Erika Staiti Interviews Brian Whitener
Erika Staiti: One way that I'm reading your work, False Intimacy, is as Manifesto. It feels immediate and necessary, impassioned and breathless. Its art is its politics and its politics is its art. It is firmly rooted in its contemporary moment, and it responds to and modulates the social, political, and corporeal crises of its time. How do you feel about my reading of your work in this way?
Brian Whitener: Hi Erika. This book is now an old book for me, so I’m approaching it (I think) like you, very much from a reader’s perspective, trying to piece together what’s happening and what animated certain concerns and constructions. I want to try to read the work through your language in the above question. What I most responded to in your question are the words modulate, corporeal, and crises. I would shy away from Manifesto, especially with a capital; I think the work is trying to draw new lines between the manifest and the latent, or the material and the immaterial. Manifesto also implies perhaps a program or a knowledge: perhaps this book is a negative space of a manifesto, sites of passage out of unknowning and unbeing, or rather its form is a search for sites (linguistic, formal, conceptual) where gestures or skins or subjectivities could be hastily thrown up. One of the questions I had re-reading this (like you I think) is to what extent the book is about a contemporary moment. I had the sense, in the repeated returns to the figure of the “mid-90s,” the “90s,” or “war,” [as Barrett Watten says “Take the War, for example; I no longer know for certain which war is meant....] that it is trying to set up new figures of time, of historicity, but also new lineages for, periodizations of, and discontinuities within the “present,” which is itself is a shifting target throughout the text. To return to modulate, corporeal, and crises: what strikes me about this book is (and perhaps this is where the “necessary” also enters) is that is written out of a series of crises, personal, political, scaling across intimate and international times. The piece’s response is to modulate, to set up altered linguistic zones and conceptual figures that could possibly bind together a skin (in turns animated by colorlessness, the feminine, etc), but skin that involutes “material” and “immaterial” in unique ways or a skin that might also just be exits. [This is perhaps not at all what’s happening, but rather just language that I’m invested in now]. But for necessity or urgency, I had the sense that this piece has an urgency, but it also feels like it is critiquing the urgency that accompanies apocalyptic narratives in the parts about tragedy, where tragedy is a break, a sublime gap, an unrepresentable event, that can’t recrossed or addressed. How’s that sound?
ES: Great, I hope we can talk through much of what you've brought up here. Your "sites of passage out of unknowing and unbeing" has me thinking about space in this work, in both your use of the physical field land/scape of the page and also within the text itself. The zones or sites (linguistic, formal, conceptual) feel so expansive, yet at the same time, passage-like too, as in connected micro-locales or concentric modes of entryways and exits through the mass expanse that is "unknowing and unbeing." Could you speak a little more to the use of space conceptually, linguistically, and/or formally? Is expansiveness or its opposite contributing to the piece? Or the ways that spatialities can be used to talk through the work? [For instance, in your statement above you refer to tragedy as "a break, a sublime gap" which could be perceived as a spatial indicator.] Or the presence of space as opposed to place?
BW: Erika this is a great question. I’d like to think about poetry in general through it, but that might be out of place here. Post-68, space and image have been two very central categories both for our historical experience and for artistic and cultural practice. I feel the experience of both of these categories in your question and so I’ll try to route my response through them, starting first with image and then moving to space. I thought a lot about image in working on this book. Typically, image has been seen as simulacrum or copy and then either spun positively (“postmodernism”) or negatively (Debord). Out of the process of writing and working through the material I was generating, started using a large font to push the language I was working with into becoming an image and started to live and feel the image as not simulacrum but as material. The writing became the process of pushing language into image and image into materiality or the process of incarnating. Making language into a thing or an act. But it is an incarnating that still has a negative moment, where certain forms or uses of the image are suspended, undone, pushed back. Incarnation and desidentification; “intimacy” (as forms to be lived, or forms of living) versus “false intimacy” (forms that fill themselves into the abstraction or gap of tragedy); “femininity” (as something that can attach to any gender, sex, race, body) versus the disavowal of it, or its use to denigrate, divide, and deny. This is, perhaps, the work of creating a body, or at least material (but invisible) blocks to be moved through, by trying to open up the image, and then to open language and image to each other in materiality. This book as well is a book about “the 90s,” in two ways. It emerges out of a kind of obsession I have with “the 90s,” both as a time of my experience and as a void of it: I was conscious but what it now most important to be about the period are things that I missed living consciously (zapatistas, NAFTA, globalizacion). As well, it was a time on a personal level of many voids, it feels like a lost era, I think about myself then and I think “who was I”, “what was I doing”? It’s the period where I most feel like a stranger to whatever I am now. But I have been wondering if perhaps this is a structural and not personal condition, that is an effect of a return to US imperialism been to erase an possibility of a connection to the past, or the 90s? [In that way “tragedy” has effects that register as both spatial and temporal, and these gaps or “insurmountable breaks” give rise to forms of false intimacy, ways of attempting to live the abstractions of the sublime gaps of tragedy-thinking]. At the same time, the 90s is a site I continually return to in poetry. This might be an idiosyncratic reading of poetry history, but I feel like in the 90s gender and race were being thought about in ways that we are only now succeeding to put on the table again. So throughout the 2000s I’ve been mourning the loss of these perspectives and commitments and secretly returning all the time in my head to the “good old days,” or the time I was alive for, but didn’t really live, or the 90s. If the book is concerned with image and landscape on the one hand, I think it is also trying to pit time against space or trying to inject the temporal into the spatial or just trying to bring time back from its almost total erasure. One of the phrases that resonates most with me now is “radiating out from Hong Kong”: I read this in a sense as in any given moment we really don’t know what we are doing and so the line pits this unknowing which can only be known via a temporal operation, as from a later date, against the ways these spatial figures or shorthands were set up within popular culture during the moment of selling the US on “globalization” (as a concept, process, and economic strategy). Time displacing space enters in another way as the book also sets up sci fi territories or zones (in the Stansilaw Lem sense) like Exico which doesn’t really depend on a strong spatial identification, which is neither a “country” nor the space between two countries (i.e., frontier or border thinking), but which is abstracted out of certain sets of conditions and experiences and unified by strange time. For example, when I think of all the different moments of my relationship to Zapatismo or just to Mexico in general, it is a very weird time: I am always late with respect to the events themselves (I missed them) but now I have a fidelity to them to these events that never had an effect, that I lived through but missed or that missed having an effect on my lived experience. So these events are immaterial (a non-presence, a past event that is over, no longer actual) that are now material, that now guide and shape my daily reality, my orientation, the horizons of my experience. To try to be more clear about it: perhaps another way to say all this is that in this book I realized how much a “child” of the 90s I am. I think the book tries to activate this in two ways. First, in searching for a response to the erasure of any possible relationship to the past occasioned by a shift to imperialism, I return to "globalization" as an event of the 90s to try and both critique it as a ground and use to begin building temporary genealogies for the current imperial moment. Second, in terms of aesthetics, the book lives in a mid-90s aesthetic world of its own imagination, and in a sense constitutes an argument for a return to a set of techniques (displaced I, attention to race/gender, use of incomplete narrative forms) that circulated then amongst certain writers.
ES: Brian, thank you for this amazing conversation. I’ve been told we can go forward with one more round. I am slightly tempted, given your last response, to talk about voice, or vocalizations. I hear a range of voices articulated throughout the piece-- in the form of direct speech acts, in quotes or borrowed language, in theoretical (or maybe a more appropriate term would be exploratory?) language. I think these voices, with their various tones and tenors, could perhaps reflect the physical/material manifestation of the ideas you mention above (ie; feeling of displacement from one’s time, environment in which race and gender is discussed or dealt with, etc)? They might also resemble the urgency (and simultaneous critique of urgency) that you speak of earlier in this conversation. Do you have any thoughts on this? Feel free to address anything you care to discuss, whether it relates to my ideas above or not. Okay! thanks.
BW: No, thank you. It’s always nice when we have a chance to talk. Your question is making me think about failure. Re-reading this piece I can’t help but think about everything it fails to do, or desired at one time but then didn’t realize. And as you are noting, there was once upon a time, a much more directed attempt here to deal with appropriation, but almost all of that got cut and what remains is a kind of polyphony: sometimes others’ language but sometimes their proper names as landmarks or openings. And while I like the kinds of collectivity these polyphonies, both in language-material and in narrative form, model, I’m wondering why this part of the work was a failure. What I felt at the time was that while since the mid-80s in the different areas of the art world, appropriation, remixing, especially digital, had been dealt with in-depth, in the poetry world, in general terms, authorship, property remained the norm. So, I was thinking about why authorship, property is so pervasive, for all the important, generative political thinking that occurs in some poetry circles, the figure of the author seems hard to shake. So I wanted to push an idea of thinking of why a certain form or positioning of appropriation as opposed to another. So, what does it mean that this was a failure or that it didn’t work out? Perhaps the writing just went in another direction, or perhaps my own author-function was just too strong, or perhaps this reading of the landscape was off. Your pointing to voice though is making me think of other failures, or aspects as I re-read through this text after your question, of aspects or limitations that make my cringe and make me want to write to Erin and tell her that I’m sorry, we can’t do this, etc. I wonder in particular about the feminine which seems to do so much work here: I wanted to detach it from any male/female biology and turn it into a kind of utopian movable marker to express things that feel non-fucked up about the world or how we live in it, as a counter to false intimacies. I wonder if that’s enough or if there doesn’t need to be more said about this. I don’t know like maybe exemplars or sketchings of it or… Maybe I shouldn’t react so strongly to its fragility though, perhaps that is how it has to be. Finally, the relation between abstraction, imaginary and image seems shaky, underdeveloped, as they can’t all be the same, but I feel like they are used to mean similar things throughout the piece… and as a result the connection between “life during money,” false intimacy, and the image, or between these lived forms and economic forms of abstraction, feels hazy and I’m not sure by the end of the text if we’ve actually gotten anywhere or if we’ve just cycled through vague positionings of these terms against one another. But that then is maybe a starting point for future work.