TYRONE WILLIAMS

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and literary theory at Xavier University. He is the author of several books of poetry and the forthcoming elegy, Pink Tie.

My Belated CPT—ellipsis, translation, the body

On January 14, 2009, Cathy Park Hong posted a comment on Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater. Here is a small portion of what she wrote:

The text is not a script for voice, but a script for performance, underscoring its artifice… the emphasis is on the artifice of voice, the voice in drag, masque, ridiculous impersonation. The voice is both synthetic and serves as a synthesis of hybrid languages…Toscano’s poetry is infected with the language of Globalization and consumerist culture…tech-speak, ad-speak, and business-conference room-speak….question the totalizing effects of Global Capitalism on individual choices… informs us that faced with the market monolith, there are no choices, even though we’re led to believe that we’re inundated with them. The voices are mordant, thorny…Many of his works share a troubling relationship with the collective: in one sense, the mass subsumes into corporate groupthink, but in another sense, the collective is necessary for political action. Throughout the book, the individual is never specified. Voices are anonymous, neutered groups…there is no differentiation between person and product, person and property, person and the labor force…simply anxious actors programmed to put on a “happy pappy face” in the great determining system of Capitalism.

On January 19, 2009, I posted my response:

I concur completely with your comments even if they are, as you note, an essay toward a more thorough analysis of Toscano's work. You have identified what I too find compelling and troubling, the reduction and ad absurdum logic of the "voice" to a collective--that is, the way the collective turns out, in its more vulnerable moments, to "be" an assemblage of disembodied voices. Yet, and this is the radical nature of his work, that dynamic (which is not a dialectic) is also the promise of another future, a trans-nationalism at the edges, if not outside, of the consumerist/globalizing markers of identity--and "identity politics" is far too reductionist (and parochial)--with which, in which, we find ourselves, so to speak...

***

I am writing this, today, on January 18, 2010. I did not intend to mark this work with the X of an anniversary, much less the MLK of a national holiday. Yet here I am, one year after my initial post on CPT. In what sense did my body know, if it knew, that it had been a year, a full revolution around the sun, even if the difference between dates, one number, is the index of history as a constructivist science, a lag, belated date only in relation to a day—one revolution around its own center—called Monday? And what does this body, which is not the same body about which I wrote a few words above, have to do with the X of an anniversary, the MLK of a national holiday? Would it be brash to call these days and dates, the delay that throws them out of line with one another, one or the other always late in relation to one another, CPT? Can this delay be drawn as an ellipsis, as an absence, as the relationship between a stamp pad and stamped impression, between a stage and a stomp?


(Rodrigo Toscano from Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception, part 1)

Now, along a Realist Theatre code-&-expectation grid that sequence “makes no sense” as to how the body-action narratively “syncs” with the speech-say action. But from the perspective of Poetics Theater, it’s altogether different. The body-action is a coordination (between two players) as through a series of stress points (the limits of two anatomies). And the speech can also be thought of as a coordination (of materiality of the signs) as through a series of ideological stress-points (Globalization giving birth and truncating incipient urbanist art forms). The “((fuck))” is where the two theatric designations would meet, but don’t. So action and speech are preserved (not pimped one onto the other), and what’s expended is the spectators striving to piece them together,"((fuck)).” So, they’re disynchronous as regards unified gesticulatory purpose, but bisynchronous as regards an elemental theatric moment, that is, a demonstration of players coupled by a spectatorship making critical discriminations of such a demonstration.

This writing proceeds without ellipsis, having reduced Cathy Park Hong’s writing to a text sewn together with ellipses, the point being that Hong’s writing is mere pretext for my writing. Still, the ellipses are an ethical gesture, alerting the reader of a missing text. Translation not only presumes the elliptical, it demands it, cannot precede without expelling an ur-pre-text. Every translation, of course, like every mode of translation, differs from other translations, other modes of translation. What does it mean, then, to translate one revolution of the sun into a date? And the reverse: what does it mean to translate a discourse into a body even if we grant that both may share a term—a “poetics”—even if we also understand that this one word means at least two different things when applied to discourse and to a body?