Writing/Body: Symbolic as a Political Act in a New Way

Abstract

If writing is a form of body (1), which of course is, how does the writing form its own body and style of its existence giving a symbolic a new dimension of political? This question first came to my mind when I began to think about modernist avant-garde writings in general and L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E writing and Conceptual writing in particular relating my own current ongoing research on body, political, and identity. I was wondering how the recent day writings like language poetry and conceptual poetry furnish an example to my point that certain community form their own body and identity by their own self-affectivity, without being overpowered by the dominant ideology and meaning. In my own ongoing research, I am trying to invent a new model of political identity moving away from the usual view of the political as a set of power relations between the binaries of ideology, class, gender, race, etc., always constructed by the instantiation of power on the level of state or government or other larger institutions. (2) My point is that there can be a new formation of our political identity going beyond the traditional way of attributing it to power relations such as ideology, discourse, and knowledge formations. My interest is to explore the possibility of developing a new model of identity beyond and sometimes within these boundaries of power relations, based (unlike the grand narratives of ideology, discourse, class, etc., which are often personalized or individualized) on prepersonal and preindividual affects, which shape our political; and this, I argue, occurs not on top of political formations such as states and governments but at the level of practices of individuals, or groups of individuals. To testify to my claim, I bring two communities--one from Eastern culture (the sadhu community (3)) and the other from Western culture (the homosexual community)--into my discussion as case studies. For example, the sadhus construct their own bodies and thoughts (here, the formation of one's body and thought means the formation of political identity or being political), not borrowing from existing ideology, discourse and knowledge as found in mainstream politics, but developing their own body practices through the arrangement of prepersonal or preindividual forces (affects) (4). Similarly, the community of homosexuals creates their identity (their invention of new erotic zones in the body and new discourses of sexuality--i. e. political identity) and becomes political differently from mainstream political codification. This short editorial is an attempt to observe how language writing and conceptual writing form their own modes of expression and their own identities as distinct poetic traditions as opposed to, what Charles Bernstein calls, "official verse culture." I want to show how the avant-garde communities of poets in their different group variations fit into my political categories of sadhus and homosexuals who form their own bodies and identities beyond the prevalent practices and thoughts, and how their writings ("symbolic" acts) are political. Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian and other poets led a new movement in poetry in the 80s known as L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E poetry. Similarly, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bok, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff started to introduce Conceptualism in poetry after 90s. The main objection of both groups of poets and critics to the mainstream tradition was poetry is not a made thing but a making, or process. In other words, poetry is not a message a poet wants to transmit but a medium--"medium is a message"--in which he expresses his concept. The poetry movement was intended "to change the way the reader interacts or responds to the poem." (5) The language and conceptualist poets believe that the materiality of the language and its objectivist/conceptualist presentation in poetry "with the great care" is what makes poetry proper. …