with heartache & chin love.

The (Not-so) Newer Poetics of Survival Theater
February 2010
By Feliz L. Molina a.k.a. Bebe, Flip, Clip, Whatever You want me to Be

We feel it more than ever this need to be continuously new, newer than new, ahead of the new. In our glitter pony Digital Age where tele-communication is as rampant and potent its ever been, marking and tracing the self's every move to call, email, text, and video-chat for varying degrees of purposes and wants, where physical absence and mobility is motioned and prolonged by a ghostly influx of mobile communication, and where a kaleidoscope of places (the Internet as a convention to break down "here-ness" or "there-ness") are now visible, accessible, retrievable, downloadable and uploadable, coded and readymade available at the tips of our fingers, it seems every right of the so-called poet in this age to feel anxious, hopeless, and excited while riding electrical tensions between form and content, all of which occur in the greater theater of the poet's life; if the events of "life" itself appears to stream by like a seamless weave of commercials and internet-television shows, if life is characterized by anything one can point their finger to from one inch or continent away.

The poet, sometimes exhausted, lonely, tired of financial constraints and yet stimulated by them inhabits and retreats into an inner world conjured and developed by these very constraints where, alone, with one's thoughts in public or private spaces need only the bare essentials of a laptop to retreat further into the imaginings of an alternate world not so alternate in that the blurring of the two is where the poetic reaches sanity's limit; this limit is where the poet is able push pause on the daily mediated reality to extract what can be taken from it and used as material (for the poem) via language footwork which manifests the following:

1. A document of the poet's existence within the bounds of socioeconomic determinism.
2. A re-hashing of the mediated world and then relayed into a poem.
3. An interpretation and investigation into the poet's im(mediate)e reality.
4. The sense that one's life operates as a portable living theater.
5. The playfulness of the poet's holy thought pattern taking place within the theater of a capitalist economy.
6. A ridiculous uncertainty of subjectivity in a poem due to post-structuralist critiques of the "first-person subject".
7. A sense of attempting to re-claim subjectivity in a poem which can be viewed as also a gesture towards claiming one's subjectivity in a mediated reality.
8. A genuine sense of love for human expression in varying art forms no matter how commercial, avant-garde, ironic, kitsch, sincere or endearing.
9. Actively or passively participating in a re-thinking of love, possibilities for love, or learning about love through our heroes whoever they might be.
10. Feeling caught between emotion and technology as though they are opposing entities.

A problem of the theater is a problem with a heightened and diluted mediated reality offering us an insane amount of ways of how to live, think, eat, sleep, dress, etc. The theater after all, is a diluted mediated reality in itself inasmuch as reality is a perpetual theater where a small percentage of endless billions of moments have the chance of ever being recorded, distorted, animated, archived, and distributed by various ever-evolving old and new medias; consider the wonders of video sharing sites like Youtube or Vimeo. One can't help but cry out to Echo and Narcissus for remarks on mimesis with regard to market-driven advertising in its agenda to sculpt public and private identities. The body itself begins as the most reliable cite for an ongoing Poetics of Survival Theater in that it is through the body alone that existence, thought, and articulation occurs. The body is where the traffic of information (manipulated or true) flows through; a digestion of various kinds of information passing through the poet who decides what to do with it or how to incorporate it into his/her own daily theater by re-mixing, directing, and producing words on a page while staying close to a mysterious force that keeps the theater from shutting down in a network of multiples theaters. If anyone has looked at a visualization of the various routes of a portion of the Internet, one will see that it uncannily resembles a neural network of the brain--and for no goddam reason.

Artaud told us the world is killing and devouring us. But today, the world is much bigger and smaller and the thing which binds and unites us globally is evolving old and new medias and communication which itself is also the very thing that is killing us, robbing the soul from the body, leaving us out in the virtual cold if we can not keep up with what is new. Imagine a world just like this, because it’s the exact same one we live in. Unlike Artaud and Marinetti who relentlessly believed theater can heal the ills of society, it is no longer applicable--their achievements simultaneously succeeded and failed like day and night. THE THEATER ALONE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND A BREAKTHROUGH IN CONSCIOUSNESS. Let alone be the one responsible for such a large task. IT WILL TAKE A REVOLUTION IN INDIVIDUALS-- A COLLECTIVE SUBJECTIVITY--TO DREAM UP A QUALITY OF LIVING OTHER THAN ONE'S OWN WHICH THE THEATER SHOULD NOT MIMIC. IN FACT, THE THEATER NEEDS TO STAY OUT OF IT, FOR THERE IS ALREADY TOO MUCH THEATER OCCURRING EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME. And this is what I dare call a Theater of Survival produced by market advertising in which consumable objects are precisely the props for existence at large and for this reason, there is no household that is uninteresting--in fact, the more uninteresting, the more interesting which involves a symbolic relationship between the self and what it consumes, for what's consumed gives context and decorates the theater of daily existence.

A Poetics of Survival Theater begins and operates with the basic need and drive to exist everyday for whatever reasons they might be. The Survival Car Insurance commercial is a great fucken spoof of this. It begins with dependency. An existential theater of pure dependency at the expense of the total production of the self and it is the poet's natural inclination to fight against this by taking on the perception of absurdity, finding and exposing painful truths, making use of or refusing the choking hands of nihilism, or happily surrendering to the production of the self only if their integrity is so solid that any brand name label begins to mutate according to their own poet's way of being and (by way of imagination) defamiliarizing (ostranenie) the brand for one's own familiar-ness of the self. It’s an American Apparel t-shirt. But it’s an American Apparel t-shirt that smells like me--all the time. It’s an Apple Macbook but it’s an Apple Macbook that bears only my fingerprints on the keys. It’s just a box of Captain Crunch cereal but damn how interesting it looks when I hold it. You get the idea. A personalization of popular goods incorporated into the poet's survival theater is what occurs everyday, all the time. "Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations- from our selves, from others, from worlds. The fiction is the individual has decomposed at the same speed that it was becoming real." (Invisible Committee, 8) Lifestyle magazines, fashion, politics, art, science all have the power to offer one common thing and that is, an identity to conform to. This form of self-identification is a mark of theater in itself; rhetoric one must be interested and willful enough to participate in. And how does this influence the external-body; clothe and decorate our bodies the way we do? David Krasner, editor of Theory In Theater 1900-2000 asks "Should theater remain faithful to real-world representation or challenge the veracity of mimesis by cutting against the grain of realistic presentation?" What exactly, might we ask, is a "real-world" in the first place, much less a realistic presentation of it? Baudrillard's thesis that "only the cultures of the West have developed a category, a notion and an ideology of the real and have produced, and reproduced, a real world" is something to consider not only in the theater, but the daily living theater of the poet; the poetics of the Poet's Survival Theater and simply the financial means in which a poet (and any artist at that) must survive.

Where do I go? Where do I belong? How do I get there? With what money? Who will hire someone crazy like me? How can I get prescription drugs without healthcare? I'm going where there's free Wifi. I'll Blog you later. Fuck it I'm going to live off student loans and move to Europe and not pay it back. Hooray, I got a teaching gig for however many weeks! Should I teach English in Saudi Arabia, for real? I'm selling my car. I need to borrow $500. Someone's publishing my chapbook--no one will read it but who cares. I applied to a dozen MFA programs--again--Hopefully one will take me. How will I get a job after an MFA? Where are you going? Can I come with you? I need to get out of here. Text me. Tweet it. What, you're not on Facebook anymore--again?

And yet, this is the real world we live in scrounging up change, bills, and loans to make it to the next place for some peace of sanity as though the theater has no exit doors just endless space crowded with the effects of socioeconomic circumstance, real-time, telecommunication, destiny, chance, objects, imagination and the list goes on like a game of mad-libs. All the while, catastrophic earthquakes worldwide, the highest death rate of starvation known to humankind, growing shortages of clean water, etc. etc. etc.--online or on-print the swift stroke of such catastrophes while we manage to stay on the fringes, viewing it from afar while remaining content and wading in the waters of a purely visual and audio-based relay of information as though all of it were a dream.

The task of the Poet is basically whatever anyone wants it to be. But let me suggest for the poet not to blindly reject the ideologies of a mediated society and to be informed by it so as to never stop challenging the multiple "authors" which design and set up the very narratives of product advertising. It is the narratives of product advertising that the poet views from the peephole of her own tiny separate imagination. It is the manufactured narratives on the side of advertising working to penetrate through our own peepholes. But still, if I am forced to decide between Angels or generic toilet paper at Walgreens, don't I have every right to base my judgment on the aesthetic difference of the labels? Don't I have every right to be ironically amused by the ridiculousness of the design and therefore, succumb to it as a way of redeeming myself in the hilarity of it because, ultimately, I am forced to choose? There needs to be an evaluation of mass consumer products as symbols and relics in a mythological media induced era where the poet dwells; if the poet can dig holes and roads through the mass pile up of these narratives and manage to still be able to write a poem that is as genuine and true as anything else. If the poet can survive in this theater then there is no telling what is possible on the vaster plane of existence outside of poetry, if, such an outside is even possible for the poet just as there seems no way out of the theater of daily living.