Michael Davidson / Susan Schweik talks/ June 6, 2009

Michael Davidson, poet, professor and critic, and Susan Schweik, professor, both gave talks as a continuation of the Nonsite Collective’s discussions of the poetics of disability/disablement, and the fourth in a series of events in the Aesthetics as Somatic Practice series.

My 'haptic' drawing in response to Michael' talk, can be seen on my blog.

This Sunday evening, at least, I cannot begin to paraphrase either talk, other than to say both pieces were ‘loaded.’ Michael’s talk began with a focus on the implications for queer theory for a man who actually became pregnant and brought the baby to term. Susan’s focus took off from her just out, The Ugly Laws from NYU Press, which she describes a social and cultural history of an ordinance adopted by many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The law prohibited “diseased,” “maimed,” and “deformed” people from exposing themselves to public view.

Both Michael and Susan are professional academics, the former at UC San Diego and the latter at Berkeley. The audience of poets and some artists, some of us who teach periodically, at least, are not professionally identified academics as such and included folks as various as Norma Cole, Beverly Dahlen, Michael Palmer, Michael Cross, Taylor Brady, Amy Trachtenberg, and others who I know only by first name, Amber, Neil, Petra, members,formally or not, of the ‘disabled’ creative community. Many of us - and I suspect that is part of the role of the ‘Nonsite Collective’ - live critically thoughtful, creative, and productive lives outside the regulatory, etc., boundaries of academic life. A kind audience, as well as the speakers, for sure, but, as many might suspect, the source of implicit tensions and/or expectations between the two worlds.

Michael’s talk did not directly reference poetry at all - though, in terms of issues of ‘creative disablement’ (my term) he has a long and genuine critical interest in the work of Larry Eigner. Though, on second thought, I believed he did give attention to the role of eugenics among some literary modernists; his major book attention, however, went to the significance of Djuana Barnes’ novel Nightwood, and spoke of it strongly as a precursor to the biological breakout of genders and multiples roles forecast and already implicit and active in the culture. He pointed to Science Fiction as the carrier of much of the direction of this kind of futurism.

Superficially put, Michael was largely interested the consequences of techno and biological experimentation on gender determinations and how these will effect the discussions of queer theory, let alone, I suspect, all manner of discussion about the generic definition of ‘family’, as well as what constitutes the margins, limits and potential (new and/or dispossessed) of any behavior. For example, as ‘queer’ people begin to reproduce families as a norm what does that do to notions of ‘queer’, in terms of the potency of its traditionally radical/marginal position (or, I would suggest, the centrist character of the traditional heterosexual family?

Susan - in addition to giving account of the legendary, and apparently considered very ‘ugly’ Ishmael clan, particularly in the 19th & early 20th century - spoke at very interesting length about the work of Cecile Giscombe, the poet, particularly in the context of both race and disablement. Similar to Michael, perhaps, she is much interested, particularly from the point of view of looking closely at history, to what is the actual story, and where possible, the existing literature of folks who have created lives within the boundaries of racial, ‘disablement’, and disfigurement, quite independent and outside the bell jar of ‘the acceptable.’

From a creative point of view, or, say, from the point of view of listening with the idea of being challenged and/or taken in the directions of new writing and creative work, I don’t think that was the explicit intention of either Michael or Susan. However, in the discussion that followed the talks, it made me ask Michael if he thought any of these radical changes, say, starting with the pregnant man, would impact the forms within which new writing and art will occur. (Or already has occurred). He had no immediate answer nor did I expect one on the spot (though I cannot imagine that his interest does impact the making and form(s) of his own work with which I am not recently familiary.) But now I am thinking, if the human species, mixed with will, can now morph itself into all manner of constructions - moving, as one example, from the traditional male to female, or, conceivably, child to elder and back again - what does that presage about the containers within which we write? In fact, is the ‘author’ ultimately replaced with a hybrid and multiple occurrence, long or short lived, of other equally important authorial figures. (You can write ‘me’ one day, and I can write ‘you’ or someone else on another). A place where we’re all participating in writing one big capacious work and the perfect singular author is pronounced dead before he or she arrives. As if all the envelopes we have ever known are splitting apart! & what value system determines ‘excellence’ in the writing, performance, etc. Is the supreme individual critic also declared dead, as well, to be replaced by a free floating spectrum of folks who make such writing and from which ‘excellence’ may be variously constructed from a multiple variety of critical entries(??).

Much to think about around ‘futurity’ - that word that gets bounced around as if it were a real other place, rather than the one we are in!