December 9, 2016

Graça Capinha e Ming Qian Ma

My dissertation will, in the first place, attempt to contextualize Kac's work. I will try to ascertain how the artist's oeuvre relates to the experiments that numerous poets set in motion during the 20th Century, with the intent of bringing the physicality of the life into the domain of the art object. I will mainly explore the connections between Kac's art and the disciples of Charles Olson, an American poet who, in essays like "Proprioception" or "Projective Verse", explored the idea that bodily processes ought to be the object (and not just the subject) of poetic production. His anti-metaphysical perspective was later adopted by the so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, who modulated it into a critique of the referentiality of mainstream uses of language (i.e. the idea that language tends to lead the reader outside of its material texture), or, more recently, by Kenneth Goldsmith, a conceptual poet who foregrounds the physicality of language by confronting his audience with the linguistic leftovers that correspond to every act of reading and listening (i.e. the graphic marks and the sounds we skip over when we read a text or when we listen to someone speak).
I will subsequently examine the ethical implications of Kac's transgenic pieces. In "The Animal that Therefore I Am", Derrida tells us that it is because human language is part of a linguistic continuum (that of difference) in which the languages of all living organisms concatenate that we just have to look into ourselves to recognize the Other. Kac's work revolves around a similar insight. But how can this idea be useful in the construction of different bonds with other creatures? Are we to see it merely as the center of a non-utilitarian frame of mind? And how far can one's subjectivity reach into the world constructed by the Other's language?