Clay Piñata: a tentative accumulation of creative-critical consequences

Abstract

When I was a kid, my family played a local version of the piñata game. Instead of a papier maché body, my parents would hang several cheap, small, glazed terracotta pots from a rope, neatly dangling in orderly intervals. They would swing, plump and identical, and the child (me), blindfolded and spun around, would have to hit them with a broomstick, not knowing which one contained candy, and which one contained water, flour, or any other trick stuffing. Creative-critical, citational practices can sometimes feel like this: the thrill of breakage, violence, and discovery, combined with a certain unpredictability.

For this talk, I want to bring together two rather irreconcilable depictions of consequential relations: Severo Sarduy’s cosmological retombée, the “consequence of something that is yet to happen;” and Donna Haraway’s thick sympoiesis, “belong[ing] in the same category with each other in such a way that has consequences.” And in doing so, I want to see, too, if autotheory can hold them both. After all, it could be said that autotheory is an embodied study of consequences. Paul Preciado writes about “a theory of the self, or self-theory” that functions as a “record” of one’s emotions being “traversed” by phenomena that is not one’s own. These "junctions," these points where self and theory (or history, or art, or literature) meet and cross each other, are provoked consequences of sorts, willed entailments. The voluntary positioning of an autotheoretical narrator - embodied, performative, and possibly votive - begs for further examination. What are its responsibilities, entanglements, and resonances?

Through the repurposed wooden stick of the autotheoretical “impulse” (Lauren Fournier), I will have a crack at this round, glossy form (new in name, old in spirit). The violence of the impact leads to fragmentary knowledge, so how does the self relate to these worldly shards? Are these “anachronistic causalit[ies]” (Sarduy), or “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems” (Haraway)? Can they ever be both? Can a body bear and nuance both timeless echoes, and endless chains? Or does something have to break, at some point?