Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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The Archive as Dumpster
Get PDFIn four exploratory theoretical gestures (appraise, dispose, hoard and mediate), I propose the ‘archive as dumpster’ as a framework for returning to the physical conditions of memory, where “picking through the trash” subverts traditional archival methodologies by insisting on the very material consequences of a culture inculcated in networked digital communications. I make an argument that by posing the archive as a mediatic question (Parikka 2013), we can begin to account for the ways in which the perceived immateriality and weightlessness of our data is in fact with immense humanistic, environmental, political, and ethical repercussions. It is also a means by which we come to understand who we are, looking forward. In both cases, pitting the archive’s orderly ambitions against the dumpster’s stinking mess reveals a ‘call of things’ (Bennett 2011); the slow and often distanced process of disposal and waste to remind us who we are, in and over time, in and out of our bodies, increasingly under the impression of a dematerialised engagement with our stuff
The Imprisoned, Unspeakable Self: Silenced Sexuality in Henry James
No full textThis essay analyzes Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) as a novel, like several other works by James, that hints at but never fully articulates homosexual desire. The relationship between Boston feminist Olive Chancellor and her protégé, Verena Tarrant, is a study in self-silencing and repression. In particular, James subtly explores Olive Chancellor’s struggle with an internal prison, her suppressed homosexuality, which was likely James’s own sexual struggle as well. In addition, James’s literary style, his famously imposing and dense walls of verbiage attempt to articulate secrets without ever stating what’s hidden. Paradoxically, James’s voluminous wall of words calls the reader’s attention to what is silent in his characters and in James himself
"I's Natural Homicidal": Violence and Silence in Execution Poems
Get PDFThe inescapable presence of violence throughout George Elliott Clarke's oeuvre proposes that the silence imposed on the black community is only overcome through violence. The inevitability of violence is particularly evident in his collection Execution Poems. This collection recounts the “Tragedy of George and Rue,” cousins of his mother who killed and robbed a white taxi driver and were then the last people hanged as state punishment in New Brunswick. Through protagonists’ rationalizations for the crime and with their familial connection to him, Clarke collapses time and justice to place the black man outside of history and within violence. Silence then becomes a visceral experience for black males. Clarke suggests that Western society enacts its silencing of the black male through violence, thus combating this enforced voicelessness becomes a matter of violent vengeance: the only expression impossible to ignore. In a reflection of a peculiar position of blackness in Canada, the inescapability of violence for the black man who wishes to express his subjective being is grounded in a Western history of violence as retribution, which culminates in the diasporic struggle for black equality as enacted by black Americans. Clarke uses intertextual references to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the iconic slave rebellion leader Nat Turner to locate his characters in a greater mythology of the battle for self-actualization, for a voice. Clarke himself is implicated in this violence, despite his recuperative ability to write poetry. The violence which drives the aptly titled Execution Poems reflects his belief that black literature still functions as a transgression for the wider community. Clarke posits the escape from this silence as an inherent act of violence
The Unspoken Possibility of Language: Poetic Silence in Mallarmé and Rilke
No full textRecent and competing definitions of “modernity” all point to a fundamental characteristic which has been explored and theorized time and again but deserves still more intellectual attention: the ambivalence towards language unparalleled by anything written before the nineteenth century. On the one hand, “modernity” has placed great faith in the power of the word; however, this faith has been overwhelmed with enough suspicion to undermine any potential linguistic stability. In its most extreme manifestation, this results in a phenomenon of linguistic anxiety, even paranoia, which threatens the semantic possibilities of poetics. The resulting threat of silence – whether thematic, syntactical, metaphoric, or literal – is ubiquitous in modern poetry. As Eliot writes, “words, after speech, reach into silence.” An analysis of the general phenomenon of poetic silence and of two modern responses to it – those of Mallarmé and Rilke – yield significant insights both into the idea of the “modern” as well as into the essence and inner machinations of modern poetry
