After Hito Steyerl

Enjoying life again
Like there were no such thing as autonomy
Wearing these protest breasts
Hoping their naked forms will open
To some other shade of gray
Or owl of Minerva our affects embody
Outside any sense of control
So what we capture briefly is our not being captured
Dressed up like the book
Of that theory we practice
By dressing up like the book
Being beaten and kettled as such
Some form of night the cops can't touch
I am thinking about taking a break
From life
But life doesn't let you take a break
I think I am enjoying life
Then autonomy interrupts
My sense of identification
With the things I have enjoyed

Intense Autobiography (syllabus)

Visual Poetics

Intense Autobiography

Thom Donovan

wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com

I want to write the vector of self, the intense autobiography that is also a philosophy of the body.

--Bhanu Kapil

Course description

In this course we will look at various forms of autobiographical writing in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I am qualifying this series of texts as “intense” in order to distinguish them from more traditional forms of autobiographical writing, where one typically encounters the writer struggling to give a narrative account of the life they have led, moral conflicts they have faced, and to accurately portray the history of their “person” or “self” within a larger society. The modes of confession found in much Greek and Christian writing offer precedents for these more traditional forms of autobiography. In much of the writing we will look at, notions of person/self are replaced by an exploration of the human being as it is conditioned by modern disciplines (medicine, biology, statistics). They also produce an examination of “life” (bios) through a registration of collective experience as it is mediated by economic, legal, and political struggle. Intensity may imply that life is a series of thresholds through which one passes—“phase states,” to use a term from contemporary physics—whence identity remains in a more or less constant state of flux, contingent on organic transformation. It may also imply conditions of movement, desire, and metabolic change within an interpersonal field. Much of the writing, as you will see, explores aesthetic forms as an extension of experiences that challenge our ability to represent them (because they are horrific, subtle, traumatic, or withdrawn from our capacity to perceive them). They also explore how notions of  “person” or “self” are fabricated through aesthetic experience.

Required texts

Numerous texts will be made available to you via PDFs and urls.

The following are the textbooks you must purchase or borrow for this class. I recommend you purchase books online via Bookfinder or Small Press Distribution. You may also feel free to use the public library and the library at SVA.

Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (Bookfinder)

Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: a Space for Monsters (SPD; Bookfinder)

William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (Bookfinder or library)

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Bookfinder)

David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (Bookfinder or library)

Bruce Boone’s A Century of Clouds (Bookfinder or SPD)

Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe (Bookfinder)

Ronaldo Wilson’s Poem of the Black Object (SPD) 

Schedule

January 10

Introductions.

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in class recitation.

Homework:

PDFs of Michel Foucault texts, “Right of Death and Power Over Life” and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress” (from The Foucault Reader)

Excepts from Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions

Further reading:

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.

Recommended exercise:

Produce a reflection on one of the following quotations, from Foucault’s “Right of Death and Power Over Life” and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress”

“For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence. Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question.” (pg. 265)

“I would like to say exactly the contrary: we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity.” (pg. 351)

17

Foucault’s “Right of Death and Power Over Life” and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress”

Homework:

Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz

Further reading:

Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

Georges Perec’s “W”: The Memory of Childhood

Robert Antelme’s The Human Race

24

Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz

Homework:

Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: a Space for Monsters with excerpts from Jalal Toufic’s Vampires [2^nd Edition] (PDF)

Further reading:

Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal

Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” section from A Thousand Plateaus

31

Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: a Space for Monsters

Skype “visit” with Kapil (7:30-8:45)

Homework:

William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine

February 7

William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine

Homework:

Hannah Weiner’s The Fast (PDF) and excerpts from Clairvoyant Journals manuscript

Further reading:

Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger and Studying Hunger Journals

Carolee Schneemann’s Imaging Her Erotics

Hannah Weiner’s Open House

Vito Acconci’s Language to Cover a Page

Vito Acconci’s and Bernadette Mayer’s 0 to Nine magazine

14

Hannah Weiner’s The Fast and Clairvoyant Journals

Homework:

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

Further reading:

Charles Bernstein’s “Experiments” at the Electronic Poetry Center.

21

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

Homework: David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives and excerpt from Kevin Killian’s Argento Series (PDF)

Further reading:

Gregg Bordowitz’s The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and General Idea Imagevirus

Deborah B Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT-UP’s Fight Against AIDS

Douglas Crimp’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism

ACT-UP Oral History Project

28 midterms due

David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives and excerpt from Kevin Killian’s Argento Series (PDF)

Homework: Robert Gluck’s “Long Note on New Narrative” and Dodie Bellamy’s “Low Culture” essays from Biting the Error (PDF) with Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (PDF)

Further reading:

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (ed. Burger, Gluck, Roy, Scott)

Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker

Kaplan Harris’ “The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation”

Interview with Dodie Bellamy conducted by Julia Bloch

Kathy Acker’s My Mother: Demonology

March 7

Robert Gluck’s “Long Note on New Narrative” and Dodie Bellamy’s “Low Culture” essays from Biting the Error (PDF) with Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (PDF)

Homework:

Bruce Boone’s A Century of Clouds and Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”

            Further reading:
            Bruce Boone's My Walk With Bob 
            Dana Ward's This Can't Be Life
            Michel de Montaigne's "On Friendship"
            Tyrone Williams' Pink Tie

21

Bruce Boone’s A Century of Clouds and Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”

Homework:

Amber Di Pietra’s and Denise Leto’s Waveform (PDF), excerpts from Jordan Scott’s Blert (PDF), and excerpts from Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability (PDF)

Further reading:

Somatic Engagement (ed. Petra Kuppers)

Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory

Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand

The Collected Writings of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4

Eleni Stecopoulos’ Armies of Compassion

Robert Kocik’s Overcoming Fitness
David Buuck at Small Press Traffic

28

Amber Di Pietra’s and Denise Leto’s Wavelength (PDF), excerpts from Jordan Scott’s Blert (PDF), and excerpts from Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability (PDF)

Homework:

Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe

Further reading:

Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Integration of Strangers

Brandon Brown’s The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

Douglas Huebler’s Secrets

April 4 Visit from Brandon Brown

Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe

Homework:

Ronaldo Wilson’s Poem of the Black Object

Further reading:

Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
Fred Moten’s In the Break and Hughson’s Tavern

Adrienne Piper’s OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967–1992, volumes 1 and 2

11 final work due

Ronaldo Wilson’s Poem of the Black Object

Presentation of final work 

2012 Disinhibitions

via Michael Cross

It's the Political Economy, Stupid (essay)

order here

Interviews at The Conversant

The following are links to two interviews at The Conversant, the first with Andy Fitch, the second with Matvei Yankelevich, regarding his book Alpha Donuts and my book, The Hole.

AF: After everything we’ve discussed about The Hole’s constructivist, cybernetic, participatory nature, I feel we haven’t given an adequate account of the lyric sections. I find it interesting, given what you’ve said, that you capitalize each line, that you provide neat and tidy quatrains, that you’ll outline something like a sentence structure then close serialized sections with definitive periods. What draws you to this orderly local architecture? How has the significance of these lyric passages changed once placed amid the book’s broader discontinuities? How would you describe the lyric’s enduring status amid post-Language poetics or contemporary poetics? Here I can quote some lines if that helps: “What voice of lyric what / Voices would resist the doing / Should syntax still be a sacrifice / Like cutting off one’s limbs / While still alive isn’t that / How Mallarmé put it of Rimbaud’s / Becoming an arms trader?”

TD: The term “lyric” seems inadequate. I tend to use it as a place holder. But often people will use this term as a foil—a negative way to define a retrograde poetics, an outmoded contrast to emergent constellations of writing. To me this all becomes quite problematic. I maintain a more or less daily practice of writing poems that look lineated, that often deploy quatrains, that retain formal characteristics people associate with poetry. I value staying faithful to this practice, to its rhythmic possibilities, to certain compositional principles. But in terms of the dynamic you’ve drawn, between localized lyric details and globalized experimental structures, I’ll sense how a literary form inflected with lyric potential can become much more interesting when you direct it someplace else, when you juxtapose more discursive elements, when you rethink design features. For example, I have a manuscript I’ve worked on for some time, with about 160 pages of mostly lineated poems. But I’ll wonder what it would mean to distribute this manuscript, collect responses to it, then remove the poems, or make new projects out of those responses. What if those withdrawn poems just served as the vehicle for inviting something else? Still I remain committed to poets working through prosodies based on constraint and procedure. One book I love that just came out (tragically, because published posthumously) is Stacy Doris’ Fledge. Its intense prosody works through some of Celan’s grammar. Much still can happen within inherited and imposed forms.

At Small Press Traffic with Sara Larsen and Suzanne Stein, September 2012

Video shot and edited by Stephen Novotny
Reading organized by Michael Cross

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Suzanne Lacy (@ Art 21)

The practice of listening is so foundational to public practice that it’s almost a cliché. What we don’t talk about is how listening is, in fact, learning. That’s why I got into this kind of artwork. When I work on projects I listen carefully for both the learning as well as the images that form between us. I test the images out in conversation and eventually the shape of the work emerges. In the process, friendships form and I begin to see issues from both personal and political perspectives. If you work in the territory of oppression, you cannot avoid being radicalized by people’s experiences.

--Suzanne Lacy