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.