealing our collective potential.

Some preliminary Nonsite functions in their corresponding spaces, along with qualities to be built into the building:

AN ENTRANCE OF UNDEFINABLE FUNCTION. By definition, such a space, architecturally, can’t exist. Such a space is not a void...but in need of being furnished so as to allow a flourishing in the re-uses of such space---of no known function in order to arrive at unknown functions.

WORDING. An area or aperture or hollow or auricle to return to for the generation of language that is action. An entraining center. Searching for terms that touch the controls of the aspects of natural and social selection in question. Weaker words require actions subsequent to themselves (are not poetry, are politic). If our theory or theoria is too feeble to form a practice it turns into a type of self-loathing.

OVERALL ECOLOGY. No separation of internal and external energy-generation-and-conservation (as an architecturally determined ecology). Not wasting (material, time, energy) but using all wastes that are generated. The underlying wound of conscience for our day is, in a word, ‘use’. We’re really hurting---already spiritually extinct, ecologically. Reverse the current neoliberal ecology by unleashing infinite abundance of aesthetics to treat scarcity of natural resource.

POTLUCK. Time of day carryovers. Spaces that allow an assembly to survive its own event---to pass from one time of day to another aided by the ability to pass from one type of space into another. (For example Peace On A is the best show in town because it is both formal and informal, can pass from evening to early morning. Its limitation is that it can’t pass from one space to another, or convert its existing space into another type.) THE WITHIN. Stillness. That which all uses come from. The most important commons.

IT’S ACTUALLY A LARGE EAR. Just as in hearing the ear converts air wave to percussion (ossicle/earth) to fluid (in the cochlea) to fire (synaptic firings) to immaterial (our understanding), the Nonsite building would be the experiencing of all elements.

OVERFACILLITATION. WORLD REPLACEMENT. Perhaps as a response to all the disability discussion---detailing an architectural function involved in extremes of enabling. Rob has said “unanticipated care”. I’ve said “missing civic services” and “extraorganopoieia” (coming up with new organs and organizations). To invent and implement the agencies of the world we’d rather be living in. B. Fuller has said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.” I come from a wildcat town---the number one rule in going out on strike: you’re responsible for running the society you stop.

MAKING A LIVING BY COMMONING. The Draft Proposal states that “the commons is disappearing before our very eyes”. A ‘commons’ was always based on subsistence (hunting, fishing, foraging, housing). Ecology is inseparable from economy. Aesthetics, if it is to be a complete ecology, is best not left as separable from economics. Still, as far as I can tell, commoners never inhabited the land to merely subsist...they subsisted to show their gratitude---to celebrate (they were notorious for their disinterest in forming a workforce or infantry...whereas even ‘free’ Americans fall in line rather readily). My architectural ruminations on Nonsite have essentially lead me to a reconsideration of ‘commons’---the translation of ‘commons’ into several contemporary, sorely necessary senses. They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common But let the greater villan loose That steals the common from the goose (English folk song, circa 1764)

NONSITE AS A FOUNTAINING OF NOVEL COMMONS---ALL ABOUT NONCATASTROPHIC ORGANIZATION---SHALL WE SAY ‘SALUBRIOUS’ ORGANIZATION, OR FORTUNATE OR BENIFICENT ORGANIZATION, OR ARE WE ALREADY REFERRING TO IT SIMPLY AS AESTHETIC ORGANIZATION (BY CONTRASTING AESTHETICS WITH CATASTROPHE)?

Taking it step by step...as adding to Nonsite curricula:

Anyone can carve out a commune or overlay a community. But a commons? A shared, outdoor resource...how could this be built? Of course the definition of a commons can be extended to include any heritable public good...but, to be precise, a commons is/was a piece of land owned by one person yet open to others for purposes of subsistence. Strolling, for example, though perhaps the exercise of a traditional right, is not a matter of livelihood. Thus a park is not a commons. A wildlife refuge is a commons...but for flora and fauna alone.

USA was never not privatized. The Virginia Company came before Virginia.

America, from the time the Europeans arrived, never knew a commons. Commons, in any capacity that might have been carried out in the New World, was systematically and permanently eliminated during the English Civil War---say, from the beheading of Charles I to the (belated?) beheading of Cromwell’s disinterred cadaver. In fact the closing of the commons in England was a key mechanism for the shipping of indentured settlers to America. The only force on earth that could have kept the commons open was Antinomian (anarchic religion)...and it fought and failed to do so. The only force on earth that could have stopped the Atlantic slave trade before it began was also Antinomian. The Antinomians were the most potent force of dissent because they linked unowned land with unowned spirit---and could only, by extension, link unowned spirit with ownership of one’s own labor and one’s own person. (Just as, today---if we want to consider the air we breath as a commons, failing to link environmental issues with private business, with doctrinaire colonization of spirit, with ideological captivation of mind, or worker insecurity, or lobbying...is ludicrous. No commons exists as such without dependence on every other area that can also be considered common and inalienable. Once, for example, biodiversity is separated from money-as-commons, culture-as commons, language-as-commons, neither side of the equation can any longer function as a commons. It’s a wreck. Free Market can’t be a commons because its use is based on maximized individual advantage. Thompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was not a commons when it was entirely squatted because it excluded other use. Commons are not strictly definable as finite public goods and resources in need of management...because the infinite is in fact our most precious commons---a nondepletable resource which can be used to replenish us (as perishable).

Before cracking down at the border and raiding northern factories, explain 400% rise in the price of tortillas.

So, use must be more care than use (in order to be use-without-using).

Nonsite is expansion of the inalienable. (A long way to go!)

So, the commons never made it to America (with the exception of the Roanoke Colony in North Carolina---not Raleigh’s lost colonies of the 16th C. but the Tuscarora/Black/Poor White coalition and the Dismal Swamp refuges of the 17th (...or, unless we also include catastrophic commoning exceptions like the theocratic Mormon/Paiute alliance in the Utah Territory).

The fact that the commons never made it to America has two obvious corollaries: in America land was never land of the free; and the English language has never been the speech of a free people.

Nonsite is not a commune because it is not enclosed---not a circumscribed self-sustaining sanctuary that looks after itself alone. Nonsite is exterventionist. It is greater-good-directed. Yet, as Humberto Manturana points out---autopoiesis requires a closed system. This is the first biological rule of self-organization---outside of which there is no entity, no environmentally effective agent---only diffusion. This requisite closure is what I’m calling, in this context, ‘architecture’.

If the collective is a group of contingent cooperators (if there are no abusers or freeloaders) then regulation isn’t necessary. This operational feature, a Nonsite imperative, is also an architectural problematic.

Jointly owned is still owned.

Think of ownership as completely nonexistent.

Just a few miles from where I’m writing these notes, casino profits are allowing the Shakopee Sioux to buy back their ancestral lands which, in some places, fall within existing city limits. The Oneida Nation is trying to make an independent territory by placing 17000 acres of central NY State into a federal trust.

And when that which is common for some is not common for others...? It is very easy to get thrown out of a park...just use it nonrecreationally. Functional commons (like public transportation, public restrooms, like tap-water) are for private citizens not well-off enough to avoid their use. Is a taxi a temporary one-person commons? What of exclusive high-end purely recreational use of a commons---like pontoon-airplaning into remote sanctuaries to bag elk? Has the forest gone from peasant stronghold to rich reserve?

Commons of nature and commons of nurture?

“Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.” Thomas Paine.

I guess my property lines don’t converge to a dot as I approach the earth’s core.

Now we have carbon credits for cleaning the unownable air.

Why won’t we break stride, break appetite?

The State of Alaska dispenses a Citizen’s Dividend for profits on its oil investments. There are countless unexplored citizen dividends which Nonsite might what to turn up.

The electro-magnetic spectrum! Who profits from...pays back. Let’s write the regulation! Let’s get out ahead of the buccaneering, the venture privateering. That would be collective.

Because early biomedical research is funded by government (us) and then given away to private interests, we’re paying twice when we buy the medicine. Once again, who’s going to write our yet unwritten rights? Happiness is a value, not an issue.

Who fails to treat a resource as (not only finite but) miraculous, disgraces the common. Sublimity of the stem of a tree rising to crown and sending roots into ground revolving around a sun---any deadening of our sense of awe (the staggering improbability of the real) disregards the aesthetic commons (the combined marvel of environment and our perceiving of its wonder).

The high-end dot com bust brought an end to the web as shared-subsistence-preserve for all.

As a minimum, Nonsite could function as a privateering alert (cases in which we’re paying many times the common cost for a public service while losing civic say in oversight---like, ‘protection’...think ‘military contracting’---paying for services we’ve already been taxed for and should, in fact, perhaps be paid for receiving at the point of service---think being paid for hospital stay!

Extend the list of basic rights and services (far beyond the DNC platform) which are currently available only by privilege, or not available at all.

If aesthetics is a commons, shouldn’t artists who make money off their work pay into the Citizen’s Dividend Fund? Are our generous spirits and good consciences already voluntarily taking care of it? Hardly.

Either we’re not well-off enough to help others, or we’ve been trained to feel all’s fair outside our one-person communes.

Your health is part of MY rights! Part of the inheritance I share.

Hold me in trust!

Commons: that without which we dry up. We die. I just returned from the dead. I’m looking at someone else’s SUV parked on the street next to the same oak tree, having completely forgotten that I’d no longer know anyone. Commons: that which dries up without us.

As the definition of commons has been extended to include the environment, survival at this point in time requires a corresponding extension in aesthetics.

Nonsite: myriad provisional commons.

(I’m sure Nonsite can survive without a formal equivalent (a site), but I’m not at all sure that it can...thrive.)

(Architecture as fear of sabotage by concretization of function...very real superstition.)

The role of art is not healing but the more potent act of celebration.

Enclosed art kills.

Nonsite is perhaps that slice of society most intently practicing language as commons. (Beginning with itself)---and nothing is as revealing of human nature as behavior within a commons (see Game Theory. See Grab Theory. See Gain Theory.)

To be a commons, must the phenomenon be depletable-though-renewable. Is language depletable-though-renewable? When we say nothing when we speak? When we don’t mean what we say? When there is, all of a sudden, meaning? When language is all the action that’s required to renew us?

Architecture appreciates the pun on ‘collective’--- collective is not only the associating of diverse people and farflung interests, but the necessary gathering of energy---for organizing itself in relation to those catastrophic forms of organization it intends to engage.

Do we have any adversaries? Had America been founded on 17th C. maroon communities instead of the plantation, founding father, indentured servant and slavery model, we’d be living in an equitable, racially relaxed America. Not to forget---that which harmonized the Native American/Black/European Poor encampment...was founding-father society as common oppressor. Is the ancestral model for Nonsite activity the maroon militia? Can the Dismal Swamp be built...the place where none who’d wish us harm dare enter? Are we that fightin’ mad? Or is that us out there too?

Architecture: that which, without which, we’re only working against ourselves. That which, with which, we’re working for ourselves as that out there. Collective.

Soup Line Think Tank. Unofficial Settlement.

We’re up against the Discretionary Budget---we’re definitely up against that (57% for National Defense—see the National Priorities Project). The Discretionary Budget is NotUs. That’s them. US as not us. Load yr muskets! We’re a warrior nation (above all else) in need of fighting against our own abuses. Nonsite: the perfect place for our phenomenally asymmetrical struggles. We haven’t got a ghost of a chance. (Personally, I like the odds.)

(I imagine the talk Rob delivered at Orono as a call for coalitioning of our nearest and most cantankerous of kin.)

Even our very organization is our own worst adversary.

We’re the new breakaway tobacco plantation proletariat (aren’t we?)

The remedy for commercialism is subsistence (as throwing a party).

An activism on the order of a regenerative art. As Thom says, we’re deluded if we think there’s time for rehearsal.

Why work when you could exercise?

Most of us bit the anti-state ideology bait. Big deficits are preferable because they prove big government bloated. So why do Republicans spend like mad as they pursue privatized security deep into political unpopularity? No more oversight. No more commons. We’re paying interest on our own money. How about a building for thinking this through.

Resistance is a matter of flowing ahead of the disasters and eroding them beforehand.

I just read an article about a certain Judge Michael A. Cicconetti who sentenced a man who had called a cop a pig to standing on a streetcorner next to a pig while wearing a sign that read: THIS IS NOT A POLICEOFFICER.

Anyone can meditate while they’re meditating. Only a poor martial art doesn’t fully engage the forces without.

Conscience is commons. Consciousness is commons. Subjectivity is the most populous commons in our country. I can build this condition, but only as an improvement on its nonsitedness. As light on itself that is itself.

Introductory Notes for the Prosody Building

FROM ROBERT KOCIK:

Again, if you'd like to delve into this more, as central to nonsite--the troubled (?) interrelation of poetry practice and space:

(introductory notes for the Prosody Building)

For the purposes of this building proposal, I am saying that poetry is of too little consequence, and that the cause of this inconsequence is poet complicity in conditions that have created the inconsequence.

It does little good to place the onus on non-producers of poetry (on the side of demand, the nonexistent audience, the readership, the lack of funding for the arts)). Such a response is deadbeat and can only deepen the inconsequence. At the same time, placing the emphasis on the promotion of poetry, greater exposure or improved distribution are of limited benefit because they are ‘downstream’ approaches to the problem. Complete reconsideration of the calling of the poet is a more promising starting point.

What’s the relationship between poetry’s lack of consequence and the absence of spaces designed specifically for the practice of poetry?

In the U.S., there are only 2 buildings designed specifically for poetry. On the other hand, nearly all trades, professions and vocations have buildings designed to meet the needs of their particular functioning. In light of this startling lack of facilitation, I could either suppose that poetry has no specific functioning to accommodate, or that it functions well enough (perhaps optimally) outside the need for specifically designed spaces. Generally, the public venues for poetry and poetry centers are found in spaces originally designed for functions other than poetry. Obviously, poets interlope, adapt, renovate, transgress...but rarely further their work through the designing of spaces in which their work would be furthered.

What’s the relationship between poets’ lack of regard for designing their own spaces and their overall cultural inconsequence? Is their space-indifference freely chosen or is it a consequence of their inconsequence?

To what extent does this absence of specifically designed spaces restrict the roles assumed by poets? How does it restrict capacity for livelihood?

For the most part, the mission of existing poetry centers is the presentation, performance, publication, promotion, and celebration of poetry--without casting an interrogatory light on the calling itself--without calling into question the very role of poet.

Does this design-indifference constitute an aesthetic? Do poets identify with spaces not designed for their purpose? Do they have a robust response to the most minimally designed, least-descript spaces-—boxes, cafes, backs of bars, rear of bookstore, classroom, conference hall, streetcorner or anyplace that will have them. (my alma mater) Is any space where there is no issue with space the place of poetry? Anything new is newfangled. Is this an autonomy or albatross? Is this placelessness part and parcel of their lack of social pertinence? Has it been cultivated to the point of superstition—such that a place designed for the fullest possible practice of poetry would by definition be disabling?

Kocik document and Disability and Poetics discussion

Just drawing attention to a document I've added to Curricula: Robert Kocik's "Proposal for Renovating the Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan." http://nonsitecollective.org/node/428

I link to it, as well, in my comment responding to the discussion on Disability and Poetics inaugurated by Amber DiPietra.

Poetics and 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):

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--Robert Kocik

See also the discussion thread beginning with a post by Amber DiPietra: http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/397

Robert Kocik, Proposal for Renovating the Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan

Proposal for Renovating The Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan
by Robert Kocik

GENERAL ISSUES AND IMPRESSIONS DIMENSIONS
The dimensions of the TFC space are problematic—specifically the ceiling height. Upon entering the TFC room, one’s sense of space tends to waft up to the ceiling and get caught up in all the pipes, sprinklers, light fixtures, conduits and beams. Reinforcing this accent on ascent: all the existing lighting is upward, ceiling-lit. Currently there are too few features (furnishings) keeping one’s feet on the floor. The floor itself, unlike the original hardwood flooring in the hallway, is unattractive. These same dimensions are also responsible for the poor acoustic properties of the room resulting in a limited intelligibility of the voice. A listener in the space is receiving the same sound signal at slightly different times (first as direct sound, then as reflected sound and flutter echoes) which has the effect of blurring the intelligibility of the original signal. Adding furnishings will serve to dampen the reverberative effect. The proposed curtain-dividers are in fact the overall plan for absorbing the wayward waveforms. If for any reason the curtains can’t be installed, attaching short (2’ height) absorptive panels from the ceiling beams in between the sprinkler pipes, would be an effective second choice. Such a system would also serve to lower the ceiling and deflect attention from the mechanical systems.

LIGHTING
Without windows and hemmed in by bordering spaces, the TFC space effects a year-round hint of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Also, the existing standard cool white fluorescent lighting (as studies show) tends to adversely affect children with learning and behavioral problems.

The proposed lighting plan for THC includes the replacement of all existing fluorescent tubes with full-spectrum tubes. There are many arguments for and against the natural daylight effect of full-spectrum lighting. For a number of reasons I would use full-spectrum lighting in TFC. It does render color more accurately and I happen to use color properties in precise ways when I design a space. Color matters so a higher CRI rating matters. Critics of full-spectrum lighting tend to dismiss its benefits as purely psychological. This critique is for me a kind of proof, as I tend to find psyche more potent than scientific data to the contrary. Finally, I believe that the body extracts from light whatever color it needs at any given moment. If the colors aren’t there to begin with, the body can’t draw on them. And full-spectrum lighting, at the very least, carries a fuller color range. These are slight differences, and slight is more.

Treating CP patients with laser acupuncture has produced some promising results. (Apparently, stimulation of different acupuncture points and scalp areas increases blood flow to the brain and other tissues.) I wouldn’t recommend laser treatment but I would install two local, hanging, handmade, dimmable, floor-directed task lights (see drawing) to relieve the diffuseness of the existing general lighting.

COLOR
I can work with the current purplish walls as the base color for the TFC space. On the other hand, the green of the pillars is stifling. Because the pillars impede the flow of the space, trapping energy in the corners, they would best be transformed into positive features. I’d paint them a certain violet, arrived at by glazing (a white base then washed with concentrated violet. The effect would be luminous...like creating photons--the color intense and diffuse at once. (Like a painterly glaze, Taoist ‘inner’ color healing uses 70% white and 30% color, as a rule.) Violet is associated, vibrationally, with neuro-function. Furthermore, violet is the only color that can act like white--carrying the properties of all the other colors. It’s also the only color range that calms as well as blue.

With the TFC space it makes sense to emphasize the neurological and muscular relaxation.

The difficulty, architecturally, with color has to do with duration and intensity. Whether painted on a surface or inherent to a material, a color is constant while we might prefer a change. To feel the potency of a color...to get the benefit...the color must be somewhat intense, yet this same intensity might often be too much to take. Thus the tendency toward use of bland colors and no color benefit. And it’s rarely wise to aim a space exclusively toward one type of use (just as it’s rarely wise...only in an emergency...wise to treat only one organ or physiological system).

Could color be ‘exploratory’ at TFC? If the dividing curtains were double curtains of differing colors, a person in the space could play with proportion and property as an attuning.

Another problem with the space is too little contrast. To address this point, the tables, benches and cabinets would be made of pine with dark wood trim. The lightness of the pine would set the pieces apart from the floor. The dark brown trim would give weight to the space and cut the energy loss to the ceiling. The pine would have a few visible knots, to break the commercial feel of the space and to pick up on the hardwood flooring of the hallway.

A FEW FINAL NOTES
I don’t think something resembling a kitchen area should be the first thing seen upon entering the space. Why change what had originally been an office-type space into a cafeteria. Place one of the soft seating areas in front of the kitchen area, or orient the refrigerator/pantry toward the far wall. The office-desk should be quite mobile. The area between the pillar and the wall seems more like a storage area/set aside area for the desk when not in use. Sitting with your back to the far door is a bit unsettling.

It’s more than a matter of air quality. ‘Respiration’ is the word I end up with. How can entering the room be like learning how to breath? Especially for children with motor difficulties...who have been less able to properly develop the muscles of respiration.

A few plants can’t hurt. Think about a hammock.

Some Notes About The Built-Environment In Relation To The Feldenkrais Method

My role is to provide an environment that helps practitioners and parents take part in the learning process of children with neuromotor difficulties. By focusing on the practical, material needs of The Field Center space, it’s possible to furnish an environment that effectively extends the somatosensory dialogue with which the Feldenkrais practitioner engages a child.

(If only subtly, and perhaps especially when nearly unnoticeably-- even while a built environment is, say, only backdrop for the kinesthetic loop between a practitioner and child--we’re suffused with our surroundings.)

As a body/mind practice opens awareness through movement, so may awareness be opened by means of the built environment. In this way, developmental exploration involves body/mind/built-environment.

The point of increasing the functionality of a space is to encourage concomitant motor learning and neuro-repatterning.

Increased functionality in one area implies fluency in another. Motor and motivation, muscular and manual, material and mental, are correlates, coordinates.

If you’re looking at your hand, it’s hard to reach for an object. Without reaching for an object, it’s hard to know where your hand actually is. If you have to look at your hand as you reach for an object, you’re still disabled.

At some point in every moment and in every movement the proprioceptive opens to and is opened by the exteroceptive. Just as a bodyworker assists motor development, the architect puts in place directed aesthetic information. This architected information, manifest as color, weight, texture, surface, position, configuration, utensil, table, window, etc (all based on the measure and pleasure of the body) is absorbed by the nervous system. The nervous system integrates this information as impetus and motor imagination. As such, a door handle or spoon is part of the extended afferent network, cycling signals back to the nervous system.

Designing an object as that which connects the exteroceptive to the kinesthetic is the work of body/mind/built. Design focused as such increases functionality on all levels.

Functionality, fluency, efficacy and flourishing make up another set of developmental correlates.

Awareness through interaction with the built environment is a matter of attuning and provisioning...and not a matter of challenging and imperiling. Instead of using design to double up or knot up the developmental process (by challenging the challenged), to increase agility body/mind/built seeks novel extremes in accommodation and facilitation. Not only for the benefit of children with developmental difficulties, but for anyone...freedom of movement is always a frontier. And without a sensitively correlated setting situated as far from the obstacle course of coercion as possible, we have no grounds for realizing that we’ve barely begun to function.

Awareness through furnishing breaks the loop of abuse—treating without care things made without care. Once again certain correlates come into play. Attention carefully given to the attention with which a thing is made and presented is, in itself, the acquisition of a new neuromuscular skill. The very perception becomes one’s own making of a thing attentively. This new cognitive skill can then be used to make other kinds of things in other mediums...even one’s own self-image.

Though the pieces I’m proposing for The Field Center would primarily be used by nondisabled adults, they are at once conceived as integral to the exploratory method with which practitioners and parents engage the children.

At the same time, body/mind/built allows the exploratory method to act in reverse, engaging the ‘normally’ functioning adults in their developmental progressions and impairments.

Just as the Feldenkrais Method offers the disabled a motor interchange that normally arises from one’s own movements, body/mind/built offers the nondisabled alternative sensory information that normally doesn’t arise from one’s habitual interactions.

As motor manipulation in the Feldenkrais Method is a way of opening alternative neural pathways, awareness through the built environment sets the scene for more agile spatial responses. Together they form a two-pronged approach for working through and channeling around neuro or motor blockages.

Developmental difficulties reappear once we’ve safely grown up. Perhaps they never really disappeared. Do we continually set the bar of optimal functionality higher, or are we simply less and less able to leap?

If I’m talkin’ motor, must I mean neuro as well?

Am I set in my ways or is my brain literally shrinking? I’m too busy functioning to not develop learning disabilities and communicational limitations. Nose to the grindstone. A kind of transfixed spasticity and wonderpenia.

Aging is itself an insult (in the medical sense). Is aging necessarily a lifelong slide into the porridge of motor loss, sclerosis, and decreased brain plasticity?

Can architecture intercede developmentally? Can it be the discovering of balance? With its sensory information can it supply the gravitational currents that load vertical being with the forces necessary to fully develop?

Body/mind/built is a dialogue between ability and disability.

It’s not the disappearance of function in convenience and competence but the revealing of ways in which we’re constantly facilitated. It is a matter of trying to manifest the grace that sustains us.

Attention through furnishing is a positive neotony, extending the gestation period in which we massively acquire and rewire. It’s the setting that corresponds with the caring for each other which is all we have to ease or abolish the insults.

Gentle is more radical. More at the root of it.

By removing the distance between disability and ability, I don’t mean to diminish in any way the hardship of living with CP or PDD or ADHD. I do mean to suggest that development is lifelong if our works make us aware.

(Perhaps the greatest learning difficulty for the able-bodied is the learning to live with that which a child who has only ever lived with loss of function has always known.)

As I’ve written above, the pieces I’ve been asked to designed would be used primarily by the able-bodied (the normally dysfunctional?). I can imagine more exploratory furnishings (beyond the adaptive equipment geared toward normal functions such as sitting and eating) that would directly engage children with neuromotor difficulties. Pieces that would provide an astute, missing, developmentally encouraging, sensory feedback just as the Feldenkrais practitioner provides a hands-on beaconing, beckoning of innate ability.

Robert Kocik: Notes Regarding Poetics of Disablement

ABout his upcoming talk on 5/16/09, Robert Kocik writes the following:

One matter that may come up for me, as one of my own limitations:

I can't, for myself, refine and redefine the issue of disability as an end in itself--just as you caution against reiterating the limits of our bodies and our communality. When you say that we still don't even know what a body can do, this accords with my stating that ability is so extremely unexplored that we scarcely have reference to it (as social or subjective bodies). This lack of reference, perhaps the very basis of disablement.

Like the B. Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality"...I can't waylay in the negative, or place the constraints anywhere but within myself (however fitting and effective it might be to do so). Placing the constraints outside myself is disabling. It's strictly a matter of harmonics...the tune I'm tuning myself with. Not far from your patiency, where you drop the exteroceptive expectation.

All in order to prevent time from being taken away from finding out what a body and a community can be.

My focus on disability is simple. It comes from nothing less than a vow to help where I can, how I can, if I can and especially if I can't (as the only way of overcoming being unable to do so).

So, one possible element is a focus on the organizings through which we work as coming from the root of our need to revamp, and extending into effective action--as potently unanticipated modes (as in patiency and susceptiveness).

Last weekend I began a talk on Architecture and Poetry by stating that business as usual is biocide. Business is a prime poetry medium because, unless the shared support system we call 'economy' turns benign, we won't have anything left to try to improve. I have 26 businesses. One for each letter of the alphabet...for which, on any given day, I'm good for.