I Managed To Think About It

One of my poems is now up at poeaticanet, courtesy of Joseph Mosconi. It's for Greeks! (That is, poeticanet is for Greeks; my poem is for all persons of middling character)

This + that

Brian's terrible poetry jokes really work for me, they don't quite make me laugh but they make me snicker a little and feel like I know things.

Nada's reading of Alli's book is interesting; I'd probably be annoyed if someone collaged the sexy bits of my poems (are there any?), but the chat about code-switching in the penultimate paragraph was very perceptive I thought. And the idea of code-switching as mask (does code-switching as mask take the place of persona as mask, perhaps?)

Book Report: Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals

To fully understand Foucault's Discipline and Punish, you have to read Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Not only does Nietzsche's book pioneer the genealogical study of concepts (the method taken up and formalized by Foucault's works), it also includes extensive discussion of the idea of punishment. Furthermore, like all of Nietzsche's books, On the Genealogy of Morals reads politics in terms of the idea of power, a reading that psychologizes politics and denies the idea that political structures and practices are intended to achieve specific purposes. Instead, according to Nietzsche, political practices are the manifestation of the will to power of political actors, and any use which political structures might seem to have is secondary, overdetermined, and temporary.

Foucault's books model an ambiguous relationship to power: on the one hand, it's clear that Foucault fears power and sympathizes with stigmatized persons who have been marked or transformed by the operation of power. On the other hand, Foucault writes like power: his prose seems to reenact power's past operations as well as producing power in the form of knowledge. Foucault as a person tends to disappear beneath the surface of his prose; Foucault's prose identifies with the operation of power rather than with his own personal subjectivity. (I assume that Foucault does not dramatize his personal subjectivity because he declines to dramatize himself as a product of the operation of the power of others.) This begins to change only after Foucault becomes fascinated with gay liberation movements in the early 80s.

Nietzsche on the other hand loves power; he views the unashamed, natural, pleasurable manifestation of personal power as the basis of human vitality. To Nietzsche, the powerful who use their power without self-consciousness to achieve their own pleasure are the only healthy humans; humans without power are impotent and full of resentment and their resentment and reactionary idealism represents the greatest threat to human vitality and to human values. For Nietzsche, the impotent forces of resentment want to universalize their condition of powerlessness through ever more restrictive and tyrannical modes of democratic governance; the side-effect of this is that they teach an ideology of contempt for human drives and human nature. Nietzsche particularly hates (and fears) Christians, anarchists, communists, anti-Semites, and the bourgeoisie; he loves aristocrats and Greek heroes. Nietzsche does admire the state, and governance in general, because they represent an expression of power to organize life on behalf of the powerful; however, to the extent that the state is influenced by the democratic forces of resentment, Nietzsche views the state as sick. This is because the democratic state aims toward the elimination of power and the production and glorification of impotence and helplessness.

In a very profound way, Nietzsche and Foucault are both pro-crime, and it is Nietzsche's sympathy for the punished criminal, I think, that first attracted Foucault to him. Foucault's sympathy for the punished is different, because it is based on sympathy for those whom society has stigmatized as deviants (a standard aspect of the punishment process--every felon has a more or less indelible label). Nietzsche, on the other hand, sympathizes with the punished person's loss of vitality; he despises punishment to the extent that it estranges the punished person from his-or-her power and removes the sense of agency (for Nietzsche, agency is confidence in one's own will to power). Nietzsche writes "Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance." Here we see Nietzsche's optimism: the hope that punishment will increase the will to power, and therefore the vitality of the punished person. Yet he continues, more somberly, "If it happens that punishment destroys the vital energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less pleasant than the usual effects of punishment--characterized by dry and gloomy seriousness" (On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, Second Essay, Section 14, pgs. 81-82).

This "dry and gloomy seriousness" of subjugation is precisely what Nietzsche and Foucault are joined in hating--they meet on this ground. Nietzsche even imagines, paradoxically, a government so powerful that it would have no need to punish--he sees this as an ideal situation. However, it's an absurd, self-contradictory idea, since Nietzsche at the same time believes that government exists fundamentally as an expression of power--how else could power be expressed than through some form of punishment? (Foucault clarifies this idea by describing the function of government as disciplinary, employing punishment to subjugate the populace. It's fascinating to imagine how Nietzsche would have responded to this idea of "discipline": I assume he would have viewed it as a horribly destructive collective dehumanization perpetrated by the democratizing forces of resentment. Nietzsche could only have been appalled by the spectacle of a state that disciplined all its members [even the President!--that would terrify him], thereby inducing resentment in everyone, and eliciting the expression of that resentment as the bedrock of political process [Think of how, in the U.S., almost every effective political stance is against someone, whereas proposals that are for a particular group tend to fail--it's in resentment and the use of power to suppress prerogatives that the public finds some unity]).

So, Nietzsche loves the state because he loves power; Foucault hates the state because he hates its production of subjugated individuals. Nietzsche also hated the production of subjugation, so one suspects that were Nietzsche to have become aware of Foucault's ideas about state discipline, he would have had to give up, or at least qualify, his love for the state. This is one small way in which Foucault undermines Nietzsche's positions.

It is in On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche defines the genealogical method for studying concepts, and, not coincidentally, it is in the sections on punishment that he defines this method. He writes "the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin" (Second Essay, section 12, p. 77). Thus, the genealogical method attempts to discover both the origin and the various transformations of a concept, without assuming that any narrative of progress governs the deployment of that concept in different locations or eras.

Nietzsche continues, "the entire history of a 'thing,' an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another" (77). And in the next section he applies this genealogical theory of concepts to punishment, writing "the concept 'punishment' possesses in fact not one meaning but a whole synthesis of 'meanings': the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its employment for the most various purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is hard to disentangle, hard to analyze and, as must be emphasized especially, totally indefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)" (80). Foucault's Discipline and Punish builds on the kernel that Nietzsche presents here, doing precisely that which this passage says cannot be done, and using Nietzsche's genealogical method to do it. And as I said above, by defining the contemporary purpose of punishment as the production of discipline, Foucault even succeeds in undermining Nietzsche's positive view of governance. At the same time, Foucault proves the value of Nietzsche's genealogical approach for producing a non-teleological history of significant concepts, viewing the shifting meanings of concepts as the results not of conceptual evolution but rather of the adaptation of the concepts to the purposes of new users (new powers).

The biggest problem of Nietzsche's philosophy is the idea that the expression of power, the achievement of the will to power, is pleasurable. What is this pleasure? Is he right? This is the place at which it is possible to doubt Nietzsche. And yet, it does seem that those who have power enjoy expressing it very much. But isn't it ashes in the mouth? For Nietzsche, my doubts about the joy and vitality to be found in the expression of personal power mark me as an impotent person, a miserable person steeped in resentment, the sort of person who cannot see the beauty in human beings and human actions and who cannot see the value of human life except as something to be superceded by idealist manifestations. He may be right. Yet still I doubt. Is cruelty really as fun and self-affirming as Nietzsche claims? (Obviously, his assumption is that the religious consciousness, founded on resentment, must be rejected before a person can realize this.) I have to say that I do believe there are pleasures much greater than those to be found in the expression of power, and Foucault came to believe this too, as is clear in some of his late discussions of gay liberation and San Francisco, where he glorifies the idea of people living as friends. Of course, the will to power has some expression in friendship, especially sexualized friendship, but camaraderie exceeds power relations. Nietzsche discusses this too, arguing that true friendship is made possible by the acquisition of power and the recognition of approximately equal power in another. But this is vague--is he arguing that only aristocrats can have true friendship? Can't the poor have equally satisfying lateral bonds? Or is friendship only made possible by some level of mutual affluence, and therefore dependent on some degree of power acquisition? I'll leave these as discussion questions for whoever's read this far.

Nietzsche makes his own effort to interpret the "semiotically concentrated" concept of punishment, with a remarkably poetic use of parataxis. He describes 11 possible meanings of punishment, of which I'll list a few:

"Punishment as a means of rendering harmless, of preventing further harm. Punishment as recompense to the injured party for the harm done, rendered in any form (even that of a compensating affect). Punishment as the isolation of a disturbance of equilibrium, so as to guard against any possible further spread of the disturbance. Punishment as a means of inspiring fear of those who determine and execute the punishment. Punishment as a kind of repayment for the advantages the criminal has enjoyed hereto (for example, when he is employed as a slave in the mines). Punishment as the expulsion of a degenerate element (in some cases, of an entire branch, as in Chinese law: thus as a means of preserving the purity of a race or maintaining a social type). Punishment as a festival, namely as the rape and mockery of a finally defeated enemy. Punishment as the making of a memory, whether for him who suffers the punishment--so-called "improvement"--or for those who witness its execution" (Second Essay, Section 13, pgs. 80-81).

I'll stop there. Obviously, the most disquieting is the "festival" of punishment, involving rape and mockery (think Abu Ghraib or, closer to home, the tolerated systematic rape of American felons). And yet, I feel this is the sense of punishment which Nietzsche views as most fundamental, the enjoyment of punishing which he views as a healthy prerogative of those who express power. One could say that Nietzsche is a sadist, but that doesn't even cover the case--in fact, he views sadism as a universal quality of healthy human beings, whereas those who resent such abuses are sick and despise humanity and human nature. In Nietzsche's view, we resent those who rape and torture others precisely because of our own feelings of impotence and frustration about our inability to do the same; furthermore, he is optimistic about the pleasure of hurting others, since the acceptance of such enjoyments is the basis of beautiful aesthetic possibilities.

It's hard to know quite what to say about all this, except that it makes one rethink the meaning of those works that do aestheticize torture--for example, are various works ostensibly critical of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo actually better understood as creating beauty out of these tortures (and thereby glorifying their aesthetic significance)? Certainly, many Americans, especially poor white people and especially (from my experience) poor white women, seem to very much enjoy the idea that male criminals are raped in jail, which they see as an aspect of justice. There's a racial subtext to this, since it's mostly people from minority groups who suffer this treatment, and then again sometimes there's this wistful hope that high-status white collar criminals will be raped this way, since that would "really show them." In other words, in a society with an institutionalized penal rape culture, who are we to reject Nietzsche's idea that sadism is healthy and universal? And yet a major problem of Nietzsche's thought is that he seems not to realize that such an idea must be rejected in order to achieve civil society. Perhaps the answer is that Nietzsche (like so many 19th century philosophers) did not really value civil society. In which case, an interesting study would be to critique Nietzsche through Habermas.

But that's enough for today--now it's time to "work"!

Dreamed last night that I had work published simultaneously in The New Yorker and Harper's (not coincidentally the two mass-market magazines I get at my house). No doubt this is my unconscious commenting on the discussion of the production of the real in the last post. An author credit in a mass-market magazine = "real" in our reputational economy. In the dream, I was very concerned that my name was in bigger letters on the cover of the subscription version of the New Yorker than on the cover of the newsstand version, where it was last name only in a smaller font. In the dream, I had written journalism for both (a two page profile of a gambler was the New Yorker piece).

To escape "reification" in a reputation economy is easy--just go unnoticed. There, I did it. Marginalization is the height of valor.

But does one not want his/her reputation to be a thing objectified and separate from the self?

Also in the dream, my neighborhood became a map of New York--walking down a tree-lined sidestreet, urban avenues of Manhattan were referenced and evoked by a series of small shrines put there by the same people who delivered my copy of the New Yorker.

Speaking of "real," I'm loving The Front by Kasey Mohammad. Reading it is a great relief from the feeling that life is administered and bureaucratic. I love the work, and therefore would like Kasey's name to become a nice hard solid thing to lead people to the writing.

Of course, I dislike the elite power enforced by the draining of subjective content from human relations. See Ballard's work for a corrective to this, such as in the Ronald Reagan stories or the discussion of Elizabeth Taylor in Crash--where he emphasizes the inclusion of objectified celebrity figures in a vortex of perverse subjectivity. A writer can crash the party of realized relations by referring to the real while replacing its official meanings. Mohammad and other Flarfists do this, and it is an effort to do more than just consolidate subcultures.

The Traffic in Citations

I've been thinking a lot about the bit in Michel de Certeau where he says citation creates reality.

I decided he's right: citation creates reality.

Academics do it with footnotes. Certeau uses oodles of footnotes.

I guess poets are content (or proud?) to be subreal.

We all know how the news does it.

Montaigne did it with unattributed quotation. The idea was that you would see the citation without it being pointed out because there was a common body of wisdom and you were smart. Very weird.

As for memoir, it's not the "I was there" that makes it real. It's not the sincerity in the testimony that does it, but rather the way the testimony cites similar accounts by incorporating elements of what others saw. What makes it real is "I was there, and it looked like they said it would."

A true but unreal memoir would be good. Like "A Season in Hell" say. A true story that fails to resemble anyone's.

There's also "reification" and the avant-garde struggle to avoid it. Like trying to shock people without being noticed.

I think "reification" is a perfectly fine idea and the struggle against it is dumb. Lukacs strikes me as Puritan, a Puritan who wanted to improve the world by rejecting pictures of it. Embracing imagophobia strikes me as the weaker position, by and large. Then there's nothing to do but attack other people's pictures, a critical stance that circulates unreality, trying to make a bigger gap in the real for the light to shine in. Where the light turns out to be a set of "thou shalt nots." But the fact is the material realities will always have their images and people will see and they will "reify" in order to have a sense of security in what they are seeing because the mind is designed to overcome defamiliarization and thereby to make things known.

I'm not sure if Flarf is citational. The point seems to be to cite so as to comment on the traffic in citations. Flarf might make the objects of its citation more real, but does not ever become real itself. How could it? The name is insurance against getting real.

Then there's Wallace Stevens whose poems offer insurance against losses of faith by situating all the powers of faith in imagination. There's a willful denial of the real there, as if there were only imagination and belief and the liquid exchanges between them, without any real to that mediate that exchange. But of course, the real does mediate that exchange. You can't believe in imagination in the way Stevens claims you can; you absolutely need a traffic in citations to make capacities into knowns. Stevens just traffics in the most abstract citations he could muster up. And denatured citations--wind and colors in no particular place.

Poems can overcome the familiar and be unreal and a tradition can build up of unreal poems citing each other and what is that?

Williams, like Rimbaud, describes real things in an unreal way. I go for that I guess. I'd love to live in William's Patterson: water-droplets banging into each other above the Falls. The mind's struggle distributed so broadly that every unit of any size or form is at productive odds with the units next to it. He was a guy who didn't like that the war of all against all is fought with walls.

I just cited Hobbes and Frost. I don't like them. Though I like that Hobbes inspired Darwin. It's clear that the traffic in citations can't be static, that the structure necessitates permanent revolution, even if it's of a type we mostly don't want. What can you do? What we collectively produce by wanting can easily be something that we mostly don't want. "Groups are more immoral than individuals"--not an exact quote--Martin Luther King. Mammals know the real is groups. Certeau says something like, I can believe in the value of what I clearly know to be shit if I am assured that others believe in the value of it. Believing in the value of shit is Certeau's way of being for others.

Left Theology

I'm reading The Coming Insurrection, a fine piece of theology. It's about overthrowing the state, an excellent theological goal.

Here's a good bit:

"The sentimental confusion that surrounds the question of work can be explained thus: the notion of work has always included two contradictory dimensions: a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of participation. Exploitation of individual and collective labor power through the private or social appropriation of surplus value; participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who cooperate at the heart of the universe of production. These two dimensions are perversely confused in the notion of work, which explains workers’ indifference, at the end of the day, to both Marxist rhetoric – which denies the dimension of participation – and managerial rhetoric – which denies the dimension of exploitation. Hence the ambivalence of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as it makes us strangers to what we are doing, and – at the same time – adored, insofar as a part of ourselves is brought into play. The disaster has already occurred: it resides in everything that had to be destroyed, in all those who had to be uprooted, in order for work to end up as the only way of existing. The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn’t work: the familiarities of one’s neighborhood and trade, of one’s village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking.

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. The mine in Carmaux, famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been reconverted into Cape Discovery. It’s an entertainment 'multiplex' for skateboarding and biking, distinguished by a 'Mining Museum' in which methane blasts are simulated for vacationers.

In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new, cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the maintenance and surveillance of this process. The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid losing them. They and their work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace. Managers, scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants and engineers, literally never stop working. Even their sex lives serve to augment productivity. A Human Resources philosopher writes, '[t]he most creative businesses are the ones with the greatest number of intimate relations.' 'Business associates,' a Daimler-Benz Human Resources Manager confirms, 'are an important part of the business’s capital [...] Their motivation, their know-how, their capacity to innovate and their attention to clients’ desires constitute the raw material of innovative services [...] Their behavior, their social and emotional competence, are a growing factor in the evaluation of their work [...] This will no longer be evaluated in terms of number of hours on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained and quality of results. They are entrepreneurs.'

The series of tasks that can’t be delegated to automation form a nebulous cluster of jobs that, because they cannot be occupied by machines, are occupied by any old human – warehousemen, stock people, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the next and never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as a force, being outside the center of the production process and employed to plug the holes of what has not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized in a multitude of interstices. The temp is the figure of the worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has a trade – but only abilities that he sells where he can – and whose very availability is also a kind of work.

On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for the functioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become superfluous, that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not much else, which introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine. The menace of a general demobilization is the specter that haunts the present system of production. Not everybody responds to the question 'why work?' in the same way as this ex-welfare recipient: 'for my well-being. I have to keep myself busy.' There is a serious risk that we will end up finding a job in our very idleness. This floating population must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day they have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. It’s therefore necessary to pursue the dismantling of 'social gains' so that the most restless ones, those who will only surrender when faced with the alternative between dying of hunger or stagnating in jail, are lured back to the bosom of wage-labor. The burgeoning slave trade in 'personal services' must continue: cleaning, catering, massage, domestic nursing, prostitution, tutoring, therapy, psychological aid, etc. This is accompanied by a continual raising of the standards of security, hygiene, control, and culture, and by an accelerated recycling of fashions, all of which establish the need for such services. In Rouen, we now have 'human parking meters:' someone who waits around on the street and delivers you your parking slip, and, if it’s raining, will even rent you an umbrella. . . .

The present production apparatus is therefore, on the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization, for sucking the energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand, it is a sorting machine that allocates survival to conformed subjectivities and rejects all 'problem individuals,' all those who embody another use of life and, in this way, resist it. On the one hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to die. This is the properly political function of the contemporary production apparatus."

More here.

By way of contrast, here's Peter Sloterdijk on the theological turn of the radical left (the turn toward an emphasis on believing in the possibility of revolution, believing in the efficacy of protest, keeping hope alive, and similar emotional millenialist rhetoric):

"Let's first talk about Negri and Hardt's success: They have managed to give the current desire for radicality a novum organum, an accomplishment that deserves admiration. At the same time, I suspect that the secret behind the book's great success can be ascribed to its thinly veiled religious tones. At first one doesn't easily recognize the good old-left radicalism when Saint Francis takes the stage next to Marx and Deleuze. But this new alliance with the saints is instructive for the position of left radicalism in the post-Marxist situation. Whoever wants to practice fundamental opposition today needs allies who are not entirely of this world. In order to grasp the awkward situation of left radicalism, one should recall Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. According to Festinger, ideologies that no longer match circumstances are reinterpreted by their believers until they appear to match them again, with the unavoidable result that theories become increasingly bizarre. Gershom Scholem clarified something similar in relation to the fate of Jewish prophetism. The gist of what he says is this: When prophetism fails, apocalypticism emerges; when apocalypticism fails, gnosis emerges. An analogous escalation can be observed in the political opposition movements since 1789: When the bourgeois revolution fails or is insufficient, left radicalism emerges; when left radicalism fails or is insufficient, the mystique of protest emerges. It seems to me that Negri has arrived at exactly this point. His 'multitude' calls forth a community of angry saints in which the fire of pure opposition burns, yet it no longer offers a revolutionary project, instead testifying by its mere existence to a world counter to universal capitalism. Thus one cannot simply say that Negri's framework failed; it has already incorporated his failure. Perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that the political revolutionary has become transformed into a spiritual teacher. This is the price to be paid by anyone who seriously tries to develop a language of the left beyond resentment."

From this interview.

On Teleology

Teleology is the idea that what makes you miserable now will make you perfectly happy, in the future. This depends on the belief that conditions will radically change in the future, such that the future will pay off. Misery will buy us joy. Obviously, it is a form of thinking for suckers, and we can see that the Western economy and philosophy are sucker-based, that our ideologies are for the benefit of suckers. They benefit suckers by affirming the nobility and usefulness of suckerdom. And suckers are useful, in truth--the problem is only that they (we) are not useful to themselves (ourselves).

It's difficult to get outside such ways of thinking. It requires, first, doing something in the present that will not make us miserable. So I am writing some essays, one on Shakespeare and Foucault and Shakespeare critics, and one on Hannah Weiner and Peter Sloterdijk. These are pleasant enough to write, and they are not entirely unlike the essays I used to write except that they include footnotes. Using footnotes means professionality, and that I will try to publish them in places that are "academic" rather than in places that are "poetic." Some of the poets seem to have thought I was an academic already, but actually this is a very new thing for me.

To seek professionality may be teleological? Or it would be if one did not take pleasure in the process? Of course, there's over-production in the academy, but of course there is always room for a few more Renaissance scholars, just as there is never any room for a few more poets. This is because the Shakespeare industry is well-funded by institutions because of the popular misconception that there is something universal about Shakespeare. I would deny this vehemently; Shakie is historically limited like the rest. But if you want to pretend there is a transcendent Whiteman, Shakespeare is your bet, so that even conservatives will always support continued Shakespeare scholarship, no matter how left-wing it might be. Shakespeare's popular usage for transcendentalizing and universalizing Whitemen is just too important to let it go, even if the queerest of Foucaldian viewpoints flourish in the monument's shadow. This is why the NEA has bucks and more bucks for Shakespeare--because Shakespeare is the key to Dana Gioia's self-esteem and aesthetic positioning.

Oh, I'll always be a sucker, natch, but it's important, from a self-esteem point-of-view, to experiment with different approaches to this situation.

Tova on Etty Hillesum

“Come on, my girl, get down to work or God help you. And no more excuses either, no little headache here or a bit of nausea there, or I’m not feeling very well…You’ve just got to work and that’s that. No fantasies, no grandiose ideas, and no earth-shattering insights. Making a translation exercise and finding the right words are much more important. And that is something I have to learn and for which I must fight to the death: all fantasies and dreams shall be ejected by force from my brain, and I shall sweep myself clean from within, to make space for real studies, large and small”

I often remember thinking things like that as a child and young man--of course, such thoughts were an index of how little capacity I felt I had for hard work. (I often thought "Someday I'll learn to stay at home and keep my hand on the oven"--bizarre metaphor I know.)

I didn't discover how to work hard at writing until many years later, when I realized my serious writing was best understood as procrastination (from those other forms of work--the ones that pay), after which I could work quite seriously and for hours and hours at a time, because I'd recategorized this activity as a form of play.

So then it was pay vs. play, and naturally I worked harder and with more determination at play than at paying things. I suppose the lesson is that so much laziness is about resentment, rather than disinclination--I actually love working, I just don't like the complex of associations that surrounds the idea of work--the whole notion of other people having a natural right to own my time. I resent, generally, the leveraged structure that requires me to sell my time at unfavorable rates. But working, in and of itself, is a great pleasure.

Ette Hillesum's determination to work rather than fantasize (or rather her desire to be determined) seems so basic--normative building blocks of adulthood. Yet Tova points out how differently it must be interpreted in the context of the Holocaust--where the Nazis, oddly enough, seem to be identified with the distracting power of daydreams. . .

Off to Providence, Off to Buffalo

I'm excited about travelling this week to two northeastern cities. I'll be reading poems with Jen Hofer at Ada Books in Providence, @6:00 Saturday. I've only been to Providence once before, when my family was driving around looking at colleges for my sister, and that visit lasted for no more than four or five hours. Also, when I lived in Hollywood I sometimes hung out with the singer of a metal band from Providence. He cleaned houses for a living and was very working-class conscious (and drank with a determined working-class seriousness). And had a shaved head, which made him look like Michael Stipe. I've always imagined Providence as being full of guys like him, and I expect a lot of bald, drunken, self-consciously working class heavy metal intellectuals who are proud of their house-cleaning skills to be milling around in the airport when I arrive.

Next Thursday at 8:30 am I'll be reading about Hannah Weiner and Juliana Spahr at the &Now Conference in Buffalo. Here's the panel info:

Jim Kurt, “The Procedural Form: Breaking the Categorization of Constraint and Chance”
Stan Apps, “New Representations of the Global in US Poetry”
Ellie Porbohloul, “Another Birth: Rethinking Social Political Engagement in
Forough Farrokhazad’s Late Poetry”

My paper focuses on the use of strategies of analogy to articulate the relationships between distant people who have not met each other.

Here are a couple teasers:

Much of the specific activity and living that governs and determines the situation of most individuals is not only geographically, but also psychically distant from them. The local environment is typically flooded with objects, machines, and produce from far away, so that to understand local conditions in the U.S. today, a quick trip to China would seem to be an essential first step. Without making such a trip, the local environment is in many ways opaque and incomprehensible. The keys to comprehending specific, local environments are scattered all over the Earth, in the distant places from which these specificities are sourced. These keys are in the hands, the work, the identities of distant people whom we may never meet. These people hold the keys to what our lives mean as we negotiate an increasingly opaque local landscape.

&

Hannah Weiner’s poem “Radcliffe and Guatemalan Women” uses analogy powerfully to study the real, nonfictional relationships between distant persons. These are not personal relationships; they exist without the persons involved having met and without creating any fiction that they have met. Nonetheless, the relations are intimate and of predominant importance. They are analogical relations, and the pressing question of the poem is whether such relations can be a basis for solidarity.

Flarf that doesn't look like Flarf

Let me note at the outset, that this is just an opinion.

At this point, it's well known what a Flarf poem looks like, how it is structured, what sort of content it contains. This poem typically is a loose aggregation, a collage of stupid opinions, inane references to pop-culture, potty-humor, and kinkiness, often linked together by repeated references to some meretricious or ridiculous central motif, such as, for example, Swiss doinks. Pound had the idea that a poem could be structured by the repetition of any element, and this archetypal Flarf poem is structured by repetition and variation on one or more motifs. Such poems are sometimes assaultive, sometimes hilarious, and emphatically not separatist or transcendent. They don't postulate poetry as separate from the dominant culture; rather they offer a take on the dominant culture, which they represent as lively, lewd, and driven more by bias than by rationality. Such poems represent our historical moment as one in which galloping idiocy threatens everything; at the same time, they valorize the kinky appeal of stupidity. They comment on a culture in which stupidity has come to be viewed as a legitimate lifestyle choice, and they represent the collision of kinky, willful do-it-yourself culture with hierarchically-managed consumer culture.

Now that we know what these poems look like, it is important to ask: Are Flarf poems becoming too predictable? After all, Flarf emerged as a project of avant-garde poets, and the avant-garde is that area of artistic production in which predictability and repeatability are least respected. Avant-gardism, generally, depreciates mimemis. All art is mimetic, not so much of life or of anything real or true, but necessarily mimetic of earlier art; a poem must duplicate formal structures of earlier poems in order to be made. But for the avant-gardist, successful imitation has no value in itself; instead, works are valued for their contribution to critical consciousness.

Now that Flarf poets have succeeded so well in writing poems that look like Flarf poems (and which emphatically do not look like Language poems or New York School poems), a new phase of Flarf is necessarily beginning. In this second act, Flarf poets will write Flarf poems that do not look like Flarf poems. For example, Kasey Mohammad's Sonagrams, which are Flarf poems that look like procedural works, or new poems by Nada Gordon that look like mistranslations. In this phase, Flarf poems will engage mimetically with a variety of structural possibilities in order to avoid being predictable, and Flarf will become more demonstrably a mode of critical consciousness and a way of looking at form.

At least, that's what I think is going to happen. And actually there's a good argument that this has been going on all along (see Mike Magee's My Angie Dickinson). Some of what's happening has to do with recapturing poetic values of elegance and sumptuousness. But the main thing is that Flarf is more a set of attitudes and a critical stance, rather than a procedure. This critical stance is deliberately complicit, immersed in the dominant culture, radically skeptical, and sarcastic. It is a stance that delights in inhabiting every failure of aesthetics. To continue reproducing its critical stance, Flarf has to produce less recognizable outputs. It is not about the reproduction of the Flarf poem I described in paragraph one. It is about 1) the insistence that critical consciousness does not exist apart from society, that immersion is more relevant than any kind of higher ground, and 2) development of critical consciousness appropriate to a society in which aesthetics are not hierarchical.

Better generalizations

So i've been writing this essay for the &Now Conference in Buffalo, mostly about Hannah Weiner (with also some discussion of Juliana Spahr and Ara Shirinyan), and it has these long theoretical sections (which probably I won't read much of at the conference, but it seems necessary to write them nonetheless).

And in the draft one sentence begins: Better generalizations allow us to interrogate specific particulars more productively

It's one of these stating the obvious sentences that are sort of an illness for me, like I feel somehow obligated to state that which is obvious as if were I not to state it it wouldn't be obvious anymore.

So then I read this thing written by my main man Gary Sullivan about the vacuity of the word "interrogates" in critical discourse, and I thought about it, and realized that actually any verb in the English language would fit where interrogates does in this sentence, and no matter what verb you put there the sentence would still mean the same thing and work.

It's really amazing. Here are some examples:

Better generalizations allow us to locate specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to visit specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to inhabit specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to view specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to hear specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to look into specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to know specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to come to specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to enter into specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to assess specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to fuck specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to think through specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to clothe specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to undress specific particulars more productively

Better generalizations allow us to respect specific particulars more productively

See how it could gone on forever? But which of the infinite possibilities will be best for my paper? Maybe I should just note in a footnote that any word could go there? But even if I do that, which word would be best to say at the conference?

Manifesto? for a New Convincing Poetry

I'd like to write poetry that expresses all the points of view, with attentive care to the reason and emotions both, including the expression of my most fervent beliefs (and even the beliefs I'd wish to believe) as well as a convincing account of the ideas and ideals I find most abhorrent.

This poetry would teach everything at once, irregardless of the views of the author, and would thus be traumatically objective. I don't think it could be achieved by mere plagiarism. The point would be to achieve the trauma of multiplicity which is so ably elided by competent rhetorics. To do this, all the viewpoints should go through (without being embedded in) a particular subjectivity.

This strategy would bring negative capability into the realm of didacticism to produce a new, more inclusive didactic poetry. The controlling subjectivity would be childlike in its receptivity, yet capable of very complex ideological constructions within a radically simple syntax. The project would be most effective to the extent the poet could seem to be stating the obvious while embodying the full range of contemporary viewpoints.

The resulting poetry would be very serious, and in a way horrifying (yet the language employed would mute the horror to the level of creepiness). Yet it's very unlikely that the poetry's seriousness would be visible to ideologically-vested readers and commentators.

The ideal reader would be convinced by the contradictions into a state of traumatized receptivity out of which all viewpoints could be feelingly and vividly represented. The ideal reader would achieve a state of total understanding in which the flexibility of assumptions would be the ground for a productive condition of total followership, simultaneous discipledom to every ideology.

This New Convincing Poetry would thereby create a totalizing discourse of competent respondership, which would synthesize the ideological management styles of the university and the media. By comprehensively depicting and thereby surrounding all viwpoints, this poetry would transcend discourse and become a meta-discourse focused on the analysis of method. (In this way it would become simultaneous with contemporary political discourse.)

Ultimately, the reader should be appalled by how convincing ideas are. This convincing property will be shown to be creepy by virtue of its inevitability.

This New Convincing Poetry will either be homeopathic or productive of a dissociated capacity for instant ideological adjustment, depending on the reader's preference. If homeopathic, this poetry will militate against personal transformation. If adjustment-producing, it will make personal transformation more rapid and total.

I'm serious. This poetry will depict my understanding of society, by associating all ideological polarities into a synthetic, collective understanding that transcends through traumatic over-identification. It will have the completeness of a painful stomach ache. It will teach on the somatic level by administering the reader's nervous symptoms, piggybacking its tragic affect on the reader's need for comprehensive critical consciousness.

Social Ecology of Tuscaloosa

I'm very interested in Juliana Spahr's workshop on writing a book about Tuscaloosa, which is a nice discussion of how to write a book about anywhere, general strategies for locating and immersing in the society and ecology of a place. It's a very interesting approach to environmental poetics (defining environment in the broadest sense).

It starts here (the quotations from CA Conrad seem particularly valuable)

& there's more here (I like this type of collaborative poem--it seems to sort of stutter and mumble into truth)

& then day 3

I think Juliana and David Buuck are doing an interesting kind of environmental poetry that takes up the concern with environment as a new way of looking at or conceptualizing landscape, as if there can be a new environmentalist genre of landscape writing that is both socially engaged (since these are landscapes densely packed with people, landscapes purposed to house people in fact) and committed to a sense of the local body and the proximate landscape as the site of environmental contamination. CA Conrad seems to be writing this kind of poetry too, at least some of the time (though the book I read recently--Advanced Elvis Course--is the most splendid possible study of American paganism, rock'n'roll as pagan fete--but focused more on pop-culture, with its very abstract diffusion, and not so concerned with proximate environment)

I like the idea of an environmental poetry organized around the local that makes no distinction between social ecology and ecology per se (I'm certainly tired of environmentalism that sees the social as no more than an impingment on ecology--after all, there are billions of us, we're going to be there. In the long run, it's a little sinister to say but, ecology is us--the key to environmentalism is making a human culture that can permit coexistence with a wider range of organisms). Applying it to Tuscaloosa is good because it gets away from this boutique urbanism where the only examined environments are the ones where intellectuals think it's cool to live (which is a HUGE potential drawback to the emphasis on the local). And I like the idea of starting with our own bodies and neighborhoods as the place of environmental contamination, though of course anything really toxic gets trucked to the rural or thrown in the sea.

It raises questions about how many forms of relations we can think through or look at, how many are worth looking at--should we document parts per million of plastic in the blood? Or better to document the changes in how people wear their pants from one block to another?

This is a way of thinking about environmental poetry where the first question is "what does the environment contain?" and if you approach this question with enough fidelity, in a sense you wouldn't have to have any other question ever (though actually, of course, it's good to build from this to analytical questions of various types). The whole idea of the local dissolves if you question it long enough, and in fact, if you demand enough detail from the local you wind up falling back on the abstract and general to answer your questions (with approximations) and that's okay because that is what generalities are FOR (though you can't gauge the veracity of a generality unless you route it into a local)

Jewish New Year Ethnicity Dream

L'shana tova! I love Rosh Hashanah because, if you pause a certain way while you're saying the words, it's sort of like Ra sha na na na, which is very rock and roll. And of course, Tova puts the "good" in good year so that's exciting.

I had a series of dreams in which Tova and I joined a series of WASPy suburban groups. In each dream, I was ultimately rejected by the WASPs and then adopted by black people who suddenly appeared. No, really, I dreamed that.

In one, Tova and were in this WASPy hiking group and bringing Leo in a stroller and we realized that parts of the hike were practically vertical: straight up a mountain more or less. And we complained. And all the WASPy people collaborated to help us, in an elaborate system of helping hands to get our stroller up the mountain. Except really I had to do all the hard work--or that's how I perceived it. This was because I was a guy and my manliness was being tested. Meanwhile, they were going to put Tova on a mattress and whisk her right up the mountain, because they didn't want her to be late for her Yoga class up there.

So I got mad at my drippy WASP compatriots, and they got mad at me (I got mad at them for wanting too much, and they got mad at me for being lazy) and then three black girls showed up and said, "Stan, we hate those honkeys too! Come with us!"

No real ethnicities were hurt during the making of this dream (I hope).

Earlier in the dreams, I had a party for a large group of black folks in my apartment. They were either all in a class I was teaching, or we went to the same twelve-step meeting. After a while, I guess to honor the fact that so many African-Americans were in my home, Cornell West crashed the party! I was really excited! And a middle-aged black lady I was talking to (she had these big gems and little bitty glasses) said, "Oh, so Cornell comes to your house now! We haven't seen him round where we live in a while."

(I am sure this dream-lady's assertion about Mr. West was inaccurate, by the way. I have no idea why an aspect of my unconscious would say such a thing, and it should in no way be viewed as a satiric portrayal of Mr. West, but only as an artifact of my dream process.)

And in another dream involving waiting in a line for a Yoga class, I was saved from a group of incredibly boring academics (a mix of WASPs, Pakistanis and Indians, all equally conversationally dull) by two down and out black guys, in loose brown pants with very big pockets and one wore a torn-up vest and the other wore a black turtleneck. They were clearly the smartest people in the room. Again I went with them (I don't even like Yoga.)

Is this too embarrassing to put on a blog? Or, did all WASPs have dreams like this on the first Jewish New Year of the Obama Presidency?

Shampoo 36

I have a poem in the new issue of Shampoo. . . It's called Market Freakout. Aaron Kunin actually supplied the title, after he heard me read it in LA. I should note that the poem is by no means an analysis of the recent financial crisis--it is only a dramatization of the crisis, as a typical American might have experienced it and was intended to experience it. (I think the most important thing about the financial crisis is the way it serves to manipulate our expectations--to the extent that a crisis of confidence was inevitable due to bad practices, the social role of the crisis itself is to spin the crisis of confidence in a way that is advantageous for the ownership class.)

My dramatization is meant to provide a little comic relief--after all, as I wrote in another poem, why not enjoy the manipulation of our expectations, while we can? I guess this is a way of saying that I think the financial crisis finally amounts to a form of entertainment--ambitious entertainment, to be sure, since it aimed both to frighten us and to morally instruct us about how we should be satisfied with less. The financial crisis moralized about domestic economy in much the same way that horror films moralize about sex.

This issue of Shampoo also has imteresting work by Dana Ward, Robert Baumann, Stephen Ratcliff, Erica Lewis, Alana Madison, and others, including a poem by one of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie.