tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74656700770723315752024-03-13T13:43:20.160+00:00all over the gridsingular complayntes set in lethal contradiction, the dialectics of plaice, geographic gyna-fascism, failed love poems, gamelan metaphysics, the whole human geography of song.Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.comBlogger120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-40044376672673447052024-02-14T21:25:00.002+00:002024-02-14T21:25:31.706+00:00LEWD SOUL<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEht7zdYjnJfZgqaIJ5_GZmUqoNmrQ-Rujiy7IfH9si7FiGh0iQRbTw2a-khECRcA75EoB5Wzh8kXCZZUFnazsPdndvp7eALw03ebWF8FcOfTTR-t7fk0FxAdUm8LTHdgD2ZZJ9CZz1PhLtbjQBvOEE00f4gkrTjxafhphRsUw85l4tpqvuyTrQbR6LajfBC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="1500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEht7zdYjnJfZgqaIJ5_GZmUqoNmrQ-Rujiy7IfH9si7FiGh0iQRbTw2a-khECRcA75EoB5Wzh8kXCZZUFnazsPdndvp7eALw03ebWF8FcOfTTR-t7fk0FxAdUm8LTHdgD2ZZJ9CZz1PhLtbjQBvOEE00f4gkrTjxafhphRsUw85l4tpqvuyTrQbR6LajfBC=w480-h640" width="480" /></a></div><p></p><p>Acerbic, scathing, revelatory, barbed, sharp as paper cuts, close to the humorous… Joe Luna’s <i>Old News</i>, brought to you by Erotoplasty Editions and slub press (arm in arm they go!) is at last upon us! Here to rival Laura Kuenssberg and Boris Johnson’s weekly op-eds with an elegant and mordant survey of the state of poetry in these our fair unpleasant lands, and in the bright and sordid beyond! Bringing you all you never knew you wanted to know (or were afraid to ask) about Anglophone poetry scenes present and late, in measured, rapturing, lapidary prose, this fateful mirror weaves the fates of pages, liege lords, layman, acolytes, all… all the while offering up some timely ultimata for that most afflicted of artforms - poor, dear, sweet little poésie! The nightingale about our necks! Feel the blade if ye be guilty! Man the oars if ye be free! Luna’s rosebush vignettes are available now, if ye dare...</p><p>— <a href="https://slubpress.cargo.site/Old-News" target="_blank">from the publishers, <i>Slub </i>and <i>Erotoplasty </i></a></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh7YUlVGkhZOV6g2S4RwThIsb3ayKG4StA_tjlVgZi3S0pP1ZaZAPp11PYgbXHJpbnJ8bYIJi2_SgI-m8C6fuZn3AcoYKftar6ukZEanDfZjOFnomEwPLsi_9mDTDnBwBd2bPFHWpmFmoIl1vu4zWvBc47CxGadTFaHp-fnOLrAnyk4x8_-cgqCrNniBP47" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="1500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh7YUlVGkhZOV6g2S4RwThIsb3ayKG4StA_tjlVgZi3S0pP1ZaZAPp11PYgbXHJpbnJ8bYIJi2_SgI-m8C6fuZn3AcoYKftar6ukZEanDfZjOFnomEwPLsi_9mDTDnBwBd2bPFHWpmFmoIl1vu4zWvBc47CxGadTFaHp-fnOLrAnyk4x8_-cgqCrNniBP47=w480-h640" width="480" /></a></i></div><p></p>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-77505591764088434592024-01-29T21:10:00.001+00:002024-01-29T21:11:27.758+00:00Peter Manson's Self-Avoiding Space-Filling Curve<p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">From a letter to Peter Manson, nearly a year ago. You can get <i>Self-Avoiding Space-Filling Curve </i>(Just Not) <a href="https://goodpress.co.uk/products/self-avoiding-space-filling-curve-by-peter-manson" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">[...]</span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">I finally had the chance to sit with the sheaf of poems you sent me before Christmas, and wanted to send you a quick note to say how much I love them. They are tender and beautiful and funny by turns; the first two are a kind of incredible overture, notes of which the rest (so far) pick up on and dive down into in different ways. The sequence completely unfolds in its sequencing, too, so there’s never a dull moment. Indeed, the moments when ‘Peter’ emerges can be shockingly emotional; the moment when ‘spontaneous vaginal delivery Manson’ emerged left me rolling in the aisles (honestly I don’t think I‘ve laughed that hard since the last Stewart Lee gig I went to). Shades of Lee, too, in the lines parodically exaggerating the poet’s sense of self and oeuvre. The pop icons interleaved here seem deliberately beyond their respective sell-by dates, so that the references promise nothing so much as a pop idiom of fleeting lyric feeling (as in Riley?), but something more keenly cynical than that. The parodies/inversions of O’Hara and Wordsworth do something similar — the détournements are hardly even that, more like belligerent refusals or petulant reversals, a more fitting kind of acknowledgement/inheritance for our age of infantilism. And all shot through, yes, with the becoming human of one life among its mothers and fathers, glimpses of this throughout, without much sentimentality but with a knowingness too brutal for Freud. </span> </p><p>[...]<br /><br /></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh44kXE8wpV5XWoVDBMOBfTSNAJgfNsr-ITYnEw9CCLd3NB-SrDrWC9w5uMyj_Zt9iSNjJZd4DTKe4zgXu9G5ZZj_1Q7gRtWOEEDgZHEQ_wy34-MxgyfNe5zEHGipFUyar-ci8uf3vmF7wWuUD3udwqYGmf7HTCeMtMgFYDjD5mbUFEETvFXQDBcJFrBdKS"><img alt="" data-original-height="1116" data-original-width="792" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh44kXE8wpV5XWoVDBMOBfTSNAJgfNsr-ITYnEw9CCLd3NB-SrDrWC9w5uMyj_Zt9iSNjJZd4DTKe4zgXu9G5ZZj_1Q7gRtWOEEDgZHEQ_wy34-MxgyfNe5zEHGipFUyar-ci8uf3vmF7wWuUD3udwqYGmf7HTCeMtMgFYDjD5mbUFEETvFXQDBcJFrBdKS=w453-h640" width="453" /></a></div><p></p>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-60617230526791945622023-10-21T21:26:00.002+01:002023-10-22T09:22:39.380+01:00A letter to John Wilkinson, on his Fugue State<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Dear John, </span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">Some more thoughts on </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.shearsman.com/store/John-Wilkinson-Fugue-State-p559170718" target="_blank">Fugue State</a>. </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">I think I’m coming to it more on its own terms now, which I’ve found to be delightfully and quite dazzlingly musical and sculptural; just as if some of the poems were in/an ekphrasis of an imaginary scene (although there’s plenty of ‘real’ skin to go round), there is a music in/of the prosody and verse-forms here that simply </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">hasn’t been invented yet</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">. By way of example, selected fairly randomly from my underlinings: ‘liquifies injury in milk’s slurry’, ‘block aperture startle will prise open’ (a poetics, in that one), ‘a cockroach or angel / seize into life / and in like form shamble forward’, ‘in its suchlike folds does its lack self-devour / also?’ It rings with a cracked futural euphony, so that part- or whole-word repetitions make little dimensional cuts in the depth of the image-clusters; these in turn accumulate, so that the grammar of iterative accumulation, at this point near-virtuosic, is supported upon a whole relief network of stave-like emphases and indirect catchment areas for song fragment. It really is like reading nothing else, I can’t emphasise that enough. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">Partly I hear the sheer depth of the surfaces here as in carefully practised defiance of contemporary depthlessness, for which there are a few ciphers scattered about, and also therefore in a kind of phenomenological defiance of the fascistic predilection for the myth-kitty and its all-too-surface readings, here nicely inverted via the concentration on poor, inverted Marsyas at the expense of any Olympic cheerleading. I stood in front of José de Ribera’s </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">Apollo and Marsyas</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;"> in Brussels last year and kept his face close by in my recollection as his skein was stretched across the kettle drums and sky. The real meat of the matter seems to lie in the phenomenology of reading which is a movement of mind pegged to a besieged cultural immortality </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">against </i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;">the immortality of any given Bezos reaching for the stars. The elegy for al-Asad would seem to confirm this. We end with ‘fleshing out senses’ gates, / chief inlets of soul’, as a way of referring to the experience we’ve just had but can’t yet name. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">As ever, for this reader, those poems of exquisite compression and confluence rein me in the most and keep me bubbling away on the inside; ‘Actaeon’ is a recent favourite. Do the dioramic longer pseudo-narratives discourse upon what song is made of, what it should be made of, what it can be made of? Perhaps, then, the interludes in their very state as less-than the main events make more of a case for the former’s inherent poetics? I’m reaching for the stars a bit, here. So what is the poetics? On a couple of pages I’ve scribbled some notes towards them (viz., below): clearly the ethics of self-examination operates at the level of poetico-philosophical discourse, so that what’s at stake is nothing less than </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">being</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">: it would be difficult to maintain the chain-linked data-shards of imagery and iteration on a basis that is anything less than the ontological. </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">What we have access to is the architecture of the underworld. What we can make of it pierces through it, but only in the process of our endeavouring to do so, in song’s midst: it’s like learning to be and think as an infant, but without the possibility of the achievement of permanence on either side. I think this is why those openings and horizons and bridges of gaps are so fleeting, why ‘no iota escapes’, why the achievement of the book is partly the uncanniness of those repetitions both local and through-composed — from syllabic pointillism to the alpha and omega of </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">white sand</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;"> — in which you can hear the </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">hors-texte </i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">pressing down or in or out (I suppose at this point we can’t be sure of the direction of travel), an external divination of the internal which is composition, which is chain-linked to the phenomenology of reading that you’ve recently returned to flesh-out in </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://thelastbooks.org/product/the-following/" target="_blank">The Following</a></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">. </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">The risks can be bluntly put, and they are familiar because I’m very familiar with them, having often tried to make my poems sing and sting in the same breath like yours: whether the density of the linguistic texture outweighs the subtlety of the endeavour; whether the iterative accumulation builds up to0 much and too quickly, so that it then can’t be leveraged or weaponised effectively; whether ‘being’ or ‘life’ become too unwieldy to have a purchase on anything except everything. On another note entirely, have you read Didier Anzieu’s <i>The Skin Ego</i>? I haven’t gone back to it but I’m guessing you must know it well, and I’d be interested to know if it had any bearing on the work. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">And anyway, here’s a note I wrote in the margin of ‘At Celaenae’ (though not necessarily in concert with that poem) that feels fairly fucking particular: </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">‘</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">The book tries to define a fascist temporality or phenomenology, and to overcome it; the true universality is under the skin, i.e., a world of gaps and turmoil that must be sought out by reaching out of oneself, to engender it; the fascists are not only wrong, they are incorrect! They worship the smooth, the unified, the false. </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">‘</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">It is an anti-fascist poetry by being pro-schist: the fascist is all surface. </span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">‘</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">The reading of the work tries harder than ever to turn the mental enunciation of words into a physical traversal of the mind’s tongue over the relief of the poetic object; the poem returns you to your failing body, not your triumphant mind.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">’ </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia;">All best, </span></p><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>You can get <a href="https://www.shearsman.com/store/John-Wilkinson-Fugue-State-p559170718" target="_blank">Fugue State here</a>.</i></span></div>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-53300095558231063002023-08-08T10:25:00.000+01:002023-08-08T10:25:02.579+01:00Somewhere Else in the Market: An Essay on the Poetry of J. H. Prynne<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/somewhere-else-in-the-market/37A017C6D51EF3E95402CCF1B317874C?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1699" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUV0MPV59Bh3mzbg1hlT2_G2FzYLpuq2K9x0DozUDVheb2_q4qsTnE8rhIp4y9bB2qLim-JwbLX1aS8R46TtsU64ll7oqea62Bs__olthxM3t8ItvLiFITO0A38Q-dg-zHOW5RJ4qZYbhW1reqcuABBgg1UDfTxxi8AjsXvPS36DeivLIzzrtr1LQgQ1FO/w424-h640/9781009345040A.jpg" width="424" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Free lunch for the first two weeks. Download <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/somewhere-else-in-the-market/37A017C6D51EF3E95402CCF1B317874C?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark" target="_blank">here</a>. My condolences, pastor. </p>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-58702265405299642812022-11-11T21:12:00.002+00:002022-11-11T21:23:28.467+00:00The Letters of Douglas Oliver and J.H. Prynne, 1967–2000<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://thelastbooks.org/product/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1754" data-original-width="1240" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVFAGxwmBsCjsERVHDW2Nr_slCnJL3yW52aY_FqCkShZKb4vovPWgikAvbb7snM2gjpc6ix30YHpaTyDdDP_lweWoeSKvYNuTqrDu5pv6_3h5Qmqk2NBxpNGkhkKBvTEUbjzsIpFUa3e0Jjph5ZyBZMD06WMHEsZSILVlhW5Dl7O6TuiVS6olEvO6Q6Q/w452-h640/Poster-Letters.jpg" width="452" /></a></div><p></p>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-24362266658998109332022-02-02T12:00:00.000+00:002022-02-02T12:00:14.242+00:00Hi Zero archive now live<p>The Hi Zero archive is now live, preserving most of the readings for the series that took place in Brighton 2011–2020. The site also serves as the new home for all things Hi Zero-related, including publications (Z-folds, books, out-of-print issues of Hi Zero magazine, and Hix Eros PDF Poetry Review) and Robbie Dawson’s and Josh Cook’s artwork for the series. Click <a href="https://www.hizero.org/" target="_blank">the zone below</a> to gain access. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.hizero.org/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="" data-original-height="875" data-original-width="619" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNXc1-MFe_9Z5-gQaiIJ90OaeYhZ2JmoztPJuHK5KEmMNbz5pXK7C6w_qfa26o9Mno5owTCaDd1S0pkL6y6xQtz98SZ7GJMQd74hKvEZvguxX3W-cel7aExRr5mR7LH-3pa76PIuqxJVrIftKdPP-GP59WTi135TNyA2db97i4GvnGyTDEIj-tJjKozg=w453-h640" width="453" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Please send any correspondence or corrections to hizeroreadings AT gmail.com, including orders for books and Z-folds. <p></p>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-83925114720219010952020-11-26T15:44:00.000+00:002020-11-26T15:44:09.240+00:00Reading from Development Hell<div><br /></div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A3CpFsTSskI?start=5667" width="560"></iframe><div><br /></div><div>From The87Press’s reading on 19th November, 2020. Thanks to Azad Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel. </div>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-32542682885679884592020-11-19T13:37:00.002+00:002020-11-19T13:54:48.602+00:00Development Hell, out now from Hi Zero <p><i style="border: 0px; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Development Hell</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px;">, by Joe Luna</span></p><p style="border: 0px; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A new 25-part poem published by Hi Zero, with illustrations by Martin Steuck. Designed and typeset by Ian Heames. Printed on Risograph by Earthbound Press. 36pp saddle-stitched on Munken Lynx paper in black, red, and aqua blue inks. Published November, 2020. </p><p style="border: 0px; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">£10 UK + EU incl. p+p<br />£12 ROW incl. p+p<br /><br />Paypal using the link:<br /><a href="http://paypal.me/hizerohell"><span>paypal.me/hizerohell</span><br /></a><br />or the e-mail address:<br />hizeroreadings@gmail.com</p><p style="border: 0px; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NB. Pls include shipping address when making an order, or send separately to hizeroreadings@gmail.com if using the button. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G0ResOgXjP8/X7Z0emPjBYI/AAAAAAAAB3w/k0Phl4qb7iEEKdjsxAW-o58oOG3vRqXvACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/3E67BD96-F1E5-4863-BD9E-2EB2E2F6464D.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G0ResOgXjP8/X7Z0emPjBYI/AAAAAAAAB3w/k0Phl4qb7iEEKdjsxAW-o58oOG3vRqXvACLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h640/3E67BD96-F1E5-4863-BD9E-2EB2E2F6464D.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lv0LoX6QB9Y/X7Z0eR4FiwI/AAAAAAAAB3s/msa_zyd3q_0aSakiaY6sEUFYHB3DCNCbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/FBD51183-41F9-4EA5-B238-56EB4C997D2C.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lv0LoX6QB9Y/X7Z0eR4FiwI/AAAAAAAAB3s/msa_zyd3q_0aSakiaY6sEUFYHB3DCNCbgCLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h640/FBD51183-41F9-4EA5-B238-56EB4C997D2C.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-23670428227203320842018-08-09T11:51:00.001+01:002018-08-09T11:51:18.999+01:00Air Hunger, out now from Plea Press<br />
A new book of poems, <i>Air Hunger</i>, is out now from <a href="http://pleapress.com/" target="_blank">Plea Press</a> in Berlin. From the publisher's website:<br />
<br />
Plea’s inaugural publication is a collection by the Brighton-based poet, Joe Luna. <i>Air Hunger</i> is a set of poems about finitude and loss; about psychic cannibalism and the inexorable movement of desire inchwards towards death.<br />
<br />
“Joe Luna writes extremely careful poems that pursue recklessness. Air Hunger is highly allusive, intricately detailed, and yet unfussy: it flows freely between weirdly earnest Romantic pastiche and formidably dense modernist music. It’s either a giddy celebration of self-destructive love or a melancholic lament for a love that’s not quite self-destructive enough. I can’t decide. But either way, the book is thoughtful and moving, and a great read: come for the alienating compressed syllabics, stay for the humanistic pleasure of recognising yourself in the lyricism of its neurotic involution. Luna’s writing is fraught in the best way.”<br />
<br />
– Steven Zultanski<br />
<br />
<i>What relation stops subtending shards of recognition </i><br />
<i>that glint in crass identitarian prolepsis, that prevents </i><br />
<i>this glow from seeming nothing less than too much </i><br />
<i>gorgeous irony, that love is, endlessly, the sight of you?</i><br />
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<br />
The book is available to order now from <a href="http://pleapress.com/">pleapress.com</a> for €10 incl. shipping everywhere. Risograph printed with a glue-spine, an image by Martin Steuck, and ten poems.Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-2438912179834598542018-04-19T23:23:00.001+01:002018-04-19T23:29:25.898+01:00Indexical Self-Cut<div>
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<i>A short squib read at the </i><span style="font-family: "acaslon" , serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">‘</span><i>Doubting Thomas’ symposium at the University of Sussex, 18th April 2018. </i></div>
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In a 2007 exchange with the critic Sam Ladkin, the poet and theatre maker Chris Goode calls Caravaggio’s The incredulity of St Thomas “the most powerfully salient depiction of exemplary wound response that we have.” Goode continues: <br />
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“Noise […] increases uncertainty: therefore, the wound – its appearance, its tangibility – must be a signal that dispels Thomas’s doubt: because it encourages him into a confrontation with the physical body. Caravaggio, as touchingly as any boyband fan, trusts the idea only insofar as he trusts its carnal embodiment. But it’s only the body below the surface that carries such authority; the surface appearance of the body may still be a depthless apparition, a commercial presentation, one of a million roaming pin-ups. So as the wound slowly heals, the body becomes less like itself, more like its image.” <br />
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At stake in this enigmatic polemic is something like a commitment to the truth of damage beyond its reconciliation into a healthy body politic; the question that concerns Goode is the following: “how do you enact fidelity to a wound, once the possibility of preventing it has been lost?” He goes on:<br />
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“In other words, the wound may be an instance of failure in the body system, but it is also a local suspension in our failure to know each other within our social system. The body thus becomes the setting for a legible signal, but also its enemy; and for as long as the wound remains, a tension exists between the tendency of the body towards closure and the tendency of the open wound towards information-giving. There is then a civic aspect to this tension, and it is, I would want to suggest, the tension that I want to hold open, not (sadistically, torturously) the wound.”<br />
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Caravaggio, for Goode, represents such a “local suspension” in our failure to know, in this instance, the risen Christ; incredulity is itself, in Goode’s reading, a Christian synecdoche for that slew of negative affects that put us in touch with a self whose price of admission is temporarily slashed. In Caravaggio’s Thomas’s incredulity, not his scepticism or his faith restored, Goode sees the possibility of rendering in aesthetic experience the very distinction between you and me, not as a function of an historically organised set of divisions and alienations, but as “a civic aspect,” that is, a kind of trust mediated not by exchange per se (in which the value of the gift is always measured by the prospect of its loss) but by community itself. It is in this sense a properly <i>communist</i> aesthetic, because the being of one body is visible (is readable) as the condition of the other, not as its corollary or analogy. <br />
<br />
To move off at a bit of a tangent, this brief contribution to today’s discussion offers the following claim: it was important to certain poets writing in the 2000s, and remains important to certain poets writing today, that they cut themselves so that other people can poke around inside them. I mean this sentence to absolutely collapse the distinction between pain expressed in poetry, and the pain of the poet, because it is essential to a poetics of wounding as I understand it that no false pretences be made about some airy sphere of language distinct from the hands that write it and the mouths that speak it. Properly wounded and wounding language, language which refuses the salvific functions of lyric harmony, is one of the defining features of the current avant-garde, and is often misread as a kind of heroic martyrdom: look at the poet bleed, they must value their own blood highly. But it seems at least worth considering what kind of violence is done to what Goode calls the “civic” commitment of wounded language when we assume either that the poet is attempting some kind of personal catharsis, or that they merely represent kinds of suffering for the edification or the activism of others. <br />
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Goode’s reading of Caravaggio suggests to me another way to think about poetry that is full of open wounds, poetry that is designed to hurt. And that is to think about it as serving a “civic” function such as the one Goode alludes to in his conversation with Ladkin. In many ways this term “civic” is the unexplored term in the exchange: it is not at all clear what it means, and it even seems likely that Goode himself is unclear as to its meaning in the context he creates. In any case, “local suspension[s] in our failure to know each other within our social system” happen all the time; perhaps they are happening right now. But criticism needs to insist on these encounters as suspensions in failure so that the wound has a chance not to heal, and the body to be more like itself. <br />
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And in that spirit, here are some recklessly polemical suggestions for further thinking:<br />
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1. Only poetry that hurts, and stays hurting, is capable of making us feel restlessly available to one another as that which we need to be alive. <br />
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2. Poetry that wounds only to heal, or to gesture towards a recuperative synthesis of body and social body without keeping alive the specific kind of “tension” that Goode describes – that between the tendency to bleed and the tendency to forget – might as well be pop music. That would be fine. <br />
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3. Poetry that ruthlessly and torturously wounds itself in an endless display of linguistic gore, and which tips into misery without the straining of lament or dirge, is despair without incredulity, and is therefore useless. <br />
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4. It is important that criticism preserve something of the incredulity of St Thomas as I read it above – as the productive tension that elucidates the negative image of a fully-fleshed out encounter – by closely reading poems without plastering over them a theoretical account of social relations which the poem is supposed to exemplify. <br />
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Further reading:</div>
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Sam Ladkin and Chris Goode, <span style="font-family: "acaslon" , serif; font-size: 16px;">‘</span>Some Correspondence,’ in <i>Chicago Review </i>53:1 (2007), pp.126-138.<br />
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Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-58167163817296125982018-03-07T17:54:00.000+00:002018-05-02T20:49:07.386+01:00Aphorisms for the Strike, 6th March 2018<br />
<b>1</b>.
Poetry is the durable record of the future ingrained into the present experience of hurt and historical disenfranchisement. The structure of verse contains and expresses the movement of history beyond what is presently possible to write of poetry<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">’</span>s <i>effects</i>, because <i>effects</i> have the inconvenient tendency to either happen or not, whereas what is effected in poems is not limited to the immediately discernible reaction they may or not elicit in people, but is instead realised according to the historical coordinates of their composition and reception. The questions of contemporary verse practise the understanding of present struggles by subjecting those struggles to the innermost scrutiny of affective resolution, and by doing so they preserve in language - in the intimate shape of common feeling - the conditions of political existence. To write of what is effected in poems built at moments of acute crisis or the threat of social upheaval, far from relatively promoting or relegating such moments beyond or beneath the generalised political crisis of what passes for "the times," is in fact to recognize crisis itself as the indelible mark of historical transformation, and in turn to transform through the praxis of reading what might otherwise remain latent into the shared acquisition of manifest social knowledge. This is to offer a definition of close reading that treats the object of interpretation as a social fact of historical contingency. It is to refuse the logic of simple cause and effect by representing <i>effect</i> as a product of the world poetry swallows and regurgitates the better to savour its taste: <i>effect</i> is mathematical, logical, universalised without a second chance; poetry is the promise of non-equivalence in the sound of an equivocal promise. Antithetical to the slick, gilded logic of consumption, poetry sticks in the craw.<br />
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<b>2</b>. One way in which poetry generates an extraordinary reserve of critical momentum is by being basically and belligerently unrealistic. Reactionaries always claim that this is a failure of the imagination; or rather, they claim with the syrupy pathos of a broadsheet editor that the poet<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">’</span>s eyes are bigger than their stomach, but that nevertheless they provide a hopeful vision (whether visible or invisible) of a future stripped of the qualities of the world from which it emerges. This is bullshit. Hope in poetry is not to be idealised out of existence by cleverly diluting it in the antidote that would cure the poem of its ills, but maintained at the cost of its violent eradication at every turn. Against cynicism, readers should claim the audible communication of hurt as the condition of social truth; against idealism, they should interpret this hurt within the careful proximity of material injustice. Likewise, those that claim that damaged or hurt poetry - that is, poetry marked by crisis - only parades the wounds of the bleeding heart solipsist, betray their own narcissistic image of suffering as something that exists only to be <i>claimed as one</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;"><i>’</i></span><i>s own</i>, rather than produced in the contingency of individual composition as a protest against its social organisation. Bad poems are usually bad because they forget this basic fact; the mainstream perpetually misrepresents "protest" as a levelling of the unrealistic against the real, whereas the point is to fashion the unrealistic as a critical weapon against the present terms and conditions upon which reality is conceived and enacted. The recent production of hexes by contemporary poets attests to this fact. Spells are the ironic exaggeration of material powerlessness to effect the justice that material inequality demands. To read them as magic divests them of their social truth. But to believe entirely that social truth snaps shut the eyelet opened by the spell<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">’</span>s casting.<br />
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<b>3</b>.
Nostalgia, like love, is neither inherently radical nor inherently reactionary. The losses of the past, like the losses of the present, need not be recast in the bloody light of pathos or damaged optimism to remain painfully alive and persistent; they can injure the despair of complacent rectitude just as well by refusing to succumb to a happy ending. Love in the poetry of Frank O<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">’</span>Hara, Lisa Robertson, and Keston Sutherland is not the end in futurity of a presently unrealisable affective surplus, any more than it is finally the <i>same thing</i> in each of their poetries. But it is possible in each of these cases to discern a passionate optic of desire that motivates, even as it interrogates, the social constitution of desire. This is the recursive critical idiom of the best contemporary love poetry. Recursive does not mean self-destructive: no excoriation of the unlovable subject completely atones for their willed self-importance. But neither can love be abandoned to the scrap-heap of self-indulgence without also abandoning the desire for self-transcendence, the loss of which curses the poet to a paradise of one. During moments of particularly intense social momentum, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2010 student movement, the poetry of love acquires a semblance of blank futility, as it reflects beyond catastrophe the solace of intimate conservation. But such desire should also be read as its readiness for adaptation, in the sense that elegy is always also a projection of relational memory. The poetry of those periods is riven with exorbitant, flailing, gratuitous violence, precisely as a means to measure, apperceive, and comprehend the destruction of life that each moment seemed to promise, on their different scales of historical significance and proximity. That response, in all its variety, was a form of loving exactitude enacted on the principles of solidarity with the victims of military and economic violence. What are the forms of love that will make the interruption of the present moment cleave most passionately to the future it drags behind it?<br />
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<b>4</b>.
Aphorisms are a cop-out. They claim through wilful hermeticism and the dense topography of impacted thought an insight into historical time, especially that of crisis or struggle, protected from the scalpels of the uninitiated by a thick carapace of rhetorical suggestiveness. In this sense they are the exaggerated image of the shibboleth-esque that some read into the contorted lines and ligaments of contemporary radical poetry. Why should we listen to these poets, the argument goes, when they simply will not tell us what they simply mean? The answer to this question is a necessarily aphoristic one: because they have nothing to tell you that you want so desperately to know that you will stop at nothing to have it told. Times like ours present this contradiction in the starkest of terms: you can see it on the picket line, in the contorted lines and ligaments of the face of the scab, in the enormous focus of concentration it takes to ignore an invitation proffered, however clumsily, in the spirit of joyful cooperation. There is no greater ringing endorsement of the primacy of address <i>to each other</i> that we make in our poems than the face of the other for whom an invitation can only be heard as an insult. In the face of that narcissistic portcullis, initiation is a field day. And in the moments gathered in the fragile precarity of collective resolution, by the permanent record of beautiful dissent, the day is ours.
Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-20624529397368831382017-09-25T11:08:00.000+01:002017-09-25T11:08:17.129+01:00More Unanswerable Questions<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;">
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[Text of a rather miserable paper given at the University of Plymouth last May. This was the starting point for the <a href="http://chicagoreview.org/unanswerable-questions/" target="_blank">recently published essay in Chicago Review</a>, and stumbles around a bit, as usual. Still, it says things that the larger essay didn’t get round to, so I thought it worth posting here. I seem never to have written down the references, but they’re hardly obscure]<br />
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<b>Unanswerable
Questions</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>What is the
condition of a problem if you are the problem?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite the
unedifying vacuity of most assertions about the “power of poetry,” poems remain
something of an affront. The best contemporary poetry, at least, is that which
speaks in tones of powerfully unstable intransigence, which unfolds in damaged
antagonism in relation to the conditions of its production, which refuses to
allow those conditions to confer upon the poetry an <i>a priori</i> sense
of autonomous resistance, but which compels its readers to confront the
questions it poses as the means by which that resistance could itself be forged
in the gift or trial of expression, and which by its gift or trial, or by the
gift of its trial, is an object worth living with at least until the powers of
its expressive mobility become otherwise than absolutely essential to the
survival of our atrophied and melancholy imaginations. These criteria are not
arbitrary or fantastic, but the vital characteristics of the poetry now most in
need of our attention and support, and most often also the poetry lost among
the grandiose and airy claims about the “power” of the genre more generally,
whenever those claims are made in the facile culture columns of the mainstream
press, literary or otherwise. A just and committed analysis of poetry’s “power”
would cease the meaningless assertions of violently affirmative transformation
that the vocabulary connotes, as if poetry were an essential force which acted
upon the world through its strength of moral fiber and high-minded ideals. If
poetry has “power” it does not consist in these reflexive character-traits of
the kind of historical subject for whom the world is indeed something to be
acted upon, influenced and transformed at will. It would instead consist in the
negative image of such a subject: in the body of one trampled beneath the various
forms of real material power – state, economic, sexual and racial – in the
service of which we are most disastrously animated. In relation to this body
and those like it, the affirmative sense of poetry’s “power” can only speak –
and critically ventriloquize its poetic objects – in tones of charitable
or tragic pity, in the voice of universal lament that reminds us of the
existence of inequality and injustice (or worse, of “death” or “tragedy” in
general) but which is content to identify this fact and rest assured that we
have noticed it too, perhaps on the way to the reading or the gallery opening.
Lots of poetry is written purely in order to provide for the model of poetic
affirmation the Duplo blocks of subjective whimsy that it requires to maintain
a kind of contemporary structural coherence (criticism may pluck its <i>historical</i> object-examples
with great freedom and alacrity – there will always be succour available in the
form of a classic). It is written, in other words, to be praised by its blurb-writers
for having identified precisely the tone of our contemporary moment, or the
touching manner in which distant suffering is trapped behind our iPad screens,
or the commoditization of everyday life that has still, miraculously, left
slivers of everyday life un-commoditized so that New York or South London
gallery poets and Brighton performance poets can notice them, the slivers, and
then write poems about their commoditization. This kind of poetry will not be
amenable to the criticism of poetry’s negative powers because it has none: it
is, even in its most depressive positions, all thumbs up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One way in
which we might approach what I am calling, perhaps after Keats but not really,
poetry’s negative powers, is through the identity and peculiar grammatical
purchase of unanswerable questions. The best and most compelling contemporary
poetry is a fit of unanswerable questions; that is to say, it is sustained by
an attachment to the world that is made from an impossible address to a subject
who cannot answer. Unanswerable questions should be distinguished from, though
they may at times be coterminous with, the category of apostrophe as its most
famous modern theorists define it: the figure which “makes its point by troping
not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication
itself,” and which thereby figures the “temporality of writing” in scenes of
either completed or frustrated reconciliation between poet-author and the
natural or inanimate world. It is the optative character of apostrophic verse,
its “impossible imperatives” in Johnathan Culler’s sense, that is most closely
related to unanswerable questions, except the questions that I am interested in
– whether posed directly in the language of poetry <i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;">as</i> questions
or expressed by some textual or metatextual demand, however complex – do not
point towards “reconciliation” as such but towards the consummate experience of
its suspension. Unanswerable questions do not figure the fictional harmony of
subject and object but the experience – intense, interminable, prosaic, or
parodic – of their incompatibility. They are the hallmark of a radical art of
non-constructive criticism. They do not offer to heal damaged life, to find
alternative means of succour or sustainability, or to rhetorically present an
intersubjective encounter with an absent other as the model for an ethical
ideal. To read unanswerable questions closely is to ask with Anne Boyer, in her
essay ‘Questions for Poets,’</div>
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Is the trial
of today that if there is no answer in and as poetry then all poetry till the
revolution comes is only a list of questions? Or is it that all poetry till the
revolution comes is only a list of questions and the answer to them is almost
always ‘no’? Is it to keep as a counter-poetry a record of each answer ‘no’?</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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Boyer’s essay,
itself composed entirely of questions, reads Whitman’s injunction that the
“direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today” ironically, as a
form of collective interrogation of the contemporary through an address to the
tribe. These are questions <i>for</i> poets, both addressed to them
and for them to ask, questions the logical and speculative power of which is to
be found in their grammar of persistent negativity. Each new question threatens
to cancel its precedent by the urgency of address all exude. The very form of
the essay asks, not altogether pessimistically, whether “the trial of the poet
that is today [is] an arena in which we perform only in fidelity to the
tradition of what is unanswerable?” What are the forms of attachment, relation,
intransigence or antagonism that such a trial would effect?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first line
of Lisa Robertson’s book-length poem <i>Cinema of the Present</i> (2014)
with which I began, “<i>What is the condition of a problem if you are the
problem?</i>,” is in one sense performative, jovial and benign: it opens a poem
of one-hundred and six pages with an invocation designed to unsettle its
reader, but the reader need not be unsettled for long: the poem contains
hundreds of other lines, each content to lean patiently against the left margin
in splendid, double-line-broken isolation from its neighbours. There is no
narrative logic to the poem; or at least, narrative per enjambment
dissolves as each new line is built not from the semantic coordinates of the
previous, but from the futural presence of the line’s lexical, semantic and
grammatical companions elsewhere in the poem. Each line reads like the
beginning of a poem that could become <i>Cinema of the Present</i>. The
lines of the poem do not so much break as replace each other. Thus the reason
for the first line’s capacity for insouciance also bears upon the quality of
its terminal unanswerability. The poem’s opening page dramatizes the
pleasurable ease with which any self-interruption of your “condition” is erased,
overridden or simply forgotten; it continues:<o:p></o:p></div>
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You move into
the distributive texture of an experimental protocol.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="text-indent: 36pt;">A bunch of uncanniness emerges.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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At 20 hertz it
becomes touch.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="text-indent: 36pt;">A concomitant gate.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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At the middle
of your life on a Sunday.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="text-indent: 36pt;">A dove, a crowned warbler in redwood,
an alarm, it stops.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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You set out
from consciousness carrying only a small valise.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 36pt;">A downtown
tree, the old sky, and still you want an inventory.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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You were an
intuition without a concept.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="text-indent: 36pt;">A gallery, a hospital, an hypothesis.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Pure gesture.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To pose the
question “<i>What is the condition of a problem if you are the problem?</i>” at
the very tip of the long poem <i>Cinema of the Present</i> is to
identify a “problem” of constitution and to keep it, gently but insistently and
firmly, in the possession of the second-person subject around whom the entire
poem orbits. For “me” to answer this question would be a legitimate but
catastrophically self-involved gesture of affirmation. There is no limit to
what or whom “you” are or what it is that “you” do, but “you” are always
potentially the problem for which there is an unidentifiable “condition,” and
it is that “condition” that remains the inscrutable and universal motor of the
entire work. The poem’s seemingly endless iterations of possibility are
themselves universally in train to the endless arbitrariness of their
determination. How is it possible for this subject to identify the condition of
their own problematic? As the poem continues, the questions begin to
accumulate. Here is another excerpt from the middle section of the poem, the
opening gambit now pluralized:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i>What are the
conditions of a problem, if you are the problem?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
It was a kind
of dance music from the plains you hear at nighttime from far above.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i>What city are
you seeing?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
Ah, the true
and fluent beauty of mass protest!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i style="font-family: inherit;">What do you believe about form?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
And yet
incomplete.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i style="font-family: inherit;">What if there were a life that
sustains life?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
You had drunk
only half of the wine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i>What if your
only witness were an animal?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
The problem of
solitude, what was it to you?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i style="font-family: inherit;">What is a pronoun but a metaphor?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
You’re bent to
a book as the uprising unfurls.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
[…]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i>What will you
be, then?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
You’re
absolutely in love with trees.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i>What will you
do next?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
Each has a
horoscope.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<i style="font-family: inherit;">What will you do when you’re human?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 13.8pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
At this point
in the poem the roving address incorporates the abstract, even cliché extremes
of proximal solitary endeavor on the one hand, and distant collective
insurrectionary activity on the other. Taken on their own, the questions herein
do not always appear to be unanswerable. The question, “<i>What will you do
next?</i>,” for example, does not exert a particularly onerous pressure on any
environment of possible activity. But read in the form in which they appear
together on the page inflects even the most innocent of these questions with a
desperate tension between their utterance and any possible context of their
answerability. The various conditions of a problem that “you” are has by this
point in the poem taken on the affective dimensions of the material conditions
that maintain the greatest possible distance between “you” and the “fluent
beauty” of the “mass protest” witnessed with a whimsical sigh of romantic
spectatorship. It is beautiful because you are drunk, despite your sensible
conservation of “half of the wine.” The “uprising unfurls” as a condition of
this separation, which is not a separation the abolition of which the poem can
propose, condone or even gesture towards. But neither does the poem’s
proposition of the relative scale of “you” and “distant mass protest” allow
those two objects to exist in lamentable and comfortable isolation from one
another. It at once objectivizes and internalizes that distance as the very
“problem” that “you” are. It makes of “protest” itself the object of a scopophilic
cathexis reminiscent of the enthusiasm with which the uprisings of the Arab
Spring were greeted, with staggering technological sycophancy, as the “Twitter
revolution.” If Boyer’s formulation of the question, “Is the trial of today
that if there is no answer in and as poetry then all poetry till the revolution
comes is only a list of questions?,” then what the questions in <i>Cinema
of the Present</i> do, and the list of questions that <i>Cinema of
the Present </i>is, figure that trial, at least in part, as the ironic
exhaustive recapitulation of human powers in the midst of their terminal and
inalienable solitude. The negative universalism of the question “<i>What will
you do when you’re human?</i>,” to which no answer can be given that does not
divest the interlocutor of their humanity, and therefore their ability to
constitute themselves as a political subject, is the emblematic caricature of
this trial. But it is also the gruesome truth of the global inhumanity
implicated in the question’s rhetorical backdraft. The lesson here is that such
unanswerable questions nevertheless seem constantly to invite, in the face of
their refusal to provide a constructive alternative to the conditions to which
they appeal, something like the radical substitution of the world in which those
conditions continue to make such appalling and predictable sense. </div>
</div>
Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-44841348749394809782017-04-19T15:12:00.000+01:002017-04-19T15:12:05.811+01:00Affect Storms and Affected Response<br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/212882683" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe>
<a href="https://vimeo.com/212882683">Affect storms 2017</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user55293318">KS</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<br />
These are precious news seconds, if you could speed up the rate of your responze. Talk by Keston Sutherland, response by me, plus questions and answers. Link to original video <a href="https://vimeo.com/212882683" target="_blank">here</a>, with information about the missing opening minutes.Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-46875207107601542192016-12-02T14:27:00.000+00:002016-12-02T14:27:29.713+00:00A Fragment on Allen Fisher<br />
[A brief, improvised fragment for the discussion of Allen Fisher’s poetry and artwork held at the University of Sussex, November 17th, 2016]<br />
<br />
<b>Allen Fisher and Everything</b><br />
<br />
One way to think about late modernist British poetry is to think of it as the poetry of everything. Allen Fisher and his contemporary J.H. Prynne are poets for whom everything matters. Both poets cite the American poet Charles Olson as the formative influence on the expansion of possibility in British avant-garde poetry circles in the 1960s and 1970s, and both poets emerge at that time into, and then beyond, the space opened up by Olsonian ambition and reach. But Fisher and Prynne diverge in the following manner: whereas for Prynne, a Poundian comprehensiveness is the means by which the world must be made vivid in its murderous coherence, for Fisher the compositional principle most clearly at work is instead <i>complexity</i>, in the sense of a dynamic system the component parts of which cannot be understood in isolation from their relative modalities of contact (and influence) both with (and on) each other and with (and on) an observer, or in this case, reader. In a complex system, individual relationships between parts of the system contribute to, but cannot finally determine, the mutable, emergent and innovative behaviour of the whole. It may or it may not make sense to study any given poem as a complex linguistic system. But it certainly does make sense to consider complexity as a formal concern in Allen Fisher’s poetry, and nowhere more so than when form is made vitally present in the work as a particular component of a poem’s unruly activity within the history of versification. Fisher’s poetry contains a vital additive principle intrinsic to complex systems, known as feedback: that everything in the world, or the everything that is the world, is increased by the activity of the poem, and that aesthetic experience is the inevitably dynamic relation of a reader to this irruption into the world of what is perpetually <i>more than</i> everything there always is.<br />
<br />
The poems I want to touch on very briefly today are part of a sequence called <i>Human Poems</i>. They are examples of a genre I want to call pseudo-sonnets. Like the comparable pseudo-sonnets of William Fuller and Tom Raworth, these poems produce affinities with the historical form of the sonnet as a function of divergence from the sonnet’s claims on compositional logic. The system of a pseudo-sonnet contains as one of its agents the mutable history of sonnet form, and this agent interacts in various ways with the syntactical properties of the poem as it unfolds over the course of its fourteen lines. Fourteen lines at a snap tells us something, namely, that such-and-such a poem looks like a sonnet; a poem’s basic disposition on the page, its brevity and compaction, its placement in a sequence of like-minded poems, all tell us more; but none of these properties tells us everything, and in the space prised open between this evidence and its indeterminacy the pseudo-sonnet exercises a particular kind of formal and syntactical feedback continually at play with everything that the poem does. Here is Allen Fisher’s poem ‘Human cosmos’:<br />
<br />
This slow universe does not seem at all isotropic, on your back in<br />
tension it’s difficult to imagine at half the speed of light watching<br />
starlight and the radiation background coming toward you, from the<br />
direction toward which you are moving, with much higher intensity<br />
than from behind. Beyond this skylight window the universe is said<br />
to be the same all around, an isotropy precise in cosmic background<br />
microwaves traveling through you<br />
from the day of your conception,<br />
somewhat more difficult to speculate that you, or humankind,<br />
are in any special position. In formulating the assumption of isotropy,<br />
you could specify that the universe seems the same in all directions<br />
to a murmuration of freely falling neighbours, each with the average<br />
velocity of typical galaxies, typical brain muscles and simultaneously<br />
all of them might see conditions pretty much the same.<br />
<br />
Isotropy is the quality of exhibiting equal physical properties or actions (e.g. refraction of light, elasticity, or conduction of heat or electricity) in all directions; the so-called cosmological principle states that, on a universal scale, the distribution of matter is both homogenous and isotropic: it is “the same in all directions.” Now, there is a simple irony at work here: that the poem expresses the logic of the Nietzschean obsolescence of anything so arrogant and mendacious as a specifically “<i>Human</i>” cosmos, whether or not the universe from our perspective “seem[s]” to be “at all isotropic.” But there is also a complex irony at work in the poem, because the spectres of traditionally sonnet-like appeal, persuasion and erotic desire permeate the poem and provide a field of depth in which to disport itself according to various combinations of immanent and historical relations: the human and the cosmic are breezily, practically insouciantly intertwined as a result, as the poem calmly and candidly plays in the light of the unimaginable scale and velocity that frame its purpose. The lines “microwaves traveling through you / from the day of your conception” express a flinch or glitch or an inward jolt in the poem’s disposition at the moment of the most direct convergence of human life and physical universe, while “galaxies” and “brain muscles” alike extend across the penultimate line as it swings into the ultimate last one: “all of them [that is, the “freely falling neighbours”] might see conditions pretty much the same.” In the paradigmatic simple Romantic grammar of extension,<br />
<br />
How exquisitely the individual Mind<br />
[…] to the external World<br />
Is fitted: -- and how exquisitely, too,<br />
[…] The external World is fitted to the Mind;<br />
<br />
And in the simple post-modern grammar of lamentable distortion, how it isn’t. But in what I want to call the complex Romantic grammar of Fisher’s poetry, Wordsworth’s <i>fit</i> becomes a Blakean <i>Vortex</i>, an active and dynamic principle at work not simply between two elements in a perfectly calibrated system, but across and between the historical and syntactical elements of a complex system that is the poem, and which includes how the poem replies to the historical conditions of its composition; that include, for example, the inevitably bathetic tone of the final line in a world in which homogeneity can promise only dearth and mutual immiseration; but which must also inevitably include, for example, the promise, however faint, of a world from the perspective of which “all of them [your “neighbours”] might see conditions pretty much the same” would mean the celebration of those conditions as evenly distributed, replete and life-affirming. The feedback produced by ‘Human cosmos,’ this Blakean excessive spirit of affirmation, which must be there because it “seems” impossible, which emerges from the poem as a function of its formal complexity, confirms the emphatic irony of life and what life could be, “to a murmuration of freely falling neighbours.” This is the spirit in which the most compelling contemporary poetry is written today.
Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-24362007222212904122016-09-18T11:26:00.000+01:002016-09-18T11:26:43.639+01:00Reading, 2005<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RswBI8qC2MA" width="560"></iframe><br />Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-29999033006395695722016-09-12T11:21:00.002+01:002022-08-29T19:31:11.481+01:00Three Types of Pain in the Poetry of Keston Sutherland (work in progress)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">1</span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">. Juxtaposition – at the largest structural level, the
pain of lurching (in performance, where it is often accomplished through a
dramatic shift in the speed and volume of delivery, though occurring during
private reading on a sliding scale of torturously slowly to joltingly abruptly,
depending on the rhythms of the transition and the reading speed); between two informationally and/or syntactically distinct bodies of material,
whether explicitly “sourced” or not, so that the difference between the two is
at least nominally marked by the substance of the material itself, and not by a
lesser shift in tone or metre; present often in <i>Odes</i>, and perhaps
paradigmatically (given the content), though tessellated, in <i>Sinking Feeling
4</i>. This type of pain is induced, though it is not inflicted; it is not a
kind of pain that is possible to receive vindictively, usually because
processes, laments, cries or struggles of/for subjectivization have been
interrupted or counter-balanced, and the reader therefore only <i>witnesses</i>
the juxtaposition instead of having it <i>happen</i> to them, per se: but see
below for the affective influence of metrical stability/instability in the same
process. The interruption of subjectivization is itself painful: as expression
is cauterized by the financial logic which is the material base of its
possibility as value <i>in this world</i>. This is not so much dialectical as
deliberately falsely so: the two ends do not meet. They are stuck; themselves a
form of conceptual grating that is the inward annoyance of frustrated
resolution, another kind of pain. This is ironic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">2</span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">. The metrically distinct/the metrically abusive – difficult
to fully separate since one can often feel like the other. The octosyllabics in
<i>Odes</i> are a case in point – the attempt by the reader to put the stresses
in the “right” place produces the violence of received instruction upon
material that inevitably attempts to shirk such patterns or that buckles under the
pressure of their imposition; see in particular long numbers, URLs, decimal
points, abbreviations, acronyms, etc., that pepper <i>Odes</i> and <i>Sinking
Feeling</i>. The spectre of received metrical formality crushes what
spontaneity might select from the line into strictly egalitarian homogeneity;
stresses feel painfully re-distributed (even or especially when they are in the
“right” place) because their material (where they reside) resists the pleasure
of abstract equivocation (syllable/stress) that was sought for in, say, 18th century verse; the metre is therefore abusive, because it disrupts what it was made to
do by doing it. But metre is also therefore dis-abusive, since such passages
are the negative image of a truly communistic equivalence. It is difficult to
explain why all or any of this is painful, but it is; not just because
insistent hammering iambic tetrameter hurts, like an infant repeatedly smashing
a piano key, but because one feels something like the interrogatee’s
anticipatory fear of the misuse of an object for the inscrutable and probably
pernicious purposes of demonstration: the first stage of torture is to show the
victim the instruments of torture. Metre in the dis-abusive sense is painful
because abstract equivalence refuses to resolve into either real equivalence (poem/line)
or real abstraction (rhythm/metre): we are once again held in a space neither
positive nor negative, only incessantly articulated by the expression of each
of these spaces flourishing in the wrong body.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">3</span></b><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">. Commas – a case in point in the recent sections from
<i>Sinking Feeling</i>, of all punctuation in Sutherland's poetry commas are the most painful, because
they operate therein as the notation of a repetition which is made out of</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> iterations of the unendurable (they <i>are </i>this repetition); because they are the pause and the passage
between articulations of inescapability; because they promise not the relative
safety of closure as a period would, but the potentially limitless expansion of
the material into the future: they are punctuation’s emblem of whatever kind of
infinity they are made to express. There is a tragedy to commas that all other
punctuation marks lack, perhaps save the (showy, stentorian, practically
operatic) question mark. Commas in </span><i style="font-size: 10pt;">Sinking Feeling </i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">are vindictive where
the upper-level structural forms of pain in the poetry cannot be, because it is
in the nature of the prospect of clausal infinity to be exhausting and
punishing, and since the comma is the representative of our enduring repeated
sections of similarly metrical prose for as long as we must. They are not
rhythmical in themselves, but ring out with the rhythmicality of the factory
alarm or the foreman’s whistle. They keep going. They contain too, then, as
does what I call dis-abusive metre, the prospect of their abolition into
recurrence instead of repetition, but the pressure they exert on the reader’s
body is such that this prospect is as far away when the poem ends as when it
began; if anything it slips back under the poem and returns us to its beginning
(it is in this sense that the frequent self-reflexive demands to “go back to
the start” in Sutherland’s poetry are expressed in the scaffold of its versification:
we are strained through the blocks of prose poetry as much as we traverse them.
Self-reflexivity is, incidentally, never emancipatory in the poetry, but always
dastardly).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.3333px; line-height: 14.2667px;">25th August, 2016</span></div>
Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-45456959638740554452016-09-11T20:57:00.000+01:002016-09-11T21:06:19.821+01:00Heart-hydromels<br />
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<br />Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-9867133702810740612016-08-30T16:48:00.000+01:002016-09-01T09:19:05.563+01:00Harmless Unnecessary Cat<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A talk-essay of mine from a couple of years previous has been kindly published on Edmund Hard</span><span style="font-size: small;">y</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "acaslon"; font-size: 12pt;">’</span>s <a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Intercapillary Space</a>. Her<span style="font-size: small;">e</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "acaslon"; font-size: 12pt;">’s</span>
a sample:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“</span></span>Poetry is intrinsically
futural: it delineates a relationship to the future that is both simple and
impossible. It makes a future by refusing to relinquish its possibilities of
commitment and thoughtful pressure to the critical idiom of the spectacle of
resistance. I think that the “demand [...] placed on thought” by the attempt to
fashion the impossible perspectives that Adorno describes could help to
formulate a criticism that would define poems not as loci of resistance, serene
in their localised discretion, but as the echoes of the future from which
resistance gains its energies, tactics and emotional intelligence of
possibility.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span>
Perhaps this would help us to think about poetry as the historical expression
of presently ineradicable social contradictions, rather than, as it sometimes
feels with the resistance model, as the cauterization or suppression of those
contradictions in the service of defending the authentic remnants of a life
already given over to its pre-, post- or sub-aesthetic abolition. I wonder if
this might either intersect with, or entirely bypass, Jacques Rancière’s
polemical distinction between the pretentious uselessness of critical art
conceived as such on the one hand, and the critical attention to the dogma of
the equality of the intelligence on the other, by which lights his theory
re-interprets entire swathes of 20<sup>th</sup> century art as the historical
hangover of the failures of didactic methodology and of the misguided
ontological compartmentalisation of art and life.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The full weft can be read on the <a href="http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/essay-by-joe-luna.html" target="_blank">Intercapillary Space website</a>, and the original oral delivery can be recovered <a href="https://vimeo.com/94422611" target="_blank">here</a>, and below.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/94422611" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe><br /><a href="https://vimeo.com/94422611">ED ATKINS «Un-like». Part 3: WORDS. 26 April 2014.</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user25903319">Kunsthalle Zürich</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ed Atkins, Ann Cotten, James Richards and Adam Kleinman are also represented. Some of the discussion is omitted. </span></span>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-85457085674109339132016-08-18T14:57:00.001+01:002016-08-19T17:13:25.898+01:00From a Letter, 23rd October 2015<div>
<br /></div>
Dear all,<br />
<br />
I hope this finds you thriving, by which I mean, spitting blood and fire, recuperating, revolving on various platforms of multilateral desire and destruction. I<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>ve had to abandon the letter I was trying to compose to you about <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2014-the-capitalist-unconscious" target="_blank">Samo Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s <i>The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan</i></a> out of frustration; it was becoming unwieldy, full of quotation and scraps of response I<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>ve been putting together all week, and it wasn<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t hanging together. For some reason I feel compelled - duty-bound even - to respond to this book in the company of poets, because the questions it raises are, I think, inordinately poetical. But I also screwed up the letter because I felt it was becoming too much like a tirade instead of a critique. Have any of you seen Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book? Tom, I know you are at least familiar with his work, but I don<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t know if K, Danny or Ed have seen it? It<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s just out from Verso, and I did an inside job and got a copy which now lies spreadeagled before me, covered in scribbles and upsets. I think this theory has compelled me to write to you about it because of some powerful disconnect between my sympathy with its aims, and my (low) level of satisfaction with its premises and methods of argument. It seems to me to be a book which manages to articulate quite virtuosically the absolute limits of theoretical discourse; not theory<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s most profound insights or possible lived ramifications, but its limits. The avowed aim is thus, spoken through Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s description of the <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>project<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> of psychoanalysis and Marxism:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>The shared logical and political project of psychoanalysis and Marxism is to determine the terrain in which the subject is constituted and to detach this subject from its commodified form that capitalism imposes on everyone through direct forms of domination as well as through the hyper-fetishisation of financial abstractions.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span><br />
<br />
The project of determining the terrain is a structural one; thus Marx is read through Lacan:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>Marx never intended to elaborate a communist worldview and [...] speculation about the future social order did not belong in his mature critical work,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> since it is all groundwork for beginning to think social change itself:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s critical project repeatedly shows that the passage from interpretation to political action involves a move from the production of philosophical, political and religious worldviews [...] to a materialist interpretation that, in quite the opposite fashion, uncovers the very gaps that existing worldviews strive to foreclose. By detecting these structural gaps, the materialist method provides a rigorous understanding of <i>logical </i>relations that support the capitalist social link, thereby also detecting the structural disclosure that enables one to address the question of change. It is precisely at this point that Lacan intervenes in the debates regarding Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s epistemological and political coordinates, proposing a structuralist reading that implies a much more unorthodox, albeit no less politically radical, Marx.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span><br />
<br />
I suppose my issue here is that I distrust how really radical this kind of Marx can be. This move of claiming a kind of binary trajectory, <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>in quite the opposite fashion,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> seems to dive straight into the desiccated gristle of Althusserian structuralism without maintaining the speculative element that would provide for the opening onto something as derisively dismissed as a <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>communist worldview.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> As he was <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>the first theoretician of the symptom,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> in Marx <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>the proletariat <i>is</i> the subject of the unconscious. This means that the proletariat designates more than an empirical class. It expresses the universal subjective position in capitalism.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> And further:<br />
<br />
“With the shift from the proletarian seen simply as an empirical subject to the subject of the unconscious, the notion and the reality of class struggle also appears in a different light. It no longer signifies merely a conflict of actually existing social classes but the manifestation of structural contradictions in social <i>and</i> subjective reality, thereby assuming the same epistemological-political status as the unconscious.” <br />
<br />
Thus, some fifty pages later, and this claim is stressed throughout: <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span><i>Capital </i>is about structural and not empirical or cognitive reality,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> a claim based entirely on a reading of the few opening chapters of <i>Capital</i>. <br />
<br />
Now it seems to me, with my limited knowledge of Lacan, that the topographical shape of this kind of theory might be useful to us. It tries to make structurally co-extensive the universal domination of the commodity form and the structure of fantasy, and by doing so the polemic wants to understand the imminent and <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>permanent instability<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> of this co-extension. One more quote: <br />
<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>Psychoanalysis and the critical of political economy are conditioned by this epistemological paradigm. The unconscious and class struggle, two real cracks in the social and the subjective reality, can be encountered by pushing the discursive consistency to its limits.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span><br />
<br />
Nevertheless it<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s at points like this that, in full cognizance of my own fucking cognition, I throw the damn book out of the window and scream in exasperation that perhaps class struggle could be <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>encountered<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> more comprehensively in the camps in Calais or in the streets of Baltimore. The value of this kind of theory is that, as I say, what it determines as co-extensive seems to be something like the <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>terrain<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> on which lots of important poetry is currently working. But its utter limits are something like the following (I admit I have lost the critique and am now blazing my tirade):<br />
<br />
<b>1</b>. Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>project<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> is treated as such, a <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>project,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> whereas I am interested in - and I think you are all interested in - Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s <i>writing</i>. The limits of a <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>project<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> are precisely in the universal applicability of its concepts. Thus class struggle is promoted to the structure of the unconscious, making <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>domination<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> something indistinct that we can begin to <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>encounter,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> rather than something that is infinitely mediated by class position, race and gender, to name a few.<br />
<br />
<b>2</b>. The way Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book is put together seems to prove my worst fears about readings of Lacan that draw out (what Leo Bersani at Sussex recently called) <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>the domination of the signifier<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> in such a way to render subconscious activity a kind of robotic schemata. In this way, and in Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book too, <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>domination<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> becomes something that operates unilaterally across minds with no distinction, as I<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>ve said, between classes - let alone races or genders. But this is the point, of course. The reorientation of class in the service of the logical revelation of the structure of both the unconscious and society severs the personal connection between them - precisely the aim of the theory: <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>There is no social relation.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span><br />
<br />
<b>3</b>. But far from allowing therefore the disclosure of the permanent instability of the system, which is now everywhere and nowhere, aren<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t the real bloody bodies, not just of Chapter 10 of <i>Capital</i>, but of a Pakistani construction worker in Qatar or a Syrian refugee, hereby rendered simply a part of the <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>permanent instability<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> of the structural relation that we need to examine to encounter class struggle, rather than the actual actionable social imperative that Marx was writing?<br />
<br />
<b>4</b>. It<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s at this point in my thinking about Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book that I feel a little like a kind of Eagleton with a sledgehammer. Maybe that<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s too much; I feel like there are plenty of ways in which theories like Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s can help us think injustice and domination. But I come back to something like this: don<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t we need a cognitive subject to do the very work of shifting the epistemological paradigms that Tomšič threads so laboriously together? And doesn<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t the promotion of class struggle to an unconscious universal misrecognise the real work of activism for the pseudo-repetitions of May <span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>68 under the guise of demanding a new master? What cognition, where, and whose? <br />
<br />
<b>5</b>. I don<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t suppose Tomšič would deny that we <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>cognitive subjects,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> just that they have anything to do with Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>project.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> Thus: <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>Marx<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s critical method cannot envisage an overall abolition of fetishisation but the detachment of politics from the reign of economic abstractions, which has been intensified by decades of neoliberalism. The liberation of politics consequently means the same as the abolition of the rootedness of social links in the commodity form as their unique formal envelope.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> The theory is the power of this methodology to allow the space to think a new politics - that fetishised catchphrase of everyone from Agamben to Cameron. <br />
<br />
<b>6</b>. The final power of Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book is in its production of a virtually inescapable dead end. The dead end is that we cannot think social change before we attend to the structural critique of the constitution of subjects for capitalism. But this end is precisely deadening: it strips the cognitive subject of the life through it would be possible to think that shift. It ends up being far more utopian than the <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>Freudo-Marxists<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> it descries, because it creates such a profound and limited break between 1) where and what we are, and 2) where and what we need to get to. <br />
<br />
These points are probably desperately unsophisticated. I think it is a completely fascinating to move to ensure we encounter class struggle as a structure of subjective reality, and I think it could and does open out all sorts of micro-struggles in the structure of daily life that I find examined and exacerbated in our poems. But I think the reason I<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>ve been so interested by this book is that it seems to be doing precisely half of what I consider our poems to be doing at their best, which is to innervate both the structures of domination and the lives that struggle vitally within them, to be both the structure and the cognition of subjective life, to be both the exhaustion of language in the diagnosis of domination and the gift of bloody commitment to lives outside of it. I don<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>t think I<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>ve encountered any theory capable of thinking this kind of thing. The accusations of idealism this would elicit from the Lacanian seem to me at the moment to be nothing less than the illiterate schema of a bad reader of poetry. Marx happened to be a great reader of poetry, and I think that poetry for him becomes a site of the constant struggle of the living tissue of historical expression in the structures of character and genre. Tomšič<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">’</span>s book is like a perfectly valid, theoretically inescapable dead end: <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>the movement of the critique of political economy proceeds [...] from the economic forms of knowledge to the progressive deduction of the subject of value, where also the horizon of a possible transformation is outlined, albeit without a prospective insight into the future social order.<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> Our poems are not dead ends but living ones, in which what is here nominated as <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>transformation<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> is not so monumental as <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>the horizon,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> flat-lining on the edge of a paradigm, but is rather fluid and malleable and distended enough to be the consistency of every beat and line, the shining promise of nothing so glib and frustrated as a <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“</span>future social order,<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span> but of forms of sociality that are <a href="http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf">impossibly already with us</a>.<br />
<br />
Please dive in and give all this a good kicking.<br />
<br />
With lots of love, <br />
<br />
Joe xJoe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-16938303036271173622016-08-16T09:01:00.000+01:002017-04-19T13:50:36.080+01:00A Primer for Cadavers<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Greetings traveller. For some time I've been writing about, and collaborating with, the artist Ed Atkins, and have recently written a note on the after-text for Ed's forthcoming collected; it will be out from Fitzcarraldo Editions shortly. The short text at the back of the book is a little manifesto on writing, mourning and melancholia, and will, I hope, fit snugly at the back of Ed's extraordinary collection. The whole book will look, really nicely, like this:</span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xRg4SqLFjto/V7LGGz0VuBI/AAAAAAAABAE/VyEu6P2c6MsKRpwOR6RX-vQu2OCUzljGQCLcB/s1600/wvknwy7ncctpp7kokhiq.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xRg4SqLFjto/V7LGGz0VuBI/AAAAAAAABAE/VyEu6P2c6MsKRpwOR6RX-vQu2OCUzljGQCLcB/s400/wvknwy7ncctpp7kokhiq.png" width="318" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A couple of paragraphs from the <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/a-primer-for-cadavers" target="_blank">website</a>: </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins
makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured
discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient
representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from
computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically
rehearsed.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>A Primer for Cadavers</i>, a startlingly
original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from
2010 to 2016. ‘Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part
script-work, part dream-work,’ writes Joe Luna in his afterword,
‘Atkins’ texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the
record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their
own production, an elegiac, erotic <i>Frankenstein</i> for the twenty-first century.’</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWmiShFb0go" target="_blank">Kill Jester</a>. </span>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-50495804768453551332015-09-13T22:16:00.000+01:002016-07-18T17:36:22.865+01:00Surfacers: Paragraphs on Rachel Rose<br />
“If
architecture is entombed structure or thanatos, ornament is the frontier
of the surface. It is at the surface where lively variability takes
place.” – Lisa Robertson<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oHO3ohgR3F0/VfXlANmnRpI/AAAAAAAAA0U/u1NSyLbQ0OA/s1600/RACHELROSE_AMA-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oHO3ohgR3F0/VfXlANmnRpI/AAAAAAAAA0U/u1NSyLbQ0OA/s400/RACHELROSE_AMA-8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2014/10/rachel-rose-at-high-art/" target="_blank">Rachel Rose’s videos</a> are surfaces. Or
else, Rose’s videos comprise a series of discrete but interwoven
meditations on surface, some of which include but are not limited to the
purview of, or at least appear over the whole cloth of the screen
seemingly sometimes in tandem, or otherwise cut-away to split between
them with: the weather on the surface of the skin, the sonic surfacing
the image harmoniously non-diegetic, that is, the diegesis of a visual
harmonic series, the texture of art-historical representation, the
fabric of an act of viewing, the material surface of a painted scene,
the architectural surface of a digital illumination, the subtitle’s
surface of signification that obscures or overlays, at least, a visual
cue, the surface of the word that collects and coordinates the images it
points out or to, the collar on a coat or jacket, the surface of the
cut or edit, the surfaces elided by the cut or edit, the temporal
surface of a look or lesson, each landmark interior domestic surface
patiently and carefully exploding in a million shards of Adobe After
Effects, the symbolic surface of the various repeated motifs, for
example, animality, element, landscape, rhythm, gesture, countdown,
catastrophe, cartography, colonialism, cops, water falling from the sky
or in a tray, developing. Surface in Rose’s work operates profoundly
superficially. It surfaces itself to foreground that which on the
surface speaks, or at least is spoken for. Rose’s videos are surfacers. <br />
<br />
Deer
appear often, enclosed within a frozen scene or stuck mid-loop like a
damaged .gif repeating, like itself. In one scene of <i>Palisades in
Palisades</i> (2014) the Facebook movie theme tune played inside a 3D
animated reconstruction of a painted deer is heard just off-screen as
the shot cuts from the deer-interior, following the path of a 3D
animated reconstruction of a bullet passing through the deer-interior in
slow motion, obviously, the cinematic pun on “shot” there emerging into
some red litter on the road. In one comparable scene from <i>A Minute Ago</i>
(2014) the deer is possibly in the first panicked fragile moments of
being startled, although one might only know this by pausing and pausing
to reflect on it, whereas the video itself flashes forward in a series
of hyperactive intercut and intercutting interiors with rain or
<i>Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion</i> hung in said human interior and
housed there. What is the equivalent in digital video of the tiny to
minuscule animal and human forms that pepper Poussin? What is the
smallest part of the film? A dead fox by the side of the road that
mimics the corpse of Phocion (or which brings to mind the dead man in
the foreground of <i>Landscape with a Man Killed by Snake</i>) in the final
frames of <i>A Minute Ago</i> could be a contender if the question could be
answered with an image and not a component, relation or technique. But I
think it cannot. The act of looking proves a relation to history
reflected in the frightened eyes of an animal alive or dead, since in
that blank mortality is found the image of the null and central fact of
history itself, freshly circumscribed by every act of looking, every
view.<br />
<br />
The whiff of death catches you off-screen, a kind of counterpoint to the
Glass House’s dialectic of fragility and permanence, of destruction and
resilience, or even of fleeting impermanence and hateful immortality,
that peculiar combination of affects that seem to structure the
experience of life in the digital archive. It’s much like a dog,
sniffing its way into the room. A stronger smell accompanies Philip
Johnson’s iterated claim repeated vaguely in the video but also
elsewhere that the Glass House’s central brick cylinder was inspired by
the beautiful remnants of burnt out Polish ruins, since Johnson’s early
Nazi sympathies structure this claim in ways he later stoically
regretted. “Um, I’m the voice of dead people, so…” The uneasy
itemisation of this particular facet of the inspiration behind the
house, however, only exaggerates the overwhelming stench of death – of
organised manslaughter – that subtends the law of private property in
general. Of course the Glass House’s most prescient pair is seeing and
being seen, exhibitionism and the exhibit. The beautiful landscape it
surrounds and encompasses passes for the <i>Death of Phocion</i> doubled, as
the world that property owned expands mid-century to realise and
counter-claim the art-object permanence of Cold War universalism. But
the constant surveillance, the Polish ruins, the central hearth: there
is not a little of the camp in Johnson’s house. Even before the house is
animated out of existence, the shelter it imagines is already
compromised; it is already an immaculate “mausoleum,” housing both the
representable and the un-representable dead. [See Wendy Vogel, ‘<a href="http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1070745/reel-to-real-rachel-roses-trippy-videos-have-painterly-roots#" target="_blank">Reel to Real: Rachel Rose’s Trippy Videos Have Painterly Roots</a>,’ <i>Modern Painters</i> (Jan. 2015).] At the climax of <i>A
Minute Ago</i> the post-war architectural apogee of modernist
dematerialisation digitally dematerialises to be replaced in the film’s
final act, its coda, by a belligerently material <i>Landscape</i> that brackets
and intervenes, and resolutely refuses to be atomised, a reminder of
the funereal in the midst of its comprehensive architectural deletion.
Isn’t architecture the art most permanently threatened by the death it
seeks to sullenly apportion and contain, and isn’t digital hi-definition
video the act of looking made most contemporaneously immortal <i>par
excellence</i>, divorced from any necessary spectator, sequestered by the
animation’s purview in a state of the art impervious and weirdly
unimpeachable? The video itself is a kind of tomb.<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
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In <i>Palisades in Palisades</i> the camera lingers on someone looking. The act
of looking centralises the skin of paint. The paintings depict
idealised moments of revolutionary significance, and include most
prominently John Trumbull’s <i>Surrender of General Burgoyne</i> and Edward
Savage’s <i>The Washington Family</i>. The person looking is presumably
standing in Palisades Interstate Park, looking out over the Hudson
River, possibly over Snedens Landing. “At the end of the war the new
American nation was first saluted in the person of George Washington by a
British warship lying off Snedens.” [Alice Munro Haagensen, <a href="http://www.hudsonrivervalley.org/library/pdfs/articles_books_essays/palisades_and_snedens_landing.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Palisades and Snedens Landing: From the Beginning of History to the Turn of the Twentieth Century</i></a> (Tarrytown, NY:
Pilgramage Publishing, 1986), p.2.] Or else it approaches them to
look at them looking out over the landing, or about to turn away from
it, or turning round and walking, in the person of whoever it is that’s
looking, the camera winding its way snakily towards them where they
stand, or reversing. Skin segues into Savage’s massive background, into
Eleanor’s forearm, into Martha’s forearm pointing down the National Mall
with fan, so that the body’s and the nation’s surfaces confuse each
other, mingle. George’s forearm’s next. Later the slave to the far right
of the scene who once (at least) tried to escape is barely visible. The
child’s white arm at the centre of the newly established nation. The
someone looking is further found next to a rock, or railing, sometimes
smoking. Sea becomes skin becomes colour becomes paint becomes land
becomes smoke in a narrative fungibility that takes what it looks at to
exchange it for the history it illuminates by obscuring: the birth of a
nation as analogy for the sovereign power of representation the work of
art simultaneously both excludes and officiously commands. The cost of
this analogy is that which remains uncollected by the metaphorical
transfer it enacts. Some portions of untraceable smoke or rock, an
abandoned coat or camera, a camera lens still spinning. A button. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Right in the middle of the video is that smoke from the twin towers on
9/11 billowing into the air behind a gasp? In <i>A Minute Ago</i> and <i>Palisades</i>
there are a number of gasps and breaths etched into the diegesis from
without it. Sometimes sound wants to describe what is happening by
sharpening the scene into a sonic superposition of varying instants, as
when a cigarette burn ignites the cannons in the Revolutionary War and a
car backfires; sometimes description has nothing to do with it, as when
someone’s eyes blink in time with a digital chink timed and carefully
adjusted to the type of blink, whether full or only partially covering
the eyeball sheltered. That sound is indexical of a human gesture by
dint of sounding so tantalisingly inhuman. The surface of the sound and
the sound of the surface are in the contemporary moving image so
infinitesimally spliced as to almost inhabit the same audio-visual
picture plane, which is to say that the more the videos self-consciously
navigate between their fields of image-complex by a series of
super-expository clicks and sighs to signify transition, the more these
sounds seem to emerge from and inhabit the internal flux of visual
material for which they provide the punctuation. In this sense sound is
essayistic in the work, lacing the image-complex through by anchoring
the scenes to each other and themselves. Sound keeps scraping the
surface. There is nothing outside the film.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
As the process of producing, reproducing and circulating images becomes
ever more transparently ubiquitous, an understanding of the means of
such image-production in the sense of a knowledge of the systematic
parameters of both the hardware/software operations that produce an
image in the first place or reproduce it in the next million, and the
fantastically de-centralized networks of dissemination and distribution,
become correspondingly shrouded in mystery. This and so much else, of
course, has been pointed out before. But it’s worth remembering.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The]
aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the
transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical
public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation-state or
corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data
pools. [Hito Steyerl, <i>The Wretched of the Screen</i> (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p.42.]</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
But then neither is the original or natural in
any fit state to revenge itself upon the superficial, the derogatory,
the imitative, the slavish or the derivative. As the digital meniscus of
<i>A Minute Ago</i> shatters in the final moments of the film’s penultimate
scene, the catastrophe cannot return us to the Arcadia its destruction
might seem to promise - only to the frenetic memory of the landscape
concocted by the video’s bizarre conglomerations of past and present.
What is Big Sean doing there? A spokesperson for the notionally
authentic in the contemporary pop culture imaginary, perhaps. I remember
as a child I would stare at the ceiling in bed, hoping it would come
off, or loosen. The one, two, three, four sides of the Glass House
correspond to the one, two, three, four sides of the video screen: you
can count them but you can’t look out. The architectural possibilities
that Rose’s videos discern are not therefore physical and spatial but
lateral and palimpsestuous, overlaying the surface of the temporary and
dubious body with the data pooled from its temperamental environment.
Perhaps they are films about being on a place instead of in it, being on
the surface of things liable to collapse into hypostatized impossible
mourning.</div>
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There is no such thing as a natural disaster. A sunny beach is plunged
into a hailstorm shattering the leisure time expected or desired, a
house of glass is carefully and clinically deconstructed. The simple
collage or super-juxtaposition at the heart of <i>A Minute Ago</i> points to
the pernicious unreliability of anything so manipulated and manufactured
as a natural disaster, in the context of which “the difference between
who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social
calculus” in any case: look at Katrina, to which the deluge besieging
Johnson’s property in the final stages of the film might plausibly
allude. [See Neil Smith, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,’ <a href="http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/" target="_blank"><i>Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences</i></a>.] Johnson died in his sleep in the Glass House on January 25th
2005. Feuerbach says in his <i>Thoughts on Death</i>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As much
and as far as other things and essences exist outside of you, so much
and so far you do not exist. And as many of these things as exist, so
many edges and boundaries, in and at which you and your being cease,
have you. In every tree, every wall, every table that you touch, you
touch your death, as it were, you touch the boundary and the edge of
your existence. [Ludwig Feuerbach, <i>Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a
Thinker</i>, trans. James A. Massey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1981), p.31.]</blockquote>
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Both <i>A Minute Ago</i> and <i>Palisades</i> end
with countdowns, scored into the surface of each film by sound or sign
respectively, their edge and boundary exacerbated in the service of a) a
parody of theoretical postmodern self-awareness to their quiet end,
both, sort of, underwater crumpled and complete, b) an index of
repetition that, especially if the videos are played on a continuous
loop, would make each video’s end the concomitant edge and boundary of
its beginning, c) a kind of melancholy digital last rites. The more
trees, walls, tables (struts, screens, beams, easels, rafters, scaffold)
you have around you the more you come up against the edge and boundary
of your existence codified in cartographic corporal materiality, for
better or for worse, the films set out to dramatise this surface tension
by a corresponding tension on the surface of the film, where am I on
the front of my residual self image – what kind of boundary do I touch
exactly when I touch a screen or painting, or a screen or painting full
of things to see and touch and by those senses multiply the edges of my
existence, have you? Perhaps the most illuminating psychoanalytical
concept or descriptor for an understanding of the actors on the stage of
social media would not be narcissism, but the death drive.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
If tracking shots like those that – fragmented and worked over,
nevertheless – accompany Johnson into the Glass House in <i>A Minute Ago</i>
are a question of ethics, <i>pace</i> Godard, raising once again the spectre of
the camp and the burden of representational proof upon any camera
straining to articulate, what is the ethical status of the digital zoom?
We alluded already to the punning “shot” through the deer-interior in <i>
Palisades</i>, but the temporal surface of the screen is brought to bear or
surfaced by the sped-up, close-to, lugubrious or microscopic zoom
throughout. The detraction zoom effected from the total social image, <i>
pace</i> Berger, can today be read as well as the critical extraction from
the object under consideration of a particular tone or germ of colour,
in order to cinematically interweave the isolatable but ultimately
indivisible strands of temporality that structure that same total social
image. [In the Vogel article Rose names them as “this deep, evolutionary
physical sense of time; this social, historical sense of time; and then
this bodily sense of time.” For John Berger on zooming, see the first
episode of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk" target="_blank"><i>Ways of Seeing</i></a> (1972).] The zoom has lately achieved heights of optical clarification
hitherto unheard of by photographic means, and <i>Palisades</i>’s chosen choke
points exploit this fact chainmail cigarette to smoke to painterly
dismemberment to beheading back to skin again and so on, a technique
that speaks to almost everything we’ve touched on here, including
surveillance, surface, the exchange of looks and looking, the
identification of the single infinitesimal life to be exalted or removed
as seen fit, the exacerbation or suppression of the history of what is
framed, the jargon of authenticity, the closer you look the more becomes
obscured, the mediation of surface by surface through surface, the
relation of each frame to the next itself the focus of the spinning
lens, the stillness of the surface of the painting being moved.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Which bring us finally to animation and its discontents and to the
limits of spectatorship, to what T.J. Clark calls “all this unnoticeable
animation that prepares the ground, so to speak, for the place where
the animation stops,” since it also stops, so to speak, with the
watching viewer:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Perhaps I imagine such a viewer
especially now, in our current circumstances of image production, when
stasis and smallness and meticulous coordination are by and large the
opposites of the qualities – the kinds of world-making – that
visualizations are involved with. [T.J. Clark, <i>The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing</i> (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.63, p.43.]</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Rose’s method of
putting on the excess of the image that her films work with isn’t to
stack or to frenetically cajole her scenes but instead to surface them,
to bring them to the point of almost calamitous proximity, zooming as
far as one possibly can in to a human, or witnessing first hand an very
everyday disaster. The meticulousness of <i>A Minute Ago</i> and <i>Palisades</i> is
found in the grain of their strangely marmoreal, lapidary medium, and in
the way in which their shots seem so arranged as to form a kind of
score for visual interpretation, each scene so fixed proceeding, even
when quickly interlaced, or layered, glitching or overlaid, in the
manner of some mid-century avant-garde graphic notation. What are we to
do with them? What to do with the rotoscoped Philip Johnson hovering
around Poussin’s <i>Landscape</i> over an imploring Big Sean’s plea never to
regret anything and to apologise for what you’ve done next to a 3D
simulation of the Glass House beside a song played backwards, and
doesn’t any song played backwards accrue some veneer of magical pathos
played backwards? The kind of world being made here is deceptively
precarious. The two most unsettling phrases of the two films discussed
in these notes are “if we die - know that I love you ^_^” and “um, I’m
the voice of dead people, so.” They both appear or get heard at one
remove from the surface of the video: the first in translated subtitle,
the second dubbed. They sound like the films talking to each other. We
could listen. </div>
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<br />Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-26063563796625811282015-04-20T10:59:00.002+01:002015-04-20T11:10:54.450+01:00Poetry and the Work of Sabotage<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }</style>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Writing poetry
necessitates acts of sabotage. Sabotage sustains the labour of
composition by encouraging in the line of verse an agency capable of
offering definition to the previous line by deliberately withholding
it. Writing verse can do this not because it is not prose, or because
the fantasy of composition involves an inherently contradictory
process of abstraction, but because the “prosodic gift” is
something which compels the temporal signature of living thought to
register the traffic of its combination by re-creating the conditions
for its survival. Poetic work must involve the sabotage of its
mechanisms of production in order to emerge as poem. The phrase
“prosodic gift” is Lisa Robertson’s, from the last 'Untitled Essay' in her <i>Nilling</i>: “Covertly the poem
transforms [the] vernacular to a prosodic gift whose agency
flourishes in the bodily time of an institutional and economic
evasion.” Such a gift must be taken from the prosodic lab by the
labour of composition in order to be freely available for giving; its
value<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent;"> emerges from the</span>
impossibility of its final determination as thought or thinking. No
free lunches, either. Giorgio Agamben is wrong about the “end of
the poem” because the “poetic institution” he defines as such
can never “[trespass] into prose” since to do so would be to keep
the poem shut forever. What the “end of the poem” in fact
necessitates is a theory of the possibility of the poem beginning to
be a poem in the first place, that is, a theory of prosody defined by
the structural incoherency of “prosody” itself to account for the
comings and goings of each line in relation to every other. The poem
sabotages prosody by appearing to present a finished product, when
really what it proves is that the product of poetic thinking is
always infinitely defective. Prosody constitutes the poem by covertly
evading itself. All good poems are damaged goods. To coin a tautology
in prose: the conditions for the survival of living thought are
poems. </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">When I had written that
paragraph it was late at night. I was in the middle of writing what I
thought was going to be a much longer poem than it turned out, in
fact, to be. I think what I was trying to articulate was something
like the fear that writing the poem would not be able to carry on
forever, which of course it duly didn’t. That’s a fear anyone can
live with. But the twist point of risk and sustain seems to me at the
moment to be something like this: writing a poem involves the need to
continually discover the possibility of being able to continue to do
so, and to do that it needs to prevent itself from securing the kind
of survival it would otherwise continue, uninterrupted, to enjoy.
Another way of saying this, or of perhaps saying something similar,
is that there has to be a way that the poem can begin to unravel so
that it feels like it can really begin. I’m paraphrasing, or
para-reading, Lisa Robertson’s untitled <i>Nilling </i><span style="font-style: normal;">essay
again. </span>Robertson’s incredible sentence I quoted above is
followed by this, equally incredible one: “Let us suppose here that
poems are those commodious anywheres that might evade determination
by continuously inviting their own dissolution in semantic
distribution.” Robertson is too much of a poet to allow this
sentence to remain purely propositional: sequestered into its
supposition is the whiff of final “determination,” of the
security of ending up, of an odious <i>somewhere</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
The somewhere that Agamben’s essay ‘The End of the Poem’ gets
to, quite explicitly, is that “poetry should really only be
philosophized.” The end of the poem “reveals the goal of its
proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without
remaining unsaid in what is said.” Agamben’s intuition is to
treat the threatening excess of tension and thought that he
identifies at the of end the poem as potentially figuring what he
calls the “mystical marriage of sound and sense.” This is because
of what he thinks poetry is: the name given to the discourse in which
the possibility of enjambment exists.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Agamben’s thesis would
only really work, or apply, if it were possible to read a poem only
from beginning to end, and only once. It relies on the distinction
that poetry needs to be conceptually promoted to an object to be
thought of, and not a thing to be read, in order to be amenable to
the rigours of Heideggerian disclosure. <span style="font-style: normal;">The
difference between Agamben and Robertson’s definition of what
poetry consists of, and in, is instructive: whereas for Agamben: in
poetry language can finally communicate itself; for Robertson: in
poetry language listens, since in poems “speech still evades
quantification, escapes the enumerating sign, and follows language
towards its ear, towards natality, which is anybody’s.”
Robertson’s definition of a poem does not reside in the lines and
ligaments of prosodic movement </span><i>per se</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
but in a kind of roving co-embodiment: “the poem,” she says, “is
the shapely urgency that emerges in language whenever the subject’s
desiring vernacular innovates its receivers.”</span> The
possibility of enjambment is emphatically lacking from Robertson’s
recent long poem <i>Cinema of the Present</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
It is a work in which every line attempts to start again – to begin
the poem – and thus in some sense to sabotage the opportunity of
its completion. That this opportunity is continually suspended is the
condition for the poem’s capacity to keep going. All of its
questions are the titles of its unanswered interior cartography. The
poem sustains itself by the exponential accumulation of irresolution. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The question of what to
sustain has been an enabling element in some recent correspondence
I’ve shared with poets. Sustain seems related to two questions that
are deeply interconnected: why write poems? And, how can I write the
next word in any poem? These questions have seemed to me lately to be
of roughly the same significance. The answers I can try to find for
them may not be causally or structurally related; that is, the next
word in the poem will not provide an answer to the question of why I
write poems, although it may help me to answer the question of why I
am writing <i>this particular</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
poem. The thicket of relationships the two questions together throw
up – as well as the relationship between both questions and the
question, or predicament, of sustain – enables something to come
into focus which is the real subject of Robertson’s essay in
</span><i>Nilling</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and that is
the kinds of politics that only poems have the capability to present,
promise or predict. Robertson’s poetic, as I understand it, is
centrally concerned with the relationship between embodied social
life and the distribution of that life, which is anybody’s, through
the desiring speech of lyric utterance. The poem starts by refusing
to determine the limits to the social life that its politics begins.
Composition is the sabotage of poetry to account for the existence of
poems.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">All quotations from Giorgio Agamben, <i>The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics</i>, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 1999), and Lisa Robertson, <i>Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias</i> (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012). </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">[<i>Delivered at <a href="https://northumbriapoetry.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Work, Performance, Poetry</a>, the Fourth Annual Northumbria Poetry Symposium, University of Thumbprint, 16th April 2015</i>.] </span></span></span></div>
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</span></span>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-3744723904076927602014-07-25T18:39:00.001+01:002016-09-18T11:28:00.324+01:00My Little Poetry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_9/Luna.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Mctped76PMc/U7Uo7Va9jvI/AAAAAAAAAjg/W0gKUK9lh20/s1600/132727056311-Hahaha_no.gif" width="358" /></a></div>
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* Click on Rainbow Dash to begin. It's worth also pointing out that Mike Bernstein's alternative etymology of "brony," as recounted in the new documentary <i>A Brony Tale</i> at around 18m 57s - 19m 18s, contradicts the origin of "brony" given in the essay (as a portmanteau of "bro" and "pony"). This alternative etymology is that the term emerged from the combination of the "b" from the "b" message boards of 4chan, and "pony." I'm not sure where the "r" got in.Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-80593775875416250372014-04-12T17:16:00.000+01:002014-11-04T10:47:40.644+00:00Poetry and the Fantasy of Totality<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K0UxtYvm9JA/U0lXQ_3uPeI/AAAAAAAAAfU/OS6avR6oPts/s1600/LangM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K0UxtYvm9JA/U0lXQ_3uPeI/AAAAAAAAAfU/OS6avR6oPts/s1600/LangM.jpg" /></a></div>
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[<i>This experimental beginning/stub written for the ACLA seminar 'Poetry and Capital(i)s(m)', March 21st 2014, but delivered without the accompanying still from Fritz Lang's 'M', above, which feels important, perhaps central, to any argument the paper might have or be in the making.</i>]</div>
<br />
The feeling of reading poetry under capitalism is sometimes the feeling of trying to comprehend what it would be like to articulate the monstrous accumulation of everything there is, and then looking at it. Not as taxonomy or catalogue, elegy or list, but as the experience of struggling to be as contemporary as the world is, once it has already moved off into the future of the same world from which it came. Some poems give the impression of an attempt to track and trace as carefully and as formally rigorously as possible the contemplation of an everything that we would like, if we had the time, to ruthlessly critique, and when they do this they articulate a condition not of resistance or struggle <i>per se</i> but of disproportion. Lyric poetry survives because the attempt to theoretically de-regulate its relationship to capital succeeded. The disproportion I am talking about is made manifest by poems which take as their object the whole of capitalism not as a concept or a system or even a set of social relations whose reproduction maintains the survival of capitalism at the expense of the immiseration of living people, but as a thing which is normally and fundamentally impossible to so depict or even think. It is possible to do this in poetry because the fluctuations and sinews of prosody make discrete and discontinuous in life what is <i>in</i> life a perpetually evolving adaptation of that life to its inescapable transformation into dead labour. There have been many attempts to make perfectly clear what it is about poetry and about lyric that resists and struggles against the myriad particular oppressions that constitute life under capitalism. Many attempts, too, to make it perfectly clear what it is poetry does as poetry that distinguishes it from other walks of life and that makes it particularly important or relevant as a use-value for anti-capitalism. Karl Marx was the first Marxist to do this, to make poetic language intrinsic to the revolutionary imperative to transform social relations, when, in <i>Capital</i>, he put Shakespeare into the mouths of the <i>dinglich</i> actors <i>die Ware</i> and <i>das Geld</i>: "We see, then, that the commodity loves money, but that 'the course of true love never does run smooth.'" [<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm" target="_blank">Marxists.org text here</a>] By doing so Marx does not merely siphon off bourgeois cultural treasure into the service of the decorative eloquence of his critique, but in fact makes the inhuman nature of commodity exchange integral to the constitution of bourgeois universalism. The recognition of a world by the bourgeois reader of <i>Capital</i> which this sentence invites simultaneously turns that world, and everything in it, against the bourgeoisie. What is nominally the site of the universally applicable truth of great art, in this case Shakespeare, is made incongruous with the social truth of that universalism's reproduction by the mediation of exchange-value. Many poets since Marx have done something similar and many are still doing so, and it is not my intention here to reproduce a necrotic condemnation of poetry for not yet having done enough to end capitalism. We all know that poetry can tell us things about capitalism that nothing else can, and that it can articulate a scene of social relations in contradistinction and in opposition to those organised by and dependent upon the accumulation of value. And we all know that by saying these things we do not tendentiously or heroically or arrogantly assume that poetry is therefore better than, or even in competition with, activism or the politics of class struggle.<br />
<br />
My object here is poetry that makes the capitalism that we live in as big as the poem, and that in doing so figures the experience of being alive under capitalism comprehensible as a totality, a totality which in practically all other experiential possibilities must needs be posited or exemplified or speculated; but not felt. This feeling is an experience of disproportion which the poem produces and which is the poem; the feeling does not occur a hair's breadth from reality, at the imagined standpoint of redemption, and does not even necessarily give an inkling of the direction from which redemption might appear; it occurs at the site of the most complete incommensurability of the promise of a better world and the possibility of its realisation. This is why poetry affords us a glimpse of the fantasy of totality: it can make it seem like everything is collapsing. The feeling is not emancipatory, in any positive sense; the glimpse, the fantasy of totality afforded by the poems I will discuss, is not a glimpse of utopia, or of a normative totality, or of a better world: it is, rather, a reflection of the standpoint of domination. But neither is this to say that the experience is wholly pessimistic; on the contrary, it is cruelly optimistic in precisely Lauren Berlant's sense of the deletion of the possibility of attaining the transformation of a relation or attachment which is nevertheless sustaining and confirming. Poetry delivers the fantasy of totality when it articulates a relation to domination that is deliberately and specifically capitalistic. You know the feeling.<br />
<br />
Here is a short poem from 1969 by the British poet J.H. Prynne.<br />
<br />
<b>On the Anvil</b><br />
<br />
Finely, brush the<br />
sound from your<br />
eyes: it rests<br />
in the hollow<br />
<br />
as looking in<br />
the shops at both<br />
reflections, in<br />
the glass<br />
<br />
how<br />
to move and the<br />
sun slanting over<br />
the streets: shielded<br />
from the market<br />
<br />
in the public<br />
domain, as<br />
taking the pace<br />
of movement<br />
<br />
in the hollow<br />
furnished with that<br />
tacit gleam, the<br />
cavernous heart<br />
<br />
Elsewhere in the book from which this poem is taken, <i>The White Stones</i>, Prynne articulates a condition of love that serves a much more grandiose nobility of sentiment. But this poem, partly by its length, partly by the sound it makes, partly by its formal delicacy and emphatic, literal insistence on answering the question it is prevented from fully formulating ("how / to move"), partly by its location in the scope of the enormity of the <i>The White Stones</i>' claims on knowledge and need, as the merest comma in the trajectory of the book's fullest social designs; this poem articulates a scene couched in such generous frailty that its effect is profoundly disproportionate to the language it deploys to produce that effect.<br />
<br />
"As looking in / the shops at both / reflections, in / the glass" is a familiar enough experience, except in order to make it a fully familiar experience we might gloss over "both / reflections" and assume our shape in the glass to remain singular and distinct. Still, any reciprocal or isomorphic relation between that subject and her displaced or alienated image or images is further denied at the site of the poem's major syntactical and prosodic lacuna, as "the glass" of the shop window barely contains within itself the momentum needed to reach over to the mono-syllabic expression of demand and incredulity hanging off to the right, "how," and we might feel all this only retrospectively when we arrive, momentarily, in the haven of a reassuring colon, only now "shielded / from the market" and the truth of social contradiction that encounter affords. It is the poem's rhythmic consistency that has this effect as much as the pressure of its voicing, how each metrical cluster is snapped into its lowest common denominators, from the cliff-hanger iamb of "the glass" to the still-beating dactylic extra-metrical twofer "cavernous heart," so that the break between "glass" and "how" remains un-terminal only if we have withheld any significant impression of caesura until "the streets" and its accompanying ":", whose sudden appearance suggests we should, and should have. The dramatisation of Lacan's claim that "a sentence closes its signification only with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction constituted by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect" [see 'The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire'] takes place only partially: the poem's sentence is singular, though it is not complete: no gullible end-stop rounds off this estrangement, and the weight of the "cavernous heart" is therefore in part denied the satisfaction of delicious pathos it would acquire were it to be the proper telos of the poem's movement. It cannot be, because it is still too much with us, too much resplendent with some primitive greed, "cavernous," not yet entirely opposed to the "hollow" inside which the poem's flicker of exchange takes place, but its gaping reflex; the experience of the love correspondingly immured in the glassy resonance of its cry for purchase is still yet the the grammar of the language "furnished with that / tacit gleam," the trappings of sustained and necessary hunger.
In the hollow, this heart cannot be full; it cannot be sincere, and it cannot be whole; it must, therefore, be cavernous. This is not a hunger that can be accounted for, or checked. The love that commodities bear for money is the excruciating, ironic truth of the encounter in 'On the Anvil,' precisely because it should not be. Both reflections oscillate endlessly between the hollow experience of the shop window and the cavernous heart of the shopper, between which the entire "pace / of movement" is measured out, quantified. In the poem, the condition for the knowledge of the reflection of lyric subject-as-commodity is the impossibility of the abolition of that subject as commodity. What I mean is that the poem does not give us a glimpse of humanity freed from the domination of the commodity form, but a glimpse of the domination of the commodity form freed from humanity. It is only possible to be shielded from the market, in the public domain, by being enclosed behind the armour of the shop's gleaming window pane. Love is the commodity becoming perfect.<br />
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One of the persistent experiences of reading Lisa Robertson's poetry has been, for me, the anticipation and the feeling of what Adorno calls sensuous particularity, but with regard to massive things. There is no other poet, to my knowledge, who can write about the sky, or language, or memory, with such surgical precision and deftness. Often the experience produces something of an irony of eloquent prematurity: you can't believe the sky can be summed up so succinctly, and yet it has been, and you are already on the next line. This experience in reading Robertson's poetry can be whimsical, humorous, witty and sensual, and it can also be disproportionate, as the intensity of preterite summation results in the overflow of attentive reception onto an object which has nothing more to say, which has finished. Some of Robertson's sentences leave you. In doing so they leave you terribly open and adrift, awake and with a surplus of attention whose objects have resolutely refused to satisfy, even or especially when those objects include everything. Consider this section from the 2001 collection, <i>The Weather</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>from</i> <b>The Weather</b>
<br />
<b><br /></b>
Give me hackneyed words because<br />
they are good. Brocade me the whole body<br />
of terrestrial air. […]<br />
Memorize being sequinned<br />
to something, water. Everything you forget<br />
inserts love into the silent money.<br />
Memorize huge things of girders greased. Say<br />
the water parting about the particular<br />
animal. Say what happens to the face<br />
as it gala tints my simple cut<br />
vicious this afternoon the beautiful<br />
light on the cash is human to guzzle<br />
with – go away wild feelings, there you go<br />
as the robin as the songsparrow go<br />
the system shines with uninterrupted<br />
light. It's petal caked. Leaves shoot up. Each<br />
leaf's a runnel. Far into the night a<br />
sweetness. Marvelous. Spectacular. Brilliant.
<br />
<br />
The propositional lilt of the bluntly syncretic sentences propels you forward even as the enormity of the sentiment packed into each proposition pulls you back like a magnet; but the lines which exert by far the most powerful gravitational pull are these: "Everything you forget / inserts love into the silent money." Christopher Nealon reads these lines in the following manner:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Robertson seems to be saying that any lapse of our attention to what we love hurries love off to capital; she is noticing that it is perfectly human to want to soak up the light, but that whatever it falls on, it is always falling on cash, so that one cannot perceive without ingesting it […] [see 'Reading on the Left,' <i>Representations</i> 108.2, Fall 2009]</blockquote>
I like Nealon's reading, but I'm unsure as to whether the discrepancy that he reads into the poem, that between what is perfectly human, and what is the unfortunately inescapable result of its attention, is really there in the lines themselves. What if what is "perfectly human" in this poem is rather less capable of wanting something as natural and pleasurable as soaking up the light; what if the "you" is as much a part of the fabric of determination, command and imperative as the "silent money" into which is inserted "love"? After all, the lines exhibit a grammatical ambiguity that seems to actively eschew a clear-cut discrepancy between the good human and the bad money, as do the later lines "this afternoon the beautiful / light on the cash is human to guzzle / with." Does everything, you forget, insert love into the silent money; or does everything you forget insert that love; or does the line break act as an icon of forgetting itself, so that what inserts love into the silent money remains as arbitrary and inexact as a "self" that says so not because it needs to, or wants to, or desires to, but merely "because it can." What agency, if any, do "you" have with regard to the love that gets inserted into the "silent money"?
<br />
<br />
Throughout the poem objects coalesce into imperatives whose claims on possibility range from the banal ("Give me hackneyed words") to the theatrical and ludicrous ("Brocade me the whole body / of terrestrial air") to the troublingly beautiful, yet traumatic ("Memorize being sequined / to something, water"). These do not feel like demands that can be met. Their tone is almost totally inscrutable, deliberately and painfully blank, reposing on the page as if to invite any reader to dare question their simple possibility of existence. What at first seems like the sheer pleasure of the vocable inevitably becomes the instrumentalization of that pleasure in the service of historically feminized labour: "Say sequin because the word just / appeared" precedes "Memorize being sequined to something," and as the over-determined line-break smugly intimates that "the word" was never going to do anything else other than "appear," the vocable itself becomes less and less possible to attend to pleasurably at all, and the stacks of demands to "Say" things become more and more sinister and unpleasant. Utterance, material production and memory are woven together in the verse to such an extent that it becomes impossible to distinguish, the further down we go, the human face from the cash into which a putatively human love is smuggled, inserted, and as "the system shines with uninterrupted / light" what is finally nominated as "beautiful" in this poem, what is named in a series of blunt, unarguable declarations as "Marvelous. Spectacular. Brilliant," is that "system" itself, the entire process of demand ("Brocade me"), production ("being sequined") and purchase, this last the point of exchange in which the substitution of abstract for particular human labour produces the fetish of equivalence that makes "cash" itself "human." It is not that human pleasures are derailed by the accidents and contingencies of the world in which that "pleasure" finds its objects; but that all pleasurable objects essentially reflect the "beautiful light" with which "the system shines [...] uninterrupted," and this goes for everything from cash, to language, to humans. It is in this sense that everything, whether you forget it or not, inserts love into the mutely universal equivalent for which everything can be exchanged.<br />
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END.</div>
Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465670077072331575.post-12268451532766734932013-12-02T15:16:00.000+00:002013-12-02T15:16:27.619+00:00<br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/mHyKDrGzn-I" width="480"></iframe>Joe Lunahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10479580962361074459noreply@blogger.com0