Reimagining Citizenship: Written Response #1

Note: I wrote this before I looked at Meena's directions for our written responses carefully...oops!  Anyway, I think I answered most aspects of her question, though I didn't make direct connections to indigenous-Han relations in Taiwan.

A response to Fred Moten’s talk:

What form of writing might disrupt the sense of a discrete self?  A writing of interruption, contradiction, excess, lack, pleasure, brutality, which refuses wholeness, coherence, self-sufficiency, which invites proliferation and incessant dialogical tendrils, which extends exceeds ruptures the limits of language, or at least ruptures the limits of a well-behaved English that is the domain of a particular privileged masculinist-capitalist-imperialist white elite.  What are the poetics of blackness, if by blackness we mean the condition of being “both more than and less than one”?  When might the form of the written word fail us, when might English fail us, when might we throw up our hands, in frustration or exhaustion, and need to cuss our heart out in a US black vernacular, but not know whether that vernacular translates to our audience?  What is at stake in being understandable, and how is that related to the fantasy of the self?  How, in the tradition of queer theory, might we see “failure” as an art, as the possibility of alternative ways of living in the world?

What form of dancing might disrupt the sense of a discrete self?  How might we need to disavow a sense of wholeness, of integration, of being “connected,” of line, of alignment – how might we need to disavow a choreographic sense of completeness and resolution in time and rhythm and phrasing?  What does it mean to not finish a movement?  What does it mean not to finish a choreographic piece?  What does it mean to be endlessly in process – for our work to be “more than” (producing far more than necessary) and “less than” (never finished or brought to completion)?  How does that defy a capitalist notion of product?  How does that sabotage us as artists in a global market?

As dancing flesh, how might it be exhausting to endlessly move?  To be endlessly forced to move?  Forced migration, displacement, the ground dissolving beneath your feet.  Syrian migrants pouring over borders.  To lose home, over and over again.  Trail of Tears.  And how might it be a gift to be constantly moving – or to notice that we are already always moving?  Steve Paxton: small dance.  Koma: the body loves to move, even when sleeping.  Even when dead...

What does recognizing the fiction of the discrete self have to do with Irigaray’s notions of endlessly “becoming,” with feminist notions of permeable subjectivity and the transpersonal subject?  Women have also historically been defined as lack (literal lack of phallus, the lack of rights as a full citizen/person, being treated as property rather than person) and as excess (too irrational, too sexual, too embodied, too emotional) – and thus in need of being controlled.   “His body is not his own” (Moten).  Her body was never her own.  Subject to being sold (= marriage, in its origin; trafficking), cut open, legislated, raped, used for the pleasure of others, reduced to baby-maker, a literal lack waiting to be filled by a male phallus.  Given this fleshy history, what does it mean to reframe our idea of consent when it was so hard-won in the first place?

I stumble, I hesitate to make parallels bumping over gravel between blackness and other minoritarian pothole whiplash experiences more familiar to my lived experience.  Or, as that person in the audience said, “I wouldn’t presume to claim blackness.”  Except that Moten invites us to.  An evangelist for blackness.  A gift you already have.  A universal condition: “more than and less than.”  Why would we want this gift.  And what would that sermon sound like?

The queer theorist in me asks, “Where is the pleasure in blackness?”

On a somatic level, “I” understand the pleasure in giving up the fiction of the discrete and fixed self, of surrendering to vulnerability, to an ever-changing soma, of being entangled with others.  (Though these others are not separable from me, since an “other” is defined in relation to a “self” -- our structures of language fail again; they presuppose an “I”).  “I” understand the pleasure in becoming skin, in becoming flesh.  I understand the pleasure of the assembling-disassembling body (Nita Little), of becoming multiplicity instead of one, of the trillions of cells that independently ask “What if…” (Deborah Hay).  “More and less than one” is a fundamental part of many somatic practices, including contact improvisation, to which Fred Moten keeps referring.  But it feels suspect to turn to these practices as the answer.

It feels suspect because contact improvisation has historically been the domain of white alternative hippie communities.  It feels suspect because contact improvisation historically assumes straightness.  It feels suspect because of how challenging it is to facilitate contact classes in a way that goes well for black dancers, gender non-conforming dancers, etc.  Why is it that inviting vulnerability and melting body-borders is so empowering for some people, and so terrifying and invasive for others?  taisha says (in a paraphrase from memory) that it is not safe for a black person to invite their body to be vulnerable in this country.  Skin hardens as defense.  On some level, I feel convinced that unless I physically experience the brutality, the precarity, the exhaustion of bodies crowded together in piss and shit and blood in the Middle Passage, of Uncle Tolliver being beaten to a pulp while he prays that the Yankees win – that if I experience the pleasure without the brutality, I must be doing "more than less than one" wrong.  Because blackness cannot be easy.

Am I mixing up blackness and antiblackness?

What does it mean to practice blackness/“more than less than one” in the studio but not in life?  Is it even possible to practice blackness in the studio but not in life?

To be a full person is to be a citizen. 

Democracy relies on personhood and citizenship and subjecthood.  Wouldn’t all our legal and juridical systems fall apart if we refuse citizenship?  What would that world even look like?  Would it even be livable?  

Am I mixing up blackness and antiblackness?

“What cultural and aesthetic resources are available to us that would allow us to claim this condition, which is already ours?”  (Moten)  Difference without separability, radical non self sufficiency, quantum entanglement, love.  What is “spooky action from a distance” but viraha sringara?  What is love-in-separation but the recognition that you are more than and less than one?  And how do Indian notions of time and rhythm play into this?  Is sam but the illusion of wholeness that disappears as soon as you touch it?  What would it be to create a series of rhythmic compositions where sam is always khali: empty?

Creative Assignments:

I think there are multiple creative assignments suggested in the above writing, but here are a couple concrete suggestions:

(1)  Create a movement study that embodies – or rather, enfleshes – excess and lack.  Embrace irregularity, and resist wholeness and resolution.

(2) Ask yourself, “What does blackness have to do with me?”  Do a 10-minute free-write addressing this question, then transform some of those ideas into artistic form (movement, video, poetry, soundscape, etc.).

Bibliography

Moten, Fred.  'Wykład prof. Freda Motena: Performans i "czarność"' https://vimeo.com/100330139