A new posthuman poetry manifesto

The manifesto about posthumanism that was posted previously in this blog now serves as the the introduction to my recent book of poems, everything essential. It builds upon the two previous manifestos about antinatalism & posthumanism that were included in the earlier books too much human & goddess says, Emma.

But I have now released a book of prose that isn't a novel. It's a book of theory about posthumanism, focused on deep ecology, goddess, & poetics, There is a fair amount about the varieties of posthumanism, about feminist new materialism, about Heidegger & Derrida's discussion of poetics, about deep ecology, earth & world, becomings-animal, & a discussion of Deleuze & temporality. Also, naturally, there is much about goddess & Tiamat, prior to the patriarchal deities of Babylon & later. All this in detail in the long version that is now on sale, the full version of the introductory manifesto in everything essential.

In this book I try to deal with fairly difficult subjects in a manner that is reasonably comprehensible to the average reader. I don't know if I succeed, but the ambition is to make somewhat abstruse subjects fairly accessible, & avoid too much empty & trendy verbiage.

First, though, here is the poetry book with the shortened introductory form of the manifesto - everything essential at Lulu. Then here is the Amazon UK link, & here is the link to Amazon USA.

Now this is the Lulu link for the full version, A new posthuman poetry manifesto, the proof looking great. Here is the manifesto on Amazon UK, & it is on US Amazon at this link. The covers for both books are directly below too. The table of contents for the full manifesto follows.

 

Review of "Post-ed on Your Mirror"

This is a review of Post-ed on Your Mirror by Linnet Phoenix, edited & published by me for Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & on sale at this link. Editors should not review books as a general rule, perhaps, but I propose to make some observations about the book that are somewhat specialized.

Linnet Phoenix is a phenomenal poet. Poetry is very sickly nowadays. What currently passes for poetry is the modern form of what Heidegger calls Poesie. This was in Heidegger's day the traditionally "poetic" - rhyming verse, doggerel - though nowadays the epigones are all producing little imitations of Bukowski's crapulent ramblings, calling it "edgy". This trash is not the rebellion, of course; it is what must be rebelled against & subverted. Dichtung is the genuine article. Linnet Phoenix is the genuine article.

Dichtung is something totally different from standard poetry, it is the opening up of Dasein that prepares it to receive Being, the Otherness of Being as manifest in beings, it is the "poetizing" that precedes the event of any art & it is present particularly strongly in poetry itself. It not only precedes art, but perhaps any understanding of where Dasein is, where the "Da" itself is. This is what Linnet does. Poesie, on the other hand, is Gerede; empty talk, idle chatter, meaningless. A poem is true not by stating true propositions, most poems don't do that, & it is not their function so to do. A poem is true by giving an insight into the unconcealedness of Being in beings - aletheia is seen by Heidegger as being built from Lethe and the alpha privativum, and truth as thus being unforgetting, unhiddenness. Dichtung reveals truth, Poesie covers over the truth of Dichtung in its nonsensical verbiage. A poem should make the reader aware of the Earth.¹

There is a religious imagery used in Linnet's poetry that is traditionally biblical, adopted from her traditionally Christian upbringing. I shall not go into this, but it is also a traditional strength. I have previously stated that she reminds me of Manley-Hopkins; the religious references connect to that, & so do the frequent hyphenated constructions that are perhaps less evident than usual in these short form poems. The following though is a clear reminder:

I am shipwrecked,
heart hull-holed
in smithereens

This I like to see as equivalent to the pre-Socratics in Heidegger. It is what we need to return to in order to carry on thinking. They still had access to the truth of Being, as Manley-Hopkins still had access to the world-making strength of words.

Thus again, I have returned to the the Heideggerian connection that I see in this poetry. The Earth/World (Erde/Welt) distinction is not one that Linnet deliberately focuses on, but it is very evident in passages like:

This old world howls
in the midday sun
as well as the frostbite moon,
but nobody listens

The old world that howls here is Earth, not world at all, & she is hidden; the average person, the average poetaster, knows nothing of this; it is only for those who are aware of the authentic poetic impulse that it is discernible. The reason the poetry that Linnet writes can be seen in terms drawn from Heidegger, or so I would assert, is that his description of what makes good Dichtung is pretty much correct, & Linnet is very good at this. It is possible to see Heidegger as saying that poetry is implicitly concerned with Being, whereas philosophy is explicitly concerned with it, or has been. But poiesis, so di Pippo argues,² is rather the original means of access to Being that is broader than the distinction between poetry and philosophy & that makes both poetry & philosophy possible. After all, it is poetry that will assist in the task of thinking that comes after the end of philosophy.

We do not occasionally produce poetry in this sense, but dwell poetically. Poiesis is the event, Ereignis, the propriative event that generates the open clearing, the "Da" of Dasein, powered by an original experience of lack & instability & fragmentary self identity, the hiding away of earth & the turning away of goddess. It is there in poiesis that Being is put into beings, the sense of earth & divinity that is so sadly lacking from modern poetry, & particularly from the bogus wannabe poetry of the various flocks of epigones, chattering away like little rock doves, opinionated little pigeons cooing, the fluttering inanity of the "edgy".

Linnet, however, creates a sense of Being:

I thought my shadow left
but she is still here
waiting for us to awaken

the twin bears are restless
clawing at satellites
like leaping silver salmon

Poiesis is not a mirroring of a stable being, a presence, it generates presence. & this naturally brings us to Derrida. Maybe Derrida's depiction of poetry as a hedgehog trying to cross the Heideggerian Autobahn, a reminiscence, a “photograph of the feast in mourning”,3 is not as distant from a Heidegger understood as not believing so much in the function of poetry as revealing earth, unconcealing it,4 as a poetizing that generates world & an understanding of world & phusis.

I once drew with found pieces,
pictures of blue butterflies,
when I was a tiny mouse,
before I roared in raindrops
honest as acid,
sweet as wild-briar lips

The above passage is so beautiful, & it creates its world, it generates a world for us to exist, better than the world of societal ideology. It borrows from the Earth where Linnet stands firm to bless world with these tiny fragments of nature. 

I do think that in Linnet's poetry we how Derrida's argument against the Heideggerian sense of poetry as disclosing unconcealed Being, saying instead that poetry is a nostalgia for a presence that never was, is part & parcel of Heidegger's original argument, the nostalgia is a result of lack, it generates Being, it gives access to Being. The obdurate life of the peasant working nature, expressed in the shoes painted by van Gogh, the struggle buried in the worn leather, the Earth where she worked, these are what Heidegger wants art to show.⁵

Linnet is, in my eyes, a major poet. She is one of those who generates a world. The Being she needs comes from her own productive work, & it is available for the reader in Post-ed on Your Mirror, since very few can do what Linnet does. She will show you how the Earth howls.

Here is the link to her blog. The book is now on sale at this link.

1 Heidegger, M. Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

2 Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo. The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics. In: Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000

3 Derrida, "Che cos'e la poesia" in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf. Columbia University Press; see also "Istrice 2: Ich binn all hier,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974-1994, Derrida, Elisabeth Weber (ed) ISBN: 9780804724883 (Stanford Univ Pr., 1995)

4 Heidegger 1971

5 Op. cit.

 

 

Extended version of the posthumanist manifesto

Earlier this year, I wrote a manifesto for too little beast, a revised & posthuman version of the shorter antinatalist manifesto for too much human, a chapbook that I had written a few years previously. Now this present text is an addendum, an extension, & a clarification of parts of that earlier manifesto. I shall not supply a list of references, & I do not think that footnotes are very appropriate in a book of poems; they are fine in novels, not poems, but I have used them anyway in case the reader wants to find out more about the subject. Basically, what I add here boils down to the observation that posthumanism, allied to new materialism, is an extension of the liberatory effect of feminism that adds the whole relational context of animal & vegetable being to the agents & patients to be taken into account in discourse.

By "posthuman", I do not want to lead the reader to thoughts of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, whatever, which are a part of transhumanism, since I myself am inclined to interpret posthumanism as more of a focus on the nonhuman after the end of humanism, which has very much overstayed its welcome. In Francesca Ferrando's terminology,¹ I would probably count as belonging to the post-anthropocentric wing of the posthuman, which is actually, according to Ferrando, more radical. As she points out, transhumanism is a sort of ultra-humanism. Posthumanism, on the other hand, originated in feminist discourse in the eighties & nineties; it is opposed to speciesism, it is opposed to exceptionalism, & it is anti-exclusionary. There is a metahumanism that bases itself on the writings of Deleuze, & that emphasizes the significations of relational embodiment, but I shall not discuss this further here

In general posthumanism is a rethinking of what humanity & humanism's place, if any, should be in the world. Here, as elsewhere, I always mean "world" as something very much like Welt in Heidegger, as opposed to Erde, or "earth". The world is the framework of meaning & definitions by which we who use language understand things in the world; it is human & verbal. The earth is being as such, presencing, & it sustains, shelters, & protects. It cannot be grasped or exhausted by the world, it is pre-verbal:

The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the world. …The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art)²

The earth in all of my books for Emma, & in this one too, is something sacred given by goddess, the fire & love at the heart of being, it is beast who lives there alone, poor in world.

Now Heidegger was an opponent of humanism, as a relic of essentialist metaphysics, & his work has been seen as eminently suitable to ground a deep ecological understanding of the predicament we now face.³ Both Arne Naess, who founded deep ecology, & the later Heidegger argue that ethics, the world around us, & human beings must be understood in new ways in order to save the environment. The natural environment should be seen as a value in itself, not just as framework for resources.⁴ Mankind is not the sovereign, at best a shepherd of being for Heidegger, a subject who must widen & deepen her narrow isolation to become the deep self for Naess, & in both cases what is called for is a radical transmutation. There is a releasement for Heidegger & Naess, there is a becoming & a conversion for me.

In all cases a surrender to the self-giving of poiesis, both as phusis & through our techne, which waits respectfully for what is given us, takes place. Cost benefit analysis will never get us there. Part of respecting deep ecology or earth, however, is a posthuman perspective. So I see the Heidegger/Naess deep ecological perspective as a natural way of applying this posthumanist perspective, an allied philosophy that calls for a transformation & a questioning of how subjectivity is understood.

Now, as noted, many people understand posthumanism as something to do with AI or robotics, whatever, some form of transhumanism, an extension of the human. I am not espousing this. Far from it, I instead would refer the reader to Lyotard, & the case of his postmodernism, understood as a detachment from the grand narratives of modernism. Postmodernism is also something that precedes modernism, it's a crisis state of modernism itself, & the "post" should not be taken as implying a strict & sequential evolution from modernism to postmodernism, the latter understood as a successor state to the less developed former state.

For me, posthumanism also implies a de-evolution, a reevaluation of evolutionary "priorities", & a variegated becoming-beast. As in Deleuze & Guattari & becoming-animal, it is a real becoming that does not necessarily involve an actual end state with some physical animal body. Now it just so happens that I am a shapeshifter, Emma made this start, it is she who first made this change happen in me, & I might have inadvertently scared other people on occasion by changing at heightened or excited moments. It is not, however, the case that becoming beast necessarily involves this actual change. I would, however, advocate it; we are not all permitted to evolve, but it is possible to switch allegiance, to identify as something better, to not let whatever it is that screams our passion & desire be stifled & restricted any more by our genetic identity than it should be by an outdated set of gender roles.

Now valuing the beast is not to be misunderstood as idealizing the cute animal, or ignoring the savagery & violence of nature. I do not have issues with pain, violence, predators predating. I myself am a vegan for moral & ecological reasons, but that is another issue, I'm just not biologically a carnivore. Wolves or cats predating is not a moral issue, they are moral patients, not moral agents. Me eating meat would be a moral issue, & for a great number of reasons. The complaint of the carnist is a disgusting echo of the past: "Don't worry about slaves." "Don't worry about women." "Don't worry about animals."

As i said in the earlier manifesto, humanism used to have a point. It was a grand narrative or meta-narrative that established science & empiricism, broke away from the religious control of everything. This was because theology was the principal enemy then, & the proper study of mankind, according to humanism, was "man".

As I wrote in the first manifesto: "Posthumanism does not only or necessarily involve hybrids & AI. It can be a return to a prehuman animal identity, as the postmodern precedes the modern. The beast precedes the human both in the order of chronology &, now, let's be realistic, in the order of priority. I am animal: not subhuman or superhuman, just different." We need to shake off the old identifications, as well as the belief that the earth that shelters & protects us is of any less value than the cultural worlds that goddam humans inflict upon that earth.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately, every "thing " - even materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.⁵

Barad is a new materialist. For new materialism, there is no clear line between matter & culture. As biology is mediated by culture, so is culture a product of biological organisms. The problem with radical constructivism is that, as Barad points out, one pays attention to everything but nature & matter. "the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter."⁶ To posthumanism & new materialism, it all matters. Ferrando describes the work of Butler as creating a lack of balance, where only language & culture was recognized. Butler's Bodies that Matter does not recognize the influence of the actual matter in the body, & how socially constructed biology is reciprocally constructed by the matter that Butler sometimes seems to think does not matter.⁷

I shall here quote the end of the last manifesto:

The Anthropocene is leaving terrible scars on this planet, on this Earth that shelters & protects. It is a relic of an obsolete humanism to pretend that the human race deserves any special consideration compared to other sentient beings, & even worse to believe with the religions of the disgusting book that any god has given humanity the right or duty to consume the flesh of animals & possess them as chattels. The only beast, mankind, with a whole history of being scumbags, polluting everything else with their dreadful excess.

There is too little beast. There is too much human.

We have to see that all sentient life is of value. Compassion for all sentient beings, & respect for the ecosystems of the earth that they need to flourish, shows us that deep ecology, based on evaluating all aspects of animal & plant life positively since it all fits together & nature functions as a whole, should lead to a reduction, at the very least, of the drastic human overpopulation. The reduction should be probably be very large. Not only sentient life, but all life, is morally significant, at least in part because all sentient life is part of the whole earth & relies on non-sentient life to sustain it.

There is certainly something that Ferrando would describe as an antihumanist tendency that is discernible in my work, but this is, as she points out, not really part of posthumanism, which is about the deconstruction of the humanist ideal rather than a destructive declaration of the "death of man" in any Foucauldian or Nietzschean sense. In the same way, my antinatalism does not extend to total pessimism & a desire for the total extinction of humanity, just much more restraint in reproduction.

More nature, more animals, more beast; less human, fewer humans. As Ferrando says close to the end of her piece:

As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse. In tune with antihumanism, posthumanism stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well. In such a framework, the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system of relations.⁸

Goddess gave us earth. Stop fucking it up. She put other creatures there to share it with "us". Stop driving them to extinction. No species is more important than any other. Even bugs that might gross me out have a goddess-given right to live. Posthumanism is not denying anything; we're just pointing out that a lot of other things are equally important. You can have ten million people in Sweden but you can't have twenty thousand wolves like Spain does? Get over yourselves, humans.

1I lied about footnotes. Francesca Ferrando (2013) "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms Differences and Relations". Existens Volume 8, No 2, Fall 2013

2Martin Heidegger (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & Row.

3Matthew Antolick (2002) "Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology" Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1326

4Martin Heidegger (1997) The Question Concerning Technology (New York, Harper and Row; Arne Naess (1995) “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. (Boston, Shambhala Press)

5Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28/3 (2003), pp. 801-31.

6Op. cit.

7Judith Butler (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge

8Ferrando 2013

"Hydrogen Sofi" by Tanya Rakh

As noted in the previous post, we are re-releasing the books that Tanya Rakh (a Libra & a credit to that sign) previously did elsewhere along with her future work at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. 

EDIT: To the greater glory of poet Tanya, & even of me, the designer, we have produced a new cover. This is up now. The image below is the new one, & way nicer. I have also done the cover for Wildflower Hell, which is good to go soon, & huge thanks to Rob Plath for permission to use his awesome erotic shot of a pollen drenched bee flourishing her some flowers.

Here is HYDROGEN SOFI at this link. EDIT: Here Sofi is on Amazon.

This book is a huge tribute to the goddess & the beauty of the musal function that she institutes for us, where this applies regardless of the actuality of the real muse, Sofi. It relates to the becomings of Deleuze & Guattari, where the poet becomes a pack, just as one never becomes a solitary animal. (When I say "poet", I mean rather the person who writes poems, & I here remind the reader of Dichtung & Poesie as they are differentiated by Heidegger, &, seriously, fuck "poetry". Did you know, gentle reader, that some sons of whores translate Dichtung as "poesy"? Can you imagine a less appropriate translation?) The "poet" becomes the love & the relationship between the parties, which are both parts of her. Thus the book narrates a "becoming-Sofi" in the damp decay of a cityscape, a fictional union as real as any other. (The pigeons do not want us to say any of this. At some point in everybody's becoming they must stop listening to the pigeons & heed the song of the seagulls.

This book is exceptional through the absence of any actual Sofi, since this highlights a real problem. The Other is constructed in general on the basis of egomimesis, according to an image of the beloved self, which lurks behind the myth of empathy, & all the beetles in all the fucking boxes, all frenetically cancelling out, everything real "divided by zero". Walk a mile in my shoes & you'll get athlete's foot, as Killdozer put it. But Sofi is more real than most characters in memoirs, more real than most actualized characters with whom I ever interacted. This is both a tribute to the splendid fertility of the madness that is Tanya, & also an indictment of the generic & slipshod construction of the Other.

Poesie is of the damn "poetic text". Poesie is seldom really the site of Dichtung, which is the poetic impulse to thought, the opening of thought to Being, & that which aligns real poetry (also Dichtung) with philosophy. It is the origin of thought, it is adumbrated in the play of identity and Otherness that constitutes the narrator/Sofi as real persons. This is why I am happy to publish Tanya, because Being itself plays in her texts, because she is a clearing, a place for the opening of truth. The universal truth of being becomes particular in some Chicago/Paris that never was, fuck the details, & art is dependent on Dichtung ("poetizing") qua the happening of truth, the same happening that projects these characters in their original leap into Being that makes the world of Sofi more real than alleged Gothenburg outside this window here right now.) But there are seagulls here in Gothenburg, some fine seagulls here, & they open up for me the whole of Earth. 

It is a testimony to Tanya's strength that she survived the writing of this book, where she herself creates the one that creates her. 

To return now to the book at hand, we post an Amazon review here, then the cover.

Tanya Rakh’s poetry is audacious and galvanizing. She speaks words that are the cotton candy melting on the pages in a lavender sky. Her ways of spinning luminous verse guide the reader through effervescent forests, sometimes seeming frightening, only to pull you back to safety and calm with her ardent sincerity and candid vulnerability. Rakh reaches depths of swirling cosmic oceans and the still waters of complete tranquility, all the while allowing you into parts of her that feel like dipping your feet into her personal diary of a man-made pond, tossing in countless pennies, where wish after wish seem to go unnoticed.

Hydrogen Sofi is an effulgent whisper, picturesque with such breathtakingly ravishing songs. This book makes feelings twist and turn up liquefying, marble, spiral staircases, like walking slowly on quicksand, in which you just must let yourself sink. It takes emotions yet to be named or felt and drags them through dusty trails hidden on the highest of mountains while allowing you to swim through mercury and emerge safely somehow. You will hold your breath at times.

I’ve never read any other poetry as fierce and raw with so much naked purity as Tanya Rakh’s. Hydrogen Sofi is a touch. It’s a flavor. A mood, a vibe, a taste, a smell, an image splattered on a canvas vibrating against a humid Summer sky and skipping like a stone over a lost creek where magic grows.

This book will change the way you look at poetry. There’s no way to describe it without reading it and dedicating your own poem to the book itself.

divinity extractor fan

I have started a third novel, more explicitly an anti-novel, since I do not like plot & I do not like dialog, thus rendering most novels a great torment to me, either to write or read. It will be called divinity extractor fan.

This book is predominantly inspired by antinatalism, posthumanism, overpopulation, ecology, & so forth. There is currently a heavy preponderance of Artaud, apart from the muse, getting into this book. Sacher-Masoch & St. Augustine of Hippo are being sampled in & cited. Footnotes & everything, fuck the world. Deleuze & Guattari with their becomings-animal are featured as well, at some length.

I am incorporating a story about how Henrietta, who is by now pretty obviously part of me (more like a goddam walk-in, to be honest, fuck all those drugs & being almost dead & shit, other souls just wandering in & out. Still, she gets me home when I'm drunk), provokes the release of Cthulhu with his army of evil, but very cute, mudkips to destroy everything, by using archaic HTML, code imbued with unspeakable ancient evil. It is my hope that some brave visual artist can produce an illustration of Cthulhu leading his army of mudkips to victory.

There is some discussion of Heidegger & Derrida on poetry, with references too, the sort of thing that novels need, I feel. Artaud is now making an appearance, because he makes everything better aesthetically, even if everything hurts. Also much discussion of Lyotard, temporality, the goddess, &, somewhat less seriously, samples from The Anatomy of Melancholy & Nietzsche, the last two being just for laughs.  But, as noted, Artaud is sort of taking me over, so we are gonna be nailing asses to the heavens at some point, gentle reader.

Couple of sample pages from divinity extractor fan follow, along with the cover. By the way, this book is complete & here at Lulu. Oh, I love that mise of mine so much. She is the best muse there ever was.