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.”