정치적 공연의 장으로서의 언어: 브루스 앤드루스의 『립 서비스』

Language as a Site for Political Performance: Bruce Andrews’s Lip Service

Bruce Andrews stands out among other language poets when he politicizes his social consciousness. Most language poets, strategically relying on physicalities of language, take a stance to minimize the communicative function of language. Andrews concentrates all his energy on calling into question overall political, economical, cultural contexts surrounding the self, the world and language. His poetry is a linguistic arena where texts are fragmented without an authorial voice and readers are invited to (de)contextualize their own social contexts. His experimental writing can only be completed in reading “by passing through . . . a field of flux & constantly negotiated positions & relative weightings of hegemonic & counterhegemonic traditions.” This article examines Andrews’s poetics from the viewpoint of its politics and strategies, and reads closely “Earth 1” from Lip Service by analyzing his characteristic chaos of language. Three points how multi-layered “Earth 1” is. First, the poem is associated with such topics as transcendence, representation, or process, which Andrews intended to develop for Tips for Totalizers. Second, its parts are connected on the basis of the way the poem “reverberates with the romance and utopia-saturated materials of Dante’s Paradiso.” Third, its unique volatility can be illuminated by examining “fluidities & tiny magnetizings of word-to-word relations.” Andrews tries to reshape a new vision of paradise by politicizing those social contexts affecting the world, consciousness, language, and the body. He also has “an absolutely spectacular ear for sound and rhythm,” which even helps the reader enjoy a heavily language-centered poem. Andrews’s vision of paradise demands that the reading subject be sensitive enough to respond to physicalities of language and also be able to recognize and reshape social contexts from their chaotic relations.