Sonnets From Cultural Studies: XLIII
In what manner is my “love” for you operationalized?
Allow me to enumerate the methodologies governing this construct.
My “love” can be contextualized within a framework
comprising the totality of lived experiences my “soul”—
to utilize a nebulous if convenient ontological notion—
can be hypothesized to attain during periods of (dis)connection
from its groundedness in the phenomenology of being-and-grace-in-oneself.
There is a profundity to this “love” that achieves equity
with the (re)production, on a daily basis, of deeply sublimated, unspoken requirements
that are situationalized atop the hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943),
forming a coherent backdrop that is illuminated—figuratively and metaphorically—
both by a mythologized “sun-figure” emblematic of (male) potency
and by a minimized re-presentation thereof, in the form of delicate (female) candlelight.
Furthermore, in order to counterbalance my complicity
in social and historical hierarchies of knowledge,
in a deliberate effort to stake a claim for both the import and impact
of emancipatory pedagogies distinct from past oppressive approaches (Freire, 1970),
as well as to foreground my project to decolonize dominant interpretations
of the embeddedness of my hegemonic (dis)appropriation of social/cultural paradigms,
I make apparent my “love” in a manner devoid of ambivalence or restraint,
centering my amorous affect within a
mise-en-scène of unbridled expression,
not incomparable to the ways in which the discourse of “right” is (p)(re)constructed
and ultimately enacted by those “doing revolution” and “being change.”
In order for the operationalization of my amorous expression
to achieve an embodied participation devoid of any sublimated desire
for laudatory recognition—however meager—and lest my interrogation
of its production be presumed to privilege a reductionist construction
whereby knowing is assumed to be a superior stance to inquiry,
I employ an epistemological lens that more narrowly focuses my analysis
of the polysemy of imaginal interactions that constitute “love,”
aiming for the simple, dodging the simplistic, foregrounding my performance of “love”
in a reflexive enactment shorn of impurity and artifice;
a “love” that, in theory and praxis, must and does stand alone.
Situationalized, as I am, at the intersections of myriad psychosocial formations
acting in both resistance and subjection to the oppressions of a dis/remembered past,
my “love” is informed by the meaning-making that is enacted at these sites—
les lieux des mémoires—and the knowledges that emerge and are then engaged,
participatory and framed in a fully problematized conceptualization
of “human-being”—a zone of “hyphen work” only lately acknowledged—
that refuses to assign any degree of (un)importance to and thus (de)legitimize
“mind” or “body”—Apollo and Dionysus in accord at last—
slacking the reins on emotional engagement and allowing, after long suppressing,
an expression of passion more commonly (and of course quite problematically)
associated with “grief” (for its own sake?) or, to depart this course slightly
and tack toward theological waters, “faith,” particularly of the kind
possessed, yet ultimately (and perhaps all too tragically) discarded, by children.
My “love” for you, in an explicit assertion of the dislocation of internality,
is (re)(drawn) in parallel motion—a simple yet expressive metaphorical construction
borrowed from music (a linguistic trope all the more appropriate in its ability
to hint at the melodic qualities inherent in the “love” described thereby)—
with a “love” no longer kinetic, a “love” long in disuse, a “love” forsaken,
a “love” in fact boldly cast off, its shackles in pieces on the idea-strewn battleground
where
sophia waged war on
theos and triumphed, its rule to this day unchallenged;
I speak of course of the “love” for things sacrosanct, that for things holy—
it is a “love” that moves and changes, making temporality an active condition
of interiority, figured as a bounded but volatile condition: the edge of a shadow
across the ground; lingering smoke encircling, intoxicating and asphyxiating;
humidity embracing, and suffocating, and an expanding, sensual body—
it is precisely this “love,” controlled, put in its place, enclosed,
included by its very exclusion (Derrida, 1988/1991) as it slips back and forth
across a boundary that divides/joins the sacred and the profane,
that I actualize as I perform it. Time as a (subjective) construct
is often contextualized as that-which-governs-all, a sort of overseer,
an obviously anthrocentric perspective and yet one from which I am unwilling
to fully divorce my inquiry, for it informs my analytic itinerary
and makes more patent than might otherwise be possible
the dualities at work—Self-Other, here-there, now-then, never-forever—
the spatiotemporally alternating cognitive configurations that indeed
are devoid of categorizational activitionalizing in the absence
of the very sort of governance implied by that account; hence I employ it here,
in my observation, perhaps tentative at first, of the tendency of interactors
to localize or embed their relationships into designated times and places,
an impulse due at least in part, I would suggest, to the reassurance this provides—
what is “now” “k(now)n,” what is “here” is “everyw(here)”—
and one I cannot conceal in my own erection of an edifice that disavows
any sense of terminality or the loss of
esse, that declaims,
in its structurationality and very being-as-it-is, that my “love” knows no end,
that my desire is ongoing—produced although it is as no more
than my consumption of you as the Other, a production mediated,
for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), by advertising’s creation of false need,
necessities inscribed on a false pretext, mere simulacrum,
of instant (self-)gratification, the ability to “have it your way, right away”
transposed from mere option to enthusiastically obeyed requirement—
that at both macro and micro levels operates without interruption—
no superatomic/subatomic divide here, no grand unifying theory to seek—
that has/will/is/continue(d)(ing), a constant throughout my life,
subject to no externalities, immutable even when this overseer—
time, “God,” animate it as you wish—has its way, and I stand, fear(ful)less,
at what is too often operationalized as “the ultimate boundary”;
indeed, that can and will only enlarge and perhaps take on new meaning
as well as reinforce old in the categories and interactionalizations
that are evoked by and embedded in our new surroundings.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and
schizophrenia II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1991). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human
sciences. In D. Lodge (Ed.), Modern criticism and theory: A reader (pp. 108-123).
London: Longman. (Original work published 1988)
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogía del oprimido [Pedagogy of the
oppressed] (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Herder & Herder.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological
Review, 50, 370-396.
