The Poetry Project

Workshop

Il/legible Opacities: Subversion, Surveillance, Improvisation; 5-Session Workshop with Kamelya Omayma Youssef

So, I’ve been trying to start a reading group about the internet on the internet. Among other limitations, I have been afraid to do so, in fear of the hyperobjects of the internet and surveillance and the accumulation of witness, complicity, and suffering amidst these slow and fast genocides. As a language worker, I am curious about poetry’s capacity to subvert and yet communicate. Let’s study together the planes on which exist fugitivity and form, the condition of being seen and the state of surveillance, the electric as a natural element and the internet as a corporately usurped commons. What are poetics within an ante-surveillant, insurgent space? Let’s study together and practice different ways to be, explore improvised utilities of language and connection. The constellation of texts informing this workshop and likely populating it include Tiziana Terranova’s After The Internet, excerpts of Moten and Harney’s Undercommons and possibly Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, certainly Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and some Sylvia Wynter, and poems and texts touching these arcs of thought. We’ll consider failures and refusals of translation, the freedom of parataxis and the techno-psycho-fascisms of such forms. I hope to go beyond the constraints heretofore laid out, and produce poems and texts emerging from our collective space including our process notes and writings. I "hate" the internet but I use it to survive, and I want to figure out how to be in it without being taken by it, especially without being taken as a commodity (and even then, what?). This might be in vain, and we might be doomed, like Etel says, but at least we’ll have tried. Like an asymptote.

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