ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Among animals and humans, honest signaling always involves dimensions of
altruism: a cost or handicap to the signaler. As Zahavi explains, the signal can operate
as “a test of bonds” among individuals (230). The higher the cost, the less likely the
recipient of the signal will be conned. Among humans, an honest sign might take the
form of a suicidal gesture or – less costly, yet still signaling a potential limitation in
mobility – an individual that gives up the use of a hand to hold the hand of his or her
lover for an extended period of time (Zahavi 218). He writes, “To the altruist, the cost
– the waste – of altruism is no different than . . . growing and carrying a large, heavy,
decorated tail of the peacock. The cost of [this] signal is the handicap that ensures that
it is reliable – that the signaler is what . . . she claims to be” (150). In such
occurrences, the relational tie between the signaler and receiver of the signal is under
pressure, carrying with its state of mutual dependency a benefit to both individuals:
the promise of reliability in communication.
In the poems I have previously mentioned, Bishop casts repetition as a compulsion, a
ritual gone awry, in which a subject seeks to redress and protect itself from its own
limitations and self-imposed boundaries, her poetics describing a process of working
through subjectivity. With its compulsive affects and dimensions of exaggeration,
discord, and partial-correspondence, her later works imagine repetition as a social act
that involves a labor of re-constituting the self through its relations with objects and
organisms. Enacting repetition as an encoun