'kissing / configuration': notes on Eleanor Perry’s Unspeakable Patterns of the House

Is it possible to feel, in your flesh, the way in which that feeling, that flesh, is also abstracted? What would it mean to be conscious of — to 'know' — your own abstraction in a way that turns upon a visceral sensation? In her book, Theory of the Gimmick (2020), Sianne Ngai proffers the visceral as a response to abstraction, even as the terms seem oxymoronic: the visceral's 'affectivity and corporeality seem to have made 'visceral' resistant to theory', while the ''abstract'' is over-deployed in 'many discourses'.ii In Eleanor Perry's recent pamphlet, Unspeakable Patterns of the House (salò press, 2020), lyric is eviscerated in a playful organology of bodily forms (human and more-than) and abstraction haunts the text through an understor(e)y of patterning and redaction in poetry's house of data. Borrowing Bernard Stiegler's term ‘general organology’ — a way of thinking the pharmacological co-relations and mutualism of human, technical and social organs — I want to argue that Perry's work embodies a vascular imaginary of nervous systems, life streams, 'nerve-riddled tissue', 'neutrino pulp' (2, 3) and metabolisms of abstraction, sensation and cellular process. Their precise, high-definition material liveliness offers a counterpoetics of the anthropocene which operates in the thick, simultaneous and glitching spacetime of an ecological oikos.