Saturday, September 04, 2004
 --image: Marketing Strategies
Poems on the Matter of Naming:
First, there is one of kari's, from hir long poem, "obedience." (thanks kari!--for this very provocative poem.) Then there is a found poem of mine, written after reading a strange poem about the imperative to name, at a Marketing site on Google not long ago (see link in last paragraph below, as well as in the poem, and the same is problematic in the site from which came the image above, opening this post).
Today, after i read kari's poem, i looked up that one of mine and posted it, too, because I liked the conjunctions I found between them on the matter of *Naming*. That's one of the benefits, too, of As-Is-- which is a fantastic group-blog, one of my favorites--the benefit being that seeing everyone's poems together creates a rhetorical evironment where the "moment of discourse" (see Foucault) becomes like or acts in ways that are recombinatory, thus, the poems often can be said to interact on multiple (subtle or at times also overt) levels in ways that are intertextual and create a cross-sectioning or webbing or weaving of new ways of thinking of more poems. It's quite pleasing.
As for the phenomenon of *Naming*: it is a continuous matter of concern for writers, in so many ways--for, we have to name things (that is what writers do, essentially), yet naming is also a way of limiting, placing, cutting something off or away from other things/people. It is a paradoxical phenomenon. (Following here is the link to the Marketing site mentioned above:) In consumerist culture, where the goal of marketing is to create and promote brands, often the worst part of exclusionary cutting off between things becomes so seemingly second-nature that our critical consciousness can easily become unaware of the consequential damage done by our apparent need to name in order to consume. Often not a pretty picture of human beings, cognition, everyday social life & culture. There is plenty to consider in all that, for all of us, but it is key to the knowledge of the consequences of naming that many suffer from it, everyday, in many ways. Naming seems necessary, and branding has contributed to that apparent necessity, in ways that are deceptive: not essential nor beneficial, though branding makes it seem so. Think racial profiling, eh? Or gendering. Or... the list goes on. Bureaucracy lives off this need to name. To categorize, to fix physical energies that are inherently fluid, in place. That may often be useful. But that use has also shown its less than admirable side in western cultural ways.
Well, I want here to say thanks to kari, once again, for being an inspiration in so many ways!
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