As part of the Nonsite Collective’s “Poetics of Disablement” curriculum,
Bhanu Kapil will facilitate a discussion around a short selection from
Elizabeth Grosz’s *Chaos, Territory, Art,* available as a pdf at
nonsitecollective.org. To access the text, look for this announcement
under events, and then scroll down until you see the attachment.

Saturday September 20, at 3 935 Natoma,
between 10th and 11th, and between Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART

For information regarding wheelchair accessibility, please contact

rob[dot]halpern[at]gmail[dot]com.

About her approach, Bhanu writes:

<< I’ve been reading Elizabeth Grosz on sensation and futurity: “There is
an involuted and oblique relation between the energies of sexual
selection…the attraction to and possible attainment of sexual (though
not necessarily copulative) partners — human and otherwise — and the
forces and energies of artistic production and consumption” (from *Chaos,
Territory, Art*). That the intensity felt in a body is part of what
allows it to extend into a territory or cross between domains – - acts of
pleasure, acts of sexual selection, as analogous to the process of making
transgressive works of art. Not sure. Am thinking about immigrant
bodies, refugee bodies, bodies made hybrid by divergence on a continuum
from prosaic (the South-Asian grad student) to traumatic. Have been
thinking about numbness, about hyper-vigilance, about what happens to the
flow of “energies of sexual selection” in a body that’s at the limit of
possible sensations. This as depending too on class status. On how
desirability is worked out in the port of arrival. My question, then, for
writers/artists working through a poetics of disablement — towards hybrid
works, in particular — is there any language we can think through
together, about the experience of hybridity/fusion in the body — and how
might this affect our transgressive relationships to the space of the
book, the territory of document, our ability to attain the kind of
couplings/intensifications/resonant physical gestures that further the
limit of what a book is? I feel as if there is another kind of book I am
only beginning to imagine. What about you? I didn’t meet you yet. Other
aims: I’d like to ask Amber Di Pietra to say more about the hybrid body as
“compacted.”