SOFT SCIENCE BY FRANNY CHOI
Soft is not the word that comes to mind when reading Franny Choi’s Soft Science. Donna Haraway’s “excruciatingly conscious” might surface rather, yet Choi offers us this mode. Then, what is soft science? what is it if not a science with give? Her collection necessitates a giving away to and an absorbing of while her speakers perform by the same intake of information on the internet as a smart bot. Choi moves inside and beyond the hegemonic barking that storms online platforms—squashing that which falsely clicks into place, bending over to screenshot before all that which has brutalized—as she examines life in the age of smartphones and SmarterChild through the many-sided lens of Asian femininity and queerness. Some of her poems fracture language and white-space, revamping familiar forms, like her glossary and sequence of Turing-test poems. The structures of these forms act not as the bones of the book, but a chrysalis that signals an ongoing state of becoming. Opening Soft Science is the following quote from Haraway, which anchors and gives a lens to our understanding, “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” Choi’s Cyborg poems most overtly interrogate the ways in which the (female) body is constituted, man-created, and expected to perform thusly. Note here, in “A Brief History of Cyborgs,” how the speaker is described as much like a machine as the scientist’s machine-turned-daughter is human: “I once made my mouth a technology of softness [. . .] I made the tools fuck in my mouth [. . .] until they birthed new ones. What I mean is, I learned.” A few lines later, we see the daughter-bot’s manner of learning runs parallel: “The scientist’s daughter married the internet, and the internet filled her until she / spoke swastika and garbage . . .” Even with her insistence that humans are cyborgs, Choi doesn’t forgive anyone for their participation in racism, garbage politics, rape culture, and the commodifying gaze. Instead, Soft Science becomes a study of how the internet is the window to the collective unconscious and the smart (soft) bot, programmed by only what is found there, a mirror.
—Review by Madeline Vardell
