After I Argued with the Learn'd Astronomer

I came across this truly chilling U.S. government document, and its equally chilling website. Indeed, I wasn't sure, at first, that it wasn't some kind of NGO that ran the website, but no. Singling out Jews like this (no one else has their own page, right?), as especially deserving of protection from campus discrimination, is so nauseating that I can't even imagine what I might say in response. Coming on the heels of Alan Dershowitz's libel campaign against Norman Finkelstein, which succeeded in getting the dean at DePaul to deny Finkelstein tenure, despite his absurdly long list of qualifications and credentials, one has to take one's hat off to the attack dogs of the Jewish right. They're really getting things done.

No doubt, the "reverse racism" page will be up soon, too.

The whole thing, with its blurry warnings about criticism of Israel, is ugly, but it definitely crosses the line here, in this definition of anti-semitism

* Comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or comparisons of Israeli/Jewish leaders to Nazi leaders, or comparisons of Jewish symbols such as the Star of David with the swastika.

The most absurd item though, is the one that defines remarks to the effect that "Zionism is racism" as anti-Semitic. Looks like academics should be careful about what they say. But, oh wait, it seems the the website has acknowledged that there's NO legal precedent for their definitions.

Glad they've gone out of their way to enforce something other than the law. As for civil rights law itself, well. . .

Some Responses

[Update: not incidentally, there's a post on related questions over at Style of Negation]

In the comments box of Kasey's Limetree, Sweet Jane and the indefatigable Kent Johnson were debating the merits of Zizek's recent interview in Soft Targets, a journal that imagines itself a Bataillean investigation into violence, a latter day Documents. Kent, misconstruing the points that Zizek made (who was sounding more reasonable than usual, it must be noted) declared that Marx would probably have "largely" discarded the Labor Theory of Value today (Simon chimes in, equally incorrectly, to my mind). The only possible response to this is, I think, like

(insert strange facial contortion here, upturned palm, here)?????

I respect Kent and think that, when he's not paranoiacally worrying that Flarf has gone all Baader-Meinhof on him, he's capable of making strong arguments, but huh? Last time I checked almost everything within my range of vision was produced by, to some extent, people who, not owning the means of production for such books, tables, foodstuffs, diapers, etc., did not receive as compensation for their labor its social value. . . Is everything made by machines where Kent lives? Does he have one of those Star Trek mystification-thing-a-mabobs? Can I get one? As for the following idea, of Simon's:

There is a great deal of "violence" in captialism; what I am most engaged by is that this is a deeply indirect violence, a violence done to the psyche, to the soul, to the spirit. It's an armchair thought in many ways, but I, at least, am aware that the greatest suffering of this psychic violence are precisely those that we -- meaning people like Josh and I -- are most concerned with politically.

I can only say I would like to see Simon explain this to a Pakistani person who works 16hrs/day for less money than it takes to feed his/her family. Do you think this person wants a psychic solution? Or the value of his/her labor? Therapy or health care and full remuneration? OxyContin of the masses? This sounds to me like the worst of liberal idealism. Sadly, this is a tendency that anarchist thought, much of which is very valuable to me, and important to my anti-vanguard politics, can fall into quite quickly (cf. Chomsky channeling Rousseau and telling Foucault, ridiculously, that he thought that people were basically foundationally good ). I think I take the side of Marx in The German Ideology against Stirner/ Feurbach. Idealist thinking like this only further proves that Marx is, in fact, deeply useful today. To the extent that I am not aware, every time I drink a cup of coffee (as big of a commodity as oil), that this is a relationship between me and somebody working a plantation in Nicaragua, then Marx's analysis of the commodity still holds. . . And it's not common sense if nobody ever talks or thinks about it when they invite you over for coffee.

The point that Zizek makes in the beginning (via Benjamin) and that Joshua reiterates, that capitalism involves a repetitive, sustaining (law-preserving) violence, that is the very foundation for those soi-disant acts of poor on poor violence, needs to be repeated until people understand it. Unemployment, broadcasting of classist/racist ideology, lack of adequate housing, social services, education, etc., these are bases for Simon's poor on poor violence. I don't know if therapy (psychic solutions) or religion (spiritual solutions) will be much help here. From the idealist, pre-Roussauvian tradition, how about this:

I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not among inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under color of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. (Montaigne, "On Cannibals)

I agree, for sure, that there's a contradiction between Zizek's advocation of, on the one hand, absolute refusal, and on the other, the seizure of state power for the purposes of socialist political change. [What do you get when you cross these two? A state that does nothing?]. In any case, Zizek does say he only supports Hamas to the extent that they want to destroy the increasingly the rogue state of Israel, not kill Jews. More and more, that seems like the rational response to the political situation.

Below, an excerpt from an essay I'm writing for Johannes's and Joyelle's Action, Yes, might constitute some kind of response to Kent and Simon.

6. In the internet, the commodity appears to have committed suicide. This is the “communism of capital.” The abundance of the developed world, those final fruits of a half millenium of exploitation, are delivered right to your living room, they are manipulable, plastic, they have a history that recedes into the future. But they are also completely purged of any substance. An equality without qualia. Everyone gets their fifteen embarrassing minutes of fame, yes, but everyone is always someone else.

6.1 That is, everything arrives “just in time,” meaning never. Without an ideological enemy in sight, without opportunities for fixed capital investment, and with an increasingly dephysicalized work force connected more and more by cheaper communication networks, but who were without adequate health care, unable to buy houses, unable to afford the luxuries constantly promised them, it seemed that, for the legendary “average American,” social unrest would be the order of the day. The internet gives this unrest an arena. Riot on the discussion boards, not the streets. So, too, were the rise of “alternative” and “indie” and “non-mainstream” forms of cultural production a means of capuring truly anti-capitalist sentiment at the end of the American era. The methadone of the masses. Pseudo-satisfactions for real needs.

Information is the New Body Armor

7. The internet is not separated from the real geography of the world by a continuous border. Rather it is folded intensively into this geography. It lives in the pores of the real geography of the world, copresent. Without our knowing it has walled, sectioned, cantonized and infiltrated at multiple levels the space of the real. When a real geographical space is enveloped on all sides, without egress, alternate temporalities, too slow or too fast, begin to form. These can spread and are, in other terms, what is known as revolution. Fredric Jameson’s important call for a cartography of the totality of postmodern space is, ultimately, victim to a certain structuralist predisposition to synchronic spatialities. Sadly, the structure of the internet is subjected to the shuffle play of capitalism’s unconscious and so, on its own, a map will merely allow one to wander in weird ellipses inside the lung-sac of the breathing, sweaty folds. Rather, we need a a kind of proprioception of the collective, a form of class hatred, hatred of capital, a compass that blinks, brightly, beside the red light of TINA (There is no alternative) the green light of EXIT.

8. The internet, then, is a Green Zone, a distribution of autonomies and dollar-forms, templates, in which the miseries of the world arrive shorn of all their burdensome material determinators and accumulates. With nasal, aristocratic delectation, the provisioners of MySpace toss out the m’s and n’s to the multitudes in order that it not spell “internment” or “interment.” We are all interns at Google, producing value whose redemption is scheduled for a future to which we will not be invited.

9. Social software: the porous, osmotic hyper-sensitized softness of which masks the rigidity of its regulative supports: it feels like consumption, but it’s really production. Anywhere a price is prominently missing, it’s production: of false needs, of distraction, and most importantly a production of social relations vital to the precarities of the present. I will not say, like some, that the petit-bourgeois of the blogs and listservs, laboring in para-corporate purgatorial cubicles, have become a revolutionary class. If there is to be revolt against capitalism, it must no doubt occur from and with the developing world, the massively displaced peasantry of China, the orbits of dispossession and immiseration, hunger and disease and bad faith ringing Sao Paolo and Lagos, not to mention the least developed parts of the post-industrial world. But laboratorial leisure, leisure made labor, provides a crucial supplement, a clean distribution of experience necessary for the functioning of capital today. As this petit-bourgeois class becomes, more and more, a kind of second proletariat, as the teaching adjuncts and clerks and “executive assistants” who provide much of the content of the internet get forced below a living wage, such tertiary or quaternary production becomes more and moe necessary. These classes need to organize as well. Their—or our—refusal is essential. Those who would controvert such a notion, by pointing to the absence of internet commodities produced for exchange and assigning to web denizens the role of cultural reproduction, misunderstand the nature of the post-Fordist economy. Rather than commodities arising to mark the unevenness of development between classes and countries, it is this uneven development itself which the web produces.

Two Old Posts

1. As ever, proofreading, I am aware of the strange punctuational malady from which suffer: hyphenism, characterized by gratuitous and ornamental bridging of modifiers and nouns with hyphens. (Not to be confused, of course, with hyphy-ism [more on this later]). I am anxious about connections, anxious to make them. Am I making sense yet? I want you to nod your head. But, oh, things fall apart--nor all the king's adverbs, nor all the king's sutures, prevent the unchaining of the signifier after the cops visit the party and tell the people in charge to turn the music down and then drive away to do cop-type things.

Nor does the recourse to the indirect style of the fragment really help matters, forcing an attention to the types of coherence that are internal to phrase units, to meaning units. The layering and proliferation of polysemousness, of vernaculars, puns, auras, mediations, icings and smogs is, it seems, also another attempt to make things stick, connect.

The pin near the top of the assemblage pops out. It holds a thread which, wrapped anxiously and multiply around each of the links, those little dead spots in thinking, makes it seem as if these words actually fit together, had receptors and nodes and agendas and budgets and all that. But no, they just drift away from each other in zero-g.


2. One month ago or so: a perfect day (clear, windy, cloudy-sunny) for looking at office park sculpture, most daring and difficult of art forms. I left my phone (see: 1, things fall apart) in the lecture hall at CCA after the tremendous Ed Roberson/Evie Shockley reading, and some kind soul found it and then found me and, after driving over to pick it up, I decided to finally head down to UCSF Mission Bay to see Richard Serra's sculpture installation there. A gigantic cruise ship was beached in a parking lot that was pretending to be water. The parking lot stretched from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. There was monumental architecture and monumental absence, construction debris, machinery and light rail, as in, perhaps, Antonioni's Red Desert or any number of Pasolini's films.

Ballast, the Serra installation, consists of two 50 ft. high rectangular steel slabs, tilted off vertical--both laterally and frontally-- by some very minute number of degrees. They are 133 ft. apart and communicate on some sonar dolphin-frequency to which ordinary perception has no access. I got up close, underneath one of the slabs, and looked up along its oxidized surface. Because the slab was off vertical, that's how I felt too, and on that day in particular, with low, fast clouds moving overhead opposite the tilt, a kind of weird counterbalance, I felt as if I were both improbably weightless and impossibly heavy.

Analogy of the Month

"Of course, we intended for Cocaine energy drink to be a legal alternative the same way that celibacy is an alternative to premarital sex," Ivey said

The Line

[Paul Klee, Abstract Trio, 1923, watercolor and ink on paper]

About Jennifer Moxley's lovely new book of prose poems, The Line, I have, on more than one occasion, heard smart friends express reluctance about what seemed to them an easy or flip opposition of prose and verse, coming as it does immediately within the most perfunctory of descriptions of the book (title, genre). While I'll admit that this opposition might initially seem like a joke or a gimmick, I'd argue that the kind of reflection it affords is deeply moving and, by the end of the book, complex without the least hint of stale paradox.

This is partly because the poems outmaneuver any expectation that the work will be a kind of poetics, reflecting on its methods and on the relationship between prose poetry and Moxley's customary intricate and musical lines. Instead, at the beginning of the book, "line" as theme addresses itself to an experience of division, separateness and segmentation on multiple levels: first, the division of the present, a kind of moving wall, or line, between the past and future; second, the line that separates waking from sleep and marks the interpenetration of these two states; and third, the ethical line--that between thinking and acting--which Moxley's poetry has always agonized over, and which she has always seemed to suggest is poetry's special agony. For Hegel and for post-Hegelian philosopher like Lukács, art is that which can delineate or clarify the result of capitalism's division of labor, a fragmentation of human activity and society into separate spheres--contemplation here and action there; aesthetic appreciation of form here and practical considerations over there. Art does this because--in making, in poiesis--form can never be separated from some attention to materials. Of course, the repair to these fractures that art provides is only virtual, and only a certain kind of praxis (that is, for Lukács, a revolutionary praxis) can truly heal the split. But in attempting to fill the gap, art measures its shape. As with deconstruction's logic of the supplement, it's a add-on that reveals the incompleteness of the thing added to. Those familiar with Moxley's work will recognize that the fractures and displacments of everyday life--and of aesthetic practice in everyday life-- are of major concern to her. She seems to be someone for from whom the question "what is poetry for?" can't really be banished. Many poets, it seems, just stop asking themselves this question, or at least don't voice it out loud. But if you read her interview Daniel Bouchard in the recent issue of the Poker, you'll notice her musing on it in all sorts of different ways. It's only in the final few poems from the book, then, that "the line" really becomes self-referential or a meditation on poetic form, and by this time it's been so thoroughly colored by these other considerations that these references refuse to be taken as simple aesthetic positions. Nevertheless, as much as I would be irritated by a book of poems that was suffocatingly self-reflexive, I would also not enjoy a book that didn't, in one some sense, make style one of the ways it thinks, and of course Moxley does this. That is, in place of the break that we get in a lineated poem, here instead we have a kind of moment of unconsciousness that snakes its way through the space between the final period and the first letter of each sentence. Although the poems put more emphasis on paradigmatic coherence between certain sentences than most exemplars of "the new sentence," nevertheless I can't but feel, often, that there's been a slight sub-perceptible displacement in between sentences, a cut too quick to notice:

Mystical Union

Infused with an early century's fatigue you dream you can never wake up. Your thought, a small dot on the horizon, is overtaken by traffic. Huge semis whiz by issuing noxious black smoke. Are they pushing the world's cheap goods onto the local market? Everything's plastic and bright. Mimics of vulgar joy, the people refuse their misery. In between moments of stupor they awkwardly waddle forward. Are they to blame? You dream the end of life has been forsaken by a world in ruins. Someone performs an amputation to tie the resources up. Your children are threatened not by a system but by a single unethical man. The air shimmers. You step off the curb into nothingness where the line offers itself to your hands. Grab hold or fall. Happy in the thought you might never recover you consign your trust to this flimsy thread that nobody else can see.

What I mean, I suppose, is that, for the most part, I get the sense that I can track the transitions here, that I can paraphrase to myself the latent dream-thoughts (these are all, or mostly, dream poems). I've often felt that many transcribed dreams fail as interesting writing to the extent that they succeed in being interesting dreams. Perhaps, in some sense, this is due to the fact that, as writing, they bring entirely to the surface all of the things which are often latent--below the line-- in dreams. They blur or erase the line. Freud, for instance, realizes that the associations generated in the transcription of the dream are as important as the transcribed material itself. Where dream writing is dull, or simply strange in a banal ways, is where it opts for a literal transcription of the dream instead of a production of the dream. The line, in the poem above, as an undisclosed and undisclosable technique of choice, is the way to make a kind of second dream--called waking, perhaps--from within the space of the first dream. It's an active dreaming, rather than a passive, one. Instead of accepting the fragmentation of experience into separate units which a latent logic will make sense of, the poem tries to transcend these divisions actively, even as much as it realizes that this transcendence is, well, mystical and perhaps mystificatory: like the solution of blaming a "single unethical man" (our president, for instance) instead of the system itself. As with the discussion about art in general in the above paragraph, the attempt to transcend these divisions is what, ultimately, clarifies them. Prose, in this sense, represents the unformed experience that the principle of choice has to cut into and through: where "the end of life"--the point, or the period--"has been forsaken by a world in ruins." By calling the book The Line, Moxley suggests that prose here is, in fact, lineated. It is lineated poetry degree-zero, where the possibilities for lineated shape-making (not, of course, the only kind of shape-making) out of those ruins present themselves all at once, and where the speaker hesitates among those possibilities. In presenting dream-logic and thought-logic and writing-logic, we get, perhaps, something like Moxely's lineated poems in embryonic form: prose poem as pre-poem. Last month, somebody, having been told that I was a difficult person, wrote to see if I'd participate in an AWP panel on difficulty. I'd just read this book and suggested that I say something about it, not because I think it's a particularly difficult, unforgiving, brutal or forbidding poetry (qualities I often like in a poem). On the contrary, I find Moxley's late-Victorian sentences leisurely, hypnotic, soothing, even if I do have to go back and reread the poems. No, I thought about talking on this book because I think it's a kind of meditation on the place of poetic difficulty, and more generally, about facing non-writing difficulties in writing.

The Atrophy of Private Life

In the heavy fashion magazines strewn here and there around the house the photos of objects and people mouth the word "money," but you, assuming no one wants you anymore, mishear the message as "meaning." Arousal follows. The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out.
Awareness, always awareness. Don't you see how these elaborate masks are turning you into a zombie? The private life is not for they eye but for the endless interior. It is trying to push all this crap aside and find the missing line. Nobody, least of all the future, cares about the outcome of this quest.
It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.

The New Constant

Failed things. What was once aesthetic pleasure is now practical satisfaction. What was once difficult to comprehend is now a necessary thread. The present turns into feathers, light and grey, and scatters with the slightest purposeful breath. Awakened, mono-vocal, redirected. The evolution of evasion in the move from charming to rude. Neither blame nor repercussion. With deathbed pressure the everyday keeps memory as a form of compassion, the future as unexplored utterance. Between these two perspectives the line continues to run through your dreams which, no longer a lost reality, work to triple interpretable being. The sacrifice of the new life has reanimated the birds. Their song is your troubled lover. This is the house where you live now.

Is it right to say that Moxley confronts a world in which the formal and stylistic devices many have come to associate with poetry in 20th century, difficulty-making devices, have lost some of their edge, some of their critical power? I think so. By stripping all of those markers from the poem, instead she seems to allow herself the license to confront the difficulties of matter, of dailiness, where form threatens threatens a hardening habit, rather than the construction of new expressive possibilities. As beloved as she may be to writers in the tradition of the New Americans and fellow travelers, she resembles that poetry surprisingly little, I'd say. If there are strong influences here, I'd say they are in Victorian prose, and more strongly, in late 19th-century French poetry, both moments of cultural and political exhaustion marked by vigorous attempts to break with the past. Gramsci: "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born." Not exactly, quite, or yet.

On Habitus

"Yeah, the things that I teach you, they come out of my body and then they go into your body!"

The "alarming" or "hair-raising" statistic, reported in these papers, that 1 in 4 Muslim- Americans feel suicide bombings can be justified in defense of Islam, is usually delivered as if this were still, after all, a rather high number. (Actually, the statistic is more like 13%, with 5% saying "rarely," but we can't expect journalists to do basic arithmetic: you can read the actual report here). But is it really, comparatively? Or rather, what about it strikes journalists as abnormal?

Given that the "Islam" to be defended in this instance probably means a territory--i.e, the Occupied Territories--more than a set of cultural practices, it's fair, I think, to ask how many Americans, for instance, would support suicide bombings in defense of the U.S.? One would imagine that this number is equal to the number of Americans who support, for instance, "staying the course" in Iraq, provided that 1) the respondents acknowledge American soldiers will die and 2) that so, too, will Iraqi civilians die. Acknowledging these two conditions, of course, is not a matter for opinion or discussion; it's a fact that anybody who can think one-third of a thought would arrive at. So what's the number of war supporters at now? %30? %40? Should we add those whose moral casuistry supports a "slow" withdrawal, meaning one with bombing from above replacing troops on the ground?

One might be tempted to interpret these statistics, and their reporting by journalists, as meaning that it's the suicide, more than the bombing, that is alarming.

Yes, yes, there are perhaps some readers out there who will no doubt have legal-ethical thoughts about "intention" and "premeditation" and other cognitive phantoms. OK, even though I basically reject these ideas, I don't need to here. The first time you massacre a family while "staying the course," fine. We can call that unpremeditated. After that, no.

So, the conclusion of the Pew Report should really come as a surprise: Muslim-Americans are by far a more peaceable, ethical and conscientious group than the mainstream against which they are being measured. But no cause for alarm, people: the poll also shows that Muslim-Americans are better integrated, and more "middle-class" and "mainstream" than Muslims in other countries. In no time, they should be as bloodthirsty, pliant, and incapable of thinking through the consequences of their political choices as the rest of the country.

I read my poems tomorrow (Friday, May 11), at Pegasus Books at 7:30, with Geoffrey G. O'Brien.

I should be back on the blog in a couple of weeks.

Good news, terrific news: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni will publish Starsdown, my book of Los Angeles, in the fall, whence it will "assume the fantastic form of a relation between things."

Hello, The Sophist. Hello, Nightwood. Hello, Matter and Memory. Hello, Nest. Is that The Origin of German Tragic Drama standing there behind you? And how long, exactly, must we wait?

More, surely, to follow.

Labor Theory of Value

Noah: Will you give me lots of money so that I can buy a giant tyrannousaur?

Me: No, I don't have lots of money. You need to work to get money. Well, at least most people do.

Noah: Oh.

Me: So, what kind of thing are you going to do for work?

Noah: I'm going to get lots of money!

Is Vagueness a Style?

I've been following with interest the discussions (now finished, I'm late) about the teaching of creative writing, and thinking in particular about Reginald's remark, and Joshua's and Kasey's response, that "vagueness is not a style."

At the risk of sounding like a creative writing student in one of Reginald's class-- (well, I once was)--I must say that I'm not at all sure that I can maintain--as he does-- a meaningful distinction between vagueness and ambiguity (two forms of abstraction, it seems to me), even if I can understand why one would want this kind of distinction.

There is vagueness that I dislike and vagueness that I like, vagueness, that is, which I find "meaningful," ripe with possibilities, experiences,"expressive," with room for thinking and feeling, that I sometimes might dub with the valorizing new critical term "ambiguity." While I find the Eliot quote about free verse, and, more generally, the inescapability of form, an important observation, I often feel that the way this kind of claim gets used, true as it may be in the long run, might encourage a kind of complacency as regards given forms and the urge to escape them (no doubt, this is far from Eliot's intention in the essay). Beckett may have ultimately found only another type of style instead of stylessness, but the fact that he tried "écrire sans style," in a second language, is important. Too often, the Eliot quote is used to discourage such attempts, rather than to describe their impossibility (which was his original intention, I think).

(Tone is, of course, everything here, as is keeping in mind that reader's concepts, teacher's concepts, writer's concepts, and critic's concepts, while full of overlap, don't always translate. They are different discourses, structured by different social relations, and in that each of these things might ask for different things from poetry).

But back to the original discussion: the difference between vagueness and ambiguity, two forms of abstraction that are, respectively, "discouraged" and "encouraged" by many people involved with poetry, lies in that verb "tried" that I used to describe Beckett This is where the distinction originates, in my view--in a pesky notion of authorial intention. However tattered my copy of On Grammatology or Philosophical Investigations, however many times I've read Barthes and Dickinson and Foucault and DeMan on notions of authorship, if I say that something is ambiguous I probably mean that the abstraction seems willed, intentional, purposeful, calculated, meant; vagueness, on the other hand, when it's used as a pejorative, will seem like an accident, a mistake. To the extent that "vagueness" is a style it is an intentional mistake, "kind of accidentally on purpose" as Walter Neff puts it in Double Indemnity (B-11). Am I agreeing with Reginald or not? I don't know. Perhaps I'm being "purposefully" vague, (er, ambiguous). Perhaps I just said that to get out of trouble, backloading intent. Personality as plug-in.

If vagueness is a style, and I think it is, isn't one of its names "John Ashbery?"Ashbery, that "mainstream unto himself" (as a friend has called him), whose advice to his own creative writing students, recorded in the poems from Houseboat Days, was as follows:

. . .Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed
Dull-sounding ones.


Indeed, Ashbery's middle-period poems, from, say, Self-Portrait to A Wave often proceed from vagueness and emptiness toward a kind of specifity which they then evacuate in a final gesture of setting off again:

"The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone."

This intentional vagueness, which occasionally becomes (especially in Ashbery's imitators) a didactic, even moralizing vagueness, didn't start with Ashbery. It also goes by the name of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens. Vagueness is what haunts Stevens dictum about the poem, that "it must be abstract." It is behind Stein's choice of a vocabulary no larger, often, than that of a third grader's, in order that she might reveal the structures of cognition, rhetoric and grammar that underlid and define the way that we talk and think and write. It is for love of vagueness that Stein turns from nouns; it is what makes her prefer words like "the" and "a" and "as."

As with Geoffrey's book, the choice of purposeful vagueness, flatness, abstraction might mean a refusal of the division of labor, of the law that says, "be specific! Do this thing and not that thing! Pick a historical field, a genre, a subject, a medium! Stay within the discourse! Ground yourself in your predecessors, in origins!" It might mean a refusal of these kinds of identities. Or, alternately, it could mean a submission to the laws of exchange and abstraction which wants our discourse as bland and fungible and interchangeable as possible, so that the speech of one group is abstract and contentless enough that it can be fitted to the speech of another, etc., etc.

So I run into a problem here. My descriptions--vagueness-- of what I value in a certain poet could equally be descriptions of what I detest in another--vagueness. Vagueness is both too vague and yet again not vague enough, and so I have to come back to tone, to relationality, placement, the fact that there may be very little inherent in a certain device that can make it aesthetically effective or ineffective. And I'm back, too, to notions of intention, which I can escape, probably, only by positing other kinds of agency: history, hegemony, the unconscious, power, discourse, language, etc.--all of the things that might speak through writing that is "purposefully vague." I'm not sure I can get away from these bewitchments, problematic as they may be. But what I can do is to keep reminding myself of the wish to perform these operations on texts.

Another example of effective vagueness, of the "new vague" (le flou nouveau?) and its refusal of specifity and specialization and identity, can be found in Juliana Spahr's Response (.PDF). Indeed, all of Spahr's books are lessons in the use and misuse of vagueness and the kinds of political and aesthetic knowledge they can deliver:


realism’s authenticities are not the question

the question [role of art in the State]

we know art is fundamental to the [New State] as is evidenced in village scenes,
majestic ancient views, masses and masses of [generic human figures]
marching in columns, swords coded as plowshares, image as spectacle

we know [name of city], [adjective], [name of major composer]
to recode [reduce] it: Linz, ambiguous, Wagner

we know a [name of major historical figure] calls, authentically, for a more total,
more radical war than we can even dream in the language of the avant
garde

we know a commercial promises to reduce plaque more effectively in this same
tone

but sometimes we exceed even our own expectations to surprise even ourselves

something encloses the impossible in a fable

an unreal world called real because it is so heavily metaphoric

we can’t keep our fingers of connection out of it
[from "Responding"]

I find this excerpt remarkably moving, as I find so much of Spahr's work, moving in the way that it seeks to uncover existing structures or systemic forces and find in them the kind of commonalities--destructive or constructive-- that they might allow.

Or, to use an example from a poet who plays a different role in the poetry world, one might think of Jorie Graham's use of the blank in The End of Beauty as a vagueness effect. No doubt, I'm missing numerous examples of effective or potent vagueness, but I'm sure you get my point.

--------------------------
Addendum:

I say all this while fully accepting, not so needless to say, the claims of specificity in poetry, of the material, the concrete, and its ability to resist the liquidation of the senses, the attentionlessness that seems to be, at least speaking for myself, the fate of my more and more mediated and virtual and bloggy life. I don't think I write good vague, and I wouldn't be surprised if I never manage to do so. There are other kinds of poetry out there.

Reginald's poetry, especially his new book Fata Morgana, is certainly concerned with making worlds from concrete colors and textures and details, concerned with preserving specifics against their misuse. But it also displays a tricky and ambivalent relationship to the vague, to the terrain vague in which the fata morgana of the title throws up its apparitions and mirages. At the risk of overworking the above formulations, I'm curious about the book's persistent attraction to spaces of openness, plainness and emptiness (spaces of, dare I say, vagueness?). This is pretty much, as it seems to me, the scene of writing here--a generative expanse, often described as a visual field, which seems to reinforce the incompleteness of the speaker, driven out of himself by lack and desire. One of the other names, too, for lack, in this book, is the gods, figures it seems for the world's disenchantment, its exposure:

But the Sahara isn't all sand
bare-scrubbed plains, barren
soil, thorn, broken stone,
gravel shimmering ocher and dun

Dunes the color of honey, wind sculpted
ruffles and flutes, a knife edge to leeward,
a hundred feet high
Tied dunes, echo dunes, barchans, seifs
parabolic blowout dunes, tranverse dunes, sigmoidal
dunes, sand seas' shifting shapes
(quartz ground fine as flour, powdered sugar)

["My Desert"]

*

Distance is money just out of reach,
a kindness like rain-laden clouds
that never drops its coins. Epochs
of fossilized trees crawl rusting hillside
strata: they smell like somewhere else
I've never been, an Anatolia
just outside the mind. Geometries
of travel and desire (from here to want
and back again), the myths of pleasure
reinvent another ancient world: oiled boys
racing naked around the circular walls
of Troy to find out who will wear
the plaited wreath, parade painted circuits
of unburnt parapets waving
to the crowds.

("Homeric Interim")

Vague space is what allows, it seems, for virtuousic reflection, meditation, for gorgeous spills and tumbles of detail. It's important to note, of course, that the poems are only vague at one level of their content, vague at the level of referent, but hyperspecific at the level of the sign. In this, they are the opposite of, say, Spahr's poems.

If there is anything that's vague at the level of the writing in Reginald's book it is probably the curious and charming presence--as a kind of internal voice, sometimes allegorized as "song"--of pop lyrics, whose cliches seem to push the poem forward to some kind of specifying concretion:

Song keeps repeating

shit where you eat, don't shit
where you eat. The day
begins with burning, then remembers
to wake up: sweetbitter resins,
pollens, dripping cum smells
flower, white. Highway's haunted
by rememberd men and boys, no light
but passing pickup trucks.

("At Weep")

What am I getting at here? Well, I suppose I'm trying to imply that form solidifying from a vague content, and vagueness deforming specific content, are in tension across these different poems by very different poets. Each strategy might need the other as a precondition, as the material or scene for its own work.

All night
He wants the young Hegelian, young Hegelian, young Hegelian,
He wants the young Hegelian
All right
He wants the young Hegelian

-------


I make a North American Free Trade Area with you, Ron Silliman.

Did everybody see this great little essay by J-clo on the prehistory of the dérive over at the Academy of American poets site?

Free! Indirect Discourse!

In the hope that there are interested readers and respondents, I'm making available an essay which imagines an encounter between the opposed aesthetic stances of Frank O'Hara and Theodor Adorno; that is, two thinkers whose moving and persuasive accounts of art have been absolutely indispensable to me, and who seem irreconcilable.

I wrote this essay with contemporary poets and contemporary poetry in mind (that is, I wrote it while thinking about you, about the claims of the recent past on you). In rough paraphrase, the essay theorizes forms of resistance and autonomy that do not depend upon negation and oppositionality as Adorno conceives it ( à la Beckett), and that do not require the kind of autonomy from the "culture industry" that may no longer be possible. It's a tendentious essay, purposefully so, and I welcome all forms of (civil) response to it. If there is interest in this piece, I will share other essays--on Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci, on Jeff Wall (just in time for his retrospective), and on Juliana Spahr and exception theory.

Having a Coke with Adorno and O'Hara (pdf)

Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Live in Paris 1970)

And, since we're doing YouTube, not a week goes by where, reading the newspaper, I don't have fantasies of interrupting transmissions with this: drums, here, on Bush's skull. Still about as good as this genre gets, next to Dylan's "Masters of War." Maybe we can resurrect Heartfield to do a video.

Brazil--Restaurant Scene

L'hyperréalité est morte, vive l'hyperréalité

Before I read Deleuze, or Derrida, or Foucault or any of the other world-rending New Philosophers, there was Baudrillard, a good introduction into so-called "theory" for kids like me whose life-philosophies were partly based on readings of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance and lyrics from Funkadelic songs [insert picture of me with dreadlocks here, 1993] and who didn't know enough about Marx or Hegel or Nietschze or Kant or Heidegger to understand much of what was going on. So, you know, I owe a great deal to Baudrillard's hilarious, poignant, gadfly's-eye view of the world in Simulacra and Simulation, a book that I've come to read as an attempt to extend Debord's Society of the Spectacle, as well as an example of the giddy fatalism that threatens all those on the left who dare to look capitalism in its big, ugly face for decade after decade while "doing" philosophy: Zizek avant la "z". His account of Los Angeles is still, basically, correct, even if its broad swaths miss the visible, irrisible marks of the real that are everywhere off the yuppie yoga-trail. The LA of Starsdown owes much to him. Embarrassingly, S and S is the only book of his I know, along with excerpts from the Gulf War book. But The Mirror of Production and Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign are things I look forward to reading soon. I like this quote of his from Le Monde, too: La lâcheté intellectuelle est devenue la véritable discipline olympique de notre temp.

I've always loved the restaurant scene in Brazil--1985 to Baudrillard's books 1981--below. This is how the simulacral looked then: already nostalgiac. Skip forward to minute 3:00.

"And the other of them, they lost their job a few weeks after the buildings fell, began writing a computer program that they would never finish. They made a program that took all the discussion on the internet that the other of them was looking at all day long in order to build their charts and scrambled it. The program then made a fake page of information where none of the connections, the analysis, the numbers made any sense. The program took hours to make and they would get up in the morning and turn on the computer and start before breakfast. Then they would go and make coffee and return to the computer. This would go on all day and when it started to get dark they would turn on a small lamp which didn’t extend much light beyond the desk and they would continue in the light of the small lamp and the light from the monitor of the computer which spread out over the light of the small lamp and filled the room with a certain, specific bluish glow. Their shoulders kept getting tighter and tighter as they worked harder and harder to scramble the information that kept being called out by the other in the room below. Because they barely moved from the computer, they often grew stiff from not moving all of their limbs. They were possessed by a special feeling, a feeling that the only escape, the only way out from all the endlessly bad information that came over the television and the internet was to keep scrambling it. And they saw this scrambling as an endless chore, as each day large amounts of new information was produced and this producing of new information continued into the night as they slept."

Green and Gray

I can't really think of any books--recent books, that is--that are doing what Geoffrey G. O'Brien's Green and Gray, is doing. (One of my favorite poems is here, others are here and here). Perhaps the thematics and thought-structure recalls the Frencher side of meditiative-speculative poetry in the last twenty years--Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Palmer and Norma Cole. He might be a tonalist.

But there's such a relentless refusal of particulars, of the soft law of detail and concretion ("show don't tell" in workshop-ese) in Geoffrey's book, a refusal enabled, I think, by the fact that the poems insist on remaining lyrics written in something that hovers close, often, to blank verse. They insist on--and consist of, and insist in--the line as a kind of untransgressable boundary, strengthened the more that they push up against it with puns and rhymes and syntactical prestidigitation. Line as a mobius strip that enforces a forgetting of its own past, a smudged present part not-yet and part already.


I have forgotten what
would travel from the north
as a series seen from above
or from below, and the followers,
the flowers, I tore them up
the next summer, or rather
before or immediately after
and thought no more about it. ("Three Seasons")

I'm already screwing up the end of the poem
with a hopeful form of forgetfulness.
Let me confess to you that I plan a perfect poem,
one written during the historical period.
Now this was a period I don't remember
and now another is coming to meet it.
This may fuck up the perfect poem
I admit I'd already planned a kind of mass for. ("The Nature of Encounters")

Each kick-turn, then, involves both a (necessary, involuntary) forgetting of its origin and an attempt to ward off an ever-imminent ending, here the period to the couplets that keeps dislocating the poem (pushing it forward or back) and keeping it from being equal to itself.

Over the course of the book, if you read it in one or two sittings, the adventure of the line-as-phenomenon/line-as-subject leaves in the mind an image of what form is and what it can be--a way of resisting the dislocations of time. I keep thinking of Marcel Broodthaers rewriting of Mallarme's "Un Coup de Dés" as a utter visuality, as form whose content is form.










It is tempting, I suppose, to read form-as-content in Geoffrey's book, its intense abstraction ("remorse of the senses") as a critique of the increasing homogeneity and contentlessness of American life, where opposition is, in fact, turned to a curious kind of affirmation, activism become passivism; where dissent is neutralized into some pale form of civility, and the cherished freedom and choicefulness of the U.S. middle-class has no relationship to matter. This is a correct reading of the book, and a helpful one. But I wouldn't want to miss the work's deep positivity, its participation in the experimental project I mention in the last post. It is not only a critique of life-made-abstract, of sameness, but an attempt to use these things as methods that can prevail against them as lived. In reading recently for a working-group meeting on Marx and Darwin, I was pointed to these sentences from the first preface to Capital:

Nevertheless the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it, while on the other hand there has been at least anapproximation to a successful analysis of forms which are much richer in content and more complex. Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the analyiss of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.But for the bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labor, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form.

I think this is a fantastic account of the power of abstraction to work against abstraction, to find forms of concretion and difference and particularity that are not false or chimerical. Just as for Deleuze, whose empiricism is similar to Marx's, repetition of the same, repetition as a stutter, demonstrates the baseline difference that cannot be submitted to claims of identity--"differnece without concept"--in Green and Gray, Geoffey dresses his poems in a camouflage of non-particulars, somnambulance and hypno-melancholy, submits the poems to line's repetition-without-concept to reveal the sub-perceptible differences and particulars to which we might attend:

The experience of leaving
one category for another,
of smooth being colder
than rough and of
that December I suffer
as the experience of leaving
one category for another,
using a life that way
that opens and stops
moving, done,
furtively waving
as with one month
that opens and stops
among the others. . . ("Mixed Mode")

This isn't really the abstraction of, say, Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," described recently by an interlocutor as " the individual subject purging itself of material determinations." The purge happened long ago. Instead, Geoffrey works to drive abstraction to its breaking point. Coming a few poems away from the end of the book, the repetition above, the little stutter, could be read as a kind of pivot, the book having hit a kind of zero-degree of abstraction-contra-abstraction, and finally giving way to the new, refreshed particularity I'm suggesting is its end. The penultimate poem, "Hysteron Proteron," allows itself the enormous conceit of containing "examples of all that has happened" and goes on to index various events political, personal and literary. The first time I read the book, I objected to this poem as the book's end; after a run of poems which so steadfastly refuse proper names and the like, to come across "Paris" and "911 is a joke" truly threw me. Now, though, I guess I'm pretty convinced that this is the point. Though I'm still not sure that the close of the book completely succeeds at what I'm reading it as attempting (a turn to particularity after the suicide of identity, the suicide of the same) I'm also not sure what such a success would look like in this instance. Only Beckett, it seems now, has pulled this off, if anybody has. And in any case, if the exit arc comes too little and too late, then perhaps what it does is point us to the next book.

For those who are skimming, the point is that you should get this book. I look forward to hearing what people have to say about it, and about my reading of it.

Terms of Agreement

While I was away reading lots of Milton and Jacques Lacan and Ezra Pound and other things that footnotes are for and that require a certain rare mineral found in the bonedust of zombie scholars, a few blog-versations caught my eye.

It's true, I think, that the terminology for contemporary poetry we have now is inadequate, and that many are forced to rely on school-names (NYS, Language) and loaded binarizations (x vs. y) or binarizations with a mediating third term (the post-avant, the fence) for things that have evolved and proliferated in excess of these terms, and that were perhaps always less clearly marked (inside and outside poems) than people might be led to believe. I find all of these schemes inadequate, and no doubt there's always going to be some remainder in any attempt to map what people are doing. Good that.

But I also don't think it's exactly helpful to forego generalizing distincitions altogether; because what we're left with then is individuals or small groups of poets existing in a vacuum, social relations turned to objects, objects turned to -jects pro- and sub- and ab- and -e. The usefulness of generalizations--despite the violence they do, all categories are violent--is that they continually remind us of the social ground of poetry, at the same time manifesting important difference in the kinds of things that are getting written, and that get obscured by accounts interested in making all of the branches of the barred American tree root arboresce into the yes/no switch of ye olde blog. Good criticism can do this with or without a catchphrase, but not everybody will be able to produce good criticism on the spot (more on this later perhaps). So I think we need TERMS, MaSTERless and MiSTERless, MySTERious terms. What I want is something that is more descriptive than evaluative, that carries the grain and hue of a good, infrequently encountered or repurposedadjective, that don't aim to brick a wall right through the middle of poetry. I'd like clusters of terms like this, shots fired into the crowd, constellations or distillations or exhalations, clusters of terms that, in their proliferates, escape the vicissitudes of mirror-games (2), triangulization (3), gridlock (4), overkill (5) [see Kasey for an excellent discussion of these problems]. Josh's use of "neo-baroque," for instance, and related musings on "strategies of excess" seems likely to be productive--even if there is, or perhaps because there is, strong disagreement about what or who or why and wherefor this means.

Obviously, the more these terms seek to be total rather than to manifest a few neglected features, the more useless and confining and irritating they will be. The totals are elsewhere, like life.

I've said before why I think the term "avant-garde" implies certain notions of futurity, of forwardness, of being ahead-of-one's-time, that don't really match with my reading of the contemporary poetry that gets labeled this way. It also carries, alongside its military origins, connotations of intellectual collectivity, collective means of production and distribution. To be avant-garde, I think, requires existing within a cultural dominant that despises, ignores and continually misunderstands what you do, and that requires, as such, alternative means of making and distributing. That's to say, the term bears on the way poetry is published, read, shared, critiqued, the goals it sets for itself. By these two standards, there are many writers and collections of writers today where this term probably fits, to some degree. But there are many that are not. Get to work: you're falling behind the average person on the Bergdorf alienation scale; you're not pissing enough people off. Even you, Behrle©.

I would be less reluctant to use it in this manner if other people used it this way too. But they don't; it means the same thing that "indie rock" does in music, or "independent film." Very little. So I just can't recommend it as a productive term for contemporary poetry. It's still fine for the most of the stuff it gets applied to historically.

I do, however, really like Lyn Hejinian's very specific definition of experiment and experimental in the first of her "Two Stein Talks" and pretty much throughout her collection The Language of Inquiry, the title of which shows her commitment to epistemological and phenomenological poetic practice. I like the term because it reads literary history and the literary present against the grain, which is pretty much what I want criticism to do, and why I think "avant-garde" is basically a dried shell. By looking at Stein's relationship to scientific method, her early work in experimental science (fascinatingly available here, thanks to Tony Tost, in the new Fascicle), American pragmatist philosophy, and the fiction of Flaubert, Zola and James, Lyn is extraordinarily persuasive about the important links between realism and experimentation in early modernism, where art sets itself to be "simultaneously an analytical tool and a source of perception and to make the real--usually construed as the ordinary--its focus." In Stein and in Lyn's work, this emphasis on a "real" obscured by habitual and commonplace ways of thinking and looking forces an intense phenomenological refashioning of descriptive language by way of the resources of poetry. There is a dialectic at work in her account of Stein--the increasing dominance of science pressures poetry and literature to recast itself, to prove its value as knowledge, just as the advent of the photograph--nature's pencil, an eye without a brain--and of a certain documentary realism, provokes the long joyride from late Courbet/Manet into the splashless colorfield: Cezanne as a realer realism, the real of seeing (Merleau-Ponty's "palpation with the look"), not the real of the seen.*

But the best thing about this term as Lyn uses it is that it would be impossible to make it mean "all of the poetry that is good," impossible for experimental realism to find itself anything but uncomfortably abutted by friends and neighbors who perform all of the thing it's not: idealism, lyricism, expressivism, constructivism. Indeed, the experimental and non-experimental often coexist in the work of a single poet, and the term cleaves certain certain coteries and schools of poetry in interesting ways. The following is subject to rethinking:

Williams is experimental but Ezra Pound isn't really. Niedecker and Reznikoff are experimental but Oppen isn't really; Zukofsky is sometimes experimental. Jack Spicer is not experimental. Mina Loy is not experimental. Wallace Stevens is experimental, Eliot not, Crane not, Moore is. ("Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination"). Laura Riding was experimental when she stopped writing poems. Everybody who is dead is experimental. Sex is experimental. Disease, pain, mortality, loss of friends, family, and my slack-jawed incapacity to respond to such things: not experimental. Parenting is experimental. Bernadette Mayer is experimental. Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch, Guest: not. Clark Coolidge is experimental but Tom Raworth not (or only sometimes). Charles Bernstein is not really experimental; Ron is sometimes; Bob Perelman not, Barrett Watten not. Susan Howe is experimental on one half of the page; Michael Palmer is not experimental. Archie Ammons is experimental in "Sphere" and in many other works. The labors of the negative in this chapbook by Alyssa Wolf are not experimental, but they may be a reverse hope. Vallejo is totally experimental. Hocquard is experimental. Berryman is not. Is Alice Notley experimental? Am I? Are you?

What happens, I think, is that the term as Lyn employs makes you realize that work that is often termed experimental involves not an experimental disposition toward reality, but an expressive attitude toward self that needs to be distinguished between from confession (self-performance, self as something that is made in the uttering of self, self-transformation, self as the expression of the things in the vicinity of the self) or a constructive or procedural attitude toward social, historical materials.

I realize, though, that the term necessitates serious philosophical and historical thought; we have to make decisions about the philosophical frames possible for poetry, about the nature of the real or reality, and about how and where language mediates what we can say. I don't, for instance, for myself, accept much of the pragmatist and phenomenological underpinnings of Lyn's useful use of the term, how poetry indexes and represents the world. And that's another thing I like about the term, is is forces us to consider the philosophical foundations of the term from the very get-go. This is to say, it's an open question for me what it means to be experimental if one is writing from within a postmarxist, poststructural frame. Lisa Robertson does this, but by way of other kinds of traditions and media--Epicurus and friends, romanticism, architecture, art.

I should acknowledge, as I sign off, that many of these thoughts come from reading not only Lyn's book but James' Agee's and Walker Evans unrelenting, seething experimental realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (why aren't there more books like this?), and thinking about the relationship, by way of Joanna Picciotto's class and scholarship, between Milton's poetry and the experimental, protestant communities (ranters, levellers, diggers, etc.) during the English Civil War. (Note: If you want to see that article and can't get access, e-mail me).

Next time: formalism.

*Bill Berkson (letter to B. Mayer in What's Your Idea of a Good Time pg. 199):

What is realism? I asked my Art Institute students and we didn't get much out of it except looking at a lot of terrific pictures with people and things in them. I remember Lyn Hejinian asking a lot of people, poets, that question a few years ago, and now she gives lectures on the topic but I never have found out what use she found for the term which seemed pretty shady to me. I tried to discourage Lyn about using it; "real,"however, being a very useful word when applied to both poems and poets, horrifying as it seems a poem can be real without being true (isn't that what unhinged Laura Riding at some point?)

I'm taking a short break from blogging. I should be back in a couple of weeks.

2nd Ave is really terrific. I'm still not quite sure what it is exactly, but it's good.

Once you finish with all of the good reading recently uploaded (Coconut 7, Dusie 5, Octopus 8),
do check out these two poems (and--yikes!--embarrassing video) from Stars-Down here, over at Boyd Spahr's nomadic and protean journal Aiden Starr. No guarantee that these links will do what they are supposed to. But for now: great work by Laura Solomon, Jon Leon, Kristen Kaschock, Karla Kelsey, and Jenny Boully.

He do the borderguards in Flash

Did everybody catch this (also above), which cher Heriberto Yepez posted to the International Exchange earlier this month? . Do check it out. We all need a nudge now and then from the didactic dead.

I hear tell that he has a book coming out soon from Factory School. That's great news. I loved his poems in Copper Canyon Press's Anthology Reversible Monuments, and last semester at UCB he gave a lovely (er, terrific)reading from the poems he's been writing in English.

(Update: hey look, it's already here).

Extreme Contemporary Conference, Part II

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A University Without Intellectuals—What Exactly Is Coming to an End and Why?” [*Note: this is sort of run-through as the same end-of-history arguments most of you will have, no doubt, heard before]

1) The contemporary is a new chronotope. There have been no new paradigms for the last 25 years. Death of the master thinkers--is there anybody of his generation of the stature of Foucault/Derrida/Habermas? A revisionist period, in which one would expect great erudition and scholarship, but no, there's a diminishing amount of time.

2) If this is a new chronotope, what was the old one (episteme classique)? The birth of history with Darwin, Hegel/ evolution/ dialectic. The birth of the second-order observer (the birth, then, of the present as mediation between past and future, a short moment of transition. The future appears as an open horizon of possibility.

3) How did it break down? Death of the grand narrative (Lyotard); end of metahistory (Hayden White). We no longer believe in the openness of history.
[I still can't figure out why this means there are no longer any intellectuals]

Svetlana Boym, “Off-Modern Ruins: Contemporary Reflections on the Avant-garde”

1) The off-modern as part ruin, part construction site.
2) A new diagnosis of the modern, a new symptom: ruinophilia, which goes beyond postmodern quotation marks or the neo-baroque (following Benjamin's notions of ruin as an allegory of thinking.
3)Etymology of nostalgia a meta-nostalgia--its neologic invention from gr. nostos (home), is itself nostalgiac.
4) Off-modern nostalgia as an utopian wishing directed sideways. Tatlin Tower as example (monument to 3rd Internationale)--as emerging from the space in between torndown statue to the Tsar and a not-yet-built monument to the party . For Tatlin and others, artistic revolution precedes political revolution. Their goal was to match with imagination did with reason, to confront technology with technique.
5) Seeks, precisely, to discomfit: equation of confort and conformity.
6) As an effort to preserve these energies, she wrote the Off-Modern Manifesto, originally as a joke. Her claim is that error has an aura/order. Interested in what the failures of technology reveal (you can read more here).

Joshua Clover, “Stock Footage, or the Representability of World Systems”

1)Would like to attend to some of the cultural fields which Jameson overleaps, despite his claims to a Poetics of Social Form, by focussing on two artworks, which like poetry do the work of providing the "cognitive maps" for which Jameson's postmodernism calls, that exist somewhere between the longue duree and the momentariness of fireworks. Postmodern not as unknowable but as unrepresentable, a representation of unrepresentability, then, is what's at stake.

2) Collapse of the historical and the cultural into each other. The groundlessness/baselessness of late capitalism--infrstructure having exchanged itself for immanence. History becomes untethered from the real, and what results is information, networks.

3) Lombardi and the Black-Shoals Planetarium come from the field of information art, which includes "process art" and "event art." Involves the display and manipulation (re-constellation)of real information.

4)Mark Lombardi, conspiracy theory art, sociograms, charts the global networks of money influence involved in real events. Extraodinarily large drawings. Our "mania for information flow" --up close it works as to demystify--and attach names to (Kissinger, etc.) --what normally appears as abstracted, reified social relations involved in , but stepping back a kind of reverse Chuck Close effect (Charlie Distant), allows and everything is flattened, made abstract and unreal.

5) Earliest point in time of Lombardi's art is 1973--the peak of accumulation, collapse of the Bretton Woods, and also the beginning of the derivatives market (futures, options) which were enabled, in part, by the Black-Scholes equations, allowing in effect the pricing of the future in real time. (Black and Scholes found a company that collapses in 1998 and has to be bailed out by Greenspan to avoid economic catastrophe).

5)Autogena and Portways Black-Shoals Planetarium uses these equations to visualize--as stars--all of the transactions of the world's markets, a sphere in which all people who have a retirement fund or own stocks are involved. Ongoing process happenign at every moment, a degree of abstraction so great that it becomes representation.

6) A representation of capital that has become free, become the subject of history, self-valorizing, autonomous. Not exactly Jameson's "waning of affect" but the affect of missing affect, of becoming or being made abstract. The planetarium as a kind of sublime negative knowledge.

The Fully Enlightened Earth

I've been wanting to put this information up for a while, but it's difficult to get over the resistance that even contemplating the catastrophe (this one, merely one among many) facing us engenders in me, not to mention the resistance I have to stating things the obvious. But perhaps these figures will be helpful. I finally got around to reading/skimming the devastating but not entire hopeless opinion of the U.K.'s Stern report on global warming (here). Of course, the Stern report imagines a world economy that continues to grow, rather than one that suffers a economic catastrophe (which could help in reducing emissions by killing consumers and producers).

Cost of stabilizing the planet's greenhouse gas emisions (expressed as %1 of world GDP, estimates run from below %1 to 5%): $ 403 Billion

Cost of Iraq war to date: $660 Billion.

Does stabilizing mean that the seas won't rise? That weather won't be even worse than it is? That crops won't fail? Your thingies fall off? Most scientists say no; these things are almost certain. Buy that designer survival kit now!

Should we just accept the end and leave the lights on all day long? No, no, no.

As nauseating as any calculations involving human life and suffering are, there's a difference between one foot of sea level rise and ten feet. Between ten Katrinas and one hundred Katrinas. The difference is entire cities and towns.

Should the whole world go on strike on my birthday or the birthday of anybody living this year? Yes, yes, yes.

Is there any hope? Yes, a sliver. A very sharp sliver.

Notes from the Extreme Contemporary Conference, Part I.

Here are my notes from the excellent conference at Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel. Much here that is relevant to ongoing discussion about poetry, I think.

Conference: The Extreme Contemporary

Event Date: January 12, 2007

Speakers: Svetlana Boym, Joshua Clover, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Alan Liu, Bill Luoma, Katie Salen
Discussants: Celeste Langan, Tyrus Miller, Sianne Ngai, Anne Wagner
Location: Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Overview (Note: this conference didn't really have much to do with novels)
Samuel Richardson famously called the novel "writing to the moment"; to what degree can this claim make sense of our present set of moments? How does the novel, long considered a pioneering form of modernity, engage the conditions that shape literature and art being produced and consumed today, Jan. 12, 2007, and into the future? What relationship might narrative practices have to a contemporary moment whose extremity is often located around visual regimes and instantaneity, organized by new technology and global communications? Are new media and digital technologies more prepared to find adequate forms for current conditions; does—and should—writing to this moment remain as a possibility?

10 am -11:30 am
Alan Liu, “Burning the Book: ‘Agrippa: A Book of the Dead’ in the Age of Networked Reproduction”

(Italics indicate my thinking and not spoken remarks)

Agrippa, William Gibson's collaborative project (with?).
--An "alien bildung," the bildung of new media. Included a poem on a diskette at the back of the artist's book, a poem which self-deleted after one reading: Agrippa as the metamorphosis of new media, the poem as the fragile, short-lived butterfly, and the disk a husk or chrysalis.
--Liu sets up The Agrippa Files to reconstruct the book and diskette; the tension between 1992-2005, web 1.0 and web 2.0. Book features a genetic sequence (I wish I knew about this before starting my genome project) that the printer had trouble printing--transcription problems everywhere, problem with the materiality of information. Agrippa becomes cult object of new media studies. What's the relationship between the handmade (high-end fine-art book) and technological?
-Agrippa and The Agrippa Files allows for an understanding of the digital event (or non-event). A circuit between new media studies, media archaeology, digital-textual scholarship. Allow us to see the problematic of seeing event as discrete moment--rather a process, a happening, that is in a continual state of redefintition and becoming. Just as it is problematic to see web 2.0 as a thing, as a one. Not network but networking. The fetish or cult object of Agrippa creates a self-sustaining or self-referencing circuit, a hype cycle, but also something that continually exceeds it.

My conclusion: Liu wants to question the thinking of new media and internet events as objects and discrete occurrences. The book becomes in a sense a redherring, the material husk of an underlying informational and social process which always exceeds our ability to think it--as as a one, or as an event, or object.

J. on break: remarks on nostalgia effect: we like capitalism from 20 yrs ago, just not today's capitalism. What is that?

Bill Luoma, “Electronic Arts: Problems with the Peace Server and Other Technologies”

--No thesis, he says. Only a question: are we there yet? Describes the peace server, uses google inputs to collage together content, links, images. "Feed unravels the web." Claims that while occasional moments of aesthetic interest, the result is not overall readable, like tedious Making of Americans (This strikes me as an apt comparison given the emphasis on person and making, back to bildung).
--Describes Jared Carter's indignation at a collage of his name. Flarflist response. Name as property? Describes his intent in setting up the peace server immediately after Sept. 11 by reading a passage about him from Spahr's forthcoming memoir--"to scramble the disinformation, to make sense of it all." Describes flarflist as "a healthy breeding ground for ass-vaginas"
--Dan Hoy's critique of flarf, and by extension the peace server, as "corporate algorithm." Likes phrase: play on notion of corporeal, but also agglomeration.
--Biographical information: Luoma grew up in Santa Clara valley, worked at Lockheed, parents worked at Lockheed. Chemical lab assistant : "mostly I was responsible for contamination." Reads collaborative poetry bus poem describing toxic sites in the Santa Clara valley.
--A short lesson in how computers talk to each other. Works directly on transmission control protocol and internet protocol. Sends Jclo an email. His point is that "ambiguity constrains protocols." Clarity as a value at the level of machine language. Indeed, he says, it's now thought that it is impossible to write a compiler that can handle ambiguity.
--His conclusion is that Flarf and the Peace Server are fundamentally constrained by this base-level attention to clarity and the corporate efficiency rationality that they index. What if ambiguity were written in? Poor John Keats. Describes the work of Jim Campbell who builds his own circuits and writes his own language as an example of a artist who writes ambiguity in.

Conclusion: Luoma's talk is a more attentive and sympathetic version of Hoy's critique, but one that is more compelling in demonstrating the regulatory forces at work in search-engine assisted art. I don't think it's a critique of search-engin Flarf as much as indication that such art forms need an awareness of these foundational clarities. In this he seems to echo Language poets' accounts of their own work as disrupting the efficiency and clarity and obviousness of ideological discourse (Bernstein and Watten and Perelman).

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Discussion:

Somebody brings up the role of comfort and discomfort in Katie Salen's project. Complicity/oppositionality--somebody mentions J. Drucker's book and Bourriaud. Is comfort compensatory? Does it supply something that is lacking, "shorthand for a process of socialization,"museums of socialization , museums of play in a world where play is disappearing. Anne Wagner speaks up for a combination between relational aesthetics and strategies of estrangement. Somebody: "Often on playgrounds you'll see children spend more time discussing the rules than actually playing." Jclo suggests we distinguish between inner rules and outer rules.

Moretti asks if the contemporary can really be identified with a medium. Medium as zeitgeist, medium as philosophy. Have we gone from a situation of the world to medium as definition of contemporary--therefore, end of history, etc. Liu mentions the singularizing of the word media and the way that "medium" drops out of discourse in the 60s. Information as allegory for capitalism, and as allegory for history. Spahr resists this equation of contemporary and internet. Why not resistance to globalization?

More to follow.

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