Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Natalia Gonzalez
Differences may hinder one from facing the core challenges of living in shared spaces.
Contributing to this, normalization can sustain difference so that it is respected/reaffirmed. Or, and this is the irony, normalization can assimilate difference to the point of undifferentiation.
A person can live in disconnect with others to the extent that the most intimate relation with another can become one´s own reflection in the mirror or in the virtual network with others in cyber reality. 1 Peter Sloterdijk proposes a new reading of Western history in terms of “spaces of coexistence” (bubbles, globes, and foams). On this account, he introduces the pathology of an individualistic regime:
“For sphere-deficient private persons, their lifespan becomes a sentence of solitary confinement; egos that are extensionless, scarcely active and lacking in participation stare out through the media window into moving landscapes of images. It is typical of the acute mass cultures that the moving images have become far livelier than most of their observers: a reproduction of animism in step with modernity.” (Sloterdijk: Bubbles, Spheres I, 73)
In North America, social differentiations are routinely framed in a preposterous language of what amounts to be racial groupings. As a resident “alien”, I am affixed with the misnomer “Hispanic”- a term strategically made official during the Reagan administration. There was already a self-applied title of “Latin American” that is based on our geographical location, our shared, heterogeneous space. More recently, subdivisions appear in applications: “white-Hispanic” or “non-white Hispanic”, which leave me even more baffled as to which ancestors I should remain loyal. Either way, the “Hispanic” label puts a blanket of ignorance over plurality and over the reality of statistic monitoring- normalizing the difference in order to track the divisions.
Normalization remains an unassuming collaborator in this matter because the dominant ideology is so corrosive that it devours even the capacity to remain critical to it. Its practical reasoning obscures the possibility to see a future and to review the past in any other way. So retrospection is not immune to normalization either.
In looking at the glossary of words relating to naturalization, an idea came to me to make poems of them.
What I tried to do through poetry and photography was to conjoin groupings of words linked through dichotomy and association. The cut-out words allowed for editing to take hold of this concrete poem, to align them in numerous ways, to reshape meaning through form, to add verbs to link rigid nouns. The poem was caught in patterns of repetition. Click here to view the process.
In his narrative entitled “Repetition”, Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “there is no repetition. [He] verified it by having it repeated in every possible way.” Perhaps an
open window between this writing and that process can allow the echoes to scatter for a while.
1 Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres I: Bubbles. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2011 (pp. 192-205)
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Natalia Gonzalez
Differences may hinder one from facing the core challenges of living in shared spaces.
Contributing to this, normalization can sustain difference so that it is respected/reaffirmed. Or, and this is the irony, normalization can assimilate difference to the point of undifferentiation.
A person can live in disconnect with others to the extent that the most intimate relation with another can become one´s own reflection in the mirror or in the virtual network with others in cyber reality. 1 Peter Sloterdijk proposes a new reading of Western history in terms of “spaces of coexistence” (bubbles, globes, and foams). On this account, he introduces the pathology of an individualistic regime:
“For sphere-deficient private persons, their lifespan becomes a sentence of solitary confinement; egos that are extensionless, scarcely active and lacking in participation stare out through the media window into moving landscapes of images. It is typical of the acute mass cultures that the moving images have become far livelier than most of their observers: a reproduction of animism in step with modernity.” (Sloterdijk: Bubbles, Spheres I, 73)
In North America, social differentiations are routinely framed in a preposterous language of what amounts to be racial groupings. As a resident “alien”, I am affixed with the misnomer “Hispanic”- a term strategically made official during the Reagan administration. There was already a self-applied title of “Latin American” that is based on our geographical location, our shared, heterogeneous space. More recently, subdivisions appear in applications: “white-Hispanic” or “non-white Hispanic”, which leave me even more baffled as to which ancestors I should remain loyal. Either way, the “Hispanic” label puts a blanket of ignorance over plurality and over the reality of statistic monitoring- normalizing the difference in order to track the divisions.
Normalization remains an unassuming collaborator in this matter because the dominant ideology is so corrosive that it devours even the capacity to remain critical to it. Its practical reasoning obscures the possibility to see a future and to review the past in any other way. So retrospection is not immune to normalization either.
In looking at the glossary of words relating to naturalization, an idea came to me to make poems of them.
What I tried to do through poetry and photography was to conjoin groupings of words linked through dichotomy and association. The cut-out words allowed for editing to take hold of this concrete poem, to align them in numerous ways, to reshape meaning through form, to add verbs to link rigid nouns. The poem was caught in patterns of repetition. Click here to view the process.
In his narrative entitled “Repetition”, Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “there is no repetition. [He] verified it by having it repeated in every possible way.” Perhaps an
open window between this writing and that process can allow the echoes to scatter for a while.
1 Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres I: Bubbles. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2011 (pp. 192-205)
