I am thrilled to announce that the thrilling SAIT group (Arts Images Textes) in France has accepted my proposal for a talk for the 2018 58th SAES conference at Nanterre University in Paris, 7-9 juin 2018 on the topic of Revolution(s) where Angela Davis (can you believe it!) is the invited speaker of honor for the general SAES Keynote.
My talk title and information are below in case you wish to check them out. I have some work to do before then for this and feel thrilled to be engaging more deeply with the writing of Bhanu Kapil and Jacques Sivan--two authors I amire personally, read and reread avidly and whose work I have addressed separately in quite different manners during previous conferences. Bringing the two together and under the umbrella of Cyborgs is going to be a fabulous experience for me!
My talk title and information are below in case you wish to check them out. I have some work to do before then for this and feel thrilled to be engaging more deeply with the writing of Bhanu Kapil and Jacques Sivan--two authors I amire personally, read and reread avidly and whose work I have addressed separately in quite different manners during previous conferences. Bringing the two together and under the umbrella of Cyborgs is going to be a fabulous experience for me!
A Cyborgian Metaphysics of the Poetic Self:
Bhanu Kapil and Jacques Sivan
abstract proposal by
Jennifer K Dick,
MdC, UHA Mulhouse, Labo de recherche: ILLE
This comparative talk plans to explore the imagined
Cyborg as self and the metaphysical questions this alternative, dual reality
imposes on the writing of poetic autobiography as seen in works by
Amercan-based of Indian background author Bhanu Kapil (specifically Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Leon
Works, 2006) and French author Jacques Sivan (specifically Notre Mission, Al Dante, 2018 and the manuscripts for this work).
In both texts the individual is subsumed or paralleled by a kind of avatar, the
cyborgian body (A.I. mechanical vs biological). The exploration of
autobiography within a space of multiple identities (both digital and
biological), reader-text interface, gender, desire and sexuality, travel/migration,
and notions of truth when speaking of the author/narrator/speaker as “I” are
subjected to innovative and complex renderings because of this cybernetic
virtual reality. In the case of Kapil, the desire seems to be to render the
past into current multiplicities of identity whereas for Sivan the result, as
he composes this unfinished manuscript while dying of cancer and becoming, as
he said directly, a kind of real cyborg as his biological functions became increasingly
mechanized due to interventions by medical science, is to project himself
beyond his life into his alter ego, Aborijak. In Sivan’s case, this Cyborg of
the last generation, “more advanced than Hal 2000”, and who will reach into the
future, into our now, the next now, as current and future generations of readers interface
with the text, also touches on Cryogenics, AI post-biological mortality
projecting the author into an imagined digital immortality: the book
literally becomes “Notre Mission”.
These works are not digital
creations, but they explore the metaphoric and metaphysical issues inherent in
our internet-connected increasingly robotic worlds where existence,
interchange, and digital reality subsume the “real real”—raising the question
of what is lived experience, and how do contemporary artists and authors engage
with this question in the digital era?
Critical work supporting my close examination
of Kapil and Sivan’s books will come from many of the books cited in the SAIT group's CFP,
such as Donna Haraway, Katherine N Hales or Jens Hauser and may also extend into authors which they have listed but which I am only now reading for the first time—in particular Aarseth, Bontems, Braidoti or Vial’s works and the
collection Le sujet digital.
Bio note:
Jennifer K Dick competed her PhD at Paris III
in Comparative Literature in 2009 and has since 2010 been working as a MdC at
UHA, Mulhouse. She is a specialist in 20th-21st century
text and image work, specifically in poetry and language-based visual art work,
though has also published in the arena of translation in social sciences. She
is currently the French co-organizing partner in the 18-month long Arts and Humanities
Research Council grant-receiving fellowship for a series of 3 conferences on “Poetry
in Expanded Translation” 2017-2018. The first was translation as rewriting
(held at The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London April 2017), the
second on intersemiotic translation between text and image (held at UHA,
Mulhouse in Nov 2017) and third is on Visual Sound and translation as re-sounding
work (to be held in Bangor, Wales in April 2018).
http://congres2018.saesfrance.org/