Is there a DISSERTATION in here somewhere?

The time is fast approaching when I will need to have a topic for a dissertation and I can at this moment only admit to my uncertainty about what that topic will be. I had entertained the idea, prior to returning from Germany, that it would concern itself with 'discourse' in some sense - this on account of my thesis having been on Lacan's theory of discourse, the prospect at that time of working more with discourse ala Laclau, and because I had tentatively explored having Angermüller as the Mainz-member for my dissertation committee. But, while I retain interest in Lacan's thought about this matter, I have too many disputes with Laclau's (to my mind totalizing) tendencies in that regard and while what Angermüller does with discourse is intriguing, I cannot see myself developing or adapting his approach to my areas of interest.

The thought then emerges that I should foreground those areas of attention and interest in my ruminations on this problem. Here, I can at least say something about my hopes. I want to develop some sort of theoretical model or collection of concepts that will be applicable with whatever situational modifications to; poetry (of the sort that I care about); fiction (and here a canonical, if modern or contemporary author seems a smart choice); film (not Lynch or Hitchcock but something cool still), and; art (possibly performance art in some sense, though object art is also a viable option).

& I then wonder if my interest in the body might be of help in that. My interests here are all over the map (from sound poetry to fashion, the body "overwritten with signifiers" to the voice as object), and that is both energizing and somewhat discouraging. There is a body of scholarship on the "body" that is of a size already that it would take years to begin to feel I had a good grasp on the debates, issues and theories already out there. Some narrowing and pruning would have to be done to even consider this as a reasonable possibility in the time remaining to me to complete a PhD, and the question must be asked as well; do I want to use the entire time I have to do that or might it not be better to just get the damned dissertation done? 

So, in a very lame attempt to narrow the field, while retaining the body and adding other areas of extant interest and curiosity, I have the following possible knot of things out of which to derive a central question (or questions) around which to structure a book (which is how I prefer to think of the diss for a variety of reasons). 

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 
• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.
• Voice as object.
• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).

The forces contending...

There is always something I haven't done, that needs doing - more often somethings - some marked guiltily (papers owed for classes, files I'd promised to search for) other's with desire (the books I'd always meant to sit down and really read with all the attention I can muster) and still other's marked as obligations of the future (deadlines, expectations, etc). All told, I guess this is better - a mild bewilderment of projects there for wherever interest next goes.

I'm a poet. I am not a philosopher. I am not a psychoanalyst. But being a poet often drives me to one of the other of the latter objects, philosophy, psychoanalysis... not to mention art of all sorts (film, performance, painting, fiction, music).

Of late my head is filled with things, and many of them are thick with interest (that key index of drive). Most crucially at present in my head each day is the book, that book that is assembling of which I am a contributor and maker and so my poems (how to render a poem I only said to a page where it loses all but the static words?), my poetics (knowing that no matter how well I get them into words, that they're always at some minimal distance from the poem, a distance that always will have been found to have been distorting - and yet I try!), and much else about being the poet I am in the group I am a part of (The Atlanta Poets Group). & so much Hegel. Yes, Hegel is really filling my head lately as I'm in a course on Hegel's influence on contemporary theory and have elected as my labor for this course a patient annotation, chapter by chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. & there is much Lacan and thus psychoanalysis lurking nearby as I will read seminars XX-XXIII this semester.

But for all of that, this space will be for the releasing of whatever pent up interest is not absorbed by the needful outputs of those things. & thus, the anything goes-i-ness of my interest when energy remains to say something more.