Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference: Performance Lecture
Abstract: This performance lecture traces fundamental aspects of the Lyric ‘I’ as it traverses the confluences of its creation, development, and transformation across the English canon. The Lyric ‘I’ is the stuff of legends, reflected outward from ancient machinations of wily heroes encountering the possibility of identity for the first time, and reflected inward as contemporary myths harken back to this imagined homescape of antiquity, where the emerging Self was yet untarnished by the chaos and emptiness of modernity. I suggest that this ‘I’ continuously interacts with, and possibly participates in, the co-creation of the independent (disembodied) Western Subject. While many approaches to the history of Lyric represent a contemporary conception of the Self/Human Subject that is superimposed on the past, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) break down the ‘I’ at the opening to their introduction to the rhizome concept. They define themselves, individually, as already “several,” opening up into a crowd through their coauthorship. This sense of the multiple ‘I’, its identity embedded in the relational vectors of the rhizome, may offer a distinctly non-hegemonic understanding of the early ‘I’s of Antiquity, which I locate throughout the English canon of poetry as a means of navigating its hegemony-building history. The inquiry traces lines of thought and experience of the ‘Self’ across four symbolic concepts (muse, affect, cogito, and assemblage) as these concepts traverse the Lyric traditions of the English language. The essay is organized in homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (in a rhizomatic/fractal/assemblage structure), as an attempt to reflect the essay’s inquiry in a form that aligns with its content; the performance lecture will offer entry points to this work through artistic modes of presentation.