Silliman's Blog

"I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry."

Buk actually. Quoting God.
 

I appreciate this immensely, though physically I am these days only 10/17ths the size of an average American male.

My background is somewhat different from yours but is moving in a similar direction. It wasn't until I read your The New Sentence that I became aware of Benjamin. Actually, the non-literary influences in my life have been more important than the lieterary ones, though I certainly was widely influenced by literary practices and theories.

Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, in which the noosphere (the sphere of knowledge / the WWW Internet) and the Omega Point (the great attractor, if you will) ideas are foreseen, has long been number one. Sagan's The Cosmic Connection and The Dragons of Eden. Arendt's The Human Condition. George B. Leonard's The Transformation. Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy.

Art Bell's conversations with Michio Kaku, especially those relating to Civilization Types. Kaku's--and those of others like him--ideas tie back into Chardin's, although from a different perspective. As you recognize, if achieved properly, globalization is the process of humanity rising from a 0.9 (as one thinker recently put it) Type Civilization to a Type I Civilization. Kaku also--without the .# distinctions--sees it this way. And yet/ they, you, and I, and numerous others, know there is no assurance we will get there.
The risks/dangers (both those we can see and those we can't because they are either beneath our radars or haven't been encountered yet) are multifarious. We could as easily find ourselves a thousand years or more back.

Brian A. J. Salchert
 

It's indispensible to theory that it has to sound plausible. But because plausibility is subjective, theory will always have a hard time reaching what you call use, it seems to me. But I'm no philosopher.

Anyway, Benjamin, in "The Storyteller," shows how the rise of the novel has corresponded with the "bottomless" falling in value of personal experience and artisan forms of communication like storytelling - with the prevalence of information over what he calls "noteworthy stories." And ominously: "now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information." For Benjamin, the novelist is isolated: "the birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual," and the novel is "devoid of counsel" because the novelist is devoted to onehero, oneodyssey, onebattle. Even the short story, for B., is an example of what Valery saw as evidence that "modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated." The vanishing storyteller, for B., was the one who had "an orientation toward practical interests," because their stories contained, "openly or covertly, something useful." We, on the other hand, "have no counsel either for ourselves or others."

I'm just putting out here what B. says in that essay, not expressing some viewpoint of my own. He doesn't talk about poetry in the essay (though he mentions the "naive poetry" of the epic), so I wonder what he would make of our poetries today...
 

I agree that flarfetic gestures are replete with theory, in that they are replete with self-consciousness, field- (as in "the field of literature) consciousness, and world-consciousness. I think it's important to say, though, that the style did not begin as theory; it began as a lark (if a lark indulged in by writers who were hardly *innocent* of theory). The theory keeps getting extrapolated out of the work, for better and for worse.

I do think most of us love and revere Benjamin, in any case. I know I do.

Nada "Bird thou never wert" Gordon
 

So, Walter Benjamin, Roberto Bolano, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg are all sitting together, smoking hash....

...what happens next?

There can be no movement of theory where there is no action. We spend more time talking about poetry than talking poetry.

I saw in one of the Darwish articles that the world just lost its last poet that could fill a stadium. Nature abhors a vacuum. How can we even begin to talk about "American" poetry when the most esteemed or respected or known or abhorred of American poets could never have filled a reasonable ampitheatre, much less a stadium?

American poetry has not even been born yet, and we all want to talk theory. Let's give the theoreticians something to talk about.

The USA is one of the least poetic nations ever assembled, at least to date. It's not because of some biological aversion to poetry. How many nations in the world honor poets as pillars of society? Scotland, Palestine, Chile, Czech Republic, Somalia, etc... not that poets need or should seek the approval of the state, mind you- the state itself should grow around the poet like the understory of a redowood forest.

And yet we spit on our good poets and reward the shitty ones with upper middle class jobs and comfortable homes where they can write and publish musings on their unmatched curtains and the struggles of growing old and not being able to enjoy sipping fine Scotch any longer.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that quantum universe where Bolano and Benjamin are sharing coffee and hash.

-Mikey Golightly
 

I think the great stone weighing down the possibility of a renewal of Large Fictions, is not so much story telling, as world building, the defining contribution of the 18th-19th Century novel. The fictive universe, sealed in narrative closure, is shut off from any world we live it. It is of necessity, not our world, not anyone's world, but an aesthetically constructed dream, an alternative to the Christian notion of life on the other side of death. Calling market fiction, "realism" is farcical. It is profoundly anti-reality, and worse--a kind of factory producing the technology of propaganda, the theme-park illusions that numb the critical senses, doping people into docile instruments of power, no longer "persons," but "human resources."
One can claim that the novel belongs to the past only by defining it in the terms of the past. Large subversive fictions are possible, and modernists like Zvevo and Gombrowicz, contemporaries like Krasznahorkai, offer a glimpse of what they might look like. But how to get past the gatekeepers? The publishing industry, governed by the laws of capital, wants no part in printing, and certainly not in promoting, anything that challenges the market defined genres.
 

My objections are far too numerous to record here, but I'll pick off a few high (low?) spots:

"There is no such thing as a poem without a theory."

This is only partly true. Most poets work within a set of guidelines which they accept as givens. Page, type, language, grammar, length & breadth, breath, size, etc. But these aren't really "theories" but a set of materials which didn't follow from theory, or even continue by dint of theoretical tenets. It's not the cart before the horse, because it isn't really even a horse. Your work, Ron, since your early Coolidge imitations, appears to have devolved directly from the application of a theoretical set of synthetic formal constraints applied from outside the poems' natural sphere (a body speaking in the context of social and aesthetic conditions). The voice--across your various works--changes very little, even the imagery and mood and subject-matter, seem very consistent. It's almost as if you've managed to keep your self perceiving separate from the work, such that the underlying "you" remains unaffected.

"A nation of 10,000 poets is very different from one of 500, particularly if the overall population of the former is just double that of the latter. And soon enough we will be able to look back and say how a nation of 10,000 poets were the “good old days,” when there weren’t so many poets about."

We've had this discussion before, but there continues to be an enormous divide between so-called "difficult" "theoretical" work, and what the great majority of the reading public thinks of as "poetry" to be read and appreciated. There may indeed be 10,000 poets writing today, but it goes without saying that the audience for that number has not kept pace with the practitioners. As a percentage of the general reading public, those buying and reading and participating in the phenomenon of contemporary "verse" culture is probably shrinking, rather than growing. It isn't how many ditchdiggers there are, but how many people have a working sewer system, that matters.

"There are hundreds of poets, indeed hundreds of types of poetry that proceed along as though nothing has changed, is changing, will change."

Most of your preoccupation on your website has been with the hierarchy of literary culture, which you feel is beset with hidebound literary formalities and socio-political prejudice and power centers. One can argue endlessly about who should be entitled, and who should not. But if there are indeed, "hundreds of types of poetry that proceed along as though nothing has changed" that's a really wonderful thing, since that plurality and provincial isolation is as likely as anything to foster alternatives and experiments and eccentric approaches. Do you really think that putting any one approach to writing at the top of a monolithic literary establishment is likely to encourage difference? That seems quite Maoist, actually.

"The theoretical orientation of western Marxism seems to me never to have been surpassed...."

Quite true, but what are the implications of this for poetry? Marxism, including its later elaborations, was an often brilliant analysis and criticism of capital in history. But it has never offered a viable socio-political solution to the problems it describes in such detail. A valid "poetry" could be made out of the contents and demonstrations of its deconstruction of the capitalist model, but would that poetry be interesting? How is "inspiration" in the Greek sense, as a kind of possession or thrall, ever to be an expression of the will of socio-political change? That place in the head (Grenier) in which perception and utterance is "born" could never be created out of the materials of a theoretical criticism of political, economic or social history. The uncreated conscience of the race is not an essay (like The Fire Next Time) but a song, like The Waste Land, or Paterson, or Maximus. These texts are not "responsible" to dogma, but flowers of inspiration.

"Once capital ceased to be based on manufacturing as a primary engine of wealth creation, it was able to move well beyond the reach of unionized labor. It bothers me no end to realize that Marx, who was the first true advocate of globalization, would cringe to see the various forms of protectionist thinking that are taking place today without regard of political orientation. The fight to keep jobs in the U.S. is not wrong, as such, but it is no different than the desire to build a wall to protect us from Mexico, that instance of profound xenophobia."

This is gibberish. Manufacturing is still the primary engine of wealth creation. China has seized the manufacturing engine from America, and is now poised to take the world lead, resulting in their becoming the richest nation on earth. This is a fact. Marx did not advocate "globalization" but a political unity which he believed could solve all the other problems; perhaps he didn't see the extent to which the efficiencies of capital could overcome the limitations of borders and political differences. Globalism is a new paradigm which he could not have imagined. No doubt it would have horrified him. The historical development of nationalism, colonial empires and exploitation, and automation--do not lead to a single conclusion; they are separate, though inter-related developments. Mexicans are fleeing across the border BECAUSE of what globalization has done to their economy--they may think they're seeking new opportunities (that's what the corporate shills would like us to think), but they're actually refugees from globalization (exploitation of working class). Does this sound familiar? One nation's refugees can't become automatically the burden of another nation; that's the same chaos we're seeing in Africa, in Europe. Would you condone paying for Union Carbide's exploitation of the Third World, out of your own paycheck? Because that's exactly what's going on now.

"We are still far from that day in a world in which the majority of the world’s citizens have never heard a dial tone. But we are moving in that direction quite rapidly."

This is just the old "white man's burden" using a later technology. If only we could bring cell phones to Nigerian tribesmen, everything would be better for them. NOT! The proposed raising of the world's standard through a crude super-imposition of technology and entrepreneurial gusto has not had the effects one would have hoped for. The West hasn't "saved" the Third World; it has trashed it, and continues to do so. The moral implications of this is well-documented, for instance, in the work of Waugh, Graham Greene, and the writers of post-War South Africa.

"Marx himself appears to have imagined globalization as being immanent in the late 19th century. We know this from the fact that he saw it as a necessary precondition for working to create real change. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” was the next century’s attempt to get around that fundamental principle, and the result was mass starvation."

Exactly. What we're now getting is Stalinism on a global scale. Except the perpetrators aren't Politburo members, but trans-national corporate executives, expertly playing one market or one nation against another, subtly manipulating the political and regulatory bodies to enable an unfettered exploitation.

"I don’t see anything approaching a movement that could provide the sustaining force to a new generation of theory...."

We don't need theory, we need action. The world's priorities have been skewed. We are still a world of nations. Those nations are beholden to their resident populations. The interests of those nations are preeminently selfish (as they should be). That's why we have the United Nations, and alliances for protection and economic cooperation. Population control is THE elephant in the room; until we can get control of that, EVERY OTHER PROBLEM IN THE WORLD (hunger, privation and poverty, disease, pollution, slavery, war, etc.) WILL ONLY GET WORSE. Poetry won't play a role in that solution.

"Theory that is content to fixate on the 19th century novel is, by definition, useless."

Pardon me? The Twentieth Century was THE century of criticism, not to speak of literary experiment. The critical fixations you refer to are long gone. Are you saying that Quietude is built upon a foundation of the 19th Century novel, or upon a body of criticism which evolved from such models? Weird!

"We’re just not there anymore. And haven’t been, by my watch, for over 108 years. Unless it can explain, or deepen our understanding, as to what befell the serious novel, a genre that is all but extinct even as poetry grows & grows & grows."

The "growth" of poetry--actually, I like the historical "progression" better, as a term--does not parallel the "growth" of the novel, nor is one genre reactive to the other. Narrative verse as a formal genre may be repetitive, but it isn't quite dead yet. But, again, we aren't talking about what the general reading public knows, or thinks, or follows; you're talking about a small percentage of the intelligentsia. The role of poetry in our culture is demonstrably shrinking, even as the contenders battle for the vanishing spoils.

Most of the tens of millions of unwanted babies born to Third World mothers because of the Bush Administration's refusal to fund contraception, will live lives of grinding deprivation, if they don't die miserably first. I'm sorry, but poetry won't save them.
 

I like it when you raise theoretical questions. I would like to ask a couple of questions, tiny ones.

Why is it that Marxism has to take over the whole world before it works? This is kind of what the Islamists are saying, too. We need the whole world, and no one should be outside of our world. Then we will have peace.

What's odd is that the Lutherans take a tiy bit of scrap space like the frozen north of Europe and turn it into the most livable space on the globe. In terms of the competition of nations, that seems significant to me. Why is it that Lutheranism doesn't require conquering the whole globe, and in fact, wants to leave enormous tracts to the infidel and to the Pope for the sake of invidious comparison?

The Chinese economy is growing, but the individual worker is in misery. 15 minutes for a maternity break, organ harvesting, zero freedom of speech, only one kid, incredible pollution, buildings that fall over and collapse if you give them the least bit of an earthquake, lead everywhere, etc.

It's almost insane to want to emulate such madness or to indicate that you think N. Korea would function well if the whole world were like N. Korea.

Marxism's theoretical developments may be one thing: but in praxis, Marxism is nothing but endless misery: the worst police states ever known, as Bakunin correctly predicted.

Lutheran Surrealism doesn't have a strong core cadre of theoreticians at present. We keep hoping you'll shift emphasis and join us. I wonder what the chances of getting you to spend one Sunday morning in a Lutheran church would be, or to swap one text by Marx for something by Reinhold Niebuhr (Barack Obama claims that Lutheran theologian Niebuhr is his truest theoretical orientation in at least one interview).

We keep the decaf coffee fresh, although we rarely get new customers.

We are the leaven in the lumpenproletariat of Scandinavia, and Scandinavia is in fact the true city on a hill.

Calvinism and Communism both failed.
 

The way you equate opposition to hemispheric trade agreements with protectionism indicates the habit of skipping back and forth between Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal. The defeat of FTAA was a triumph of hemispheric cooperation, activism, understanding, and information sharing. The corporate press repeats the refrain that any reluctance to accept trade agreements negotiated secretly and unelected organizations that have power over elected officials of sovereign nations is protectionism, and the political class offers no alternatives to the oligarchic contract of globalization. Globalization happens with or without the imposition of unaccountable authority over the hemisphere.

Curtis, If you are of the opinion that The Waste Land was not born of theoretical criticism, you’ll need to convince Mr. Eliot that his record of its inspiration was in error: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jesse L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance,” begins his footnotes. “Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it to any who think such an elucidation of the poem is worth the trouble.”

Both the theory of the socially engaged text and art for art’s sake emerged in modernity from socialist critics, the latter arising as a theory of alienation from the pre-Marxist Pierre Leroux which paved the way for the approaches of the Parnassans and the Symbolists. It was Plekhanov that first stated that all texts were ideological while critiquing the purist presumptions of the Parnassan Leconte de Lisle (“..poetry can no longer give birth to heroic deeds, it can no longer inspire social virtues”), and Gautier (“I will most gladly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen, in order to see and original Raphael or a beautiful woman in the nude”) and noting the vacillations on the topic by Baudelaire, who favored the committed text briefly after the Paris Commune. Plekhanov’s point was that ‘perpetuating the nymphs’ was both a mythology in and of itself and a practice socially determined by place and time.

Plekhanov’s conclusion concerning the universal ideology of texts was rooted, though, in his reading of the Russian tradition. The religious Tolstoy also was suspicious of the moral detachment of the Symbolists. Why the use of Russian models to devise this conclusion is critical is that this conflict of duty and escape reverberates between the two countries through the October Revolution, Surrealism’s conflict with Moscow, Sartre’s debates with Camus, May ‘68 and the decline of the PCF. America’s voice in this crowd is the “I” of Whitman through to the SoQ, echoed in its political structures. Plekhanov also contended that ideal form and content must exist in harmony, an idea that was roughed up repeatedly long before Ron threw the signified off the boat in The New Sentence.

Althusser arrived at mediating these two approaches in Lenin and Philosophy by approaching ideology as a producer both of mythologies in art and the alienation that breeds the artist’s escape from them. In L&P’s Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre’, Althusser defers to Pierre Macherey on the question of ideology’s position within a work of art, that art consists of the continued critique of the ideology that inspires it, being inherent in all social formations. Macherey:

“There is little point in denouncing the myth which would endow the book with a semblance of life. Since it is built from the formless language of illusion, the book revolves around the myth; but in the process of its formation the book takes a stance regarding the myth, exposing it. This does not mean that the book is able to become its own criticism; it gives an implicit critique of its ideological content, if only because it resists being incorporated into the flow of ideology in order to give a determinate representation of it. Fiction, not to be confused with illusion, is the substitute for, if not the equivalent of, knowledge. A theory of literary production must show us what the text ‘knows’, how it ‘knows’.” Theory of Literary Production 64

Through this prism, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister may differ from a Robert Grenier poem in that the novel shows the process of critique while Grenier shows the end product, or, like a Barrett Watten sequence or Ketjak, an assemblage of points on a grid between illusion and critique. This, I think, also speaks to Jacob’s excellent contrast between enclosed illusions and the work of Gombrowicz et al: that fiction in an exemplary work exhibits a subversive relation to those received enclosures. Benjamin was firmly opposed to art for art’s sake and formulated through Brecht’s epic theory the work of art as a critique of illusion intent on being as social and experimental as it is alienated. Dos Passos, Sartre’s the Reprieve, Romains, and Steinbeck sought to experiment with social formations of narrative through collective characterization, and Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (which both illustrates and resolves in its way Benjamin’s Lukacs-derived problems in The Storyteller) built on Joyce to combine a detached psychoanalysis of the protagonist with the consistently impersonal intervention of scientific concepts and cultural beliefs.
 

Ian,

You confirm what I have suspected for a long while, that theory people don't actually know how to read. Eliot's prefatory comments to his notes to The Waste Land, as well as many of the notes themselves, are funny. If you haven't figured out as much by the time you read the phrases "vegetation ceremonies" and "certain references" to them, there isn't much to be done about it.

So strange that for decades now such a large amount of writing on literature has been provided by people who wouldn't be able to distinguish Tennyson from Shakespeare if the names were taken away, not to mention the funny from the serious. Explains your immunity to Althusser's bacterial syntax tho.

Burns
 

But, Ron, what am I to think of a work "content to fixate" on a 16th or 17th century genre, extinct now for centuries? Am I somehow to think that the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels does not "approximate the best of Walter Benjamin"?
 

Ian, I like your remark about Ron's shifting between Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal--that's something I thought but didn't say.

Eliot's Waste Land footnotes have been a controversial aspect of that work for generations. How much credit was due, and to whom? We can talk endlessly about the religious ideas that motivated Eliot, but ideas and theories don't write poems; poets do, are "in-spired" (by "divine" breath and spirit) to create texts. In any case, Eliot's claim is exterior to the poem, and certainly posterior to its effect(s). The Waste Land doesn't stand as a proof of any theory, but a response to a thousand things in Eliot's experience and personality. Its music is a chorus of voices; all of which do, in some sense, speak "for" the poet. Eliot turned away from that cacaphony to verse drama, with mixed results. The Waste Land will always symbolize, or stand for, the frustration, exhaustion and spiritual desperation of a generation exhausted and demoralized by modern warfare, as by much else. Eliot's personal despair was a mirror for the decay of modern civilisation. He didn't set out to write a demonstration of a theory. The poem isn't a blueprint, or a call to action (manifesto), but a tableaux, an abstract tapestry with compressed duration. It was highly original; no one who had two or three simple ideas about how poems work or what purpose literature serves could have written it. Eliot wasn't abrogating the function of artist, as Duchamp did.
 

My best to the Schemer family and all the young bards that emerged from your Tennyson lectures.
 

I didn't understand the remark against the 19th century novel. Was this a kind of chronocentric remark that the past doesn't matter to Ron, only the present matters, or was it a hit against Benjamin's exhumation of 19th century poetry, or the fact that Benjamin was "steeped in the ambience of Lutheran and counter-Reformation art and drama, with their decisive bias towards allegory" (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 14)?

Just curious.
 

Curtis,These contentions depend on whether you believe that there is always a theoretical component that enters a work unconsciously, not whether that theory is simple or complex or whether the work of art functions conciously to illustrate a critical concept. Illusion can exist in fragmented, irrational form, beyond monotheism and theorists or some propagandist function.

Perhaps you are creating a paradox when you say that Duchamp is abrogating some function of art after saying that art shouldn't have a fixed function, that Eliot and Olson are responsible to the functionless function. If that's what you're saying, it's not far from the de-mythologizing Macherey suggested.

I didn't know until web surfing today about the controversy brought about by the release of the early drafts of the Waste Land, in which the Jesse Weston symbolism was added to subsequent drafts, and of course you can't even count on bitter anonymous pricks to include that in their insult screed, but I don't think it changes the matter. Plekhanov would contend that the Odyssey IS an ideology for The Cantos and Ulysses, even if it comes in the form of a narrative schema. When Zukofsky commented on Marx and Spinoza in "A" it was similarly enclosed in the grand narrative of his journey. But I think for Joyce and Pound, Picasso and di Chirico, and Eliot's use of mythology and quotation in The Waste Land, neo-classicism is used as an anchor in eternity to wrest the structure of the text away from their own illusions, with full knowledge that the temporal and the contemporary must exist astride this anchor consistently - Scylla and Charybdis. I don't say this to suggest in any way the neo-classical flourishes are necessary or preferable, as you can always find the eternal in the temporal.

I don't think Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even is less of a representation of the human universe than Durer's Adam and Eve or Michelangelo's Creation fresco if that's the kind of visual function you're looking for. Or you only look at the readymades, or you just say that to hurt my feelings.. I attribute your hostility to Marcel to be a West Coast phenomenon for people who don't live near the Philly collection. He took long breaks from art, an abrogation perhaps, but one you may be familiar with. I should say that I liked your political tract but I was typing overtime last night as it was.
 

Ian: I think we're much closer than you think.

I'm perfectly willing to allow a Jungian interpolation--or overlay--or, however you want to name it--of the "spirit" of a civilization being "expressed" through individuals. But that's not the same thing as saying a specific theoretical rubric serves as the basis (& blueprint) and justification for a work of art.

I am not hostile to Duchamp. He is one of my heroes. But to accept his assertions about the self-immolation of the artist--the ("futile") act of a single individual--as a commentary on the place and function of art (and the artist) in culture--is not to deduce that all such industry is irrelevant, or that parallel traditions--based on continuing production--cannot have a similar compelling persuasion. Duchamp's paintings are no less interesting as a result of their creator's abandonment of the form--they still exist. If Duchamp had never made any art at all, had simply theorized about the production of artistic object, and suggested some of the things which he left to us (instead of actually producing them), then he would have been nothing more than a theorist. He never abandoned the object, he just changed it (and our conception of it). The peephole in Philadelphia, though--withheld until near the end of his life--ultimately changed the meaning of his career. The chessgame of his relationship with his "audience" underwent a sort of ultimate gambit that may have overcome the simplistic biographical summary that his place in 20th Century had consigned him to. Who knows what posterity will think of his repudiation of painting in favor of prurient models? By removing the craft and the object status as demonstration/artifact he used himself as a sacrifice to "mere" theory.

If Eliot's version of "fragmentation" was "unconscious" then it doesn't matter what he "thought" it meant, or how he "thought" he had been chosen to create it. Are artists mere vessels? Transitory vehicles for the passage of abstract "forces"? Maybe. But artists and writers still must be accountable for what they produce, and are entitled to take credit for what they make. The form of the Waste Land is original--it has no antecedents in literary history. Its fractured narration was a joke, a ruin, a cautionary nightmare, an "atonal" opera, a quirky religious "prayer", what have you. It does not "prove" any single philosopher's ideas; it generates interpretation, as all great works do. As a 20th Century artifact, it resembles Ulysses, as a multi-faceted opaque crystal, which exists in at least four dimensions, and resists easy summary.

And Eliot was not alone in speculating about the disintegration of form. Pound's Cantos was designed to be every bit as disjunct and abstract a work, from the beginning. Try to imagine Moore's Observations without this kind of thinking. Try to imagine Stevens's Harmonium without it. Or Masters's talking headstones.
 

Gosh. That's absolutely everything ever. You people have discussed and generalized all things in the history of the whole world. You're like a salon of the greatest intellects who have ever lived. How did you all get so super-brilliant? And where do I get some?
 

Last week, thank's to Ron's link, I read the 2007 Guelph Jazz Festival keynote address by Anthony Braxton where he said:

When we approach things with a positive perspective, all kinds of things can open up. I think of the wonder of the orchestra. The orchestra is really a family and if the orchestra functions as a family you can hear the difference in the sound and music becomes healing again. And so a friendly experiencer is a term I evolved in the early ‘70s as a way of saying, “Be nice, be respectful of one another. It's not just about you. It's not just about me. It's about, here we are in this incredible opportunity and we need to have some fun, kick it about, have some fun, be nice.” That's why I use that expression.

In the Sunday edition of the Star Tribune, I read a Stephen Lyons' review of Paul Theroux's book Great Train to the Eastern Star from which this quote was pulled:

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. ... There are too many people, a great number of them spend their hungry days thinking about America. The world is deteriorating and shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how badly the world is aging and all that we've lost.

On Monday's edition of Democracy Now!, there was a discussion about Mahmoud Darwish and then, they played a clip of Darwish from Jean-Luc Godard's film "Notre Musique" in which he says:

There's more inspiration and humanity in defeat than there is in victory. If I belonged to the victor's camp, I'd demonstrate my support for the victims.

Last night at the Minneapolis Public Library, I attended Neil Baldwin's lecture on William Carlos Williams where he read WCW's "The Poor" and there was discussion of WCW's concept that A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. I asked a question about WCW & Louis Zukofsky, and Baldwin talked about how Zukofsky helped edit "The Wedge," and I thought maybe these two poets will have more influence on the 21st century than they did on the 20th.

This morning, I read a Chicago Sun-Times online article by Jim DeRogatis about the Ex, a band from the Netherlands:

Moor sums up the ambitions of the Ex by quoting Chicago critic, musician and champion of art and free jazz John Corbett. ""He described it really well: He said we win our audiences one member at a time. We're not trying to do a Chumbawumba-style big hit where you subvert from within; we're not even trying to subvert. We have our own musical vision, and it doesn't seem to be connected to the mainstream. It's our own personal vision, and we want to share it with people, and also shake it up--to send that energy. Some people will take it and do something with it, and some people won't.

"But it does feel good when you go do a gig, and two years later you come back, and one guy says, 'After I saw your gig, I started a band' or 'I did this' or 'I left my job.' Of course, we didn't prompt that change. We were just a sort of catalyst that set it going."

It seems to me that the fodder for 21st century theory will come from sources such as these.

My wife & I belong to a CSA farm in Wisconsin. We get produce deliveries from there every Saturday during the growing season. When we were helping at the farm recently, the farmers' daughter told us how she would be starting the final year of her four-year nursing degree and that earlier in the summer she'd spent three weeks in South Africa working with people on various health issues, meeting with families, and learning about their needs.

There is theory being put into practice and use by people all over the world to bring about change. I am sure that we are about to witness dramatic changes on par with what happened in the beginning of the 20th century, on par with the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. Will it be the end of the corporate capital structure as we now know it? Perhaps. I see it connecting local people, jobs and the environment in an international and sustainable way.

What theory articulates a Dutch band playing with an Ethiopian musician in Chicago's Millenium Park for free or city folk supporting local farmers who send their offspring to do health work in Africa?

pac, lov and undrstanding (nvr giv up!)

Stv Ptrmir
no man's land
minnapolis, mn
usa
 

I'm with Ian and, to a significantly limited extent, Curtis, on your equation of trying to keep jobs in the U.S. with the building of the wall on the Mexican border. The failure, here, to distniguish between types of globalism and between types of response to it sounds much more like neoliberalism than Marx, unless it's Marx via the Soviet ideology that similarly makes the global a big abstraction, freed of its ties to concrete situations. Marx considered (even in the "Manifesto") the variously localized character of revolutionary activity, the different forms global class solidarity would take in response to distinct circumstances within the situation of current and (predicted, global) capitalism--the dialectical relation between global and local.

The "Global Justice" movement--of which the anti-FTAA movement was one of the last flashes here before it was crushed by police violence and overshadowed by a perceived need to replace its activities with an exclusively anti-war focus--was (is, will be, I hope--and it hasn't ended everywhere) on its way to being the kind of movement whose absence you cite. Its non-centralized activities coordinated activisms around peace, labor of all kinds, environmentalism, queer and feminist politics, local food and GMO issues, insurance, animal rights, indigenous people's rights... a kaleidoscope of angles on the global situation in which some of the problems of the envirnomental movement were solved by linking it, through direct collaboration, with more radically articulated anarchist & socialist concerns. The labor movement's involvement, too, brought it to a more radical position than it had found in a long time. All this was being acheived through a way of conceiving social change that got out of the split in "think globally, act locally" by pushing the local beyond its intrinsic limits until a bunch of localized concerns could prevent the passage of horrific global trade laws.

"We" can't "achieve globalization" without building it out of constellations (see Benjamin, Adorno) of localisms. The way you present things here seems blind to that, in its downgrading of the particular.

All that said, I'm loving this serial essay on theory, and hope you continue it.

--Andy
 

Eliot is funny? Mostly when he doesn't mean to be. His actual attempts at jokes tend to fall as flat as the 2-D caricature of anti-intellectualism "Burns" presents.


Kirby--

In my own experience, Ron's comment resonates with my experience of dissatisfaction when I was first reading a bunch of theory from the '50s through the early '90s. All these fascinating philosophers and literary critics writing exclusively about work from (mostly) the 18th and 19th centuries. Why wasn't anyone applying this thought to late 20th-century poetry, fiction, music and theater? Why did the tastes of most of these radical thinkers seem so conservative?

Now I think it's actually that the art with which they were contemporary was actually more philosophically advanced than their own theory--that, therefore, their theory couldn't interpret it according to its own terms. I think that's often the case--that the arts are ahead of more fully conceptualized forms--partly because of the flexibility of thinking and the greater likelihood of new insights possible in the less formally-restricted fields of art-making.

--Andy
 

Andy, the fence is a symbol of the failure of nations to address their respective economic crises. In Mexico, that's meant government corruption on such a grand scale, there's a virtual moral chaos at all levels of transaction. That leads to a demoralization--intelligent people, even (or especially) those without sophisticated education can quickly decide that running away is the ONLY option. In America, money has bought the government and the whole infrastructure has been abandoned in favor of corporate profit. Jobs, benefits, the environment, credit--everything is being given away and/or burned like furniture to keep warm.

But we're still a world of nations. Those sovereignties can either protect and enhance their interests, or have them stolen from them. in California, everything is turning into shit. It will only take one or two generations for life here to be brought all the way down to the level of Mexico. All the politicians are lying, and all the immigration interests are lying too.

"Multi-culturalism is bull. People don't get along; they just isolate and leverage each other. Who wins is determined by power and propaganda."

It would be nice if it weren't true. If only....