Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Hunter, Lynette, Disunified Aesthetics: Situated Textuality, Performativity, and Collaboration, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 288 pp, 978-0-7735-4186-3, £26.99 Paperback
Reviewed by
In Disunified Aesthetics, Lynette Hunter argues for an entirely new approach to the practices of both engaging with and making texts. In a book that ranges from intelligent and complex engagements with critical theory to moving personal accounts detailing the experience of being a woman in the male dominated field of academia, Hunter provides a mixture of literary criticism, performative writing, and theoretical commentary, all to the effect of establishing and demonstrating what she terms a disunified aesthetics. Hunter takes as her book’s premise the fact that as we live in an increasingly globalized world, more people from diverse backgrounds (read: not solely white males) are enfranchised and thus in positions of cultural power. Hunter argues this shift necessitates an alteration of current scholarship in order to account for more diverse subject positions. As such, Hunter rejects our current mode of critical engagement, what she terms a “universalist modernism and a unified aesthetic,” in which “very small numbers of people produce, commodify and consume products called art” (4). The current hegemonic aesthetic does not allow for marginal subjects to either access or disseminate cultural output. In its place, Hunter stresses the need for a community based, engaged form of reading, writing, performing, and viewing. Per Hunter, “In engaged critical ethics, the writer/maker remakes the text with the critic and often many other readers, makes the new differences that build a disunified yet collaborative aesthetics” (14). Hunter is primarily concerned with process: how can we shift our aesthetic focus to include diverse voices, and how can we ensure that we are valuing the differences that emerge when we engage and collaborate?
While taxonomically one can note that her book primarily discusses 20th century Canadian writers with a focus on women’s studies, this categorization would fall short of what is truly a more expansive book that strives, quite successfully, to alter the ways in which we read and write and engage with texts. For example, her first section, “Situated Texualities,” mostly takes the form of close readings that culminate in a discussion of her conference performances. The second and third sections move into “performative writing” that foregrounds the process of reading as much as it does the critical examination of the writing. Her “Performativity” and “Collaboration” sections increasingly merge formal textual analysis and Hunter’s personal engagement and collaborative relationship with the text in question. This is both thematically and formally displayed in the penultimate section which overlays bpNichol’s poetry onto Hunter’s reading of said poetry that at times becomes quite literally unreadable. The final section does away with the distinction between critical reading and performance description—they are one in the same, and by the end of the book Hunter has re-made her own text.
One of the central problems Hunter continually runs up against is a lack of necessary vocabulary to even begin to discuss the issues her book takes up. The inadequacy of language to speak for/speak out marginal voices is a recurring tension. She largely attributes this to a language that has been created by and for the hegemony that leaves the words that would be from marginal voices “unsaid.” For example, Hunter recounts an experience while teaching a course in Canadian Women’s writing: “when we tried to focus our discussion through available mainstream critical vocabularies, we frequently ended in silence” (58). To combat the tendency for the unsaid to remain perpetually silenced, Hunter creates her own vocabulary, and consistently redefines and adds to her working dictionary of disunified aesthetics. These definitions come largely in pairs, such as “enough” and “fit,” which both work under the premise that “all that needs to be said has been said,” but “enough” disallows the unsaid from becoming said, whereas in “fit” the unsaid is said. Hunter also utilizes the concept of the “alongside,” which describes the work that is done to speak the unsaid in the making of difference, “which is an unending process of making present.” This “alongside” work is important; rather than a reactionary response to the hegemony, where resistance is the primary aim and co-optation by or assimilation into hegemonic culture is more likely, Hunter and the authors she uses, especially Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, work alongside the hegemony to produce alternative cultural output.
Alongside work is also important in making difference—a large part of disunified aesthetics. As Hunter crucially notes, “difference does not exist before we make it” (9). Making difference, which encompasses a collaborative effort in which parties come together to re-make a text and come away with something new and wholly unique, is achieved through processes of “rehearsal” or “performance.” These are more broadly defined terms for Hunter, where rehearsal is the collaboration of a “group with shared common ground,” whatever that may be, who “work on making differences…and enable us to form non-hegemonic alongsides” (95). Performance differs in that it moves the more personal rehearsal into the public, where audience members may not have shared common grounds and must make a choice as to whether or not they engage with the text. It is through these processual and communal activities that art can truly be moved into a moment of fit and therefore speak what has for so long been silenced. Hunter’s book is laden with vocabulary and new definitions for existing words, to the point where it may seem a bit didactic. But the terms are essential to understanding this unfamiliar and intensive approach to aesthetics. Each definition moves the reader one step closer to having a full vocabulary with which we can move from silence to speech.
Although the book contains several expository sections that clarify Hunter’s aims and methodologies, Disunified Aesthetics’ standout moments come from the instances where Hunter expertly demonstrates the ways in which text makers and text consumers can enter into a relationship that produces something new, that makes difference. These come most notably in the chapter that deals with Hunter’s conference performance entitled “Bodies in Trouble” and her treatment of Alice Munro’s fiction.
Hunter’s chapter titled “Labour Notes for Bodies in Trouble,” coalesces many of the book’s aims to produce new material through collaboration and performance. The chapter takes the form of an interview between Hunter and her colleague, Susan Rudy, which is textually intercut within Hunter’s own descriptive and analytical notes on the performance. It culminates in three responses to the performance, which differ greatly. The chapter merges the personal and the critical, as Hunter’s drier analysis is cut through and interrupted by her own, quite personal, reaction to the performance, which includes her baking and transporting several sheets of cookies, then remaining naked in a box until, when the audience did not know how to respond or when to leave, Hunter walked out of the room, bag of clothes in hand. The two texts, laid at times side by side and at times interwoven, enact a new reading of the performance and create a new text that rehearses its meaning as the reader navigates “Bodies in Trouble” through this lens. It is also uniquely collaborative, as it involves not only Hunter and Rudy, but the writers who responded, and the reader who becomes part of this re-made text’s audience. Thus “Bodies in Trouble” fulfills Hunter’s aim: “I wanted them to become involved but not in terms of talking to me, in terms of engaging with my performance” (125). Finally, the performance skillfully engages some of Hunter’s most insistent preoccupations, including the feminine body as it is related to domesticity and knowledge production and its role in the academy (specifically important as the academic audience’s discomfort rose from their anxiety as to whether to exit for the plenary session). She notes, “By their existence as women’s bodies, our bodies are always considered bodies in trouble” (123).
“The Rhetoric of Masking in Alice Munro’s Writing” concerns itself primarily with Munro’s book Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and functions as a performative critique of the work while revaluing what is often dismissed as cliché within Munro’s corpus. The chapter is notable due to the way it truly transcends the realm of academic criticism and moves into the performative; it is disunified aesthetics in practice. Formally, the chapter includes large swaths of Munro’s prose followed with Hunter’s readings, which she calls dyads. The dyads take the form of blurry free-writes, graphic novelesque vignettes that track Hunter’s process of reading and visualizing Munro’s words, and pages that seek to mirror and reflect one another. These textual representations are not merely unorthodox, they serve to demonstrate the ways in which Hunter’s reading engages and seeks to collaborate with Munro’s work to produce difference. This is most clear in a pair of dyads where Hunter provides four versions of the same written text—two are produced on the page in prose form, while the second two are produced in verse. While one version reads, “a lot of articulation is about throwing out words and phrases, sounds and syntax, and waiting to hear if they connect/echo/are picked up and reworked,” the second follows:
Registering the way that a lot of articulation
Is about throwing out
Words and phrases
And waiting to hear if they connect
Resonate
Echo
Are picked up and reworked (200-202)
As a reader, the effect is palpable. For Hunter, the piece is about “the process of reading/audiencing…the reader re-making the text while they read” (208). We are implicated in this performance; we must make a choice: do we engage with these two texts to produce something new?
Overall, Disunified Aesthetics challenges readers to rethink the way they engage with texts, and urges readers to come together and collaborate to make difference and finally speak the “unsaid.” Hunter’s book leaves one with the feeling that these sites of reader/text-maker collaboration are a welcome, and quite possible, change. She notes, “In the disunified aesthetics I have outlined in this book there is an attempt to offer another way of thinking about art that acknowledges the possibility that all people may collaborate in, through, and around it in re-imagining their lives” (286). While this is admirable, I wonder if it is not an overly optimistic view of the current state of affairs in both academia and cultural production. Hunter herself provides many caveats to her approach, some of which include the notion that engaging with ethics may alienate those less educated, and that funding may limit vast amounts of diverse and engaged art from being made, but she leaves us by noting that “this is moment of ar(rest)” (288), a moment where by her definition “what has not been said is said, yet that saying renders further unsaid” (65). What are we to make of Hunter’s final, unpunctuated claim? Perhaps it shifts the focus back onto us—the readers. We are responsible for taking up the alongside work of Hunter and the authors she cites; we are responsible for making and valuing difference, and changing the moment from one of (ar)rest to one of “until,” in which “what has not been said is made present, and then we have a choice.”