Okay obviously I lied last time when I said the "What is Culture?" post was almost done: it wasn't, and it still isn't really, but it is coming and will arrive eventually. Each read-thru has been exposing new territory, but I think I've got it almost cornered: just a couple loose ends to tie up. Tentatively I'd say to expect it by the end of the month, but no promises. In the meantime, here's another quick poetry review, this time of Chika Sagawa's collected work:
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Impact: Dissolution of the Synthetic/Organic Divide
Chika Sagawa’s poetry is located at a collision, a harmonization and decomposition, a cultural dissemination and imperial, urbanic reconstruction. “[S]he straddles so many contrasting elements—[…] nature and the urban, archaic and brand-new poetic lexicons” (vi). This collision of past and present, old and new, natural and urban, organic and synthetic leads to the muddling of haecceities, the blending of contrasts and the generation of interactivities and connectivities. Chika writes, “It is not so much about searching for boundaries, but rather the precise snapping together of the infinite allusions on either side of that line, with the cross-sections of a leaping field of vision” (vi)—boundaries lose meaning when cultural diffusion reaches a certain warp-speed, when objects oscillate, vibrate and rattle out of their categories, smashing through breaches into fresh ones.
In Chika’s poetry, natural phenomena get cheeky, act like noumena: “Morning, sporting a top hat…carrying a newspaper printed in green” (2), “murky dark air…spreads out a single blanket”; they interact with urbanic elements: “pale blue dusk scales the window” (2), “pictures of trees printed on the walls of the sky a green wind gently flicks them off” (13). It is not necessarily the case for Chika that the human (synthetic) will always and necessarily degrade the natural (organic)—merely, that as conceptual reifications they are not stably distinct; that is, they warp into one another, splattering superstitioned fields occurring “within the cross-sections of a leaping field of vision.”
Yet, there is an element of ecological sickness in Chika’s work, a threat leviathan-like in its enormity, cosmic in its incomprehensibility. This sickness, if not caused by, at least heavily involves this boundary dissolution between natural and urban, organic and synthetic: “Underwater, the cities of the sky quit their laughing” (5). The ominous implications of this line read through a contemporary lens are stark and her precociousness is frightening (born in 1911, she wrote far before ecological disaster became common knowledge, and died before the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Perhaps these images can be traced in Chika’s work to a speculative playing with the hubris of the new modernity—invincibility implies vincibility, and horror is located in the making-real of the negation of a bulwark (vulnerability of invincibility, animated life after death, invasion and possession of the autonomous body, etc.). But there is a broader implication to be found in her work—that the world itself is hurting, “Insects multiplied with the speed of an electric current/Lapped up the boils on the earth’s crust” (1), and that human activity is responsible: “From the bottomless pit the blue officer corps lops off the neck of night” (14. Vitality itself is focused in the natural/organic domain, and too much urban degradation becomes alienating: “The books, ink, and rusty knife seem to be gradually stealing the life out of me” (4). This organic domain is expansive, and envelops the synthetic as the synthetic moves into the organic, dissolving strict boundary lines. Yet, to critique to the reactionary notion of “synthetic=bad” is not to condone all petrol-plastic synthetics—on the metric of vitality, of life-flourishing, certain statements can be made about the damage of the synthetic on a mindful and holistic relationship between subject and the objects in which the subject is immersed. For Sagawa, it seems that the synthetic tools used to categorize (books, ink) and the tools used to shape (rusty knife—and even here, see, oxidization compromises the total a-natural permanence of shaped steel) the organic world induce an alienation which drains life force. While the synthetic is not always invasive, the coextension of the two into one another seems to attend a melancholy and a mournfulness, a gripping nostalgia for a time of total organicism, a time that never in fact was. It's a melancholic relationship with the human present, and a desire for a return to the purely organic, a return made always already impossible as the organic warps into the synthetic, and as one realizes that as long as there have been humans there has been no purely organic way of life.
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