Nathalie Stephens' latest prose-poetry book, We Press Ourselves Plainly (Nightboat, 2010), presents itself as a continuous disaster (the disaster of incommunicability, of divided labor, of global warfare, of meaninglessness,"The whole of it") whose continuity prevents the disaster from reaching its apotheosis: the abolition of the text via its totalization.
The disaster around which the text orchestrates goes unnamed, unspecified; it is Blanchot's disaster, an engagement with the experience of death whose impending doom is postponed by the space literature creates. Such a space is typographically represented by ellipses being the sole form of punctuation, which act as a metaphor for an undecidedness, an intervention in time that recalls poet Tyrone Williams' line in The Hero Project of the Century, meanwhile means dissent.
The language, divided into incomplete sentences or complete sentences with referentially open pronouns, cannot be utilized (cannot, that is, integrate into an entirety, with each part an instrument of the sum). If we take it that the sentence is to language as the single commodity is to capitalism (both being the smallest utilizable unit), then such syntactic ruptures are a way of evading the specter of referentiality, wherein language would be exchanged 1:1 for the world it represents, absent any critical capacity, whereas here, without such a quantitative abstraction, we gaze at the language's quality, its material presence. A sample:
Parcelled out the small formations into smaller ones... Tiny little disasters... Handled carefully and placed gingerly onto small metal trays... Then labelled... We make these manifestations into ourselves... What happens when... Shorn and emaciated... I forget all of it... The disordered remembrances... There is knocking... It comes from inside... A strangulation... The tripes pulled up into the ribcage... A thick elastic band... Not breathing... Heat in the skin of the face... The faces... Hands flipped back... A plasticity... It was touching... A hardness... Twist of a straight bone... Close to snapping... It releases... Leveraged... What do you suppose.... Does she mark time anymore... There is no sense... In the end the...It doesn't
What we notice about the text's material presence is also its absence. Composed of subordinate clauses, it's frequently written in the subjunctive mood (a verb mood used to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred). This is significant because it implies counterfactual times of action, such as reformulating the present in light of an imagined one, wherein "The projection declare[s] a form of disappearance..." (29) at odds with the society of the spectacle whereby the modern spectacle (as in the image of the real concealing the system of labor producing it) "expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible" (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 25).
The subjunctive then is an expression of the contingent, referring to displaced times not crystallized in the "totalitarian management of the conditions of existence." Thus we're in an asynchronous tense the breaks from the objectified present in which our world is usually communicated to us. For example "What happens when" questions the future while "I forget all of it" disables any such active contemplation. So the language wars with itself. Just when we think a plot is developing outside the development of the text itself ("There is knocking") we find "It comes from inside," bringing us back to the zero point.
Stephens' provocative endnote gives a glimpse of their poetics:
"The text operates a form of confinement, manifest as a continuous block of text from end to end. If one of the active functions of this work is compression, it is the compression not just of a body in a carefully controlled space, but of all possible spaces pressed into that body, upon which the pressures of historical violence and its attendant catastrophes come to bear” (103).
Thus the text writes thru the structure in which the voices are "always already embedded in the structure they would escape" (Moten, Resistance of the Object, pg 2), performing one's enslavement as liberation as submission, where to read is to redress.
The disaster around which the text orchestrates goes unnamed, unspecified; it is Blanchot's disaster, an engagement with the experience of death whose impending doom is postponed by the space literature creates. Such a space is typographically represented by ellipses being the sole form of punctuation, which act as a metaphor for an undecidedness, an intervention in time that recalls poet Tyrone Williams' line in The Hero Project of the Century, meanwhile means dissent.
The language, divided into incomplete sentences or complete sentences with referentially open pronouns, cannot be utilized (cannot, that is, integrate into an entirety, with each part an instrument of the sum). If we take it that the sentence is to language as the single commodity is to capitalism (both being the smallest utilizable unit), then such syntactic ruptures are a way of evading the specter of referentiality, wherein language would be exchanged 1:1 for the world it represents, absent any critical capacity, whereas here, without such a quantitative abstraction, we gaze at the language's quality, its material presence. A sample:
Parcelled out the small formations into smaller ones... Tiny little disasters... Handled carefully and placed gingerly onto small metal trays... Then labelled... We make these manifestations into ourselves... What happens when... Shorn and emaciated... I forget all of it... The disordered remembrances... There is knocking... It comes from inside... A strangulation... The tripes pulled up into the ribcage... A thick elastic band... Not breathing... Heat in the skin of the face... The faces... Hands flipped back... A plasticity... It was touching... A hardness... Twist of a straight bone... Close to snapping... It releases... Leveraged... What do you suppose.... Does she mark time anymore... There is no sense... In the end the...It doesn't
What we notice about the text's material presence is also its absence. Composed of subordinate clauses, it's frequently written in the subjunctive mood (a verb mood used to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred). This is significant because it implies counterfactual times of action, such as reformulating the present in light of an imagined one, wherein "The projection declare[s] a form of disappearance..." (29) at odds with the society of the spectacle whereby the modern spectacle (as in the image of the real concealing the system of labor producing it) "expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible" (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 25).
The subjunctive then is an expression of the contingent, referring to displaced times not crystallized in the "totalitarian management of the conditions of existence." Thus we're in an asynchronous tense the breaks from the objectified present in which our world is usually communicated to us. For example "What happens when" questions the future while "I forget all of it" disables any such active contemplation. So the language wars with itself. Just when we think a plot is developing outside the development of the text itself ("There is knocking") we find "It comes from inside," bringing us back to the zero point.
Stephens' provocative endnote gives a glimpse of their poetics:
"The text operates a form of confinement, manifest as a continuous block of text from end to end. If one of the active functions of this work is compression, it is the compression not just of a body in a carefully controlled space, but of all possible spaces pressed into that body, upon which the pressures of historical violence and its attendant catastrophes come to bear” (103).
Thus the text writes thru the structure in which the voices are "always already embedded in the structure they would escape" (Moten, Resistance of the Object, pg 2), performing one's enslavement as liberation as submission, where to read is to redress.
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