On Writing Bridges after Donna Haraway
I come into contact with a killer when I hold my birthday presents. When I lift that glossy book up and adore, I know the plastic waste will drop to the ocean floor.
This is a bridge between points of contact. The history of the hyper-quarantined self (the isolated self) and the history of inventions has designed this impolite transaction between points of desire and points of fear. I fear the plastic, but I desire what is beneath; the skin of a culled planet is torn apart as I reveal the concrete signifier of my desires. But in 2022, it seems crass to speak about plastic. The need for human excellency - the need to say something completely unique - has meant that I cannot talk about plastic, and even now, the need to write travels to shame.
But I have come to love the glass forest that I occasionally live within. This glass forest is the lettuce and artichoke bowls that sit on my partner’s counter. A tomato bowl, a porcelain ecosystem. This bridge, between nature and the man-made, is a destructive bridge in how it attempts to destroy the human with the plant. It takes me to the outside world, to the swarm and the regeneration of the emerald leaf curled as a ball of divine energy, and therefore, it is a bridge-burner. It wants to free itself from the metal world, the money world, the human world that churns on (the human does not want to be anything else but a companion species to the lettuce leaves born in the dirt). We should have never built the bridge that told us we are inherently excellent. Bring it down like Babel, let the human be indiscernible from the animal. Let us not be ‘half dust / half deity’ as Byron shames us to be, but let us be the whole dust entirely.
Language bridges have always interested me. The shift from Old English to Middle English was the birth of a great bridge for words and their place on the page. Synthetic languages produce grammatical functions not through their word order, but largely through the use of inflections. I favour this image - it is not the straight bridge of meaning. It seems more organic, almost fungal, in the growth of a word, and the shift from a synthetic language to an analytic language straightened it out. It was a severance - an anti-Frankenstein move.
The concept of intertextuality means that there are countless bridges across textualities that can be born in language. A particularly uncomfortable English student, here at Durham, will declare with annoyance that no, a text cannot be endlessly analysed. Or, better yet, that there are more valuable analyses than others. This is not really about the text, however, but rather, it is about the social function of the text. The text alone can be transformed into the hyper-nightmare of surplus apparatuses of interpretation, but to an audience, there are limits (they cannot have that many bridges).
It is a form of border control between the bridges of thought and the bridges of possibility. It is also a form of control of the bridge that lies between the text and the analytic text. I want to write literary theory like a sequel to the text, and I want the textuality of both that text and mine to dissolve into the messy play of points of contact. I want textualities to be cannibalistic. Let them eat each other up, but without the formal occasion of a feast. Let them gorge. Eating alone in a black gown, the candle gives me the usual look. I feel the pressure of the room. What are formals but the bridge of sustenance to the border of constraint?