Poiesis and Death/Citizen
(originally discussed 7/7/20)
This week, we're going to continue discussing Alexa's undergraduate honors thesis, Poiesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Volume 1. Let's focus on Chapter I ("Poiesis as a listening for exclusions and elisions") and Chapter II ("The poetics of undoing Sexuality One"). I would like for us to pair these chapters with Parts I and II of Claudia Rankine's 2014 poetry collection, Citizen. The EPUB I found of Rankine's work doesn't contain the original cover, which is a reprinting of David Hammons' work, "In the Hood." The image, which contains the jaggedly sawed-off hood of a black sweatshirt, might immediately signify memories of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. However, Hammons' work originally debuted in 1993, in response to the LAPD's beating of Rodney King. Rankine's use of the image is searingly and intentionally ironic, as is the entirety of her commentary on race in Citizen. In Citizen, Rankine expands situational irony (in which the outcome of a situation differs entirely from what the viewer would expect) to the discursive and semiotic registers to illuminate the tangled mass of historical, economic, and social contingencies that are pre-coded into every single conversation we have about "race in America."
During her time in graduate school, Alexa wrote a draft of an article about irony, interpellation, and surveillance in Rankine's Citizen. She titled it, "Semiotic Ruptures: Visual-Textual Tension as Lyric Speech in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen." Let me know if you're interested in reading a copy of her full essay. On Citizen's cover, Alexa wrote, "Citizen’s cover finds its disruptive sense of irony in the hood’s implied resignification as Martin, and Martin’s implied resignification as a 'citizen.' How is it possible that 'citizen' can be a synonym for 'Trayvon Martin,' when a citizen is someone who, by definition, belongs, and Martin is someone who, by description, does not? Based on Zimmerman’s characterization of Martin as 'suspicious,' his perceived unbelonging is exactly what is cited in the trial as his cause of death."
In addition to the metamorphic power of American practices of racial signification, Alexa identified another problem of race within the assumptions that undergird the concept of the "I" within American literature. She wrote, "If we follow the poem’s logic of disruptive tensions, then the antonymic tension between the cover image and the title, Citizen, is not the poem’s only irony. Its categorization of itself as an 'American “lyric' also feels like an acerbic proclamation insofar as its lyric subject never speaks from the place of the 'I.' The inhabitation of an 'I' has something to do with its Americanness. Deep within the term 'lyric' is the history of a verbal subject that establishes some kind of relationship to itself through the occasion of its speech. Who is this subject if not the grammatical 'I'? If we think of the lyric poem, along with the romanticists, as an expression of 'subjectivity coming into consciousness of itself through experience and reflection,' then whose coming-into-consciousness does Citizendepict?"
As you begin to read Citizen, you'll very quickly notice that the speaker exclusively uses second-person when narrating a series of conversations with individuals who are typically presumed to be (though usually not labeled) white. The effect of the second-person narration is both deeply alienating and seductively intimate--the narrator assumes that "you" already know what's going to happen in each poem, that there is a monolithic "Truth" of reality that exists both in the narrator's mind and your own. But the narrator's (ironic) assumption of a singular, pre-coded Truth opens up the possibility of the chiastic making and unmaking of the self and the other that dominates the final third of Alexa's thesis. Citizen is a book of thoughts that should never ordinarily be spoken aloud--it is a dizzying bricolage of personal memories, professional slights, academic criticism, and seemingly "random" images whose devastating power to trigger or re-traumatize only becomes evident (to a white reader) in the unique context of Rankine's poetry. To read and listen to Rankine's poetry in Citizen is to place oneself in the position of the elided, the excluded, the silenced, the "mad," and the absented.
However, it is crucial to avoid reducing this act of poiesis to mere empathy, which Saidiya Hartman eloquently eviscerated in Scenes of Subjection (Hartman's Foucaultian sensibilities become far more pronounced when read through the cipher of Alexa's fragmented Foucault). In the chapter "Innocent Amusements" in Scenes, Hartman critiques the white abolitionist John Rankin, who re-stages grotesque scenes of beatings, rapes, suicides, murders, and familial separations in a letter to his brother to demonstrate the "evil" of slavery. Hartman writes, "Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or 'the projection of one's personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own emotions.' Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin's empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body" (Hartman 19).
Reading Hartman alongside Alexa, I suggest that Alexa's interpretation and practice of chiasmus offers coordinates for a landscape of intimacy, friendship, and identity formation that extends beyond the limited horizon of empathy. For Alexa, the possibility of a chiastic relationship between the self (which Rankine breaks down into the "historical self" and the "self-self") and the other (which must be presumed to have its own internal fractures) begins with the refusal to simply make madness (or the "margins" generally) "speak." She writes, "The question has perhaps shifted from how to make unreason speak to how to make visible those masked over through normalization and silently rejected into death. How does one see this other that is at once ourselves without performing the same panoptic surveillance of power? The question, I suppose, is how can we see ourselves in a way that does not succumb to biopower’s continuous surveilling gaze?" (Cucopulos 16)
In other words, to quote the chapter Beloved narrates in Beloved, "All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching" (Morrison 248). The X of the chiasmus--formed by the parallelism AB,’B’A’-- can be visualized as the crossing of your self-self (A) and your historical self (B) over into the other's self-self ('A) and their historical self ('B). But how do we know which self is the "original," the norm? Which self is sovereign, and which self is dispossessed by fate? Which part moves first? Which shard of your fragmented self is reaching out to touch and be touched? Typically, in interracial relations, the historical self is perceived as the dominant representation of the self, an assumption which is "proven" through interpellation (ex: Altusser's police officer saying "Hey, you there!" or Fanon's white child stranger shouting "Look, a Negro!"). Within this model, there is an implicit assumption that there is a static, true self-self that is repressed (this is the germ of the fantasy of the post-racial society).
However, building on Alexa's commentary on sexuality, ("Sexuality, rather than something we have repressed, is something we have created through the rise of modern scientific discourses" [Cucopulos 1]), race is also a fiction or tragedy of discourse. The (unspeakable, invisible) history of anti-Black and colonial violence within language is the stage, grammar writes the script, and we as individuals who are socialized into racial categories insert ourselves into the roles we believe are most befitting of our respective fates. For this elaborate tragedy of circumstance to reproduce itself, each actor and script must remain in total isolation--the fiction of the script must produce the real-life dramatic arc of one's life-as-bios.
But, Alexa notes, "In the same way one feels an uncomfortable spectral presence, one feels the disquieting murmur of the excluded from within the episteme, if only one bends down close enough to listen" (Cucopulos 22). As we have discussed earlier through the work of Luce Irigaray and Hortense Spillers, "grammar" is both a linguistic and embodied concept. Alexa's intentional use of embodied language such as "feels" and "bends down" offers us a clue as to how we might reach out and understand the silenced spirits of the excluded: through ourselves. It is impossible to hold another without holding your selves first.
We are eternally haunted by an unspeakable number of selves which are not (yet) our own, but could be if we bent over into and put our arms around the intensity of the silence which marks the space of their presumed absence. In the absented/silent I/eye of the chiasmus, X literally and figuratively marks the spot of nothingness. Of nothing to see, no story to tell, and nothing to be done. The chiasmus both plots the course of tragedy and acts as a witness to the possibility of its interruption, of its undoing. The light from elsewhere born of the crossing—of arms, of selves, of lives—bears the promise of poiesis rather than fate, eros rather than bios, and imagination rather than discipline. No one except Beloved lives in the heart of the cross, in the heart of the now. Will you embrace the depression left by her absence-which-is-not-one? To do so would require you to become her as you simultaneously, inextricably become someone other than yourself. Choosing to love Beloved necessitates that life be lived in the future anterior tense, or all that "will have been," based on the past of a future which has not yet arrived but was always felt in the many-faced flesh of the self. Life lived in the future anterior tense must, as Alexa argues, "pull us outside of our present moment and make us look back on ourselves as strange—to experience ourselves from the other side of an unbreachable epistemic break" (Cucopulos 15).
You can find Alexa's thesis online here: https://etd.library.
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