Machado de Assis, The Alienist

I read this excerpt in The Quarterly Conversation on the alienist (researching mental illness).

A passage that struck me:

The alienist proceeded to a sweeping classification of his patients. He divided them first into two principal orders, the angry and the meek; then he moved on to the various subclasses, obsessions, deliriums, and hallucinations. With the taxonomy complete, he began his thorough and endless research. 

Research only begins after taxonomy.  Put differently, it's not really what his research does.  Research obstructs and confounds the categories.  Taking seriously cultural production and art objects is very much the same thing--not that we don't need taxonomic touchstones but they really falter as a means to interpret and gauge the scope of what culture does.

Caro Baroja on The Window of the Soul

"La ventana del alma, la vía principal mediante la que el sentido común puede considerar ampliamente las obras infinitas de la Naturaleza."

I do think that JCB has a more subtle approach to thinking about humans and nonhumans but this bit is part of the problem!

On fragility in Manuel Rivas, "Historia del arte"

Tal vez por eso lo primero que reparó
fue las cuerdas  de los violines
de la serie inconclusa de las Naturalezas vivas
donde había también abedules, caballos, garzas,
postes telefónicos, máquinas de coser,
el par de botas del padre
que andaba por los caminos del lobo
para sanar electrodomésticos
y orientar las antenas
de los primeros televisores.
--"Historia del arte"

This poem begins after the flooding of the river "Pequeno."  Its title gives way to a commentary about a running theme throughout Rivas's Desaparición de la nieve (2009): an almost dangerous fluidity between real objects (of all kinds) and impetus towards artistic expression (something like Harman's "sensual objects").  The small river's liquidity leaves its own topographical situation and enters into a painter's study, "looking for landscapes / all of that awake and oneiric material."  The artist, and custodian of all vanguards, attempts to salvage the drenched paintings, converting his studio into a painting hospital, trying to extract water from the drowned, filth from the muddied and rearrange the "amputated" images of the broken.  Rivas writes that he "wanted his pieces to be happy...or full of dispossessed sadness [saudade de tristeza]".  According to the text above, the painter first fixed his series entitled "unstill lives" (naturalezas vivas), which are comprised of random collections of objects: birches, horses, herons, telephone posts, sewing machines, a pair of boots....

Artistic expression is about a rearrangement after the disappearance of the originals, about the restoration towards a strange happiness that ultimately remains a "saudade desposeída de tristeza".  The artist, as the "custodian of all the vanguards," becomes "volcánico, plutónico, anátido, obsidiánico, astrográfico, ginkgófito, anfibio," each ascribing an attribute of geological, astronomical or biological origin.  These adjectives also point to the painting, or the poem, as a composite of different things, each interacting (or not) within the medium.  Perhaps most telling on this point is the adjective "ginkgófito" from the peculiar tree Gingo Biloba, itself a living fossil.

For me, this poem offers a compelling glimpse at what art looks like as an expression effected by the phenomenon of the flood.  The paintings material fragility draws it into the liquidity of floods, fires, oil spills and explosions.  This also seems to be why it is able to say something about a crisis--because it is there.  As a "living fossil," it's solidified but also fragile and alive.  The rescued and repaired paintings will still appear mutated, amputated and all mixed up.  The same might be said of the humans that read, view or make art objects.      

Joaquín Araújo thinking between living and nonliving beings

"No es pequeña, en éste último sentido, la entrañable amistad entre lo inanimado

y lo palpitante. Nos referimos a que aires, soles, aguas y rocas, sin estar vivos, sean soporte esencial de la vida."

Yes.  And we should say culture works in very similar ways.

Landscape painting in Garrotxa

I'm re-reading an essay by Joan Nogué that has become integral to an argument in the first chapter of my dissertation.  Nogué examines what he calls "a phenomenology of landscape" in a case study of human experiences in Garrotxa (Catalonia).  His essay explores the different approaches to a given terrain through interviews with farmers and painters.  These two vocations tend to edit out nonproductive elements in the geography.  While a farmer's experience is more corporeal, the painter's reflections seem more "holistic".  It's also interesting when he discusses what painters include and exclude in their vision of the "whole" landscape.  Among the things excluded: agricultural buildings, areas of deforestation, television antennas and plastic and metal structures.  These exclusions do not only happen spatially but also temporally (as they edit out evidence of so-called economic improvement).  So they are kind of like painterly jump cuts.

At the same time one painter reflects on painting in Garrotxa (which in Catalan means difficult or entangled terrain): "The sky is difficult to paint because it is not a smooth or uniform layer. The sky is living, filled with shades colors and vibrations."

I'm interested in asking what these exclusions mean as a point of contact between ecology and art (or a lack of contact).  What do these edits imply for the nonhuman and nonliving elements out there in an apparently desecrated agricultural space?

Joan Brossa on [not] writing

"If I could not write, in my moments of euphoria I would be a guerrilla, and in my moments of passivity, a conjuror.  Being a poet includes the two things."

This is a mixture that equates to some kind of expressionism--even the passive moments have a fair amount of activity.

Action as an ecocritical object of study

Ecocriticism, since its origins in the late 1980s, has tried to distinguish itself from other veins of criticism through its central emphasis on action, becoming known as "an activist criticism".  As a student of Iberian Studies, I find this claim to distinction fascinating and problematic.  Language departments (among others) have long maintained allegiances to various political causes.  In Hispanic and Lusophone studies, many scholars have notably followed and disseminated developments (and emergencies) of human rights, feminist movements, civil rights and, most recently, environmentalist movements.

Due to its relatively late transformation from North American environmentalism as an academic trend (as opposed to feminism and race studies from feminist and civil rights movements), its institutionalization in academia is relatively new and in many ways still in process.  This late arrival to university discourses is interesting because environmentalism itself has fractured, splintered and mutated into different modes of thinking throughout different regions of the world.  Ecocriticism, then, often appears to lack a central methodology or critical tendency.  Except perhaps the two related tendencies of action and place-based criticism.

First, ecocritics place an importance on reading specific texts in conjunction with their site of origin.  Reading becomes an action that re-introduces us to a place.  Ecocriticism has been jokingly referred to as "a backpacker's criticism," one that desires to blend together the classroom atmosphere with the out-of-doors.  Cultural production becomes a mechanism to access a world ("Nature") previously severed from the reader's viewpoint.  Ecological texts, then, perform the action of regaining this lost space.  In my view, this sort of approach severely limits the kinds of texts one would examine as "ecofriendly" texts.

In particular, there is a disdain and borderline dismissal of arte por el arte, art (supposedly) working only for its own sake (whether it be Modernist, vanguard, neovanguard etc. etc.).  I'm less interested in texts that should take us back to some lost origin and more fascinated by those that take us forward into a haunted, weirder future.  This requires a certain amount of (problematic) autonomy for experimentation and a critical openness towards this process.  That is to say, though experimentation may not overtly contain a social purpose or message, its end goal is precisely to alter (human) consciousness in some form or fashion.

Following poet Jorge Riechmann's homage to Martin Buber in Cántico de la erosión:

La dolorosa tarea inaplazable de recomponer el mundo a partir de
estos añicos cada vez más indóciles, tan menudos e hirientes
como vidrio molido.

Y de repente, la fuerte mano extenta que con lumbre escribe en el
aire: «el objeto de estudio es hacer».

Enunciación exacta de nuestra verdad.  Pero ni por soñación
conoceremos a uno de los treinta y seis tzadikim ocultos que
sustenan el mundo.

Buber writes "el objeto del estudio es hacer" with fire and light, delivering a clear point of enunciation.  But for Riechmann (and I follow him here), despite the exactitude of this statement, it does not follow that we are given some special access point to "indocile fragments" that compose the world.  Not even in dreams (ni por soñación i.e. experimentation) can we exhaust (in Graham Harman's words overmine) these surroundings.

What needs to be elaborated on is the action itself, to weave together heterogenous elements into a single artistic event.  (Artist Perejaume also refers to una acción as a nuclear fusion between alien objects, which means to question our disavowal of other beings.)  I would suggest, then, that ecocriticism needs experimentation and supposedly "disavowing" works of art in order to diagnose their (lack of) attention to ecological crises unfolding all around and inside us.

Carlos Fuentes on Baroque Nature

Since his death last week, I have been scrambling to re-read my favorite passages from Fuentes.  I've also tried to find time to take a look at a few of his essays on the concept of nature.  In particular, I am reading parts of Valiente mundo nuevo given to me by a colleague over a year ago.  Fuentes traces a particular what I would call an uneasiness in the western apprehension of biodiversity:


La naturaleza clásica empieza a ser humanizada cuando Heráclito

dice que el universo está en tensión y esta tensión es resultado de una

conciencia y de una presencia: el hombre está en la naturaleza, es

parte de ella, pero no se somete ciegamente a ella. Gracias a esto, el

universo sabe que su permanencia es su cambio y su cambio su

permanencia; como en el gran soneto de Quevedo, «sólo lo fugitivo

permanece y dura». 

On the one hand, Fuentes suggests a desire to subsist with nature but an inability to do so.  When nature becomes "humanized" it simultaneously falls apart, leading us to beautifully frightening lines from Quevedo about tempus fugit.  The ability to classify zoologically becomes esthetically unbound and fantastic, resulting in a different kind of divide between civilization and the state of nature (the outside).  It's uneasy and overwhelmed to the point that any dwelling with nature becomes dizzy and even sick.  This is what Lezama has in mind when he states the Latin America has landscapes in monstrosity.

      
On this view, landscape refuses to remain a backdrop for the pleasant waltzes of human behavior.  Instead, it infiltrated poetics (on both sides of the Atlantic) creating what Fuentes aptly describes a kind of panic, an inability to honestly distinguish human projects from their backdrops.  This panic results in a rupture famous in baroque architecture, a division between the interior of a cathedral, for instance, and the wilderness outside: "cómo contestar al desaflo de la naturaleza, ser con ella pero distinto a ella?"  Baroque thinking makes things worse because it wants to absorb the alien exteriors, as Lezama describes:


Here again we note a manifest tension, as if in the midst of this abundant nature, this absorption of the forest by the argumentative stone, this rebellious and unbridled nature, our Baroque gentleman wished to establish a little order while at the same time refusing to exlude anything, an impossible victory in which the defeated are free to indulge the demands of their pride and extravagance.

The response to panic is absorption but one that will ultimately fail to assimilate its surroundings.  Lezama's "baroque gentleman" (el criollo) fails to find his order.  While Lezama seems to constantly dream of redeeming this absorption (albeit in a different poetic order), Fuentes accepts a tragedy outside  of merely esthetic questions.  Beyond architecture and poetry, the humanization of biodiversity ends up  mangled and devoured.  Citing Adorno, Fuentes assents that any kind of reconciliation might be impossible (what I have called the impossible situation of nature).  His solution lies in the imperative to narrate these tensions and tragedies, tracing these failed steps and possibility pointing to something new.

la vivencia del Otro no representado

In "La pregunta por la poesía," Miguel Casado cites a passage from Karlheinz Stierle that I couldn't agree with more:

El sujeto lírico es un sujeto en busca de su propia identidad, cuya articulación lírica está contenida en el movimiento de esta misma búsqueda.  Por eso, los temas clásicos de la lírica son aquellos en los que la identidad se percibe como precaria: el amor, la muerte, la autorreflexión, la vivencia del Otro no representado socialmente y, en particular, el paisaje.  En todo caso, el sujeto lírico es una situación de sujeto, una figura de sujeto, a través de la cual se puede vislumbrar la identidad problemática como condición del discurso problemático. (27)

What interests me here is the discussion of landscape as the unrepresented other.  What Stierle means is not that there aren't esthetic representations of landscape.  Of course there are.  What is brought up here is that the epistemological categories conjured up by these representations have nothing to do with this nonhuman other.  This is another approach to Bruno Latour's concern about the exclusion of "nature" from politics.

A first step (and implication) of this observation is a survey of poetry (among other cultural texts) that destabilizes the signifier of landscape.  This is where my work on Talens began--as a questioning of the epistemological category of nature.  This brings me to the second step: emphasizing a new kind of ontology after we shed our biases about nature, landscape and wilderness as given categories.  What we need is not simply new critical categories of reading but also new forms of art that emphasize the processes, relations (and lack of relations) previously discussed under the guise of "nature writing."

Flor silvestre: on affirming the sentiment of difference

FLOR SILVESTRE

Hermosa es nuestra fecunda lengua,

hermosa, ciertamente, cubierta de helecho:

¡ojalá pronto extraigas, Poeta,

de la flor silvestre, miel,

y del bosque, esencia vasca!


This fragment from Xabier Lizardi's poem raises a few interesting concerns about the intersection between language and place in regional literature.  Supposedly, as this text suggests, this composition produces some intertwined, botanical and human essence (esencia vasca).  At its most dangerous, such an essence becomes unbound from history, real objects and communities themselves.  At its best, such an essence, or identity, provides a possibility to read and unentangle such assertions.  What follows is a few words on the function of language in the "minor languages" in Iberia.

The cases of so-called peripheral nationalities in Iberia have been approached almost consistently as a tension of language.  This occurs even as authors working in minority languages resist this kind of classification.  And the language question is certainly an aspect of writing in any minor language.  Yet, it seems that this approach quickly politicizes texts in the polemics surrounding the rights and privileges of these "historic nationalities" in Spain.  Through my current work, I hesitate about the question of language as the sole point of departure for thinking about regional literature.  Instead, I am interesting in engaging the question of language through its relation to actual objects and geographies.  That is to say, to a kind of human and nonhuman geographies (much like what Levi Bryant has called "terraism").  

There are a few implications.  Such an approach pushes the reader to question what it is that a regional text might affirm or negate in its status as "minor".  Second, this kind of criticism becomes less about the literary institutions and more about the kinds of objects circulated textually (the quality and subjects of a given text).  To ask, for instance, does the text articulate a certain kind of identity (as opposed to simply affirming any essence carte blanche?  Is its framing device open, closed, or ambiguous?  Finally, it becomes more difficult to engage minor texts as objects composed in an isolated language (as if this were ever actually the case).  That is to say, instead of  the common rejection of, say, literature about the Basque country written in Castilian, I contend it is more productive to exam the relationality and circulations at work in the text itself.  This "esencia vasca", then, becomes very intertwined textually and ontologically.

comets, corks and anchors in Atxaga

I have remarked here before that Bernardo Atxaga's work is full of imagery about the withdrawn status of Basque as a minority language.  I think it's a nice way for him to acknowledge the status of Basque as archaic and minor while avoiding the common overdetermination about Basque authors as individuals somehow dedicated to the political (and literary) advancement of the language itself.

I find this passage from "The Cork and the Anchor" to be very refreshing:

In the case of the particular individual, of a particular writer, the choice of language need not be dramatic.  It does not matter whether the language he selects to begin with is a minority language, an asteroid a hundred light years away from the inner stars, since there is an artifact, a rocket ship—an aerodynamic cork, if you will—capable of crossing sidereal space in just a few months.  The name of the artifact: at times Translation; other times Traductio; or, in its sweetest form, Traductrice.  (54)

The celestial imagery is incredible in this lecture.

"Tearing Granite"

This blog has remained dormant for some time due to my focused attention on developing my prospectus and the dissertation chapters themselves.  However, I would like to take this opportunity to awaken it with the sounds of granite that I heard last evening at a musical performance taking place and involving a exposition of Jesús Moroles's sculptures.  My brother played about an hour of music with three other musicians.  Each part consisted of a site of improvisation.  They circled around different sites, utilizing the different textures and tones of the granite itself, often waiting on the stone itself to finish the composition.

Much of my current research has been thinking about globalization and local identities in Iberia through ecological representations of cultural identity.  One helpful productive lens to think about these issues has been object-oriented thinking, represented by the thought of Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost.  After working through difference parts of my prospectus and thinking a bit about the role of nonhumans in esthetics, I attended my brother's concert.  About 10 to 15 minutes in, I impulsively started taking notes on how the granite seemed to be speaking as much as (if not more than) each of the humans involved in the performance.  The following is a summary of the notes I took.

The performance might be seen as a mode of encountering, rendering or summoning.  Primarily, sounds were the consequence of mallets, sticks and tuning forks striking the granite formations.  This encounter in turn renders a sonic scale of effects from the stone itself.  Importantly, these sounds would have remained absent, if the performers (and the audience) had remained at a comfortable normal distance from the art objects.  Yet, with Moroles, the spectator becomes a performer and summons these qualities of the granite.  Qualities, for Moroles, that were "born of fire."

There is more to be said about what is actually being summoned in such an encounter.  I would describe it as a summoning of nonhuman time and space scales.  If the musician were simply expected to leave the instruments untouched, there would be no cause to the sounding out of the rock.  Instead what began was a musicality of causation, a summoning of something we, as viewers, had to wait on.  The rock provided the final cesura.  It is the granite that is performing just as much as any of the human performers.  From the audience's point of view, we remained in a limbo of waiting, a kind of spectatorship of waiting.  This waiting was a way of slowing down the duration of music.  It was a way of imbuing the sonic textures of granite into the composition.  Our expectations mutated as time slowed down.

As mentioned above, each part was a loosely structured improvisation.  Yet there was composition with each of the elements at work in each site.  Each site provided a particular kind of sounding out of the sculpture This sounding out leads to another way of considering the encounter between each objects as enclosed within a larger envelope: a table, a chessboard, or a large circular stone, for example.  These envelopes served as points of contact between the different instruments and, in fact, changed how each object interacted.  In Heidegger's terms, the situatedness of these objects provided different arranged "moods" for each moment.

The net result, I think, is what might be called slow creating, after Moroles's own term, a tearing or severing.  What is most interesting here is how the performance and the medium of the sculptures themselves are not entirely within our control.  Instead, it's the granite performing just as much as anyone else.        

[Q]ue lo universal es lo local sin paredes

Manuel Rivas has an interesting take on the supposedly rigid dichotomy between the particular and the universal or the local and the global.  Riffing on Miguel Torga, Rivas asserts that the universal is simply the local without walls (read borderlines).  That readerly interest draws together a series of words and (hypothetical) worlds.

[Q]ue lo universal es lo local sin paredes; y cuando leemos a Rulfo, a Graciliano Ramos, a John Berger, al mundo de Onetti, o de Lezama Lima, o de todos los autores que nos interesan, y vemos precisamente que el lugar en el que escriben, es concreto, es el lugar donde viven, pero es también, es el lugar donde se posa la esfera.

I would also suggest that such a claim also re-evaluates precisely what we consider the borderlines of the local, that is, of a place.  Instead of remaining rigidly inscribed along ethnocentric or geographical lines, the local becomes connected across continents in new formations of alliances...

Re-reading a bit of Foucault

I really like this short essay, "Of Other Spaces."

Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below, of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or a space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of exter-nal space.

It's interesting to see his work directly approach the phenomenological question of space/place.  I do wonder what he might mean by fantasmatic here.  How does a place become fantasmatic?  Ghostly?  Or uncanny?  On the one hand, this passage might suggest that it draws back to "our passions" -- which almost write themselves into a space (thereby making it a place?).  Or we might turn to the second of the passage which lingers on the phenomenological surface of things.  How might this external space also contain interior(s)?  

"El campo reconquista la ciudad"

I'm really enjoying this article in El País -- especially when they quote Enric Batlle.  For instance: "¿Qué ocurriría si fuera la vegetación [en lugar de la arquitectura] la que organizara la urbanización?"

The question points to some underlying issues with placing all of one's faith in human-based design.  Instead, Batlle seems to suggest that buildings should be placed in the gardens -- and not the other way around.

Humanism in M. Lowry

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit.  And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
--Sophocles Antigone


I ran across this passage as an epigraph to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a text that one critic details not as the drunk writing literature but "the drunk as literature".  (This description is certainly apt - the majority of the plot is immersed in some kind of bottle.)  The phrasing is interesting in relationship to the Sophocles text because it calls attention to an alliance (albeit full of discord) between the inebriation of texts and the inebriation of the bodies (including a minds).  This liquidated text seeps into the lines from Antigone.

Yet Sophocles here speculates about a humanist techne that always manages to salvage humans from the wreckage of the tired and weary god (Mother? Earth).  The resistance to death (or the drive to it) is a consequence of flying-machines, nets and yokes.  Animals also sway in and out as theoretical tools utilized by humans.  Horses fall into the cyclical patterns of agriculture and submission.  The result is not only an exaggerated claim to human greatness but also an excessive gesture at what defines humanism: other beings.

What does the drunk as literature tell us about the supposed masters of on top of the old god?  Lowry suggests a two-fold process in his novel.  First, there is a deficiency in the vision -- an inhibited blur of words, facts, faces and films.  These objects becomes multi-faceted and obscure.  On the other hand, this inhibition also works in the text to de-emphasize a world created for a hyperactive human awareness. In its place, the Mexican environment is vacant but also enchanting:

How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed!  Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees.  An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marías, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.  (10)

The activities of one locality stray away from the observer.  Drunk literature has to pause, re-read and re-locate the writer in this entanglement.  Such a sentiment should be extended beyond the question of drunkenness to consider a variety literary modes and tools that link up any humanism explicitly to its milieu.  In this case, a de-emphasis on the uniqueness and (pure) activity of human consciousness draws our attention to other actants in the story (booze, for Lowry).