POETIC DIANOIA

Epistemic Injustice and CA Conrad’s (Soma)tics

This essay thinks the confluence of two concepts, epistemic injustice and poetic dictation, in the work of CA Conrad. Epistemic injustice is a concept invented by the analytic feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker that concerns forms of harm people suffer in their capacity as knowers. Poets, since Plato, have been seen as precarious subjects of knowledge. My wager is that Conrad critically redeems Plato’s degraded model of the poet – as an ignorant mineral body magnetized by a lodestone – not by refusing it but by literalizing it. In doing so, Conrad’s “(Soma)tic rituals” rhapsodically expose violence inherent to the field of social knowing.