Janet Laurence
Tacit. They will give consent. To the structure of a language. She. Does not judge. Is butter. Is?
I am. A female cultural worker. , Rachel Blau DuPiessis uses that designation to incorporate the politics of her (re)valued body.
Out of ash.
And sand, eroded. In segments. Of zinc, straw, wood. Is an arbitrary alignment. A remnant of yellow . For Janet Laurence the work/painting/not yet word investigates the materiality of the pre-linguistic realm; that is, the palpability of those intonations-rhythm, laughter, fluid, breath-which may be observed "in the first echolalias" uttered by the subject prior to the accession to a language proper.2 Such an exegesis poses the question of why it is that a dominant culture might seek to cover (elide) the traces of such a corporeality; the prospect of a material existence which requires sustentation (honey, yellow, art) and yet is liable to a physical disintegration (rust, erosion, ash).
What is imperative for the female cultural worker in this morphology of the prior-to-speech is the material (bio-maternal) relation to signification. Janet Laurence assembles a somatic field (as did Rothko) containing a residue, grain, imprint as analogue of the lived body. Nevertheless, an ordinate art historical practice is unable to account for such a libidinal category as that of the somatic. What is required therefore is a semanalysis, that Kristevan procedure which draws attention to the physiology (mark) of the sexual subject. Which signifies. Does. Make sense. As in the work/words of Gertrude Stein. Stein wrote Three Lives in 1909 and Tender Buttons in 1914. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in 1922.3 It was she who gave the unconscious a body. Her writing is necessarily elliptical (segmented) accounting as