The various text and sound rooms of my installation Middling English (2010) were linked together by a series of lines, planes of lines stretched and installed across the space. The entire work was shaped by long stretches of thin metal wire, which drew up the space diagrammatically. The structure was held together at one end by four heavy suspended weights while each line was tied down at the other end by a small cleat bolted to the floor. This architectural sketching structured links and trajectories between the various pieces in the show. It allowed me to think about the way language also structures both bodily and mental movement.
Middling English, Photos by Steve Shrimpton, 2010.
There are lines that draw from one node to another, one bell to the next, towards the architectonic structure, spatial resonant membranes of interconnections and tendencies. There are the obvious ones, the official line, the family line. The power lines, wired and electrical, electromagnetic landscapes, fibrous and spun. There are lines of travel, trade routes, blood routes. Intense seasonal species’ traffic, migratory paths. Fields of uproots, departure knots, severance of the connects. Umbilical cords, lianas, plant ropes, hanging moss, epiphytes, headphones. Plumblines, sonars. Infralines of inseams, subvocalizations. The fine lines that crisscross between belonging, adhering, disappearing. Dissenting lines or lines of flight that sustain or dissolve under lines of fire, buzz lines, rumours. Songlines, memory structures, great pickup lines. Outlines like edges, silhouettes, phasms, ghostings, x-rays. They set the wider configurations, the threadings that fall in under a future perfect of English as language practice, what I call Middling English.
I then proceed to make four points. Four short points about Middling English. The point about the midden. The point about the middling. The point about the middle. The point about the meddle. The midden, the middling, the middle, the meddle.
The midden is method, and style. Intercepted notions of the past. The tracing-up of re-emergents. The middling is a long embedded soak. Obstacle to flux and larger access. Language policies. Occupation, not occupancy. The middle is slang. Processing of new literacy tools. Networks and distributive modes of knowledge. Writing in culture. The meddle is collective awareness. Denaturalization of one’s personal and cultural premise. Getting lost. Physical and mental effort. New apprenticeship and transformed commitment.
Spoken, transmitted, inscribed languages are at the root of the imagination of writing. They highlight the social machines that underpin the work: the voices, the languages, the pleasures, the complex nexus of cultural and literary motivations with their access markers, their specific narratives, existential tropes, their polemical procedures and formal devices. It is the writer’s role to test out, provoke the naturalized edges and bounds of language use and rules. She mines language for what is always moving, always escaping. To travel at the heels of writing activates reclaiming zones, fictitious collective memory.
So much holds our bodies, our lives, to separate identitarian account. How does one shift the representational stick-up from the face of the speaker? I repeat what many have said, that poetic or art language must not implicitly be held to account of identities and national language, the seductions of literary history, or the frequently fetishistic methodologies of art movements, but rather seek, far and close, the indicators and practices of language in flux, of thought in making: pleasured language, pressured language, language in heated use, harangued language, forms of language revolutionized by action, polemical language structures that propose an intense, deliberate reappraisal of the given world and its given forms. More often than not, we each use a voice that speaks for us before we get to speak. Quite apart from the ideological implications and beyond palliative arts methodologies, this is why so many of us spend so much of our lives and imagination working at the undoing of a voice or identity we do not wish to be tagged as and questioning the methods of environments we might not wish to represent. It is through this confusing, seemingly self-defeating process of dissociation, of “disloyalty,” that other forms of allegiances are made manifest and other conductor channels can be generated.
To meddle with English is to be in the flux that abounds, the large surf of one’s clouded contemporaneity. It is a process of social and mental excavation explored to a point of extremity. One that reaches for the irritated, excitable uncertainties of our embodied spoken lives by working with, taking apart, seeing through the imposed complicities of linguistic networks and cultural scaffolds. One which is not only prompted to recognize what it wishes to fight against: what sedates, what isolates, what immobilizes, what deadens, what perpetuates. But works at it tactically, opportunistically, utilizing at will and with relish the many methods, tools, abilities, and experiential attitudes it needs. Making a workshop of the surrounding world. Oiling creativity and artistry with critical spirit, since there can be no revolt nor renewal without creative impulse, without anarchic pleasure, without a leap in the dark.
It means implicating one’s own life through the gestures and events of one’s work. Taking the risk of spitting it out, and of being spat out. There is only so much one should want to do to pass, to be passable, to appear to belong to today. Anonymity — &onymity — of the writer whose masks have fallen deeply into the pits and currents of l&guage. Rebirth of the songer. Intense magnetism of lines that go through the body like radial songs.
My personal sense of linguistic belonging was created not by showing the best English I can speak or write, but the most flexible one. To make and irritate English at its epiderm, and at my own.
Something crosses over comes. The borders are as long as the journey, etched in. Words disappear from all sides of the borders. A sudden surge of sweat on crossing the border. National, regional, urban borders, unknown streets, spaces, places, bodies, names, faces. Crossing into something, or someone. The borderline eats up the overspill, makes a long line of corpses. Dialogue is conflict, said the German playwright Heiner Müller. The apprenticeship of dialogue as encounter is necessarily a meddling of boundary, a heightening of points of internalized resistance or ideological differences. One’s comprehension meddled with. Then, let us imagine it as contact, a point of uncovery. Rather than retaliation, a point of sharpened attention. Transitive directionality, transitive awareness.
Thus, the meddle is collective awareness. Denaturalization of one’s personal and cultural premise. Getting lost. Physical and mental effort. New apprenticeship and transformed commitment.
1 Excerpt from Middling English. See the full catalogue version in Caroline Bergvall, Middling English (John Hansard Gallery Publications, 2011); for the final version, see Caroline Bergvall, Meddle English: New and Selected Texts (Nightboat Books, NY, 2011 (2013)).