Descriptive tone

One of the things that has interested me most about Juliana Spahr's writing since I was first introduced to it is the particular and peculiar tone she strikes. It's not a poetic tone, per se — or, to be more precise, it's not a "poetic" tone, one that gestures towards poetry as it is typically or traditionally imagined.

Though I could locate a position for it with respect to "language-centered" writing, I'm not quite sure how to characterize its own peculiarities, the particular approach Spahr takes — through this tone, or with it — to the world. We could call it "descriptive," did the term not suggest an especially florid and lurid use of modifier and metaphor. So I'm tempted to propose "analytic-descriptive" or some such.

What characterizes — and is at stake in — this tone is Spahr's resistance to specificity. Much is shared here with Laurie Anderson's account of walking, as I described it here. Anderson facilitates an examination of walking that renders it foreign, that underscores its relationships to falling and catching. Furthermore, those terms extend themselves — as metaphoric and allegorical language — into dimensions (faith, defeat, etc.) that aren't nominally or ostensibly relevant to the activity of walking as we conventionally and habitually practice it.

Spahr's account of balance, from Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You, works similarly:

It is balance that tells us to keep
our head up and the hips and
knees well flexed.

It is balance that keeps the elbows
bent slightly and the fingers
pointing forward.

In balance, one tries to realize if
the weight is too far forward and
if so one presses downward with
the finger tips and raises the head.
Or if one realizes that the weight
is too far backward then one
presses downward with the heels
of the hands and lowers the head.

Over the course of Spahr's poem, balance becomes a way of thinking the complexity of social interactions, to participate in culture, a "group enterprise" that "requires the cooperation and teamwork of we who are in formations," and in which "innumerable combinations may be developed."

In both Anderson's and Spahr's writing, our focus is shifted away from our habitual attention to specifics, and over to the underlying structures that govern the interactions and relationships described. If the effect is a defamiliarization, it allows for a renewal of perspective, such that the quotidean is made redolent with meanings. This tone — flatly descriptive, "cool," the language we might find in technical writing, characterized in part by the neutral "one" — makes it so. So that the world is found to be haunted by diverse causes and effects, by unseen forces. And that action might be drawn into relation, with world and others.

Another way to think this — and it may demand a revision of the term I've proposed — is to return to Stein. Though the term "description" recurs throughout her work, I'm thinking here of Stein's account, in An Acquaintance With Description, of "studying in description." We might twist Stein's use of the term "studying" away from its painterly sense, pointing it instead towards the notions of research, experimentation, or analysis. Instead — and because neither Anderson's account of walking nor Spahr's writing in general emphasize the visual — we might revise Stein's practice of "look[ing] ... really look[ing]," such that its attention is re-focused on "being ... really being."

Juliana Spahr — The Transformation

[I've already written a bit about Juliana Spahr's newest book, but have been meaning to get around to a longer post on it...]


Juliana Spahr's "barely truthful" memoir, her "catalog of discomfort," The Transformation, locates its subject, the self, within what Joan Retallack calls "the chaotic interconnectedness of all things, the dynamic pattern-bounded indeterminacy in which we find ourselves." Here, subject positions are collective and collaborative; they are often uncertain and unstable.

As Spahr reminds us throughout The Transformation, thinking such a subjectivity necessitates a re-imagining of language, that it may itself be transformed to articulate the sort of complexity that is at stake here. Spahr's work contorts itself away from convention in order to model interrelationship. But it becomes clear, over the course of the text, that these strategies are only partialy adequate to the task.

What is at stake is the dismantling and opening up, à la the projects of first Levinas and later Derrida, of a pervasive "expansionist language" that "often absorbed in order to kill out ... local languages," that "was not innocent," that works alongside "the coercive economic dominance of the governments that spoke [it], the military might of the governments who spoke [it], and the technology industry and its alliances with the entertainment industry." Within such a language, it is impossible — Spahr's text reminds us of this throughout — to see things correctly, to understand self or world in anything other than reductivist terms. Thus language's transformation.

Thus the memoir's narrative "I" gives way to a "they" that works twofold, pointing towards a model of community without allowing the reader to forget that the speaker's subject position is marked by an outsider status that is no more innocent than the expansionist language the text disrupts. (Spahr deals with her time spent living and teaching in Hawai'i.) At the same time, it points towards a model of community, even if that community is first and foremost a domestic and hermetic one. Over the course of the book, this "they" splits, becomes various and multiple, reunites again, suggesting that "they" are not a homogenous "them."

Thus, too, the refusal of the habitual vocabularies that fail — and in their habits fail to acknowledge the failure — to account for the complexity of the activity of being's interrelation, whether conceived in ethical, political, ecological terms. Native, Hawai'i, United States, America: to fall into habit, to use these words habitually, is to risk naturalizing these terms, effacing their history and presuming a stasis that Spahr's book constantly places under erasure in its continual emphasis on complex non-teleological change as truth.

The effect is a defamiliarization. We know what is meant when "they" talk about "the island in the Pacific," "the government that currently occupied the continent," just as we know what buildings fell down. Nevertheless, the act of reading here, though not strenuous, demands an agility of mind, an attention; and it is attended by a tendency to rethink the assumptions we make, the thinking we skip over, when we rely on habit and use the familiar names and nouns. If, as Spahr writes, the trauma brought on by terrorism — and, more significantly, its political and social ramifications — marks a certain impossibility of language, The Transformation demonstrates that this catastrophic impossibility has already occurred, well in advance of itself.

Nonetheless, we "find an ease in discomfort," as the text wishes we will. And the text draws to a close by finding a collective and collaborative model in an ancient and fragmented poem. The effect is haunting, gives us pause, reminds us that drawing breath finds us drawn into relation with one another. That the act of writing is intimately connected to the act of being human.

Report on refusal

In my post on Bruce Conner's REPORT a few days ago, I read the film's stroboscopic blank spot as a limit of representation, as a manifestation of representation's limits. There's a passage in Juliana Spahr's newest book, The Transformation, that addresses this topic as well, and that I think is worth mention. Where questions of representation, of language, of explanation, of defintion constitute the book's displaced and decentered "center," they come to one of their many heads in relation to another, more recent, national tragedy.

"Basically, langugage itself became impossible" in the aftermath, in the seventh section of The Transformation. Approaches to language taken up by the avant garde, Spahr writes, that were designed to critique power, to provide ways of thinking that resisted the structures of power, no longer made sense, no longer worked their resistance, when "all the government officials avoided clear language and stuttered."

It was as if the government that currently occupied the continent had taken over one of the few remaining tools of resistance, the very tools of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on, and even used them, leaving not only the poets but also the organizers and the activists empty handed.

This impossibility of language takes the form of an uncertainty, a confusion, that, while it precedes the national tragedy, takes a different direction, takes on a different charge in this aftermath. Spahr articulates an uncertainty of what, or even how, to think within this place where language has become impossible.

It — this confusion, this uncertainty in the face of language's new impossibility — is also framed as a refusal. Spahr writes, of herself and her domestic collective community: "Even though they were trained ... in close reading, trained in making sense out of nonsense, ... they refused the sense." Elsewhere, "they refused to understand" what was happening around them. This refusal's form works throughout the text, in its refusal of specifics, particularly of descriptors and proper names, and of the official language used, by the "government that currently occupied the continent" to describe the tragedy, which, in this account has no name. The question of what to call this event, how to think it, how to describe it without using the language used by the government is left unresolved, presented as a problem of naming, of definition, of representation. To call it anything is to participate in the construction of a particular interpretation; thus, refusal.

There is a resemblance here, between this refusal of representation and Conner's use of the blank spot, but it comes with a difference. Spahr's text explicitly theorizes — even as it resists the temptation to a solid and non-problematized theory — the impossibility of language and of representation, where Conner's film does not. The difference is of effect, and of the ideal readers constituted by these texts. Where Spahr's work is at its base critical, where The Transformation intellectualizes the question of a refusal of representation, Conner's film is an act of mourning that calls upon its reader in emotional terms, even as it comes to problematize representation, and ultimately to refuse it.