We live in the age of “argument frags” rather than sustained rhetorics. This is not news. Whether you’re on the left–Deleuze, or right–Alan Bloom, you must make your way among clots of reasoning and spurts of semoiology. In literary terms we call writing that forwards fragmentation “lyric” with the understanding that lyric writers are invariably navigating crises, either personal or historical, and that the hot spasm of the fragment is the only way to make one’s way. Emily Dickinson; Miklos Radnoti; Odysseus Elytis; Audre Lorde–lyricists make a long list. I am a lyric writer and prefer submerged and aleotoric offerings to larger inventions, whether we’re talking about a long poem or a cultural theory. Fragments are harder vehicles to drive and they also admit more plurality than big narratives. This hasn’t always been true but I’ll venture to say that imperialism has made it difficult for any thinking person to incorporate wide narratives into one’s thinking without irony.
When big theoretical narratives succeed in our age they are necessarily anti-imperial and contrarian. We read Edward Said, but not what’s his face who wrote “The Bell Curve” because our post-colonial time affords us opportunities to examine the history of destructive ideas. The oppression of people of color; of women; of gay and lesbian, and trans-gendered citizens; of the disabled–the list is long–was built from sustained imperial rhetorics. This begs the question: what does a sustained anti-imperial rhetoric look like? I’m asking both as a disability studies professor and a lyric writer and not without my subjectivities.
The best answer remains Edward Said’s sensibility–that we read fragments as fragment formations. We assemble collages, analyze their frictions. And this is where the theorist and lyricist are in agreement. We’re shoring things up, scattering pages across the floor, building a sensorium and ethos from bits and pieces. In this way we’re all like Walt Whitman in old age who, sitting in his rocking chair, poked at dropped pieces of paper with his cane–always finding the bit he wanted for a visitor.
In his justly famous essay “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of American Culture” Michael McGee wrote about this shoring of fragments, noting: “that the fragmentation of our American culture has resulted in a role reversal, making interpretation the primary task of speakers and writers and text construction the primary task of audiences, readers, and critics. (Interpretation and text construction go together like reading and writing, of course, so it is important to understand from the outset that I am not suggesting that today’s critics no longer need to worry about interpretation, for example, or that today’s speakers need not make speeches. “Primary task” means “the most essential” or “crucial” operation in successful reading/listening and writing/speaking.”
In other words, “you’re on your own” or as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say: “help is not on the way, repeat…”. The primary task of audiences is now the assembly of the means of interpretation. The idea is terrifying if you’re a Victorian, exhilarating if you come from a historically marginalized position. All fragments carry their origins and their specificities. Nowadays our job as literate citizens is to know about the fragments and in turn know what our role must be in re-presenting them. We are all cultural rhetoricians. Michael McGee used Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as an example:
“As a finished text, “I Have a Dream” is an arrangement of facts, allusions, and stylized expressions. As a fragment in the critic’s text, the speech is only a featured part of an arrangement that includes all facts, events, texts, and stylized expressions deemed useful in explaining its influence and exposing its meaning.”
My text and your text and Dr. King’s text are all fragments in a greater counter-intuitive but necessary enterprise of resistance–we expose influences and meanings. We are all “Rhetors” as McGee puts it. We are suspicious of anything that passes as a finished text. Finished texts are suspect. Dangerous. “The White Man’s Burden” and “The Monroe Doctrine” and Oliver Wendell Holmes famous eugenic assertion that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Finished texts can kill you.
But in the market place of ideas there’s still plenty of room for consumerism. If fragments and lyric assembly are active engagements, there are plenty of readers who want assurances and agreements. They hope for affirmation, to be told there are people who think just as they do. Such assurances and agreements are, in the age of fragments, larger fragments–sectarian, oppositional, phlegmatic, but fragments nonetheless. I first noticed this in my early thirties during a lunch with Catherine Stimpson and several of my English Department colleagues. I was hoping for dialogue–to frame an intersection between feminist theory and the emergence of disability studies. This was in the mid 1980’s and dis-studies didn’t yet have a name, at least not broadly. Professor Stimpson heard me out as I talked about Julia Kristeva’s “The Power of Horror” and the intersection between abjection as experienced by women and by those in the disability community. I was treated graciously but also dismissed, less by Stimpson than by my colleagues. I was, as they say in the vernacular, “OK with this” for I rightly saw that my ideas offered a distraction in just that moment. But you see, distraction is part of fragment assembly, crucial, entirely necessary to working against method (as Paul Feyerabend would say) and counter-politics depends on alert distraction. Feminism, crip-theory, queer theory, post-colonial theory, all depend on our understanding that arrangements–our texts–are only reified examples of larger fragments deemed useful in explaining influence and exposing meaning.
I’ve always been an admirer of Hannah Arendt’s view of political life, that it should be spontaneous, plural, and public. I worry about disability studies–a field I care passionately about–fear it has generally left out neurotypical people, non-speaking people, those whose disabilities are invisible, favoring models of “super-crip-ism” that could move easily from back rooms to television screens. I fear that all too often disability studies valorizes narratives of sexy contrarianism by leaving out the spastic people and the ones who don’t look so good. Or the ones whose disabilities are just too inconvenient. Our fragments are assembled without sufficient irony. The finest disability writer I know (I know him both personally and on the page) is Tito Mukhopadhyay.
Tito’s autism has largely prevented him from attending college. He doesn’t have a degree and he’s not likely to get one soon. The latter speaks to how disability studies imagines its fragments rather than to obstacles of accommodation. Tito is one of the best poets I know. This is a lyric poem, searching out its direction:
The White Cup
Nothing could make me
stop thinking
about it.
Its inside was white
and its outside
had
some patches of colors—
orange and yellow,
randomly marked
here and there
by some one who was perhaps
entertaining his vision
with orange and yellow creation.
It lived on the kitchen shelf
like a smile,
watching all the food preparation
from the kitchen shelf.
Who knows what the smile
was about?
No one fed it anything but tea.
Nothing could stop me
from staring at its smile,
its orange and yellow,
randomly patched smile.
It entered my heart
from the kitchen shelf
until it turned into
my obsession.
And then—
I never
wanted to leave the kitchen!
Who knows what might have
happened to the cup
forever after?
The cup, white on the inside,
patches of yellow and orange
on the outside,
turned into a memory.
It returned one dream
to begin this poem.
And ever since then,
at a moment called When,
I began my thoughts
of filling and emptying
that cup of memory—
in orange and yellow patches—
with my story.
Planet of the Blind 