'kissing / configuration' : notes on Eleanor Perry’s Unspeakable Patterns of the House

Sledmere, Maria (2022) 'kissing / configuration' : notes on Eleanor Perry’s Unspeakable Patterns of the House. [Review] (http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue28/Sledm...)

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Abstract

Is it possible to feel, in your flesh, the way in which that feeling, that flesh, is also abstracted? What would it mean to be conscious of — to 'know' — your own abstraction in a way that turns upon a visceral sensation? In her book, Theory of the Gimmick (2020), Sianne Ngai proffers the visceral as a response to abstraction, even as the terms seem oxymoronic: the visceral's 'affectivity and corporeality seem to have made 'visceral' resistant to theory', while the ''abstract'' is over-deployed in 'many discourses'.ii In Eleanor Perry's recent pamphlet, Unspeakable Patterns of the House (salò press, 2020), lyric is eviscerated in a playful organology of bodily forms (human and more-than) and abstraction haunts the text through an understor(e)y of patterning and redaction in poetry's house of data. Borrowing Bernard Stiegler's term ‘general organology’ — a way of thinking the pharmacological co-relations and mutualism of human, technical and social organs — I want to argue that Perry's work embodies a vascular imaginary of nervous systems, life streams, 'nerve-riddled tissue', 'neutrino pulp' (2, 3) and metabolisms of abstraction, sensation and cellular process. Their precise, high-definition material liveliness offers a counterpoetics of the anthropocene which operates in the thick, simultaneous and glitching spacetime of an ecological oikos.

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