val flores
“…beauty emerges when a rule is broken in the text—whether grammatical, syntactic, or conceptual. It is that unexpected irruption of something that subverts common sense that startles and moves us.”
—María Negroni
“Life is a reckless risk that we, the living, undertake.”
—Anne Dufourmantelle
To risk language? What does it mean to take risks? If every word is a trial, is every word a risk? What is the relationship between vulnerability and risk in our writing? Is becoming vulnerable a risk in creation? Does risk make us vulnerable? How do we eroticize the risk of writing as experimentation? Through what visual, textual, sensory, haptic operations does risk become entangled? How are poetic and creative experiences practices of risk? What relationship do we establish with damage, error, discomfort, unease, contingency, indeterminacy, fragility, within our creative projects? How does research or creative processes place our language at risk? How can we make each word an experience of risk that unsettles the obligatory relations that construct consensual reality?
These are the questions that have been commanding my attention lately, striking at the very pulse of my writing. Days of imaginative collapse and the destruction of lives, of genocides broadcast on open screens, of a chill that carves unease into our bones. Why ask about risk in language at a moment when it seems that our entire existence is stalked by danger under fascist assaults? Perhaps because it is precisely the most difficult moments that demand the boldest and most thorned questions.
I think about risk in the face of so much sanitization of experience, the purging of any discomfort, the avoidance of pain, the protocolization of mystery, the eradication of uncertainty. A sensitive propaedeutics of consensus as the confiscation of risk and dissent.
To risk the obvious is the challenge that Eve K. Sedgwick takes up from within queer thought. To denaturalize what presents itself to us as given, to question what appears self-evident, to cast doubt on what is established.
How might we avoid becoming accomplices of the obvious in our writing?
Risk, as a prism through which to discern the pleasures and the ethics of encountering the unknown, Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests.
And what if writing is the place where the known comes undone?
Risk, in its spectral polysemy, is where danger and adventure converge—though not always in equal measure— braiding potential harm with play, threat with boldness. It becomes the compass for navigating contingency and intuition.
Where might one rehearse a writing that refuses to be domesticated by the therapies of clarity, the celebration of transparency, and the imperative of understanding?
Writing is a field for experimenting with the (im)possibles. Writing does not come to communicate, nor to represent, reflect, or illustrate. Writing is not a site of encounter; it is the place where we lose ourselves. Writing is that unruly territory of invention and power where we test the very material with which we (un)make the world: words and their capacity to (not) bring into existence. Writing is a material practice that (un)makes bodies as inventories of desire. Writing is an imaginative method for conspiring a deviation from the instrumental use of language. Writing is a gesture of exposure to the elements, one that poetic experience calls upon in order to resist attempts to domesticate language, attempts that seek to fix, once and for all, the bonds between signifier and signified. Writing is that alchemy of skin, sign, blood, and hunger that subverts the fiction of the real and its pacts of conformity with a heart starched in certainty. Writing is a tactile practice that seeks synaptic excitation and polymorphous irradiation. Writing is that perverse game from which we do not emerge unscathed as we test the indefinite magnitude of words and their economy of wonder.
Writing as unsheltered thought. A practice of exposure that seeks to wound the protections of institutional logics in order to open other pathways of the imagination. A practice of exposure that finds its greatest excitation in the risk of not knowing where it is going. A practice of exposure as a poetics of disobedience to the sociability of consensus.1
Susana Thénon urged us to let language loose, enraged and refined, plain and complicated, comprehensible and incomprehensible,2 in order to wound the pacts of thought and unsettle the ontological and utilitarian comfort of a hegemonic language that fears the exposure of inadequacy. It is a wager attuned to the slow and sinuous work of assembling a community of readers through the arts of opacity and non-belonging, resisting the dominant ethos amid so much demanded and applauded transparency. It means freeing language from the didactic obligation to explain, unsettling the sensibility of a reading community that gathers in the flesh of words, where reading demands a pause before the insoluble, the endurance of disorientation, the slowing of easy legibility, the work of resisting one’s own time.
If obedience means entering into the grammar of a language,3 what do we risk in each act of writing? Subversiveness resists calculation, Judith Butler tells us. Something is potentially subversive when its reading or its understanding becomes impossible. Subversive practices overwhelm the capacity to read, challenge conventions about reading, and demand new possibilities. Rather than constituting a counter-knowledge that is easily identifiable, subversiveness resides in the very moment of unintelligibility, or in the absence of knowledge.4 What do we risk in each act of listening?
That is why writing assembles itself as an escapist maneuver from the bureaucratic pacts of communication, with their requirements to purge speech of every shadow, paradox, and bewilderment, in pursuit of an algorithmic legibility.
This cardiac convulsion that magnetizes my words is nothing more than the aftertaste of a sexy obsession with untamed language and a lascivious devotion to sabotaging the forces of normality.
If words are sparks,5 as the poet Susan Howe suggests, we might dare think that writing’s unsettling force is not harmless.
—
“…beauty emerges when a rule is broken in the text—whether grammatical, syntactic, or conceptual. It is that unexpected irruption of something that subverts common sense that startles and moves us.”
—María Negroni
“Life is a reckless risk that we, the living, undertake.”
—Anne Dufourmantelle
To risk language? What does it mean to take risks? If every word is a trial, is every word a risk? What is the relationship between vulnerability and risk in our writing? Is becoming vulnerable a risk in creation? Does risk make us vulnerable? How do we eroticize the risk of writing as experimentation? Through what visual, textual, sensory, haptic operations does risk become entangled? How are poetic and creative experiences practices of risk? What relationship do we establish with damage, error, discomfort, unease, contingency, indeterminacy, fragility, within our creative projects? How does research or creative processes place our language at risk? How can we make each word an experience of risk that unsettles the obligatory relations that construct consensual reality?
These are the questions that have been commanding my attention lately, striking at the very pulse of my writing. Days of imaginative collapse and the destruction of lives, of genocides broadcast on open screens, of a chill that carves unease into our bones. Why ask about risk in language at a moment when it seems that our entire existence is stalked by danger under fascist assaults? Perhaps because it is precisely the most difficult moments that demand the boldest and most thorned questions.
I think about risk in the face of so much sanitization of experience, the purging of any discomfort, the avoidance of pain, the protocolization of mystery, the eradication of uncertainty. A sensitive propaedeutics of consensus as the confiscation of risk and dissent.
To risk the obvious is the challenge that Eve K. Sedgwick takes up from within queer thought. To denaturalize what presents itself to us as given, to question what appears self-evident, to cast doubt on what is established.
How might we avoid becoming accomplices of the obvious in our writing?
Risk, as a prism through which to discern the pleasures and the ethics of encountering the unknown, Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests.
And what if writing is the place where the known comes undone?
Risk, in its spectral polysemy, is where danger and adventure converge—though not always in equal measure— braiding potential harm with play, threat with boldness. It becomes the compass for navigating contingency and intuition.
Where might one rehearse a writing that refuses to be domesticated by the therapies of clarity, the celebration of transparency, and the imperative of understanding?
Writing is a field for experimenting with the (im)possibles. Writing does not come to communicate, nor to represent, reflect, or illustrate. Writing is not a site of encounter; it is the place where we lose ourselves. Writing is that unruly territory of invention and power where we test the very material with which we (un)make the world: words and their capacity to (not) bring into existence. Writing is a material practice that (un)makes bodies as inventories of desire. Writing is an imaginative method for conspiring a deviation from the instrumental use of language. Writing is a gesture of exposure to the elements, one that poetic experience calls upon in order to resist attempts to domesticate language, attempts that seek to fix, once and for all, the bonds between signifier and signified. Writing is that alchemy of skin, sign, blood, and hunger that subverts the fiction of the real and its pacts of conformity with a heart starched in certainty. Writing is a tactile practice that seeks synaptic excitation and polymorphous irradiation. Writing is that perverse game from which we do not emerge unscathed as we test the indefinite magnitude of words and their economy of wonder.
Writing as unsheltered thought. A practice of exposure that seeks to wound the protections of institutional logics in order to open other pathways of the imagination. A practice of exposure that finds its greatest excitation in the risk of not knowing where it is going. A practice of exposure as a poetics of disobedience to the sociability of consensus.1
Susana Thénon urged us to let language loose, enraged and refined, plain and complicated, comprehensible and incomprehensible,2 in order to wound the pacts of thought and unsettle the ontological and utilitarian comfort of a hegemonic language that fears the exposure of inadequacy. It is a wager attuned to the slow and sinuous work of assembling a community of readers through the arts of opacity and non-belonging, resisting the dominant ethos amid so much demanded and applauded transparency. It means freeing language from the didactic obligation to explain, unsettling the sensibility of a reading community that gathers in the flesh of words, where reading demands a pause before the insoluble, the endurance of disorientation, the slowing of easy legibility, the work of resisting one’s own time.
If obedience means entering into the grammar of a language,3 what do we risk in each act of writing? Subversiveness resists calculation, Judith Butler tells us. Something is potentially subversive when its reading or its understanding becomes impossible. Subversive practices overwhelm the capacity to read, challenge conventions about reading, and demand new possibilities. Rather than constituting a counter-knowledge that is easily identifiable, subversiveness resides in the very moment of unintelligibility, or in the absence of knowledge.4 What do we risk in each act of listening?
That is why writing assembles itself as an escapist maneuver from the bureaucratic pacts of communication, with their requirements to purge speech of every shadow, paradox, and bewilderment, in pursuit of an algorithmic legibility.
This cardiac convulsion that magnetizes my words is nothing more than the aftertaste of a sexy obsession with untamed language and a lascivious devotion to sabotaging the forces of normality.
If words are sparks,5 as the poet Susan Howe suggests, we might dare think that writing’s unsettling force is not harmless.
—
