SUBJECT-MATTER OF THE DISPUTE

If a face emerges from Patriarchal Poetry’s efflorescence, I would like to propose that it belongs to the figure of Antigone. According to Mitchell Verter, Antigone is not only a female character who disobeys the law and sacrifices her own life in order to bury her brother; she is also the first anarchist. In Aeschylus’ play Seven Against Thebes, Antigone states that she “is not ashamed to act in anarchist opposition to the rulers of the city” (qtd. in Verter 68). (Further, in Sophocles’ Theban play, Creon — whose name means “ruler” in Greek — tells Antigone that “there is no evil worse than anarchy” when he condemns her for fulfilling her obligation to her

brother [ibid.].) Verter notes that even her name, “anti-gone,” against birth, reiterates the challenge to origins and first principles implied by an-archy (69-70).80 _{For him, Antigone’s}

anarchism alludes to Levinasean ethics. Refusing to leave her brother’s body for carrion, as Theban law requires for traitors, her “evil” consists in the responsibility she takes for her brother’s treachery: “she refuses to recognize the distinction between friend and enemy, anarchically subverting the foundation of the polis” (70). In the context of Patriarchal Poetry, her sacrifice suggests the flexibility of gender. While she had put herself in the place the father, leading the blind patriarch to Colonus, Antigone then makes the ultimate sacrifice and takes the place of her brother, whose citizenship is unrecognized by the sovereign.

As an anarcha-feminist figure, Antigone suggests not simply that gender is a performative construction; it emerges in response to the assignation of the (b)other. Within Patriarchal Poetry, that assignation comes from the neuter. It is the interruption, the incommensurability of itself with oneself, that both justifies and propels the repetitions organizing the poem. For Judith Butler, such iteration is at the heart of gender performativity: “[If] the ‘I’ is the site of repetition, that is, if the ‘I’ only achieves a semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the ‘I’ is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it” (18). She adds: “The disruption of the Other at the heart of the self is the very condition of the self’s possibility” (27). (Despite tooling her post-feminist theory to complement the politics of identity and recognition, Butler calls herself a “provisional anarchist” [Heckert 93].) For Patriarchal Poetry’s anarcha-feminism, the effects of repetition imply not simply that the neuter murmurs in every gender identification, but that (as the CrimethInc. Collective states) “there is no male. There is no female.” Instead, as the character of Antigone suggests, there is only substitution, one-for-the-other, so that gender

becomes not only interminable permutation but responsibility for the enemy, the brother and the father.

Anarcha-feminism takes up similar questions about gender. For example, Rita Katrina- Andrews argues for “a post-feminist anarchy” that implicitly aims to break the noun “woman.” Criticizing politically engaged feminisms for dissimulating the singularity of gender

identification, she writes: “When feminists proclaimed ‘the personal is the political’ they conveniently ignored the fact that politics require de-personalization: de-uniquing and de- individualizing, massified roles with near verbatim scripts. I insist, the personal can only be anti-

political — ungoverned and ungovernable unique humans whose liberation can have no

interceptors, interpreters, or redirectors” (2). For her, gender is only an ideology. Her anarchist goal is to create a classless, raceless, and genderless society where individuals are not determined by political categories but are encountered in terms of their Eigenheit. “There is no womanhood to exalt, no manhood to destroy,” she writes. “If anyone treats you in a way that you don’t want — deal with them as individuals” (8). Implicit in Katrina-Andrews’s “post-feminist anarchy,” then, is the idea of a neuter — an un-gendered locus that engenders various gender forms. For her, “respect for the individual” requires an acknowledgement of this anarchic space anterior to the formation of the subject, that is, prior to socially recognized personhood.

However, Patriarchal Poetry has proven more radical than “post-feminist anarchy.” While Katrina-Andrews isolates the social constructedness of gender, she does not question the

place of the gender subject.81 _{For her, before ideology and identity politics, there is a being, ego,}

or einzige that would be free in the absence of “spooks.” Like Mix and Spahr, she reproduces liberal-humanist assumptions about the primacy of the subject and its intrinsic nature. In

contrast, Patriarchal Poetry suggests that einzige comprises another metaphor. In the poem, not only is there no Eden, original plentitude, or innocence; there is no individual or state of

freedom. There is only anarchy: an efflorescence of signs, technologies, affects, trajectories, and intensities of which freedom and the individual are effects. For the poem, Katrina-Andrews’s criticism of feminism’s misrepresentation of women is justified, but she neglects anarchy’s extreme passivity. Representing the primacy of being, she massifies gender subjects and limits them to being eigentum. If Patriarchal Poetry is a “post-feminist anarchy,” it demystifies the ipse and liberty, and it proposes to anarchy the possibility that the individual and freedom will not be revealed when every hierarchy, inequality, and domination has been abolished. In the poem, the individual and freedom do not exist subtract for the other, and anarchy is

fundamentally a “neutral” style of constructing them.

Approaching this anarchic stylization implicit to Patriarchal Poetry, Lena Eckert’s postanarchist examination of Beatriz Preciado’s contrasexual manifesto and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” locates the subject in a place where gender, sex, and sexuality are

constantly being constructed by discursive regimes. She expresses the anarchist possibility with the phrase “anarchise perself!” (87). For Eckert, the pronoun “per” encompass every queer and gender subjectification; it is Antigone, whose formation at the site of substitution renders her for- the-other before she is “male” or “female.” “Anarchise perself!” refers to the construction of the anarchist (gender) subject, that is, “the contra-productivity of the genealogical cyborg who can rearrange per own embodiment, desires, and practices in resisting moments” (86). In other words, effectively glossing Patriarchal Poetry’s vulvamorphia, Eckert’s phrase refers to a body whose organization and value are not prescribed but are performatively produced through

technological prostheses that circumnavigate the naturalizing and hierarchical discourses of anatomical organization. For Eckert, this body is “becoming-resisting” (73; 87). Rather than “human,” it is flux capable of organizing otherwise than patriarchy, heteronormativity,

phallocentricism, and logocentricism, and open the possibility of “concetualis[ing] ourselves as non-hierarchically organized (internally as well as externally” (ibid.).

While Eckert’s “anarchise perself!” builds on Lewis Call’s command to “become who you are, create yourself as a masterpiece,” it does not reinforce the metaphysical subject. Like

Patriarchal Poetry’s vulvamorph, which emerges from nomic combinations of “lively” parts of

speech, Eckert’s cyborgian gender subject (“per”) is produced by arrangements and

rearrangements of prosthetic and technological organs on the body; the subject does not exist qua subject prior to this combination. Thus, “anarchise perself!” cannot be paraphrased “become who you are,” since the ontological identity would be the effect of the action’s fulfillment. While Call’s language falls short here, Eckert’s formulations effectively accommodate “the anarchy of the subject,” that is, the subject that is anti-gone, “against birth.” (Eckert even characterizes the cyborg, qua genealogical, as that which “takes into account the questions which it produces” [86].) Thus, even though “anarchise perself!” is not an imperative that registers the passive voice, it nevertheless captures the passivity that inflects the anarcha-feminist obligations “let her be” and “let her try.” In other words, unlike Call’s “make yourself as a masterpiece,” Eckert’s impearative is not an action performed by a subject; it is a performative always already enacted wherever the subject takes place.

The difference between Eckert’s anarchic gender subject and Patriarchal Poetry’s vulvamorph is that Eckert’s emphasis on “becoming-resisting” limits the subject to a reaction

against patriarchy and other forms of domination. For her, contrasexual and cyborgian practices are tactics for “reclaiming the body as a non-hierarchical structure”; they hold the promise of “creating spaces within a discourse from which counter-discourses can emerge” (88; 78). The neuter in Patriarchal Poetry, however, suggests a conversation older than discourses and

counter-discourses. Rather than a counter to patriarchal poetry, Patriarchal Poetry would be that which patriarchal poetry resists. It is not intrigued by the possibility of “building a new world in the shell of the old,” as though its cut-up effects could carve out a temporary autonomous zone within patriarchal language, where women might not be constructed as subordinate to men. Instead, it contains patriarchal poetry without dominating it or exercising hegemony; it is the “shell” itself, not the prefiguration of anarchy to come. Patriarchal poetry appears in Patriarchal

Poetry, but the latter shows that the former’s appearance is only an infinitesimal emission — not

beautiful, but tedious and dreary — amid other heaving flowerings and exfoliations. Counter to Eckert’s contrasexual practices, as Stein’s theme-and-variation and vulvamorph show, anarcha- feminist alternatives do not take place within that structure, but in its proximity, at its side.

For Patriarchal Poetry’s portrayal of gender, this difference implies that the anarchist gender subject is not defined by its resistance to patriarchy (or other hierarchical organizations, practices, and forms), but by its relation to the neuter that it is listening to and talking with. If Antigone is the model, “anarchise perself!” means to become a masterpiece in Stein’s sense: to

be made into a subject by the anarchy activated through the call of the other. But the meaningful

difference between Stein and Eckert is that Antigone, insofar as she represents the effect of this imperative practice, takes the place of the adversary. She sacrifices her life for the father; she gives her death to the brother. She is an “anenome” — one of the flowers that Stein refers to in

the poem, which would designate the gender subject without effacing the trace of “enemy.”

Patriarchal Poetry sustains its “inner fascist.” Rather than “killing” patriarchal poetry, the

poem’s substitution opens alternative vistas to it. In the poem, patriarchy is a risk; “close, close, close,” it speaks within Patriarchal Poetry and might make it a monster. But the poem that has both named and borrowed the name of patriarchal poetry indicates that the outside surrounding that aberration is infinite, and the infinite alternative forms that threaten to throng its borders incessantly check its development. For this reason, the poem manifests Antigone’s face. It is not simply that the poem’s anarchy is “against birth.” Put in the place of the father, the poem leads him from place to place, but the father is sightless and broken by his own inexorable turpitude. In making its life a sacrifice that gives place to the other, the poem puts the brother in the ground.

If Patriarchal Poetry is a masterpiece, it is not simply because it draws a circle around patriarchal poetry with neither center nor circumference, but because it is installed in patriarchal poetry. While the poem is “interesting” because it antedates and contains that aberrant institution, its stutters, echoes, and false starts simultaneously give expression to the other in it, that is, give place to the neuter that is patriarchal poetry’s intimate exterior, outside and inside, doubling it from within. In these terms, Antigone’s sacrifice figures forth the neuter’s passivity; her suicide registers the violence of patriarchal poetry dashed to bits upon itself.82

If Antigone is a bird — that final term of the floriographic list — she is only so mistakenly. The bird is a bat, a Tzotzile, and Antigone figures forth “the birds of the coming storm.” She scatters, dark dots rising into the air, and moves on the turbulence, a “daughter of the wind,” undulating on the taut thread that gives her life.83

CHAPTER 4 MYOCLONUS:

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS’ NOVA TRILOGY AND POST-LEFT ANARCHY

Rub out the word — there is no one there to hear it.

— William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later,” and most do not die, because they are already dead.

— Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life (51) If there were no anarchists, the state would have had to invent them. We know that on several occasions it has done just that. We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy.

— Bob Black “Anarchism and Other Impediments to Anarchy” From Silence rewrite the message that is you.

— William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine