ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
difference and sameness (Badiou 98). Both he and Bishop apprehend repetition not as
an automatic allegiance to preexisting behaviors or structures, but an event that
permits a disinterested re-appraisal of difference. The emergence of truth involves –
for both – in-difference, a state of becoming indifferent to patent differences (Badiou
98). In-difference is potentially revolutionary, an affirming process that does not
resolve a dialectic into a single meaning or truth, but that enables a re-conception of
difference itself. To be on the lookout for the event, which entails for Bishop a
naturalist’s eye, is to be aware of the ceaselessly evolving processes of
communication, which always call back to an origin. The poem enacts a Badiou-like
in-difference in the moment of honest signaling, displacing habitual patterns of
thinking and feeling and setting into relief the altruistic and universal dimensions of
the honest signal. Bishop favors the potentialities that inhere in a two-fold semiotic
system, including the horizontal reverberations of symbol, metonymy, and permuting
similes, as well as rhetorical, lexical, and syntactical honest signals. Where language
does not adequately convey quality or degree of intensity, the honest signal can.
For Bishop, the consummate traveler and translator, the desire to communicate across
cultural and geographic borders was real, and yet also cautious, self-regulated.
Interrogating her tourist’s eye, Bishop registers its potential to mis-identify or misrepresent that which is foreign to it and transfers her cautious optics to her travel
poems (Costello 152). Her poems present a beholder whose conscientiousness is
actualized in her resistance to a self-projective or proprietary spectatorship. As
Costello argues, Bishop’s poetics are committed to questions of mastery, which are
particularly prominent in the travel genre. In her study, she writes, “Travel is a
constant challenge to the boundaries of culture and selfhood and an expression of their
frailty” (Costello 10). She charts in Bishop’s poems an “ordering mind” that expresses
both desire for and resistance towards a dynamic of mastery that the poet recognizes
as illusory and potentially perilous (Costello 10). She argues that Bishop’s penchant
for order finds itself at odds with an agitated inner life and the slapdash messiness of a
“recalcitrant world.” Nevertheless, the poet confronts and often delights in the mess,
engaging an “excursive vision” that resists an optical propri WF'