Little Red's Recovery Room

Giovanni Arrighi, 1937-2009

2009-06-22T08:12:00.002-07:00

There have been few books of history and social theory--not quite sure where I can place it in terms of genre--as important as The Long Twentieth Century. It's a shame that Arrighi couldn't have lived to see more of history's own confirmations and counters to his predictions. So far, mostly confirmations. One cannot but help feel, now, in the summery green of the dollar, the autumnal yellows and reds of a terminal crisis. . .

As is well-known, Marx projected the writing of a number of companion books after he finished his investigation of Capital (which he never finished)--books on wages, the state, the world-market. There have been many writers--of course--who attempted to fill in these gaps, and many of the arguments among leftists during the early and middle part of the 20th century concerned the precise relationship between the state, the world-market, finance and capitalism--in other words, the forms and futures of imperialism. It seems uncontroversial to suggest that Arrighi's contribution--set beside Lenin and Luxemburg--is definitive here, however much its integration with the micrological account of the capital-labor relationship of Marx (the subject of his earlier research) remains unclear, and however mild and modest its horizon of possible worlds.

I met him once, and he seemed a kind and generous man. You can read an interview with him here.

One More Fragment on Machines

2009-05-24T12:21:00.005-07:00

A new stage in the historical process was suggested by Wedderburn's pamphlet Cast-Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature, on Political Economy (1820). During a visit to Saint Paul's Church, Shadwell, on the London waterfront, he had asked the parson whether the church was built of brick or stone. "Of neither," came the reply, "but of CAST-IRON." An old apple woman who overheard the conversation added, "Would to God the Pasons were of Cast-Iron too." Wedderburn considered this to be an excellent idea: "Finding that the routine of duty required of the Clergy of the legitimate Church, was so completely mechanical, and that nothing was so much in vogue as the dispensing with human labour by the means of machinery, it struck me that it might one day be possible to substitute a CAST-IRON PARSON." It would be oiled and kept fresh in a closet, to be rolled out on Sundays. In fact, the idea had broader application, as it might also be possible to make a clockwork schoolmaster to teach the sciences. This invention Wedderburn called a "TECHNICATHOLICAUTOMATOPPANTOPPIDON." As a postscript, he suggested making a cast-iron king and cast-iron members of Parliament, and was promptly jailed for his blasphemy. He understood machinery, politicians, and the source of all wealth: "Slaves and unfortunate men have cultivated the earth, adorned it with buildings, and filled it with all kinds of riches. And the wealth that enabled you to set these people to work, ,was got by hook or crook from society.--Pray, was ever a solitary savage found to be rich? No; all riches come from society, I mean the labouring part of it."

From The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (318)

Follow-up and News

2009-05-24T08:00:00.003-07:00

Well, Terminator Salvation did, indeed, suck. And that's an understatement. Perhaps, if there were no acting or writing, the film would have been watchable. I mean, Christian Bale is so boring. He puts me in mind of the part of Paradise Lost where Jesus appears, the most uncharismatic and stultifying Jesus ever, whose overbearing seriousness instantly forces you to Satan's party.

*

In other news, it turns out that Joshua has a radio show--Jane Dark's Cultural Revolution--and it also turns out that I'm going to be on it tomorrow, talking about pirates. I don't think you can download a podcast after the fact (the link is broken) but you can stream it live: Monday the 25th, 5:00 pm. After that, Joshua and I are going to read at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

Marx's Sci-Fi

2009-05-23T08:32:00.009-07:00

I'm going to see Terminator Salvation tonight. With full knowledge the film will likely suck. But I share with many of my friends the hope—irrational, surely—that a film like this will succeed, that it will lay bare all of the operative contradictions of this last horrible decade. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The first two Terminator films were formative, giving shape to a form of catastrophic thinking I'd already developed on my own. (I’m remembering now that I watched the first one on Laserdisc, in a motel in the tiny highway town of Chemult, Oregon. I must have been ten or eleven, and was visiting my mother and stepfather who lived in middle-of-nowhere woods in southeastern Oregon. My stepfather had built a house for them, a log cabin, essentially single-handedly, but they didn’t have hot water or electricity, and so we’d occasionally drive into town and rent a room—just for the day—to take showers and watch movies. Then we’d go and eat fried clams or roast beef au jus).

I’ve been thinking about the first two Terminator films, which I’m sure I misremember, and wondering, to the extent that they are symptomatic of the Bush and Reagan years, how much they were really concerned with technology, robots and artificial intelligence. Or perhaps it’s only that they were worried about these things in a different way than a film like The Matrix. In T1 and T2, the imminent robot takeover seems a pretext for a Haraway-esque allegorical recoding of the culture wars of this period: unborn babies threatened by a technological future, single mothers, androgynous women, at-risk kids.

In short, what seems at stake in these films is biological reproduction, the family and gender, where technology (in the form of T1’s “bad” Terminator) threatens to wipe out biological reproduction, or erase the differences between men and women (buff Linda Hamilton in T2). But in T2 the masculinized mother is also super-mom, so maybe what we get is a sort auto-immunological masculinity, not designed to undo the differences the institutions of patriarchy but to preserve them in a new form.

The first two films, then, seem to wonder if bourgeois society still needs the bourgeoisie—its morality, its family structure, its bizarre rituals. The anti-bourgeois bourgeoisie is, of course, coded in the first film as a fascist (read: Austrian, accented) other. But the second film realizes that there can be no simple rejection of these emergent forms—only the good terminator can destroy the bad terminator, only a masculinized mother can preserve the institution of motherhood.

I don’t know what T3 is about. The internet? Yeah, sure, but the film also seems to take seriously the rhetoric of globalization and the end of history. The final scene—with its shot of the empty podium and the Seal of the Office of the President, its regression to an era (the 1960s) when US dominance was assured, wants to think the fact of waning US hegemony.

Not to disparage the themes above—which were relevant then and are still-relevant now—but my irrational hope for Terminator Salvation is that it will take on the development of capitalist technology in a more direct way. In other words, now that we get to see armies of robots as opposed to one or two robots, I’d like to see a filmic translation of the part of Marx’s Grundrisse called the “Fragment on Machines” (Viking, 690-714). It's one of the most amazing pieces of critical theory ever written, and the points Marx makes there are enormously relevant to the current organization of society.

For Marx, as productive forces develop—as society becomes able to produce more and more stuff with less and less direct labor—large numbers of people become redundant. And yet capitalism has no way of distributing access to this wealth except through the measure of the wage and, implicitly, labor time. As his Hegelian grammar has it:

In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude. . .

Workers become “conscious linkages” within a larger automaton, “a mere living accessory of this machinery.” Such a situation effects a profound mystification, not only for perpetually mystified owners of capital, but for workers as well: “The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital. . .”

The paradox of such a situation—the central contradiction of capitalism for Marx—is that poverty and abundance grow simultaneously. The more these productive forces develop the more workers are cast out of the production process. Further, because this development also means, as he demonstrates in his reworking of this argument in Capital Volume 3, a tendency for the profit rate to fall, there is less willingness to ameliorate this growing poverty and dispossession by a redistribution of profits through social entitlement programs. This is what we’ve seen over the last 30 years.

Real wealth manifests itself, rather—and large industry reveals this—in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. . .

On the one side, then, it (capital) calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value. . .

The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. . .

The point here is that the accumulation of capital in the form of machinery is an alienated, objectified form of potential freedom—the full development of the individual—one that is constantly reconverted into alien form. There is some danger in the perspective that Marx lays out in this passage—we shouldn’t go too far in attributing to capital an automatic, self-organizing power. To the extent that the social brain of capital is Skynet, it is a robot horde that, in pushing both the class of capitalists and the working-class to the side, continually relies on them in order to stay in motion. There is no automatic subject without the people who serve and direct it, and such automatism takes place as the class struggle between the two classes trying to direct, control and appropriate the fruits of such a process. But neither class can really completely determine the automaton, as recent events confirm. At the same time, the automaton has no raison d’être except by way of people. If Skynet were to eliminate people it would have no reason to continue, would it? And anyway, the convenience of the time-travel plot device does away with this line of metaphysical speculation. There is no apocalypse. And history has not even begun.

This is a tall order for a film, and I realize I’m mostly using the Terminator series as an opportunity to geek out on Marx. But if Terminator Salvation doesn’t deliver, maybe we should make the action-movie version of the Grundrisse ourselves?

Two Kinds of Credit

2009-05-16T08:39:00.004-07:00

Today it is possible to speak of a credit crisis in the double sense with which one used to speak about the Bush administration's "intelligence failures." For the torrents of real and nominal money that the Obama economic team continues to pour into banks, with the sole intention of propping up equity values and saving stockholders and bondholders from an inevitable day of reckoning, money which has reached consumers and businesses almost not at all, done nothing to stop the plummeting of housing prices, the hemorraghing of jobs, you can fill in the rest yourself--such a plan is only really possible because of the intense, fanatical optimism which his election has produced, and which his diplomatic and charismatic form of eloquent thievery and rhetorically-skillful imperialism maintains by a favorable comparison with the unashamed, plainspoken thuggery of the Bush crew. The trillions of dollars of credit facilities that team Obama has offered to the banking industry--for the sole purpose of maintaining the wealth of the rich and avoiding the dreaded nationalization which will yet still be necessary, next month or next year--: none of this would be possible without the belief, the hope, the faith and optimism which the majority of the American people continue to lend to his administration. The same goes, of course, for his intensification of the war in Afghanistan and its extension into Pakistan; his continuation of the Bush policies with regard to secrecy and extra-legal detention; Homeland Security's continuance of raids and its deportations of immigants; the proposal of a solution to the health care crisis that comes from the medical and insurance industries themselves; a solution to the ecological crisis developed by the energy-industry. None of this would be possible without Obama's return to the graceful, charismatic form of lying that once used to characterize the office of the President: a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on torture, the bob and weave of diplomacy covering the use of military force, a few decisively vague admonitions for Israel designed to imply the opposite of what they say. Obama is, therefore, an instrument, a kind of credit facility, by which the US state can absorb vast torrents of political "capital" in the very same way that the banking industry can suck up economic capital. But just as the interventions in the banking industry do nothing to address the underlying contradictions of the US economy, so too is the face-lift that Obama gives neoliberalism entirely cosmetic. In the same way that our banks are now zombie banks, their avant-garde accounting practices maintained by state guarantees, so too is neoliberalism a zombie neoliberalism, dead but still shuffling forward. Both zombies will die, of course, die again, when the supply of fresh brains runs out. And when they do die, we will most likely find that the libertarian wing of the Republican party, with its naturalistic fantasies of the free market, is better at resolving its differences with the gay-bashing, racist and pro-life wing of said party than the American hard left is at convincing the still starry-eyed and hopeful progressives that they've been pwned.

The World Turned Upside Down

2009-05-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

DEPARTMENT OF INT'L AFFAIRS
(Office of the Under Secretary)
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue NW,
Washington, D.C. 20220.

I am Timothy F. Geithner the newly elected secretary of the united
state treasury department, following the series of complains from
Citizens of the United States as well as Citizens of Other Countries
In Europe over the Discrepancies and fraudulent ways in which fund
transfers are handled by Africans which has made it impossible for a
lot of People to claim their Contract or Inheritance or lottery funds from most
African Countries due to frauds and illegal activities, A decision was
reached recently by the United States Treasury Department under the
authority The office of foreign Asset Control(OFAC) at the G-8 summit
in Japan to compel African Union Fund Recovery (AFR) to urgently
release all funds of American and European citizens that are trapped
in most Banks in Africa. It was discovered that some bureaucratic
bottlenecks was put by these Banks to make it impossible for
beneficiaries to claim their funds so that they will fraudulently
divert those funds to their private accounts. After this meeting it
was stated that because of the problems with Bank transfers and so it
was agreed that all Unclaimed Funds should now be paid in Cash to the
Beneficiaries.

Consequent upon the aforementioned, I personally came into this matter
with my vector power as the official secretary of united state
treasury department secretary to ensure that all funds of our Citizens
and others, which are fraudulently being trapped in African Banks, are
urgently retrieved and paid to the actual Beneficiary under a legal
manner. the team of experts were delegated to Africa for this task and
we discovered your File NO: AFR/NG227/59068007/00 with your unclaimed
fund.

It was discovered that officials of the Bank has only put up illegal
requirements in order to make it difficult for you to claim your fund.
The United States Department of Treasury has retrieved all Files of
legal transactions and we will be working under a legitimate
arrangement to ensure that you receive them along side with your
funds.

Your unclaimed Fund has been directed by the G-8 to be packed in
two trunk boxes and delivered to your destination the Diplomat who
will accompany the funds will not know the contents of the Trunk Boxes
for security reasons so once the Diplomat arrives You will be notified
so that you will go personally to the Airport to claim your
consignment.

You are requested to Re-confirm the following information to us by e-mail: tim.geithner@live.com

1. SURNAME
2. OTHER NAMES
3. PHONE NUMBER AND FAX.
4. ADDRESS.
5. AMOUNT TO BE CLAIMED

Be informed that the above information will only enable us to make due
confirmation and You are also required to get prepared to Clear the
Consignment as soon as the Diplomat arrives your country, with this
medium you will not be subjected to any illegal bills for any
documents from any office and I shall make sure that all the documents
regarding to this transaction is also sent to your residents.

Thank you.

Timothy F. Geithner
US TREASURY DEPARTMENT.
Email: tim.geithner@live.com

2009-04-29T09:38:00.003-07:00

Given the evidence that swine flu originates from "the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty," in Mike Davis's memorable phrasing, and more specifically, from a subsidiary of US-owned Smithfield Foods, one of the many companies which moved, after NAFTA, to remake Mexican food production along the lines of US agribusiness, we propose renaming the virus "the NAFTA flu." Unsurprisingly, someone else has the same idea.

Jokes about "bourgeois pig flu" notwithstanding, we do not think this jeopardizes Infinite Thought's musings on the Transcendental Pig.

There was never a better time to read Joshua Clover's astounding "Terrorflu," in Lana Turner.

The Truth of the Enlightenment

2009-04-13T11:23:00.003-07:00

"Oskar Morgenstern, who along with Albert Einstein was to serve as one of his two witnesses at the proceedings, reports that Godel had taken the injunction to study the American system of government for the naturalization exam quite seriously, so much that he confided in Morgenstern that, to his distress, he had discovered an inconsistency in the American Constitution. Morgenstern, fearful that this would jeopardize the swearing-in ceremony, conspired with Einstein on the drive to the courthouse to distract Godel's attention. Of course, the judge scheduled to administer the oath was acquainted with Einstein, and so Godel was accorded special treatment when the appointed time arrived. The judge ushered them all into his chambers, began chatting with Einstein and Morgenstern, and as part of the process of making polite conversation, queried Godel: "Do you think a dictatorship like that in Germany could ever arise in the United States?" Godel, with all the tenacity of a logician, the fervor of a firsthand witness of Hitler's Anschluss, and the rationality of a paranoid, became animated, and launched into an elaborate disquisition on how the Constitution might indeed allow such a thing to happen, due to a subtle logical inconsistency. The judge, wiser in the ways of man, quickly realized that something had gone awry, and thus quashed Godel's explanation with an assurance that he needn't go into the problem, and proceeded to administer the citizenship oath" (308).

--from Philip Mirowski's wonderful Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

2009-04-05T15:00:00.003-07:00

[Note: This is a short description of my dissertation project. The full version--too long to post--can be downloaded here. I'm happy to hear responses to either version]

There is no shortage of persuasive interpretation that correlates the cultural products of the last few decades with those signal economic and political restructurations that must run alongside them on any timeline, where the latter are placed, alternately, under the signs of postmodernity, the information age, neoliberalism, or the like. With a few exceptions, though, most of these critics do not attend to the significant transformations of labor and the labor process during this period—changes not only in what people do for work but in how they work—and as a result they remain unable to reflect in any sustained manner on the effect that these changes might have on the horizon of artistic or literary making. My dissertation, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, descends into the “hidden abode of production,” as Marx calls the site of value-formation, in order to illuminate the “mutations in built space” (Fredric Jameson) and the changing “shape of the signifier” (Walter Benn Michaels) during this period. I read the sometimes antagonistic and sometimes complementary relationship between the work of art and work in capitalism as an important part of the interventions in the labor process with which capitalists respond to the economic crises of the 1960s and 1970s: deindustrialization and the rise of the service industry (as well as the turn to geographically-dispersed production), the informationalization of work and the concomitant attempts to make it more “flexible,” the increasing reliance on temporary, part-time contracts and the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce.

If we are to come to terms with these transitions, and understand them as integral to the dynamic of capitalism, the terms will be, by large measure, drawn from Marx. It is my view that while there has indeed been a great deal of very powerful Marxist-oriented criticism in the humanities in the last 30 years, too much of it begins and ends with Part One of Capital Vol. I—that is, with the commodity and money. While it is true that the entirety of Marx’s system is, in effect, contained within his reflections on the theological whims of the commodity, there are many useful (and, for scholars in the humanities, under-examined) terms and concepts elsewhere in Marx. I am at pains, therefore, to work out a phenomenology of labor that can be applied to literature and art, particularly through a reading of Marx’s analytic of capital and labor, with its dynamic ensemble of overlapping pairs: dead and living labor, fixed and circulating capital, constant and variable capital, formal and real subsumption, technical and value composition of capital, etc. I am particularly keen to route this reading of Marx—in which the Grundrisse, his notes for Capital from the 1850s, looms particularly large—through Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. I read Debord’s “spectacle” as a broadly applicable analytic term that also has a specific historical referent—in my view, spectacle is first and foremost an account of the regulatory mechanisms of the period dominated by the welfarist economics of John Maynard Keynes and the industrial organization of Henry Ford (mechanisms that persist in the logics of capital in the period after this, too): spectacle is a complex of apparatuses which bridle capitalism’s tendency toward economic and politic crisis. It is a machine which manages overaccumulation and rebellion through 1) an expanded reproduction of consumer demand, the creation of new “lines” for capital through the transformation, as Marx puts it, of desires into needs and 2) a mechanical (in other words, automatic) reproduction of social relations, where the administration of labor is partially internalized by a self-managing and therefore self-dominating class of workers, now “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers” (Debord).

I focus on experimental writers (mostly poets) and conceptual, installation and performance artists because it is these figures who most explicitly address the rationalization (one might say Taylorization) of labor and society. The artists and writers in this study draw attention to the “administered life” of postwar American (and, in the case of Debord, European) culture, the subsumption under abstract labor time of more and more of the activities and faculties of the human organism. What these figures confront is something similar to Sartre’s practico-inert, a field of activity and matter that resists the agency of the subject. To use Marx’s terms, this period is marked by the conversion of more and more labor into the dead, inert form of fixed capital—dead labor that in its objectified form weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living, reifying and making rigid their activities. It is important to remember, of course, that Marx’s infamous argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall devolves upon his sense that with capital accumulation comes an increasing disproportion between dead and living labor, where the dead, in its way, squeezes out the living and with it the profitability of capital. In my reading, then, the figures in my study proffer alternatives to this reification, this fixity, alternatives that evoke, in opposition, forms of liquidity, dissipation, dematerialization, or free exchange. But as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown in their important study of French capitalism, through a kind of capitalist sublation the artistic critique of capitalism gets incorporated as part of the “new spirit” of capitalism, a spirit which stresses “creativity,” “innovation,” and non-hierarchical “networked” relations between “team” members working on “projects.” My goal here is not to wag my fingers at these writers and artists because of their participation, unwittingly, in the cunning of capitalist reason, but rather to understand precisely how such subsumption took place, and what parts of the art of that period still provide alternative forms of thinking and being in the world that might link up with an anti-capitalist politics. In other words, this study requires the patience of the dialectic: it proposes to understand these figures both in the positivity of the alternatives their work offers, and in the negativity of what actually results from it. Only then can we begin to imagine other forms of political and aesthetic mobilization.

My first chapter combines a study of a certain crucial period in the poetry of John Ashbery—from The Tennis Court Oath (1962) through to Three Poems (1972)—with a study of the theory and practice of the Situationist International: in particular the visual-verbal collage, Memoires (1957), which Asger Jorn and Debord produced together, and the theoretical architecture of Constant’s New Babylon. In brief, this chapter takes Ashbery’s self-positioning with respect to early 20^th century modernism and aligns it with Debord’s Hegelian account of cultural “decomposition.” My basic claim with regard to Ashbery is that, whereas his predecessors such as Wallace Stevens figure the work of poetry as engaging with raw materials or elements and making from them, through a process of selection, abstraction and focalization, a sui generis product or artifact, Ashbery takes as his materials these pre-made or pre-given (“readymade”) artifacts that are the products of modernism. And while it is true that Ashbery’s practices do resemble the avant-garde practices of collage or appropriation from earlier in the century, for the most part, Ashbery does not mark such work, as did earlier figures, as a kind of negation of bourgeois values. Ashbery realizes, as did Debord, that this negation has already been accomplished and redirected by bourgeois society itself. If anything what remains to be done is to reassemble the fragments in a manner different from that proposed by the ruling order—for Debord this means art’s self-transcendence (“the negation of the negation”); for Ashbery a sense of the perpetually unfinished, protracted and yet at the same time foreclosed and preempted nature of the activity. I argue that this diagnosis on both Ashbery’s and Debord’s part hinges upon the transformed nature of the capitalist mode of production in the US and France (where Ashbery spent at least half of the years under consideration here)—that is, the retreat of art’s encounter with primary matters and elements and its acceptance of the prefabricated as its primary material parallels the incipient movement away from a manufacturing-intensive economy and toward a service-oriented one. In Ashbery and in the slim artistic output of the Situationist International, we find an aesthetic of distibution, circulation and exchange rather than one of extraction and production. And in both cases, this involves a reliance upon forms of free indirect discourse (in the sense to which Deleuze gives the term in his writings on cinema) which prefigure the form of unalienated life—what Marx calls the “social individual”—that the economic transformations of this period have as their repressed potential.

But “social individual” as a term remains ambiguous and could connect to any number of possible mergers between individual and collective, the great majority of which will not involve a “free association” of unalienated workers. In this light, my second chapter concerns the peculiar postwar discipline of cybernetics and the fate of some of its key conceptions—feedback, information entropy, system—as they are taken up by the artists and writers of the period. Emerging from Wiener’s work with automated anti-aircaft guns and self-guided missiles during WWII, the discipline is in many respects a science of management—Norbert Wiener coins the term cybernetics from the Greek kybernetes, for steersman or governor—and it was taken up immediately with great excitement by businesses and scholars of business, a fact which makes its deployment by artists and writers associated with the counterculture somewhat odd. On the one hand, the discourse of cybernetics allows the writers and artist I attend to in this chapter— the poets Hannah Weiner and Madeline Gins, the conceptual artists Dan Graham and Hans Haacke, among others—to reflect on “administered life,” the subsumption of the entire day (not just that part of it devoted to work) under capital and the application of forms of dominance developed in the workplace to the entirety of the social field. But at the same time many of the figures above, despite their alliance with the counterculture or left, see something different in this discourse. Because it is non-mechanistic or “organismic” and sees “environment” as a partial agent within the circuit of “systems,” cybernetics provides an ambiguous model: a picture of administered life in which, at the same time, people like Haacke or Graham also discern glimmerings of an organic, self-organizing and egalitarian sociality. I argue that this ambiguity is reflected in the uncertain meaning of the concepts of “information” (which refers to both the measure of “organization” and “uncertainty”) and entropy (which evokes both static homogeneity and volatility). In my reading, entropy is the ideologically-determined lens through which the crisis of postwar capitalism of this period comes into view.

The understanding of systems as adaptive and dynamic, non-equilibrated forms of self-organization connects, on many levels, to Marx’s understanding of the capital cycle, the passage from dead to living labor and back again under the terms of the dialectic between constant (non-wage) and variable (wage) capital. But cybernetics also mystifies this dialectic—therefore, my third chapter will pick up on such threads in examining Bernadette Mayer’s project-based writing (much of which could be hung under the sign of conceptual art) during the 1970s. In a certain respect, Mayer’s projects are models of systems—whether psychic (Memory) or personal (Midwinter Day)—but they are models that I think open up some of the blind spots and presuppositions of cybernetics, particularly its conflation of epistemology with praxis, a slippage that is foundational for the discipline (and that persists in latter-day systems theorists like Niklas Luhmann) and which ultimately belies its technocratic and bureaucratic disposition. If a certain version of cybernetics imagines itself answering Debord’s call for art’s self-transcendence through the complete subordination of artistic technique to the technocratic rationality of postwar capitalism, Mayer instead returns us to the real implications and consequences of Debord’s notion, and also highlights the perpetually vexed relationship between an art that wants to cancel its own separateness, and a life that, because of its division from art and the aesthetic, remains mere labor.

My final chapter will conclude the dissertation by looking at works by two poets (one of whom is also an installation and conceptual artist) that are themselves acts of conclusion and inconclusion, acts of restrospection that draw various conclusions from the failures and transformation of the 1960s and 1970s. Barrett Watten’s Progress (1985) is a meditation on the neutralization of the anticapitalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, one which continuously features scenes of repetitive labor and therefore mimes, in its formal structures, the recursive temporality of Taylorized labor. But because Watten identifies language with matter, and language work with industrial work, he ends up uneasily identified with both the technical-managerial class and proletarianized white-collar workers. The ambiguity of the class position here is part of what leads to this sense of suspended agency, the sense that a meaningful historical subject is missing. I argue that we can begin to locate such a meaningful actor within the poetry, performance and installation art of Cecilia Vicuña. In her reflection on the tragedies of the 1973 Pinochet coup and the subsequent massacre of the Chilean left, Vicuña elaborates a poetry and art based upon the indigenous weaving practices and the Incan language of knot-tying (quipu). Braiding together English, Spanish and Quechua, her poetry places labor and specifically feminine labor front and center within the work of poetry. Her poetry takes as its object forms of connection-making and relationality that can be made and broken in the service of oppression or made and broken in the service of emancipation. And by focusing on the fragile and precarious (or, alternately, chain-like) threads of social relations, her precarios, precarious objects, specifically foreground the historical subject missing in Watten, and begin to elaborate forms of social relationality and labor—and thus forms of value, since value is nothing but relation—that could replace the capitalist value-form and the forms of labor that it dictates.

All Power to the Government of the Dead (Labour)

2009-04-02T13:11:00.006-07:00

My chapbook, Desequencer, is now available from TAXT. It's free and it features lovely drawings from one of my oldest friends in the world, Daniel Subkoff. All you have to do is write Suzanne Stein ask her for a copy. The e-mail address is on the TAXT site. Thanks to Suzanne and Erin Morrill for their hard work putting it together.

In other news, we here at Little Red's Recovery room heart "bossnapping," plant occupations and the wit of the G20 meltdown participants. We'd like to see all of that and more out here in Cali.

On the subject of bossnapping, I am of course reminded of Godard's excellent Tout Va Bien, also the title of an also excellent chapbook by Suzanne, which brings me full circle.

I'm pretty sure that no bosses were kidnapped in the making of Suzanne's Tout Va Bien, but you never know.

This is the preface to Desequencer:

A Correction

What follows is an annotation of the sequence of nucleotides which form the
human genome. Or rather, an annotation of their representation as letters, since
the “genome”—itself an abstraction—is not letters but molecules. From this
distinction, often effaced, many aberrations issue.

And yet, while it is no doubt a distortion to describe genetic material as code,
as language, consisting of messages, signals or instructions, such an account is
not without its truth. It is only assigned to the wrong object. What such
abstractions do describe, in fact, is the world which a heroic science would
realize. Writing from Dublin during Second World War, Erwin Schrödinger’s
invocation of a substance in the chromosome which was both “law-code and
executive power,” able to counteract the inherent entropy of matter, smacks of
the authoritarian core of a world in ruins. Taken up by Cold War societies in
the midst of 1950s future-rapture, it referred to nothing so much as the real
abstraction of life in advanced capitalism, the real state of affairs within a
highly administered and rationalized society. The cell in biology textbooks is a
picture of a technocratic dream world, perfectly ordered by networks of
command and commission. And so, fifty years after the transformations
inaugurated by the model of DNA that James Watson and Francis Crick
devised, now more than ever the scriptural model of the genome is also a
practical truth, an abstraction which real practices have made concrete. If
genes were never originally a code, the information technology for their
sequencing, analysis and synthesis has certainly made them so.

In genetic science, the bad conscience of capitalist society—its knowledge that
the difference between those who do and those who do not own things is
nothing but the history of theft, violence, lies—finds a perfect opportunity to
render true a favorite fable about why things are as they are, to realize those
fictive differences between classes and races that have required such vigorous
ideological exertion. Done with the ambiguity of class, done with the endless
work of racialization: what the enclosure and privatization of the genome
dreams of is the transformation of class into species.

Of course, this catastrophe will have to get in line behind the other faces of
gross imbalance. The passage from gene to protein and back is no more easily
navigated than the passage from the particular to the abstract and back.
Therein lie weird folds, feedback loops, irreversible changes, crises, gaps,
monsters. It is to that intermediate terrain—the not yet real of the not quite
abstract—that the following attends.

Illiquid Assets

2009-03-23T10:12:00.020-07:00

[In the form of the inimitable photo-essays of IT]

Bored with the world and its maldistributions, Jane and TK and I drove out to Benicia to document the circulating capital stranded in parking lots in the shape of automobiles.

All dressed up and nowhere to go, like a bunch of adolescent boys ready to lose their virginity in any way possible (animal vegetable mineral mechanical), they posed, these cars, just shy of sublimity, in front of the derelict navy ships given over to the slow sacrificial fires of rust.

In De Chirico's paintings, the miniaturized trains steaming along in the distance are meant to announce the inexorable impact of modernity and its rectilinear exactions on the a-perspectival angles of a yellowing classicism gone bananas, but in Benicia the junked fleets shoaled upon the ranks and files of stranded cars mean just the opposite, mean the retreat of modernity into senility, financial dementia, suicidal wars.

& a kind of eternal traffic jam.

"The combination of this labour appears just as subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence—having its animating unity elsewhere—as its material unity appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea, and is in fact the coordinator, does not in any way relate to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark, as its living isolated accessory" (Capital, 430).

Never for a moment are you allowed to forget which country you are in.

Not even by self-induced amnesia.

It's a hothouse for political dissidents. . .

. . .whose cryptic messages the authorities will have learned to decipher too late. Amnesty? Immunity? American unity? @?

2009-02-26T10:47:00.001-08:00

Please join us on Wednesday, March 4 for an ENGLISH FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENT COLLOQUIUM on Poetry, Entropy and Information.

Presentations by

JASPER BERNES: "Hannah Weiner, Dan Graham and the Use and Abuse of Cybernetics at the End of the Postwar Boom"

and

CELESTE LANGAN: "Precipitation: Poetry and the Rain of Information"

Wednesday, March 4 * 5 pm * Wheeler 300
*Reception to follow in the lounge*

Hope to see you all there!

De quoi Obama est-il le nom?

2009-02-26T10:16:00.006-08:00

[This is my contribution to Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days, Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's attempt to give new force to our thinking about the extension of the Ideological State Apparatus today--JB]

It was said by the statistically lawful personalities and charismatic slimes in the Treasury Department as they crafted $2 trillion dollars of new giveaways for the banking industry. . . Yes we can!

It was said by Lt. Something Something Something as he maneuvered his predator drone into position and unloosed a quiver of rockets on the probably terrorist morphologies of the villagers below. . . Yes we can!

It was said backchannel by the Obama administration to the Israeli government in advance of the massacre, in Gaza, of a thousand people. . . Sure, why not!

It was said by the Justice Department when it formally announced that it would continue the Bush administration’s extra-legal detentions of Afghanis at Bagram Airforce Base. . . You betcha!

And by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement as it continued terrorizing immigrants at their places of work . . . Yes we can!

2009-02-24T11:15:00.001-08:00

Undergoing stress test. . . please standby.

Conference

2009-02-19T21:51:00.006-08:00

The Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group

Presents

Crisis, Contradiction, Contestation: Postwar Economy and Culture

March 6^th-7^th Wheeler Hall

Friday, March 6^th

Panels 9:00--4:00, 300 Wheeler

Keynote 5:00, Maude Fife Room

“Knowing Finance, Being Risk”

Randy Martin, Art and Public Policy, NYU, Tisch School of the Arts

Saturday, March 7^th

Panels 10:00—5:30, 300 Wheeler

Poetry Reading 6:30—8:00, Maude Fife Room

Craig Santos Perez Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Juliana Spahr Joshua Clover & hate socialist collective

Co-sponsored by The Critical Theory Program, Critical Sense: a Journal of Cultural and Political Theory, The Department of English, The Department of History, Global Metropolitan Studies, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, and The Katherine Bixby Hotchkis Chair.

A program with panel titles and abstracts will be available at the IMWG website: sites.google.com/site/imwgucberkeley.

Please direct questions to ajmcc@berkeley.edu or bernes@berkeley.edu

Home Defense Campaign

2009-02-18T18:16:00.003-08:00

[I'm going to have to miss this event tomorrow, but I was at the action in front of Martha and Eddie Daniels's house earlier this month. It was a good time. Sometimes (ok, mostly) marches and rallies and such things are just baldly depressing. One goes around and around in front of the enormity of the thing, its awfulness, and the bad slogans and bad signs persevere in their badness, against all odds. I can't go, I'll go on, whatever. But the ACORN thing was exhilarating, largely because it seemed like it could start to have immediate effects, that it consisted of a small, pragmatic, not-necessarily-radical demand that hit upon the core violence of the present. Or maybe that's just me. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

In any case, I'm hoping there will be a lot more actions like this, and that ACORN will be able to summon large, surly crowds with very short notice. Whatever you think about their (frankly tepid) politics, they seem to be handling this campaign quite well. There's an excellent article about their work here. I'm particularly fond of the idea of moving potential evictees into the bank lobby. Detailed here .]

Come join us as we kick off our Home Defense Campaign!

Thursday, February 19th 11a.m.-1p.m.
2525 Ritchie Street, Oakland Ca. 94605

On Feb. 19, Oakland ACORN will join six other cities across the country in announcing its "Home Staying" Campaign, a national foreclosure-prevention project in which families facing eviction for foreclosure will refuse to leave their homes. Read about it in the New York Times!

Families like Rosa Gonzalez, her husband and 10-year-old daughter, who are facing an imminent eviction from their East Oakland home sometime this month, will announce that they are staying in their homes! Come and join us to support them and defend their home!!!

"There are so many families in this same situation, losing their homes, and it isn't fair," said Rosa Gonzales. "We have income, we want to keep our home. We want the bank to negotiate with us, work something out, and let us stay in our community." Gonzalez and her family live in an East Oakland neighborhood where vacancy and abandonment has been a grim reminder of the crisis sweeping the nation.

As part of ACORN's comprehensive foreclosure campaign, foreclosure victims and community activists are building Home Defender Teams to mobilize peacefully to defend a family's right to stay in their home until a fair solution to this crisis is put into place by the new Administration.

Oakland ACORN is at the front edge of this fight, after successfully defending the home of Martha and Eddie Daniels from eviction on February 3^rd. While ACORN members, neighbors, and allies gathered outside their home waiting for the sheriff to come, ACORN Housing counselors continued negotiating with the bank to reach an agreement and combined efforts led to the cancellation of the eviction.

"If it hadn't been for the support of other ACORN members and the action we did, we would be on the street. It was something timely and much needed, not just for us but for everyone losing their homes," said Martha Daniels, who, along with members of ACORN defended her home from eviction on February 3^rd. She offered advice to others in the same situation, "Stay in your home and fight for as long as you can. Use whatever tools you have and keep fighting, taking action, and exposing what the banks and brokers are doing to families and communities across the country."

For more information, contact Claire Haas at (510)434-3110 x241.

On Balance

2009-02-09T09:23:00.010-08:00

I take as particularly auspicious (in a good way) the combustion of this hotel at the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations. The hotel is a sibling building to the OMA 's headquarters for China Central Television (bottom), one of the most famous recent architectural projects and a metonym for neoliberal globalization, for the wealth of the destroyers, awkwardly balanced in a weird mid-air jointure, like a game of Twister, straddling the rich countries and the industrializing ones, and looking as if, yes, it's about to topple over at any moment. I take as particularly illuminating the confusion regarding the meaning of the acronym CCTV. Some disambiguation is more difficult than others. And now that it appears no one was harmed in the fire, I can enjoy its destruction wholeheartedly.

Don't get me wrong: I like Rem Koolhaas's and OMA's writings and I think many of the OMA buildings are quite stunning, innovative, and perhaps even useful for people other than the rich. But the CCTV building is a gorgeous prison, and like all gorgeous prisons--the commodity first and foremost--it must burn. If it won't burn, we'll settle for the hotel next door.

Bad Guys and Bad Banks

2009-02-03T07:37:00.006-08:00

My son is a huge fan of the president. Indeed, Obama is incredibly popular among the pre-K set here in Berkeley. Obama has magical powers, and he's bad news for bad guys. This is one of the things you learn from your parents if you grow up in Berkeley.

Because Noah is five, and also adorable, he gets a pass from me: he's allowed to believe in Obama, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, all that stuff.

But I wish that everybody over the age of consent would get real. I know that the election of Obama has provided a much-needed opportunity for middle-class white people to feel good about their own tolerant open-mindedness, and I know that the new meaning of "hope" is "I don't want to think about it," but I must now declare the post-inauguration grace period over.

For a while I felt ambivalent about the Obama election. I could understand its meaningfulness for many and I was happy for people's happiness and I wanted to affirm what I thought and still think are mostly benevolent aspirations on the part of the electorate. But ambivalence also ends, and I've been really almost too irritated and dispirited to write anything here--I can feel nothing now but antipathy for a president who stays silent while our immaculate ally in Israel massacres, starves and humiliates the people of Gaza.

It's a pretty lonely place, over here with the handful of haters, revolted by the crypto-Reaganite rhetoric of American exceptionalism and personal responsibility that apparently impressed people in his inauguration speech. As it seems to me, the true meaning of Obama's claims that the financial crisis was caused by people living beyond their means, or refusing to make "tough choices," is that people must now prepare to hand their wages over to the banks and take whatever shit jobs they can find.

I feel no special relief about Obama's economic stimulus package with its capitulation to the ideology of "tax breaks." The infrastructure programs that people think the bill contained, and which have provoked absurd comparisons with FDR, amount to pennies, really, less than $100 billion, all told, most of which will no doubt be sucked up by the creative accounting of contractors. I mean, there is $32 billion for clean energy: a figure that is guaranteed to make absolutely no difference for climate change. Looked at beside the $2-4 trillion that they're getting ready to dump into the banking system, and in light of the rate at which the economy is hemorraghing jobs, this is simply laughable.

But I am supposed to feel calmed by Obama's performance of "anger" last week after the news (which is no news) about banking bonuses finally percolated into the mainstream media. Sitting beside one of the engineers of the original bank giveaway in the person of his Treasury Secretary, Obama tells us he's going to have a serious "talk" with the bankers. A talk! About responsibility! Those bad bankers! They need a "bad" bank!

I do admit that I am intrigued by the resonances of the term "bad bank." I am reminded of the wide variety of pre-capitalist responses to crises of accumulation--many of them proactive--from the burying of excess precious metals (in order to preserve the value of holdings) to the Jewish practice of declaring a Jubilee year every fifty years, in which all debts were forgiven, all slaves freed, and all contracts anulled.

One wants, however, not merely to return the system to homeostasis but to end it once and for all. I propose, therefore, that we come up with our own proposal for a "bad" bank or sacrificial economy whereby we might zero out any and all debts, annul contracts we find injurious, print and distribute poetic monies of all flavors and colors, seize the means of production, throw parties, get divorced and/or married many times in the same day, make puppets, hold free concerts, etc. The purpose of this "bad bank" will be to lose money rather than make it. I nominate Anne Boyer for CEO.

Taxt Benefit

2009-01-14T11:40:00.002-08:00

I'll have an exhibit based on my TAXT chapbook, Desequencer, at this event. The chapbook has been delayed a bit, and won't be ready by Sunday. But you can get a taster. And see what all of the other TAXT-ites are up to.

Join us this Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 6:30pm for a very special ensemble performance, gala in spirit and cozy at heart.

In the intimate manner of carnival coin toss or old-school tents-of-wonder, a dozen poets will present their work fairground style, with all performances happening at once around the space. Expect real-time twitter feeds, slide shows & other sweet surprises! Listen in on headphones, have a poem whispered in your ear, observe in groups of two or three, or all at once or all alone. There might even be a REAL KISSING BOOTH.

Our star-studded TAXT cast of contributors and performers includes:

Stefani Barber
Jasper Bernes
Lindsey Boldt
David Brazil
David Buuck
Geneva Chao
Del Ray Cross
Chris Girard
Michael Nicoloff
Eleni Stecopoulos
John Sakkis
Jerrold Shiroma

This event is a TAXT FUNDRAISER. All proceeds will go towards the printing, stapling, & mailing of the 2009 series of TAXT chapbooks. TAXT appreciates your support!

About the press:

"TAXT works to make visible the work of contemporary Bay Area poets, writers, & artists previously under-represented in publication. The chapbooks are produced at home in Oakland, on an irregular but consistent basis & will continue to appear thus until I get tired of folding pages. This editor's role is to provide a physical space in which writers & artists may do whatever work they choose: the site is always 24pgs, in the 5.5 x 8.5 framework. This publisher's desire is to work with each contributor to produce a simple book that makes its consideration as both object and container.

TAXT chapbooks are ALWAYS FREE. Keep yours or pass it on. Share the wealth; there will never be more than 100 copies of each book. Sorry."
If you can't come to the KISSING BOOTH, but would still like to support TAXT, or would just like more information about the press, please visit http://www.taxtpress.blogspot.com/ or email the press directly: taxt@mindspring.com

MLA Off-Site Reading

2008-12-21T07:35:00.005-08:00

[I'm not quite sure why we'll be wearing masks. Is it a counterpoint to all the facey-face of the MLA? But if Laura says masks, then masked we must be!]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th from 7-10:00pm
the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street, San Francisco

FREE and ADA accessible to the public
Co-sponsored by Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation

Over 60 POETS reading (just) 2 minutes each: Aaron Kunin, Alan Bernheimer, Aldon Nielsen, Andrew Osborn, Barrett Watten, Bill Howe, Bill Luoma, Bill Mohr, Brian Kim Stefans, C.S. Giscombe, Carla Harryman, Christian Bok, Chris Stroffolino, Dale Smith, Craig Perez, Dan Featherston, David Buuck, Dennis Barone, Donna de la Perriere, Durriel Harris, Dodie Bellamy, Elizabeth Hatmaker, Etel Adnan, Jasper Bernes, Jeffrey Robinson, Javier Huerta, Jeanne Heuving, Jennifer Scappettone, Jerry Rothenberg, Joe Amato, John Emil Vincent, Joseph Lease, Joshua Clover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Julian Brolaski, Kasey Mohammad, Kass Fleisher, Kazim Ali, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Kristin Prevallet, Lisa Howe, Lisa Robertson, Lorraine Graham, Maxine Chernoff, Michael Davidson, Norma Cole, Paolo Javier, Patrick Durgin, Paul Hoover, Philip Metres, Rob Halpern, Sarah Schulman, Rusty Morrison, Standard Schaefer, Stephanie Young, Stephen Cope, Suzanne Stein, Timothy Yu, Tom Orange, Tyrone Williams, Walter Lew and more!

Poets in Masks! Refreshments! Books! Books! Books!

Books by the readers for sale from Small Press Distribution.

SPDbooks.org

PoetryFoundation.org

Small Press Distribution, 1341 7th Street, Berkeley, CA 9471

Noah

2008-12-18T07:05:00.006-08:00

Noah turned five on Tuesday. It's impossible to believe that Anna and I have survived parenthood this long; impossible, too, to imagine a world before Noah. Not that I lack for selfishness as a parent or think about him every second of every day but, you know, it's as if he has threaded through every capillary of my sense of the world, stamped every thought with some peculiar cast, expanded to the limits of my (dim) memories of things, even if only as a faint trace, a whisper. It's terrifying to love someone so much and to think what I think of the future, of the world we live in. And, of course, it's that anxiety, that certainty of the limits to present society such as it is constructed, which makes ninety percent of the parents I meet, when they are being parents, so unbearable to be around. . .

[Noah, right, and my nephew Asa, left, in a gold mine turned museum.]

The Baselessness of Idealism

2008-12-14T09:52:00.005-08:00

La-Bas:

"The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which was the most beautiful one of all: for the pyramid had a beginning, but one could not see its end; it had an apex, but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. That is (as the Goddess explained) because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else would God not have determined to create any; but there is not one which has not also less perfect worlds below it: that is why the pyramid goes on descending to infinity."

Monadology, Leibniz

"Some persons are so troubled by some effects of the market order that they overlook how unlikely and even wonderful it is to find such an order prevailing in the greater part of the modern world, a world in which we find thousands of millions of people working in a constantly changing environment, providing means of subsistence for other who are mostly unknown too them, and at the same time finding satisfied their own expectations that they themselves will receive goods and services produced by equally unknown people. Even in the worst of times something like nine out of ten of them will find their expectations confirmed."

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Hayek

Tragedy, Farce

2008-12-12T08:57:00.006-08:00

Surely, in the good state of California, we can note, now that Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared the imminence of a "financial armageddon", and given the disastrous state of the news industry, that the front-page and the entertainment section of the papers have become virtually indistinguishable. . .

This is why Schwarzenegger is the perfect front-man for his good (and goodly dead) friend Milton Friedman's ideology. As Naomi Klein makes clear in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal restructuring has always depended upon the manipulation (and outright creation) of crisis conditions, has always depended upon the melodrama and hysteria of the disaster movie. This is not to say that conditions are not dire, nor is it to say that the new economy which will emerge from this crisis is likely to follow the lines of neoliberalisms past. Only that we are, indeed, under the spell of a disaster politics, and we should be mindful of the messages borne aloft by the waves of affect now pouring from our television sets.

The solution here is, of course, rather simple: Gov. Schwarzenegger should go back in time, Terminator-style, and undo the tax cuts that he and his Republican buddies pushed through during the fat years of the 90s and 00s. Oh yeah, and it's probably cheaper to help poor people with food and housing by some other means than putting them in jail.

I wanna' be Exarchy (remix)

2008-12-11T06:42:00.012-08:00

for DZ Brazil, classicist extraordinaire

You know what's really great about running street-fights between Greek radicals and Greek police? Well, aside from the obvious, there's the vision of root-words and concepts central to the great diseased career of Western thought blazoned on the shields of riot police.

(αστυ + nómos = ???)

It is almost as if the illuminating but politically unconvincing etymological divagations that form the metier of Giorgio Agamben had suddenly taken on material form and force, become actors in history. Archos and nomos vs. the ex-'s and the an-'s. I mean, where is this Exarcheia place (related to archos only by a false etymology, and all the more Heideggerian for that), land of anarchists and bohemians and cafes and street riots and universities that police are forbidden by law to enter, and can we move there now?

(sun at noon)

(better than the hora at your bar/bat mitzvah or wedding)

Well, it's time to start a celebratory meditation on the political saliences of the bankrupt "Republic Windows and Doors," whose workers, occupying their shuttered factory, have forced Bank of America to stand down and extend their employer a loan to fulfill its obligations for severance pay, accrued vacation time and health coverage

2008-11-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni press presents

Kevin Killian & Stephanie Young

and the release of their books Action Kylie and Picture Palace

6:30 pm, 5 USDollars

416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland

Special guest appearances by Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover...

KEVIN KILLIAN, born 1952, is an art writer, poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1996), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), two books of stories Little Men (1997) and I Cry Like a Baby (2001) and a collection of poems, Argento Series (1997). With Lewis Ellingham he has written a biography of the poet Jack Spicer—Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). For the San Francisco Poets Theater he has written 37 plays, including Stone Marmalade, with Leslie Scalapino, and Often, with the late Barbara Guest. His most recent book, from Hooke Press, is a volume of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham, and now there is Action Kylie.

STEPHANIE YOUNG lives and works in Oakland. She edited the anthology BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and is currently at work on the collaborative website DEEP OAKLAND. Hey, you should propose a project for DEEP OAKLAND! Her books of poetry are Picture Palace and Telling the Future Off. She is here very sometimes: www.stephanieyoung.org/blog.
________________________

newyipes.blogspot.com

Pessimism of the Internet, Optimism of the Nil

2008-11-19T10:40:00.005-08:00

Many of you have no doubt already seen this, but it bears widespread linkification.

I love The Yes Men so much it’s not funny.

In particular, this recent hoax, in contradistinction to their earlier and nonetheless exemplary infiltrations, marks out rather clearly the boundaries beyond which organs of left-liberal humor like The Colbert Report or The Onion will not or cannot venture. Don't get me wrong: I think Colbert and The Onion have worked up some of the finest ideology critique of the last decade, but their stance is, for all that, the opposition of the weak, of irony contingent upon the iron-clad immovability of the status quo. They cannot directly name their own (doubtless tepid) desires, and so must ultimately concur with Adorno: "A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia."

With the exception of their brilliant Union Carbide impersonation, the Yes Men's previous stunts are mostly close enough to Colbert and Billionaires for Bush and Sanguinetti and other left-wing parodies hinged upon a politics of satirical hyperbole. But the affirmative or perhaps neutral lineaments of this latest project bears note. However inadequate we might think its inability to see past a social democracy doomed for not posing the problem of capital as such, the special edition is nonetheless a negation potent precisely because it is the afterblow of an affirmation. To follow a useful distinction Jane once made, this paper is a détourning-forward, and so runs no risk of providing the illusion of critical distance, or freedom from ideology, that so often results from the weaker negations. You can’t live there. It is, thus, instead, a way of conserving, of suspending, of carrying forward certain heretofore sadly radical propositions like single-payer healthcare and a living wage and full unconditional withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, by placing them in a new context where they might continue to breathe. Debord’s films are perfect examples of this. As is Rene Vienet’s film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? And it is no doubt telling that, late in the life of the SI, René Vienet returned to Eisenstein’s proposed film of Capital as a model for the future of détournement. This is what is too often missed by Debord’s inheritors: he is not ironic. Sardonic, yes. Vicious, certainly. But he is as sincere and as sentimental as they come. Irony is environmental in Debord. It’s the resistance of the given.

For all its foibles, the Yes Men’s special edition shines some welcome light on the current cynical enthusiasm for Obama and his crew of free marketeers, Wall Street insiders, union-busters, charter-school enthusiasts, lawyers for paramilitary-backed banana companies and military adventurists. But it does so by taking the enthusiasm and wishes of the electorate seriously: this is what the majority of Obama voters mostly really almost want. We should not deny the meaningfulness of the election in terms of ideological positions vis-à-vis class and race. But the meaning of ideology here cuts both ways, as weapon and smokescreen, and it is to me an open question whether the people who celebrated in the streets on Nov. 4th are willing to do the much harder work of forcing the US State away from its commitment to immiseration, xenophobia, racism, militarism and general fuckery, just as much as it's an open question whether instruments like The Onion and Colbert and John Stewart, whose entire premise is staked upon the existence of the Republicans as comedic foils, will be able to make fun of the Democrats.

And this is why there are ironies and then there are ironies. And I guess there’s an almost ontological irony to talking about equality with a straight-face in a culture in which not giving a flying fuck is a form of currency. It’s the fine grain of the paper’s impossibilities that gets me, right down to the hilarious ads for De Beers diamonds and American Apparel (themselves the negative detournement couched within the positive one), right down to Thomas Friedman's lovely admission of his own irremediable stupidity, right down to the comment boxes where people can take political positions with regard to a world that does not exist.

And so it was yesterday therefore not at all incidental that, after my students presented on De Certeau, and some other students introduced me to parkour, and I decided against mentioning how the IDF cuts right through walls and houses and buildings and makes you want to stop loving Gordon Matta-Clark, and after I did lay on them my critique of micropolitics and differences that make no difference, and asked them to consider whether and how this might apply to Breton and the SI, and my architecture student said, yeah, but isn’t détournement still really effective, and I said, yeah, well, maybe, sometimes, but not always, and I talked too much about neutralization and recuperation and forgot to deploy the phrase the spectacle of negation ‘cause we were rushed for time but did mention The Yes Men—it was, then, yes, more than incidental, even an example of l’hasard objectif when, leaving the class, I ran into my to-remain-unnamed friend who is a total badass and whom you want with you on the barricades, I ran into her and another one of my friends who you want with you always, and they said let’s go see the improvements made to the giant outdoor feel-good yearbook-wall thingie in Dwinelle plaza, with black-and-white lifesized headshots of happy UC Berkeley students and faculty and staff and inspirational messages of enjoyment and privilege and ain’t it all fucking great in printed cursive next to the heads, itself borrowed it seems from the playbook of activisms past and present, and there it was, the counter-counter-détournement, a giant banner with all the facts about the multiple, 39, between UC President Mark Yudof’s and the below-living-wage wages of UC service workers, and headshots of UC workers keeping it real about what it’s really like to try and live on what they pay you here, and the fonts were all fucked up and different sizes because of all the inequality and I wanted to take it back then and I felt bad for maybe discouraging my students who were maybe going to vandalize something for their final project and you can be too smart and sensitive and too subtle of a thinker about the vicissitudes of ideology and sometimes I wish yes I could just shut up yes I said maybe I will yes.

2008-11-03T23:59:00.001-08:00

Firearm sales up 120%
Camping/outdoor dales up 57%
Bicycle sales up 72%
Wood/coal stoves up 43%

A Few Symptoms

2008-10-22T09:04:00.009-07:00

A specter twice-removed, a meta-specter, haunts the

. First the fiasco with banks: it’s socialism, the right cries out, suspecting that Bush and Paulson have, in their enormous ineptitude, accidentally gone communist, sucked into some strange wormhole that unites the far left and the far right of the political continuum. . .

But then the plot thickens: the uppity Democratic candidate is secretly a Marxist; he wants to redistribute wealth; his first, middle and last names are an anagram of anti-American terror; the color of his skin a secret semaphore of racial solidarity and frightening Gospel music. . .

And so the established parameters of ideology collapse. One is reminded of Jameson’s claims at the end of The Political Unconscious that even the most reactionary ideology is utopian since it responds to, and therefore records, the drive for an egalitarian world. . . Now that these old, mouldering ideologies emerge from the rag-and-bone shop of middle class ressentiment, now that free-marketeers are departing the Republican Party for the conspiratorial melodrama and confused monetarism of the Libertarian Party, we must attend to the empty space their charmed circle of hysteria marks out.

Yes, of course, the bank “nationalizations” are nothing more than glorified governmental loans that force no writedowns of worthless or near-worthless fictitious capital nor direct the streams of available funds to the real economy; of course, Obama—surrounded by the deregulator and ex-Chairman of Citibank Robert Rubin, by the shock doctor Lawrence Summers, by the former Fed Chairman who induced an artificial recession in 1981 to kill off working-class power and with it inflation—is about as much of a socialist as Clinton. . . Still, the right is crying out for a worthy enemy. It looks at the empty spot called socialism, that ghost of the ghost which once haunted the US, with wistfulness. Up, socialists, wherever you are! Someone’s calling you!

Updates

2008-10-19T10:06:00.003-07:00

1) If you've recently lost your job and find yourself with lots of time on your hands and are looking for more reasons to be pissed-off or more confirmation of the fact that capitalism truly sucks, or if you're just trying to figure out the short and long-term causes of the current crisis, you'll find your work greatly simplified by visiting this aggregator: Radical Perspectives on the Crisis. Also: good stuff here and here, and translations of Mario Tronti and Alain Badiou weiging in here and here. You can also learn a lot by reading Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr. Doom . . .

2) Last week, the Chicago area (Cook County) Sheriff announced that he would halt all foreclosure-related evictions. Under legal pressure, he has since resumed the evictions. Right now, the Alameda County Sheriff is considering a similar moratorium. You can call the Sheriff's Office and leave a message for the Sergeant of the Civil Branch (the one responsible for evictions), at 510.272.6878. Let them know you support a full moratorium on evictions.

Technically, the Cook County Sheriff's concerns were only with tenants in buildings and homes whose owners were being foreclosed on, and not those who had gotten hustled into bad loans with exploding interest rates. That's not acceptable, of course, but a full moratorium would be, I think, a good pragmatic start, and form one face, ideally, of a larger movement to get debt relief for homeowners (rather than debt relief for the holders of securities), as well as extension of unemployment benefits and other entitlement programs for the poor, money for job creation, health care, infrastructure projects, education, etc., all the stuff we would need to keep this recession/depression from dragging on and weighing down disproportionately on the least well-off, and which, as Mike Davis and everybody else who's paying attention suggests, we're unlikely to get from a victory for Obama and his team of "compassionate" neoliberals. Unless, of course, some people start threatening other people's property. . .

A conference I'm organizing. . .

2008-10-14T17:57:00.001-07:00

Recent crises in global capitalism have functioned, as crises often do, to reveal the historical contours of the present, providing new opportunities to read history against the grain and to unsettle established assumptions. This call for papers proposes that as our economies enter a period of potentially profound structural transformation, it is all the more necessary to examine the relationship between the economic mode of production and cultural and social forms in the period after WWII.

We seek work that brings together analysis of the modes of economic accumulation which have characterized the last 60 years—their actors, institutions, histories, and structures—with analysis of the forms of subjectivity, ideology, culture, and resistance they have produced and been produced from. How have attempts within sociology, geography, political science, and history to explain the economic transformations of the 70s influenced accounts of cultural forms before and after this shift? Where do accounts of the novel, of poetry, of film, of visual art, and of architecture stand in relation to broader economic and political histories? How does work in sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology on the collectivities and cultures of economic production—from day traders to migrant workers—negotiate the relationship between subject and structure? How can consideration of economic processes like risk management, collateralization, foreign and consumer debt structuring, privatization, and data collection give us access to related transformations in national security, war, and neoimperialism? What has been the social or cultural effect of new forms of labor, including not only new modes of “immaterial” knowledge work but also the labor being done in sweatshops and maquiladoras? Other potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: cultural globalization and uneven development; anti-capitalist social movements; experiments with value in literature and the arts; the management, exploitation, or creation of risk; other capitals (cultural, social) or other economies (symbolic, affective, libidinal, spectacular); financialization and culture; class contradiction and conflict in literature and the arts; technological transformations in economy and culture; race, gender, or sexuality and the economic.

We hope this conference will provide an opportunity for dialogue between all participants of the sort often not possible at larger conferences. As such, we will not schedule panels concurrently, and request that papers presented not exceed 20 minutes so that each panel is followed by ample time for Q&A. All panels and events will be free and open to the public and accepted participants are expected to attend as many panels as possible to enable a sustained conversation over the 2 days of the conference. On Friday, March 6^th we will feature a keynote presentation by New York University Professor of Art and Public Policy Randy Martin, whose most recent books include The Financialization of Everyday Life and An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, searingly critical and engaged interdisciplinary accounts of how life is lived, war fought, and ideology sustained within a financialized present.

Paper proposals should be no more than 600 words (1-2 pages double spaced) and should be accompanied by a brief cover letter—this letter may, if applicable, give a sense of any larger project from which the proposed paper emerges, list other conferences or symposia in which the submitter has participated, and provide any other useful information. Proposals and cover letters should be submitted via email to imwgconference@gmail.com as attached documents by Monday, December 1^st and all accepted presenters will receive their invitations to participate no later than January 1^st. One or two meals will be provided by conference organizers and if housing costs are a prohibitive burden, arrangements for housing with local participants can potentially be arranged. This conference is designed to be an opportunity for current graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, although beginning independent scholars and writers may submit proposals as well.

This event is organized by the Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group, a group which has, for the last ten years, provided an opportunity for graduate students, faculty, and others to read and discuss together works of both classical and contemporary Marxism and to frame those conversations around interdisciplinary—historical, structural, and theoretical—concerns. The conference is additionally funded by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and affiliated departments and groups across UC Berkeley.

Deadline for proposals: Monday, December 1^st

Email address for proposal submission: imwgconference@gmail.com

Conference date: Friday March 6-Saturday March 7, 2009

Contacts for conference co-organizers: Jasper Bernes (bernes@berkeley.edu) & Annie McClanahan (ajmcc@berkeley.edu)

The only things anybody wants are T-Bills, yen, bullets and bottled water."

2008-10-10T10:07:00.004-07:00

In his statement, Mr. Bush said the federal government has “immense resources and a wide range of tools” to combat the crisis, and will use them aggressively.

The Spirit of Utopia

2008-10-04T08:32:00.004-07:00

Noah and I were talking about one of his favorite movies, Prehistoric Planet--the CGI recreation of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous reptile life. The final minutes of the movie depict the extinction event at the beginning of the Cretaceous period--you know, raining meteorites, walls of flame and tidal waves, the sun squelched behind a thick overhang of smoke and dust. . . It's rather adult material, and though I let Noah watch it, I always find these concluding scenes, for reasons you will no doubt quickly grasp, rather sad.

And so, the other night, Anna and I wouldn't let him watch this part before bed and, as is the custom of his tribe, he asked why. "Because it's too scary," I said. And then this morning, having given the matter some thought, he assured me, as I put the DVD on again, that "death of the dinosaurs," as the chapter is called, isn't scary at all.

Me: Well, it's kind of sad.
Noah: Why?
Me: It's sad to think of a whole form of life disappearing and never coming back.
Noah: But daddy, let me tell you something . . . in the next evolution we're going to live forever.
Me: What's going to happen in the next evolution?
Noah: The dinosaurs are going to come back to life and never die and the surface of the sun is going to cool down so we can walk on it.
Me: When's that going to happen?
Noah: In eight million months.

2008-09-26T08:56:00.001-07:00

What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.

--Marx to Engels, April 30th, 1868

Oratory on the Death of Neoliberalism

2008-09-24T07:22:00.014-07:00

If forced to place it in a genre, I’d say the current economic crisis is either a heist movie or sci-fi.

Where are we, precisely? Well, we’re in that part of the heist movie where, after x double-crosses y, who in turn double-crosses z, and so on, it becomes clear that the whole plot was orchestrated by the owner of the casino, in debt so deep the only solution was to rob his own place and collect the insurance. . .

Rarely is class power in the US as nakedly visible as during this last week, and rarely is the two parties’ de jure acceptance of the dictatorial rule of capital so explicit, unless of course one finds the canned populism convincing or thinks that the wrangling in the legislature over the details of Paulson’s bill is anything less than theatre, designed to convince us of the iron necessity of the main piece, a massive socialization of risk that leaves profits privatized. Because, you know, it would be one thing if the Treasury’s plan to pump $700 billion of economic Viagra into Wall St., the better to keep on fucking you, was actually going to work. But why should anyone believe that? Credit will start to flow again if the plan goes through, but as many historians and economists have pointed out, this isn’t just Wall Street’s crisis, it’s the result of thirty years of rising inequality in the US, of an economy built on nothing but household debt and longer and longer working hours. The plan will shore up stock prices, sure, but chances are the ensuing inflation and, therefore, the declining value of wages will still mean a nasty economic contraction. The stockholders get to keep their money but the rest of the country gets starved by inflation and unemployment. Sound like a deal? And, of course, if you ever believed any of Obama’s promises in the first place, this likely means that if he gets elected there’s not even a weak national health care plan and no investment in “green” energy.

As Laura Flanders aptly points out, this is nothing less than an economic coup, and it makes the putative differences between McCain and Obama moot. The various attachments that the Democrats want—an equity stake in the companies, pay limits for execs, judicial oversight, and some very modest programs for homeowners—are a start, but they don’t go even remotely far enough, and as they stand, are pretty much ideological legitimation for what will still be a gargantuan transfer of value from the working- and middle-classes to the rich. It’s as if the majority of the country were just told they’ll have to work weekends for free for the rest of the year. Instead, it seems better that we either nationalize the banks completely and let the profits redound to the treasury or, for added viewing pleasure, let the banks burn and put the money into subsidizing consumer demand through social programs, job creation and debt relief. The bankers are the ones who believe in the free market, the necessity of shock therapy, the salutary effect of price as a disciplinary mechanism, so let them have it. Once they get a taste of that American freedom, they’ll surely thank us.

*

It’s hard to know what rough beast will emerge from the dust. I could be wrong, but I think we can safely close the brackets on the particularly brutal period of capitalist rapine and immiseration known as neoliberalism (1973-2008). And good riddance. But there’s no reason to believe that what will succeed it will be any better, and there’s plenty of indication that it could be much, much worse. Despite the amusement I derive from the apoplexy of right-wing pundits who think the current quasi-nationalizations constitute socialism, what we see emerging less resembles Scandinavian social democracy, or Roosevelt’s New Deal, than it does Mussolini’s merger of state and corporate powe r. The difference is obvious: so far, there’s no indication of anything but a minimum plan to redistribute the surpluses to the lower classes. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the other affinities between the US and mid-century European fascism.

None of these periodizations are ever as cut-and-dry as they seem, anyway. The neoliberal era retains many elements of Keynesianism—in government funding of the military-industrial complex, and by extension high tech, in recurrent bailouts, in the shell of the welfare state kept around for purposes of legitimation, farm subsidies, etc.—just as the Keynesian period retained many elements of earlier monopoly capitalism. And, in any case, it’s a mistake to think of deregulation as the absence of an action, as the absence of intervention, when it is, in fact, the result of deliberate, forceful and always violent intervention, and requires the continuous resort to same (c.f. the Volcker shock). All that’s old is new again, and I’m sure the capitalist playbook of the period 1973-2008 will continue to get used. . . For now, though, I’m betting on an increasing reliance on direct and overt as opposed to indirect and covert domination.

*

As for sci-fi, it has gone curiously unremarked that Wall Street’s implosion coincides with the first tests of the Large Hadron Collide r, a 17-mile-long particle accelerator under the Franco-Swiss Alps. Sadly, the LHC probably stands little chance of creating, as some fear, a microscopic black hole capable of swallowing the earth. And, in any case, we clearly have far more serious things to worry about, an economic black hole of sorts, produced via the manipulation of all sort of exotic financial chimera that seem kin to the bizarre forms of matter and energy forged in the artificial conditions of particle accelerators. The LHC was created, in part, to verify the existence of the Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. To conjure the Higgs boson, however, physicists need to create levels of heat and energy on a scale of those of the Big Bang. These artificial conditions, capable of probing the deepest recesses of matter, are more than a little like the massive ratios of leverage which hedge funds and investment banks are working with today, where, all told, a million dollars of investment might have only $20,000 of equity capital behind it. This allows the managers of these funds to probe all of the possible areas where profits might be had, to test the spread of virtual futures that branch out from the present, to move the borrowed money around from site to site until it lands somewhere where the going is good. . . Or not.

Although I understand neither world very well, I understand not understanding well enough to say that the subatomic world is sort of like that of the unregulated, poorly-understood, mathematically-exotic ‘shadow economy’ of financial derivatives so much in the news of late. To speak of heat and energy, Donald Mackenzie, in an article about a form of financial insurance—end-of-the-world-insurance, as he calls it, our economic Higgs boson perhaps—which would only pay out in the event of a complete and absolute destruction of the world economy (in which case good luck collecting), offers the following savory description:

The credit market is also one of the most computationally intensive activities in the modern world. An investment bank with a big presence in the market will have thousands of positions in credit default swaps, CDOs, indices and similar products. The calculations needed to understand and hedge the exposure of this portfolio to market movements are run, often overnight, on grids of several hundred interconnected computers. The banks’ modellers would love to add as many extra computers as possible to the grids, but often they can’t do so because of the limits imposed by the capacity of air-conditioning systems to remove heat from computer rooms. In the City, the strain put on electricity-supply networks can also be a problem. Those who sell computer hardware to investment banks are now sharply aware that ‘performance per watt’ is part of what they have to deliver. (via Jane)

Nothing behaves as it ought here—particles vanish in one place and reappear in another, or move backwards in time, debt is aggregated and sold, and then other products are sold to insure against the default of that debt. What’s happening down there, or up there, or over there, in the shadows, while it will yield to all kinds of predictions and models, is fundamentally overdetermined, unpredictable and dangerous.

If I understand it correctly, many of the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that the investment banks and hedge funds are holding now are priced according to what people will pay for them—priced entirely according to market demand and not content, as is the case with, say, corporate shares. There is thus no way to know what these things are really worth. According to Michael Greenberger, one of the reasons the banks are so itchy to get the government to take this stuff off their hands is that if one of them goes bankrupt and the accountants come in to figure out what everything is worth, they’ll likely assign a figure of pennies on the dollar to the MBS’s, and prices will plummet accordingly. . .

Credit default swaps, for instance, are insurance on debt, designed to pay out in the event of defaults. There are currently $62 trillion of credit default swaps outstanding. That’s larger than the GDP of the entire planet, folks. It’s 3 ½ times as large as the GDP of the US. That’s your black hole.

So, then, to come full circle, this is a little like the moment in any number of “alien invasion” films in which it dawns on you that, below the threshold of visibility, in the pores of this world, behind the apparently friendly faces of the well-mannered professionals, another race has quietly prepared its takeover. It’s called capital:

The product of labour appears as alien property, as a mode of existence confronting living labour as independent, as value in its being for itself; the product of labour, objectified labour, has been endowed by living labour with a soul of its own, and establishes itself opposite living labour as an alien power.

That $62 trillion? Well, it’s nothing less than the weight of the products of 500 years of exploited, maimed, mutilated and exhausted bodies, bodies bought and sold, bodies murdered in wars, bodies disciplined and legislated and incarcerated. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

And, oh yeah, the LHC collider malfunctioned on Sept. 19th. It won’t be up and running for months.

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)

2008-09-13T10:03:00.002-07:00

Reginald Shepherd is dead. I miss him. It’s hard to know what else to say.

Reginald was my professor at Cornell, my friend at large, an early supporter of my writing, a trusted reader, a correspondent. There were two writers who helped me out a great deal early on, and without whom I would, doubtless, be somewhere different right now—Deborah Tall and Reginald Shepherd—and they are both dead now at far too young of an age. The other professors at Cornell were nice people (or, rather, some of them were) but they didn’t care about poetry, they weren’t reading it or writing it or thinking about it, and to the degree that they were disengaged from writing Reginald was engaged with it, inflamed by it, knowledgeable and curious and full of opinion. He wrote things on my poems. He told me about writers I’d never heard of and, importantly, he didn’t think of criticism or theory as irrelevant to writing, but as a useful spur, an illumination, and a pursuit in its own right. Poetry, as he makes clear in his essays, saved his life and it kept on saving it.

He lighted things up everywhere with his intelligence, his sensitivity, his tremendous love for poetry. And of course his poems, poems where, I think now, touch is the first sense, love the motive, and all language address, all the dressing-up and dressing-down a form of directness and transparency. The comment stream here testifies, I think, better than I can, to his impact. The growing recognition of his poetry and critical writing is, no doubt, just the beginning. But I’m cheered that he got to be around for some of that recognition.

Reginald had a childhood and an early life that would destroy most of us, and he’s written about this movingly in his Orpheus in the Bronx. That adversity never really went away. But for all that, the joys stood out all the more clearly. Chief among these joys was his partner, Robert Philen. I remember how much meeting Robert changed Reginald—instantly, deeply. His devotion to Reginald over the last couple of years, in sickness and health, should serve as an example to all of us of that part of love that is hard, and for all that, its truth.

Good News

2008-08-30T09:31:00.006-07:00

Emerging again from the network of passageways that spell out all the fungible and frangible moments of this life, my publisher, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, has just released two volumes so good they will make you pee your pants. Stephanie Young is destroying ponies with ponies. Kevin Killian would have waxed a dungeon to match your feeling. These books will protect you from the harmful rays emitted by political conventions.

Repetition Compulsion, Democrats

2008-08-27T08:01:00.002-07:00

The Obama campaign has settled on a winning slogan, it seems. Written on the outside of a recent (unopened, soon-to-be-recycled) mailing are the words “Jasper, this time will be different.” Ah, yes—I’ve heard that before, said it to people I’ve loved and not loved, said it to myself, placed it at the very front of the card files marked pure and utter bullshit and electoral politics, hollowness of. Seriously, do you think they could have come up with anything that rings more false than this? The phrase is nothing less than the rhetoric of the addict’s (or the obsessive’s) superego. Jasper, this time will be different. Following on the heels of which comes a temporary loss of consciousness, of self-possession, and when you return to your senses you have a cigarette in your mouth, you’re walking out of the liquor store with a fifth clutched tightly to your side, walking back from the parking lot where you meet your connect, you’re lying in his or her bed, you’re walking out of the polling booth where you’ve just voted for the murder of hundreds of thousands and the immiseration of hundreds of millions. Fill in the rest yourself.

But, as The Dark Knight teaches us, the American people, those loveable schlemiels, need something to believe in, they need hope, never mind if that hope comes with a variable rate mortgage.

Questions about Tronti

2008-08-13T10:28:00.002-07:00

One of the questions I have about Tronti, and operaismo in general, is to what extent his critiques are applicable today. He is writing out of a very specific moment in capitalism—the so-called “golden age” of the post-war boom, with its combination of developmentalist economics in the third world, the Keynesian compromise with labor in the imperial core, Fordism, and centralized, comparatively inflexible corporate structures. To what extent does “social capital” as he conceives it still exist? And what happens when “social capital” turns into Negri’s “real subsumption” and “biopolitics” under condition that are, arguably, quite different?

The shift to what David Harvey calls “flexible accumulation” that occurs in the 70s—with increasingly decentralized firms, liberalization of the economies of the periphery and volatilization of capital movement in general, the growth of the service sector, the mechanization of agriculture—can’t really be seen as replacing the tenets of the ‘45-73 period, so much as transforming them. For instance, the state continues to intervene in, legislate and administer production, and in the US, though the spending is not re-circulated to the working-class, the state still runs a huge deficit on corporate giveaways, subsidies and, of course, armaments and colonial adventures. Then as now, many industries are dominated by monopolies. The idea of neo-liberalism as anti-state is, of course, a fiction. There is, now, simply (or rather, complexly) a different relationship between state and capital.

But still, it’s unclear that, for instance, trade-union activism of the modest sort that seeks a larger share of the surpluses is today, as it was in Tronti’s time, a force that contributes to development. Given the conditions of stagnation within the capitalist economy, and given the fact many manufacturing sectors seem mechanized to such a degree that additional profits are very difficult to secure, it might be the case that unions are actually a far larger threat to capital today than they were 50 years ago. Hence, for the last 25-30 years the US and British governments (among others) treat with labor in increasingly brutal and intractable ways. (In The Shock Doctrine –which is a truly excellent book, a harrowing map of the last 30 years of berserker capitalism—Naomi Klein uses Reagan’s response to the air traffic controllers and Thatcher’s to the coal miners to mark a shift). Further, as a friend pointed out to me recently, the service sector admits of no mechanization—there, the ratio between profits and wages can’t really be improved through machinery or technology. Full unionization of that area—a difficult accomplishment, given all of contingent labor that’s used—could be devastating, since, it seems (and correct me if I’m wrong) the only recourse that capital has there is “absolute surplus value”—lengthening of the working day, lowering of the wage, lowering of the standards of living, etc. And this, of course, threatens a crisis of overproduction of the sort we’re facing right now. All fictive capitals come to an end. Farewell to an idea.

What I’m worrying over is the oft-repeated claim that critiques of administered life, of the conformist culture of 50s and 60s capital, of the “augmented survival” that Debord describes, and the society of command in Tronti, (critiques, in other words, of the extension of the state across wide swaths of the, umm, welt) actually play into the hands of neoliberal crusaders in the 70s, 80s and 90s, that the critique of augmented survival for the most privileged sectors of the working class enables a shift to “mere” survival. There is some truth to this, although I think the truth has more to do with perversions and distortions in the implementation of ideas that were, and remain, radical, but that can end up—this is the case with a good deal of post-structuralism—as fundamentally liberal or even libertarian in nature.

“Social capital” might in its transformation end up as something like Debord’s “diffuse spectacle,” a form of rule that proceeds less by direct command and administration but by a tacit performance on the part of society, in order not only to reproduce the existing relations of production but to expand what is deemed socially necessary labor time. Spectacle works on use-value. I think both of these functions fit with Foucault’s definition of biopolitics—the creation of desires (History of Sexuality, Vol I), and the management of populations (The Birth of Biopolitics).

The shift, then, seems to do with an adversion to a kind of calculated chaos—a calculated permissiveness that allows the formation of areas of self-governance, autonomy, agitation—in order to allow capital to expand. The State, in certain sectors, retreats only to return. . . Or the capital “S” State turns into the little “s” state in order to permit the kind of flexibility and leverage that capital needs in this age. . .This seems to be characteristic of things in the imperial core.

At the same time, however, the need for new capital markets requires increasingly brutal and direct legislative or military intervention in the periphery—primitive accumulation by force and fiat. Naomi Klein’s book documents the infernal career of such slash-and-burn techniques, whether they result from the exploitation of “naturally” arisen crises or the manufacture of crises.

Tronti suggests—and this is a point made very explicitly in Harry Cleaver’s excellent Reading Capital Politically—that all crises are either the result of working-class militancy or, relatedly, an attempt by the ruling class to control the working-class through the political implementation of economic control (all economics is politics, for Cleaver). I’m not sure I buy this %100. Or I’m not sure—as an empirical claim—that it’s a meaningful distinction. Of course, I want this to be true. I think that—in terms subjectivity—this is probably the best way to look at things, in line with, say, Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” I also think it bears out if one looks at the crises of the 70s and 80s, and those direct interventions that Klein so expertly indexes. It’s certainly true, for instance, of price gouging by commodities speculators currently, and it’s certainly true that the subprime housing scandal was a way of, in a sense, getting, by a backdoor means, givebacks from the working class (by putting many people in deep debt). But there also could be a good deal to learn by looking at such things as inter-capital competition. I don’t think doing so renders the working-class entirely passive.

Many of my readers—used to me talking about poetry—probably don’t care about any of this, and have probably already stopped reading paragraphs ago. But for those who do, what do you think?

Labour Capacity and The Strategy of Refusal, Part II

2008-08-11T10:41:00.003-07:00

[Part I is here]

If you’re like me, the characterization of labor capacity as absolute (rather than determinate) negation in Tronti will start to remind you of the myriad readings of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” that seem de rigueur for European philosophers/theorists (Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida and Zizek, among those that I’m aware of, all discuss the story and the character). If you read Marx on labour-capacity, the connection to Bartleby is rather unmistakable. Bartleby (and his less-remarked cousin, the Carpenter, in Moby-Dick) is a perfect exemplification of the antinomies of the working-class subject as both all-containing potentiality and absolute, immiserated de-qualification— in Marx’s words “Labour as object absolute poverty, labour as subject general possibility of wealth.”

Marx’s distinguishes two “moments” of labor; a negative moment:

As such it is not-raw-material, not-instrument of labour, not-raw-product: labour separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labor, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labor, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. (Grundrisse, 295-296)

And a positive one:

Labour not as an object, but as activity: not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action. (296)

And, in conclusion, their synthesis:

Thus, it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital. (296)

I think that the two-fold character of labour here goes a long way in explaining the problems and potentials in implementing, as militant praxis, the viewpoint of Tronti’s essay. In both Agamben’s and Zizek’s reading of Bartleby, there is the perverse belief that one can, by exarcerbating this “absolute poverty”, by reducing oneself to an ontological zero-degree, reach the Arcimidean point from which a destructive potential is gained. The trick, in Agamben, is not to fight the extension of bare life throughout the social field, but to generalize it. In weakness, strength, etc. The Christological resonances are well-remarked.

And yet, as much as this conception makes me uncomfortable (a kind of latent miserabilism), I can’t but help find myself attracted to it also. Although it’s not without the hints here and there of condescension which mark Melville’s ambivalent view-point, the show-stopping passage from Moby-Dick quoted below is, in many respects, a perfect description of the proletarian as social individual, the proletarian as prefiguration of communism, the proletarian for whom deskilling and dequalification, after “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,” allow her or him, as absolute self-determining plasticity, to lay claim to the entire spectrum of human ability, experience and possibility:

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory;
heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held
for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously
accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too;
all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence.
But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable,
than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say;
for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things,
that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole
visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes,
still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig
foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity
in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;--
yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian,
wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain
grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time
during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark.
Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer,
whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings
might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract;
an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe;
living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem
to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been
tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven;
but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process.
He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.
He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful,
multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior--
though a little swelled--of a common pocket knife; but containing,
not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers,
cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers.
So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver,
all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast:
or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not
have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow
anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver,
or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was;
and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more.
And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him;
this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing;
but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes;
or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there,
and talking all the time to keep himself awake.

The ways in which this “man without qualities” is, at the same time, a pure potentiality, becomes clearer in the later play-like scene where Ahab casts him in the role of God. In any case, I think this passage supports CLR James’s claim that the true protagonist of Moby-Dick is the ship’s crew, trapped as it is between the intellectual domination of Ishmael and the directly political-theological domination of Ahab.

I started thinking, again, about all of these matters when, with Suzanne Stein and many other local poets and writers, I watched Fassbinder’s truly devastating Berlin Alexanderplatz at the SFMoMA this summer. I’m not sure I can think of any other film that displays such a range of affects. It seems to cover the whole spectum of human and inhuman feeling. Franz Biberkopf is, in many respects, a character like the carpenter above. His actions are seemingly without premeditation; he contains within him a spectrum of affects, from the most earnest sentimentality to the most terrifying rage. [It’s hard not to suspect that James Gandolfini based his portrayal of Tony Soprano on Biberkopf—not only are Gandolfini and Lamprecht matches for each other physically, but the alternately brooding and delicate mannerisms are nearly identical]. As an allegorical figure for either the German working-class or, more generally, the German people, he yields himself, in merely opportunistic ways, to the manipulations of the Nazis, of organized crime, and he flirts with anarcho-syndicalism. In each case, he remains rather indifferent to the ideological content of the group. He is self-actualized, but this self-actualization can’t be easily conceived in terms of any identifiable want or desire. He is “a stript abstract, an unfractioned integral.” As above, Fassbinder’s portrait of the German proletariat is, like Melville’s, not without its condescension.

What Biberkopf can’t bear, it seems, is his dependence upon another. But this is never phrased as a positive demand, only as a reaction to circumstance. There’s no small amount of Sartrean existentialism here. As a figure of radical autonomy, Biberkopf reacts murderously when he is enchained to other characters (Eva, Reinhold) through an exchange of women. Despite his refusal of work, what he never manages to refuse is the subservience of his girlfriends. His autonomy, in this sense, forces him into the role of pimp. He is unable to give a positive character to his autonomy—to negate the negation, if you will—and so proletarianizes those he loves and who love him. At every step of the way, his entry into society, and into the market, comes always by way of an exchange of women, even though, what he wants, in the end, is the refusal of work, a refusal of the market of exchange and value which objectifies him and those he loves. As a member of so-called lumpenproletariat—who as Silvia Federici and others demonstrate, should really be conceived of as part of the working-class proper—Franz finds that the informal economy of crime and prostitution mimics the logics of the formal economy. Given the staggering growth of global unemployment over the last 30 years, the portrait that BA provides seems important, since any resistance to capitalism will have to engage this group as a figure both of radical autonomy and radical dispossession.

Biberkopf already knows what he wants. Or rather, what he wants is beyond knowledge—it just is. He has no goals, no need of ideology. Working-class strategy is already inherent in him, but what he lacks is the tactical, constructive force which will allow him to actualize his own hatred of work.

The following scene, when Franz and his friend and partner-in-crime Willy go to a meeting of anarcho-syndicalists, makes this pretty clear. What I take from the film is that some synthesis of the two positions below would be necessary if Biberkopf is to avoid the fate—that is, Nazism—which befalls him, and by extension, the German working-class. Somewhere between voluntarism and spontaneism, Marx with just enough Nietschze to get you through to the other side:

[After hearing a rousing speech, Franz and Willy meet an old syndicalist who is walking his bicycle trough a rubble-strewn interior.]

Syndicalist: Come on. Tell us what work you do.

Franz: Oh, I get around. I do this and that. I don’t actually work. I let others work for me.

Syndicalist: So you’re an entrepreneur with employees. How many do you have? And what are you doing here anyway, if you’re a capitalist?

Franz (ringing the bell on the anarchist’s bicycle): I want to reduce Jerusalem to rubble and the abode of jackals, and lay waste the cities of Judah, so that no one can dwell in them.

Syndicalist: That’s just an excuse.

[Willy gets on a swingset in the ruined interior. Starts swinging.]

Franz: What do you mean? Haven’t you noticed I’ve got only one arm? That’s the price I paid for working. And that’s why I don’t want to hear anything about honest work.

Syndicalist: I still don’t understand, buddy, why you don’t work. If you don’t have an honest job, you must have a dishonest one.

[Franz and Willy get on a seesaw]

Franz: There you are. He’s caught on at last. Come over here, Willy. That’s it: dishonest work. Your honest work is slavery. You said so yourself just now. That’s what honest work is, and I learned my lesson.

Syndicalist: Okay, so you don’t work. But you don’t seem to be on welfare either.

Franz: No, I’m not on welfare either.

Syndicalist: Then I’d just like to ask, though it’s none of my business, what you’re doing here.

Franz: I was waiting for that question. You were talking just now about damned wage slavery, and saying that we are all outcasts with no room to move.

Syndicalist: Yes, but you weren’t listening properly. I was talking about refusing to work. But to do that, you’ve got have a job first.

Franz: And that’s what I refuse to do.

Syndicalist: That doesn’t help us. You might just as well go to bed. I was talking about a strike, a mass strike, a general strike.

Franz: And that’s what you call direct action? It’s just talk. Talk and more talk, yet you go to work and make the capitalists stronger.

Syndicalist: You idiot.

Franz: Hey. You make shells for them, which they later use to shoot you dead. And you want to teach me something? Do you hear that, Willy? Boy, it bowls me over.

Syndicalist: I ask you again what work you do.

Franz: And I tell you again: nothing! Not a lick. You can all kiss my ass, because I shouldn’t do any work, according to your theory. I’m not boosting any capitalists. And I don’t give a damn about your bitching and strikes, and what you keep going on about, what’s supposed to happen someday. I don’t give a damn. You’ve got to stand on your own two feet. What I need, I do myself. I’m self-sufficient.

Syndicalist: Just try to go it alone. Alone, you can’t do anything. We need militant organizations.

Franz: What?

Syndicalist: We have to set up militant organizations. That’s what we have to establish: militant organizations.

Franz: Organizations. I’d like to know what’s going on in your head. I’d really like to know that. On the one hand, you preach and say you’re against every system, against any kind of order and all organizations. On the other hand, you want to set up militant organizations. Don’t you see there’s something wrong in your head? Can’t you see that?

Syndicalist: Words are wasted on you. You can’t think straight. You’ve got a mental block. You don’t understand what’s important for the proletariat: solidarity. That’s what’s important.

Mahmoud Darwish 1942-2008

2008-08-10T11:08:00.002-07:00

--Good-bye, sir.
--Where to?
--Madness.
--Which madness?
--Any madness, for I have turned into words.

Labour Capacity and The Strategy of Refusal, Part I

2008-08-10T10:43:00.006-07:00

[This post ended up being rather long, so I thought I'd break it up into two parts. Part II is here]

Rather than spend any more time arguing with Stan and his irrepressible sub-McCarthyite sophistries, I thought I’d actually look at some real questions of "socialist strategy."

With Nate H, one of my favorite bloggers, and some others, I have been re-reading Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of Refusal,” as well as other translated essays from Tronti’s Operai e Capitale and a few pieces by his Quaderni Rossi collaborator Raniero Panzieri. It is from these essays that the basic lines of Italian operaismo (“workerism”) emerge, and so, valuably, I can detect in them all that I find provocative and useful in the later work of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and other writers associated with Autonomia, but without the sometimes baroque post-structural stylings that can get in their way.

There are some excellent short pieces on Tronti collected over at Long Sunday. Essentially, in this and other essays from Operai e Capitale, Tronti argues that the communist and socialist parties in Italy, and Marxist thought in general, have lost touch with the actual subjective and experiential character of the Italian working-class. Tronti’s is a sociological project that aims to reground Marxism in the experiences and the standpoint of the working class. It inverts the relationship between party and class set out in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, suggesting that the overall goals and views of any “party” must be that which the working-class already experiences and knows. The working-class contains the strategic perspective, the totality of desire for, and the vision of, the end of capitalism. The role of the party is not as a “vanguard” as we traditionally think of it, and not as a curator of class-consciousness, but merely a tactical weapon. It contains the ability to act quickly and forcefully in local, tactical situations, but nothing else (cf. Class and Party). Tronti’s is a kind of immanentist non-Leninist Leninism.

I don’t know much about the history of Italy, but from what I’ve read of Steve Wright’s book on these writers, Storming Heaven, I do know that it’s important to situate this work in a period when, as a result of the Marshall Plan, a Keynesian state and adoption of Fordist-Taylorist production by manufacturers in the North, Italian capitalism had been largely transformed: the so-called “economic miracle.” Panzieri and Tronti, for instance, both make use of Marx’s notion of “social capital” from Capital Vol. III —not to be confused with Bourdieu’s conception—in which the individual capitalists aggregate into a class-for-itself, producing “capitalist communism,” or a mode-of-production characterized not by individual producers competing with each other but by a single, state-administered front which regulates and administers production in order to 1) ensure enough redistribution of profits that overproduction/underconsumption is avoided 2) neutralize revolutionary ferment on the part of the workers. “Social Capital” functions not only through the dialectic of the wage in the workplace but by direct command (capitalist planning) over the totality of society. Not only is it true that “Capitalist power seeks to use the worker’s antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its own development,” but also:

The surpassing of State capitalism by a capitalist state is not something that belongs to the future: it has already happened. We no longer have a bourgeois State over a capitalist society, but, rather, the State of capitalist society.

One can see in this an echo of Kojeve’s idea of the end-of-history involving a confluence of the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and American capitalism, merging into a single, administrative social form.

In the face of such eventualities, Tronti wants to reground Marxist theory by way of what Yann-Moulier Boutang called a “Copernican inversion,” putting workers first and capitalist development second. It’s important to note that, even though Tronti is writing to and from a particular conjunctural moment within Italian capitalism, the Copernican inversion is not, pace Negri’s reformulation of it as having to do with a new epoch in capital, something that suddenly becomes true in the 60s, but something that was always true. Here’s the pith of the essay:

Rather, stopping work—the strike, as the classic form of workers’ struggle—implies a refusal of the command of capital as the organizer of production: it is a way of saying “No” at a particular point in the process and a refusal of the concrete labor which is being offered; it is a momentary ‘blockage of the work-process and it appears as a recurring threat which derives its content from the process of value creation. The anarcho-syndicalist “general strike,” which was supposed to provoke the collapse of capitalist society, is a romantic naivete from the word go. It already contains within it a demand which it appears to oppose—that is, the Lassallian demand for a “fair share of the fruits of labour”—in other words, a fairer “participation” in the profit of capital. In fact, these two perspectives combine in that incorrect “correction” which was imposed on Marx, and which has subsequently enjoyed such success within the practice of the official working class movement—the idea that it is “working people who are the true “givers of labour,” and that it is the concern of working people to defend the dignity of this thing which they provide, against all those who would seek to debase it. Untrue. . . The truth of the matter is that the person who provides labour is the capitalist. The worker is the provider of capital. In reality, he is the possessor of that unique, particular commodity which is the condition of all the other conditions of production. [italics mine]

With this formulation, Tronti, very much like Moishe Postone in his Time, Labor and Social Domination, unhitches Marxist theory from the work-glorifying productivism of previous Marxisms, not to mention those Marxist humanists who would characterize labor as the ontological ground of all human society, while at the same time critiquing any merely distributionist opposition to capital, those who would, in the manner of the actually existing socialisms of the time, redistribute the fruits of the capitalist mode of production differently but retain the relations of production of capitalism. Like Marx, he identifies capital with these relations of production—capital is the direct imposition of these relations of production, and not merely a parasitic force that attaches to pre-existing relations and siphons off the surpluses from them.

Furthermore, because “capital” (that is, labour, the relations of production) is itself merely the ossified, dead residue of working-class labour-power (that is, capital), Tronti can then characterize capitalism as, essentially, the working class’s relationship to itself, in which the class of capital (givers of labor) serves only a mediating role. The fixed capital in the form of machines, inputs, and accumulated money, are there for the taking, and in many respects, the working-class (especially if one expands the definition to include some supervisors and technicians) will have more understanding of how to access, utilize and seize this material than the class of capital. All the working class needs to do then is take charge of its own capacity, and its own dead products, and refuse the commands/relations of “capital.”

Leaving aside the considerable question of state power, the problem here, of course, is that the fixed capital, the machinery, etc. can’t be disentangled from the relations of production; as Panzieri indicates, “the relations of production are within the productive forces.”(Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning”). The working-class’s inequality to itself seems almost constitutive, unless of course there is a positive element, a constructive proposal of different relations of production, that goes along with this refusal. But even then, unless capital is destroyed, those new relations will merely make capital stronger.

Quote of the Week

2008-07-15T19:42:00.004-07:00

David Graeber: "Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons"(pdf!)

Statewide AFSCME Strike Starts Monday

2008-07-12T07:43:00.002-07:00

Picket is at Bancroft & Telegraph MTW and in Dowtown Oakland, at the UC President's Office, on ThF. Please come out.

If you're a UC Graduate Student Instructor, you have the right to engage in a sympathy strike. Details after the AFSCME press release.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: William Schlitz 510-701-0810
Lakesha Harrison, President, 310-877-6878

University of California Service Workers To Begin STRIKE July 14

Gas and food prices exacerbating poverty for workers

California – 8,500 University of California workers will begin a strike at UC's ten campuses and five medical centers on Monday, July 14. The workers do everything from cleaning and disinfecting hospitals and dorm rooms, to providing cafeteria service to patients and students, to ensuring hospitals and campuses are secure. They have been negotiating in good faith with UC executives for almost a year, but have remained deadlocked over poverty wages for months. An overwhelming 97.5% voted to authorize a strike in May.

UC's poverty wages are as low as $10/hour. With skyrocketing gas and food prices, many are forced to take second jobs or go on public assistance just to meet their families' basic needs. Roughly 96% are eligible for at least one of the following taxpayer-funded program: food stamps, WIC, public housing subsidies, and subsidized child care. In a difficult budget year, UC executives are pushing the costs of paying poverty wages onto California taxpayers.

"UC executives don't pay service workers enough to survive, but expect taxpayers to pick up the tab in the form of public assistance. We expect that from Wal-Mart – not from the University of California, a public institution – that's double dipping." – Lakesha Harrison, UC Licensed Vocational Nurse and President of AFSMCE Local 3299

Higher gas prices and stagnant wages have created a crisis for thousands of UC families that are already living paycheck to paycheck. Typically, the lowest paid workers at UC can only afford to live in low income communities farther away from campus, forcing a longer commute and higher fuel costs that use a disproportionate portion of their budget. Increasing wages would not only help lift workers out of poverty, but could positively impact CA and the low- and moderate-income areas where UC workers live as they contribute more to their local economy.

"It is always a struggle on UC salary. But now that gas prices are so high, I don't know how my family will survive. From week to week, it's a choice between gas, paying the electric bill, or putting food on the table. I don't want to go on public assistance, but I may have no choice."– Jaron Quetel at UCLA campus

UC wages have fallen dramatically behind other hospitals and California's community colleges where workers are paid family-sustaining wages that are on average of 25% higher. Additionally, University executives insist on increasing benefits costs that would drive families deeper into poverty. When workers have stood up for better lives for their families and better working conditions, the University has retaliated by violating labor laws.

During the strike, hundreds of medical workers may honor picket lines as a matter of individual conscience and refuse to work, "If UC executives insist on paying poverty wages, I cannot in good conscience cross the service workers' picket line. This is a public institution, and UC executives have an obligation to serve the public, not keep people in poverty. – Judy McKeever, Respiratory Therapist, UCSF

According to California State-appointed neutral Factfinder Carol Vendrillo, who independently evaluated the viability of a service workers' labor agreement, "U.C. has demonstrated the ability to increase compensation when it fits with certain priorities without any demonstrable link to a state funding source…It is time for UC to take a broader view of its priorities by honoring the important contribution that service workers make to the U.C. community and compensating them with wages that are in line with the competitive market rate." UC continues to reward its Executives with hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation and lavish benefit packages.

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299, AFL-CIO represents 20,000
patient care and service workers at UC including licensed vocational nurses, medical techs and assistants, respiratory therapists, custodians, cafeteria workers, and security officers.
2201 Broadway Ave, Suite 315 Oakland, CA 94612, (510) 844-1160, media@afscme3299.org
###
_____________________________________________________________
Service workers at the University of California have announced a strike beginning next Monday, July 14, 2008 and ending Friday, July 18. Service workers, represented by AFSCME 3299, have been in negotiations with UC administrators for almost a year now and have been working without an agreement since February 1, 2008.

AFSCME leaders inform us that negotiations with UC have been deadlocked since May, with a major sticking point being below-market wages and benefits: "UC's poverty wages are as low as $10/hour. With skyrocketing gas and food prices, many are forced to take second jobs or go on public assistance just to meet their families' basic needs. Roughly 96% are eligible for at least one of the following taxpayer-funded program: food stamps, WIC, public housing subsidies, and subsidized child care."

UAW Local 2865 stands in solidarity with AFSCME and, even during this time when many of us are not working, encourages all of its members to show their support for AFSCME. There are a number of things you can do, including going to the picket line, participating in AFSCME rallies, and sending letters in support of AFSCME workers to UC administrators (unionvoice.org/campaign/service_strikes).
There has been a lot of information circulating regarding the strike. While some of the information in circulation is good, other information risks jeopardizing the protected status of those who are working and choose to honor the picket line. To be safe, ASEs should rely only on official advice from the UAW.
YOUR CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS: Article 19, Section D.2 of the UAW/UC contract states: "Under this section, individual ASEs retain rights of free expression including their right to engage in activities in sympathy with other UC unions or bargaining units who are striking at the work location of the ASE. When ASEs exercise these rights and do not meet the expectation that they comply with the terms of his/her appointment, at the discretion of the University they may not be paid for work they do not perform." If you do elect to exercise your rights under the contract, please note the following:
PAY DOCKING AND SELF-REPORTING requests from your campus or department should be fulfilled. Just as you have the right support AFSCME's strike, the University has the right not to pay you for work you don't perform during a strike.
AVOID LEGALLY UNPROTECTED "PARTIAL STRIKING": If you choose to exercise your right to support the AFSCME strike, do not perform some of your job duties and not others during the AFSCME strike. You will be risking your legal protections.
RETURNING TO WORK: If you make the personal decision to support the strike by not working then, return to work on the first day that you would normally work after July 18, 2008. UC cannot require you to complete any work you didn't do during the strike without paying you for it. If you are employed this term and are asked to make up any work that was not done during the strike, call the Union for advice.
For the latest information, go to UAW Local 2865's website (www.uaw2865.org) or AFSCME's website (www.afscme3299.org). If you have questions or concerns, please contact your campus Union office using the information at the bottom of this e-mail.

In solidarity,

UAW Local 2865 Executive Board
Christine Petit, President
Daraka Larimore-Hall, Northern Vice President Coral Wheeler, Southern Vice President Sara Kirker, Financial Secretary Cassandra Engeman, Recording Secretary Meaghan Chadwick, Trustee Marco Chiodaroli, Trustee Laura Henry, Trustee Hugh Dauffenbach, Sergeant at Arms

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
UAW 2865 Berkeley
2855 Telegraph Ave, Suite 305
Berkeley, CA 94705
phone: (510) 549-3863 / fax: (510) 549-2514
berkeley@uaw2865.org / www.uaw2865.org

-________________________________________________________________

And here's a short video about what it's like to live on the poverty wages that UC pays its service workers:

2008-07-11T07:40:00.002-07:00

Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

2008-07-07T21:32:00.004-07:00

Sad news. Bruce Conner, the great filmmaker, photographer, draughtsperson, assemblagiste, and founder of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, has passed away.

There's an exhibition of his excellent photographs of punk shows from the late 70s up at the BAM right now.

You can watch A Movie (1958) here.

Debriefing

2008-06-17T09:32:00.007-07:00

Orono was so much fun even if I felt ornery occasionally because in the 1970s the coffee is extraordinarily weak and the panels started at 9:00 a.m. and the readings ended at 1:30 or 2:30 a.m., history doesn't work like that, and I don't drink alcohol and it was difficult to fill my body with enough sleep and food and caffeine to reproduce my labor power every day and I didn't know who I was working for maybe Barrett Watten who in his plenary speech talked himself right into a corner, O good antinomy, O parallax, claiming both that language poetry had technical, direct effects, constructivism, its formal antagonisms de facto politics, rubbing blood on the fragments and chanting the magical words which, as we learned from Lytle Shaw's talk on Amiri Baraka were "up against the wall, motherfucker" but then also claiming that langpo reproduced intentionally, through allegory, with its liberalization of the signifier, the liberalization of capitals in the 1970s, which story got told many times, David Harvey was a favorite, and therefore the guilty passive subject of Adornian melancholy climbing in through the window to print THIS on the same machine that printed TELOS, voila, a kind of rationalist Blake, guilt by association, a kind of reverse red-baiting, I had a terrible headache, but what an amazing poem he could write climbing into the computer's window to turn the X into a T, into time, which he kept trying to abolish in 2008, byte by byte, like Case in Neuromancer, the dates are close, Watten comes first, thank god for Progress, which disrupts such genealogical manias and eternizing heroics, I think, but comes many centuries after Anne Boyer, history doesn't work like that, have you read her book, it is like a new NATURE without nature, it has stories and workers and liberation and sex and no telos only a tendency for the rate of affect to rise contra exploitation, and who I could only talk to for like five minutes last time we met and who is even more charming in person than on the internet and so we skipped some things and sat outside with Sandra Simonds and David Lau talking about feckless unions and the casualization of academic labor and parents and also gossip which is what gets left out of the internet, where was Tim Kreiner, where was Sophia, and so wells up as violent emotion coursing through the channels eventually Joshua showed up and Chris Nealon and then, in the bathroom, Rod Smith said nice talk and I didn't know who he was but then he introduced himself and it seemed like the right place to meet Rod Smith, a bathroom, he has an excellent deadpan sitting in the back of the auditorium while Tom Raworth blitzed for twenty five minutes without pause line after line measured to the micron and Clark Coolidge bobbed in front of the mike all twisty phrases, spelunking horns, topologies, vanishings and floaters I met Bernadette Mayer who showed up to read at the Colby College museum in the midst of Alex Katz's profoundly boring paintings, against which her exuberance shone, the sound was muddy, I had to stand up to see her reading sitting down, and there was so much critical attention devoted to Bernadette and now I realize I have to try and get those books back in print and get a copy of the digital installation of Memory, the photographs were surprisingly good, a chill ran through me both times when the pictures of the second WTC tower going up flashed on the screen, urban renewal, the building raised up and moved, the empty lots, the whalebone steel exoskeleton, twins of twins of twins, I want to do a real installation of Memory, just like it was the first time, maybe a fortieth year anniversary edition maybe the BAM will let me do it or even SFMoMA, Stan Apps and I exchanged books, a kind of peace offering, he seems like a nice guy with whom I could disagree or maybe even agree sometimes in peace, Kasey and Rodney were our roommates, a real mensch, Rodney, a real mensch, Kasey, so likeable in person and together and Kasey's book which I brought half-read and read no more of on the trip because I was being stuffed by living poetry, Kasey's book is so amazing, it doesn't work to talk about in the ways that flarf stuff gets talked about usually, there's a self-organizing autopoetic subject in there, in the materials, like Rod Smith's spiders, I want to say it's like Hardt and Negri's multitude and maybe I will some day, Anne Boyer doesn't like Ashbery, what do you say to that except uh-huh and I think maybe we'll play Debord's kriegspiel online and I will be Ashbery crossed with Brecht and she will be Machiavelli crossed with Rosa Luxemburg and who will win, where was Tim Kreiner, he was in his room finishing his paper, which was awesome when he spoke it and provoked an actual real honest-to-god discussion about language poetry, which somebody claimed doesn't exist, like Lacan, his dissertation's gonna rock, friends are great, it's easy to forget that sometimes when you live with books, which are not your friends, really, maybe I'm a humanist, what else, we got a ride back with Patrick Pritchett, Linda Russo, Tim and Chris Nealon and I, we were on the same plane to Dulles, all three of us, to dullness, leaving all out including all, I barely got to talk to Franklin Bruno which reminds me to buy his chapbook, but then on 95 at the rest stop we ran into Dodie and Kevin, it was like San Francisco had gotten collaged into Maine for a second, there were millions of poets on the interstate, trying to live the whole decade in a few days, it's called real subsumption, it's called neoliberalism, Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush, fuck that, we stopped at a restaurant called Silly's where the food was good and we had our first real cup of coffee, it was father's day, I had to bring Noah something back but I had barely even been into town so I went to the Asian market and bought him a bag of cream candies from China, and in the airport a pair of lobster socks which I couldn't give him, the candies not the socks, because I was being absent-minded and forgetting about his cavities and Tim said it was like a poem by Joshua or Frank O'Hara or a poem by Joshua about Frank O'Hara and globalization, not the cavities, what great conversations, so many things to read and think about, Jennifer Moxley told me I looked like her brother, Marjorie Perloff said the NPF conference had turned corporate which is like Warren Buffett complaining about market deregulation, it was the 21st century again, history doesn't work like that

Bernadette Mayer and the Capitalization of Everyday Life

2008-06-17T09:24:00.002-07:00

Talk for National Poetry Foundation Conference “Poetry of the 1970s,” June 11-15, Orono, ME

John Ashbery’s famous aesthetic opposition in the first lines of Three Poems, balancing a desire to “put it all down” against another desire to “leave all out,” gets taken up, not incidentally, in the penultimate sentence of Bernadette Mayer’s loosely contemporaneous Memory: “what’s there,” she writes, “as a piece, to mesmerize, to suck you in to leave all out to include all” (Mayer, 195). [1] There is no punctuation in Mayer’s version, just the run-together infinitives, waiting to be conjugated. If Ashbery’s formulation is a dilemma, an either/or, then Mayer’s is an inclusive synthesis, a both/and. Arguably, such a synthesis is what Ashbery, that virtuoso of vacillation, eventually manages in Three Poems. By tracking back and forth between the two alternatives, the solution Ashbery devises is a rather Stevensian one: he decides by refusing to decide. Ultimately, we might think the same of the synthesis that Mayer improvises. Along the way, though, she adumbrates a way to leave all out and, at the same time, include all. Timing is everything here. If you do it at different moments, it isn’t quite the same.

“To put it all down” or “to leave all out.” Ashbery’s dilemma involves in many respects a distinction between modernism (totalizing, world-building, encylopediac), and the avant-garde (relentlessly negative, anti-traditional, ironizing). As the inheritor of both Stein and Stevens, Roussel and Williams, Ashbery felt this a choice not worth making. The upshot has been that Ashbery is one of few figures able to speak, seemingly, across the fissures in the landscape of American poetry. But there is also another divide to which this phrase attends, a temporal divide. It is significant that these two highly significant writers pose this question at this time because the early 1970s are a time when economic, social and cultural fortunes were very much up for grabs. As the Vietnam War drew to a close, the 1973 oil embargo, the collapse of the Bretton Woods currency exchange markets and the resulting recession and high inflation in the US meant a precipitous shift away from monopoly capitalism, Fordism and the Keynesian welfare state, and toward the new, highly variable economic structures which David Harvey calls “flexible accumulation,” the result of which has been forty years of deindustrialization, wage stagnation for the working class, and a financial sector that operates with increasing autonomy from real economy of production. Whatever the precise relationship of determination, these powerful transformations in the way that people work and live occur, in the last instance, alongside momentous changes in the arts, in popular culture, and in the very way that the world is understood and represented. The 1970s are, arguably, the moment in which modernism becomes residual and the formerly incipient forms of postmodernism come to dominate. To put it bluntly, postmodernism in the largest sense (and not merely the slick, cynical products of the 1980s) attempted to mediate between the avant-garde and modernism in a historical moment in which neither really seemed like a viable possibility. Essentially, the crisis in representation that the changing social ground of the 1970s engendered meant that neither modernist totalization nor avant-garde futurism seemed sufficient. Something else was needed: “To leave all out to include all.”

The Apparatus

By memory, I mean less the retentive, the fact-storage faculty than the associative faculty. From the arts we are learning to make connections, jumps, through cues and clues that come to us in fragments.

—Lucy Lippard, from the Index for Information (MoMA, 1970)

Reflecting on Memory in the first pages of its sequel, Studying Hunger, Mayer counters A.D. Coleman’s description of it in The Village Voice as “an enormous accumulation of data” by writing that she considered it, rather, “an emotional science project.” In fact, her goal in Studying Hunger, and implicitly in Memory, was “to do the opposite of accumulate data, oppose MEMORIES, DIARIES, find structures.” One of the chief conflicts in Memory, then, is that between mechanical remembrance (data, information) and human remembrance (emotional science). Memory attempts to humanize the technological apparatus of film and audio tape, to modify or even undo the social relations that these technologies support. Because Memory was first a work of conceptual art and an installation, and only later a book, the text we have is, really, a memory of Memory, the documentation of a project of documentation that is—and here is where we truly lose ourselves in the hall of mirrors—itself documenting documentation. The details are as follows: for the entire month of July, Mayer documented her experiences with photographs and audio recordings. She then made a seven-hour taped narration, “which took the pictures as points of focus, one by one & as taking-off points for digression, filling in the spaces between” (Studying Hunger, 4). Both the 1200 photographs and taped narration were part of an installation at 98 Greene St. But because the print version references events that occur after August, 1971 (e.g. the Attica prison riot of September, 1971), she must have been revising the work through the fall of 1971.

Memory is thus memory thrice removed, memory made to spool through various types of technology and language—it is “experience . . . increased by addition of observations which were future, down the road & reflections to infinity.” The writing in this sense is a form of “double exposure,” a term that occurs frequently in the book. While the addition of the technological apparatus allows for an enlarged experience, a redoubling of experience, such mechanically recorded experience must be made to come alive once again, lest it become not memory but forgetting: “we seek,” as she writes, “once more to order in the same manner our increased volume of experience.” The apparatus threatens to consume the poetic work, the open present of writerly performance, and to suck the writer and her associates into the quicksand of entropic data from which she can’t escape. There is thus a double articulation of memory—rememberer and remembered—with the result that Mayer stands both inside and outside the work, both inside and outside of memory. For instance, on the first page, Ed Bowes, her boyfriend and assistant, “leans against the machine” (presumably, the Nagra recording device) but he is also inside the machine: “He leans against the machine, reels, & while it’s on I’ve turned we are now in an image sound . . .” Given these problems, her strategy in Memory is to use the technology without being captured by it, to give order to experience without fixing that experience. As she says later in Studying Hunger: “It’s not the whole story, I’ve left out the motives, the history & the memory, the parts that have direction, I’ve left them out because in that way I could be pinned down, possibly tortured.” In Memory, though, what is left out seems to inhere within the data itself—as a possible relation within it. It is left out because of the inclusion of everything. Like Poe’s purloined letter, it is hiding in plain view. And this totality threatens, I think, the bad eventuality of the machine itself including everything and leaving out Mayer.

Psychoanalysis

Memory includes a foreword from Mayer’s psychoanalyst, David Rubinfine, whom she later describes as “perhaps the only person in the world who ever did know how much I want to eat every thing & one up” (Mayer-Berkson, 162). Rubinfine identifies the writing of Memory with the primary process of the unconscious; in his words, “she has somehow found the means to recreate archaic modes of representation, of inner and outer sensory data” and to bring this into language without the censorious effect of “present day ego structure, defenses, interests, needs and moral values” (5). Like the unconscious, then, Memory frequently observes neither negation nor chronology.

In the Interpretation of Dreams, which Mayer cites as one of the “novels” that have changed her life, Sigmund Freud uses the photographic apparatus as a metaphor for the psyche and as a way to think the complex interrelation of memory, perception and the unconscious. In the final section of the book, Freud, attempting to synthesize his dream researches, describes the unconscious as follows: “we shall . . . accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the psychic activities much as we think of a compound miscroscope, a photographic camera, or other apparatus” (Freud, 456). As if through the aperture of a complex camera, perceptions enter consciousness and leave a permanent memory-trace in a “location” within the psyche. These traces accumulate such that new perceptions, passing through this location on their way to the conscious mind, set off processes of association. These associations are purely qualitative, sensory, pre-verbal and do not demonstrate the logical relations—subordination, negation—of the conscious mind. All new perceptions must traverse the unconscious but there is also a vector that operates in the opposite direction, where consciousness exerts pressure on the associations (and, as we’ll see later, the drives) in the unconscious. This creates what Freud calls the secondary process, which does include verbal and logical relations.

Mayer’s installation thus seems to me an ingenious attempt to literalize and model Freud’s psychic system. The 1200 photographs represent the preverbal sensory contents of the memory-system, atop which, or among the traces of which, the tapes (as verbal representations of the preverbal) model the associations and interrelationships of primary process. Finally, the transformation of these tapes into the codex form effects the transition from primary to secondary process. Undoubtedly, the tapes, by virtue of their being language, must exhibit some of the censoring, criticizing backpressure Freud associates with secondary process. “We’ll think of talking backwards,” she writes, “I’m talking backwards, I’m working more the way students in a science are working in a lab.” Indeed, the final words of the work, “can I say that,” both statement and question, seem to foreground the presence of a criticizing superegoic voice, the stakes of which criticizing are often, in fact, the distinction between totality and negation with which we started:

what would you do? create laws? discuss the purpose of them? disorder the order that has already been established? Order the increased volume of experience? or reject it altogether leaving nothing to be ordered & everything lax in a mess in chaos in a muddle out of place cluttered in a maze. . .

In this, we see the double bind that faces Mayer. Leaving the totality of memory-traces as they are means, especially if this work is to occur at the behest of the superegoic injunction, annihilating them, “leaving nothing to be ordered.” But, of course, laws and orders are also a form of destruction.

Access to the unconscious comes, then, as the result of a transgression, a negation rather than a leaving be. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the unconscious is characterized as a bank (a financial bank, but also a memory-bank) which she fantasizes robbing:

written fast, an emergence at the bank: something was accepted there & now I cant remember if I had the car with me at all, K must have had the Cadillac & they say no pictures here, I might have been planning to rob that bank that beautiful old bank at bowery & grand street I'll tell you one thing I photographed the windows with just a little thought to the builtin alarm system, like the antennas built in to the window of your car, if you happen to own a buick electra, mourns: death, for which reason I deny autobiography, or that the life of a man matters more or less & someone said we are all one man & someone said I count the failure of these men, whether they are jews or chinese or whether they are me or my sister, R., I count the failure of these people as proof of their election, they are all divine because they die, screaming, like the first universal jew the gentiles will tell you had some special deal: the end, not by a long shot: one chinese boy holds out his hand to one chinese girl about seven or eight years old in a short dress in the bank.

The logic of association is, I think, rather clear. Her photographic and writerly project is an attempt to rob the memory-bank, to gain access to its fund of unmediated sensation and association. But the thought of such transgression immediately produces another thought about alarm systems, and even more transparently a “buick electra,” and then, subsequently, the thought of death. Her father’s passing while she was a teenager figures prominently in the book, and so we can assume, perhaps, that the connotations of “electra” is meaningful. The autobiography, and with it the self-identical speaker, also means death. Consciousness, too, means leaving some memories behind.

There is thus a constitutive tension in the Memory, one present throughout her writing of the 70s. She wants a writing, a technique of documentation, adequate to the whole of experience, leaving nothing out and including all, agile enough to catch every nuance of experience. But because her writing is not a neutral prosthesis, not a passive reflection of experience but an intervention within that experience, there is always some remainder: the time spent writing down experience comes at the expense of experience itself. (Not incidentally, this is a key feature of the pathos of representation in Ashbery as well). These two problems—the problem of the censor and the problem of time—crystallize in the figure of Ed, Mayer’s lover and assistant. Mayer delights in punning on his name, so that he represents, as suffix, a kind of pure participle, a participle without substance, the very pastness of the past: “I feel sick & am not interested I'm arrested, ed, we waterproofed till dawn & K came bravely through the trail to see us doing it with tom still with us with him with us what does that mean he loves us too much.” At the same time, he stands in for the editorial interventions which transform that past: “& the head headed with leader edit a magazine I'll tell show see it & say it, Ed.”

Over-Memory

On the first page of the coda to Memory, a section entitled Dreaming which recounts some of her dreams from the month of August, Mayer writes that “memory stifles dream it shuts dream up,” drawing a distinction that should already be familiar and to which she adds: “What’s in sight, it was there, it’s over, dream makes memory present, hidden memory the secret dream, it’s not allowed . . .” This echoes, in general, a depressive and anxious tone that has progressively risen in the book since the halfway mark. By the time of the July 30^thentry, there is the sense that the work is a form of prostitution—“a trick”—that the writing renders the speaker a commodity, and that the dissipation of the poetic materials is near-total. In other words, things fall apart. Such a mood is well-conveyed by Mayer’s punning use of the word over in the long entry for July 31^st:

& she spread the frosting over the cake & he cast a spell over our group & he will preside over the lake & the city’s over the border. . .& you make your property over to her & the game is over & how I got over & he is three hours over for the week & that shot hit over & that bomb explodes over & we were over against them from end to end. . .

In the two passage from the July 31st in which over plays a strong role, Mayer employs every possible meaning of the word (as preposition, as adverb), creating networks of clauses held together by the relationality of prepositions and the agglomeration of conjunctions: more than, above, beyond, in excess of, during the course of, and finally, the adverbial sense, as said of an action, finished. The main opposition in these passages devolves upon the difference between excess, a sense of more, and delimitation or termination.

If there is a sense, by the end of the book, that the project has failed, its meaning is this: that the experiment has bifurcated into, on the one hand, a series of techniques (which stand over, which delimit) and, on the other hand, a neutral, intractable material (excessive, surpassing):

Apology in rest: research isn’t festive, looking for names, burning down piers & papers & scoring the time I’m translated to shore on the back of a whale. . .a knife for the course that ends like this not like that & they’ll all come to orbit, arbit, exhibit in the courts by force, we’ll make exchange & to count, continue to embrace, forgetting parts important to ‘in concurrence.’

Failure is not the only way to read the ending, and it isn’t even right way, but it is an important part of the work’s self-consciousness, and a measure of the risks it skirts.

For many reasons, and not least because Dan Graham appears, in the Dreaming section, as an amalgam of musical conductor and torturer, experimenting on Mayer and her friend Grace, I want to suggest—and this is, alas, a rather abbreviated form of a larger argument—that this final movement of Memory is a reflection on the troubled fortunes of conceptualism in art and writing: that is, a reflection on the aesthetic movement to which the magazine O To 9, edited by Mayer and her brother-in-law Vito Acconci, was central. Even if, because of its writerly emphasis on sensuous language, Memory must be seen as anomalous within the typically arid and deadpan language-use common to conceptual art, as with much of the work that falls under this rubric, Memory does ask us to consider its own techniques and processes, its ideas, as more important, in some senses, than the products thereof. It participates in the reduction of the aesthetic object to a transportable idea or technique—loosely, the idea that a combination of writing and image could offer an expanded life—which can then be easily shared, taken up by others. Conceptualism and, more broadly, much of the art that follows after minimalism, proceeds by leaving all out, by reducing art to a typescript, map or operation, hoping thereby to escape the commodification of art objects—that is, the exchange value which inheres in sensuous artifacts—and make art a pure appropriation of uses by individual participants, a pure use-value that can’t be traded on the market because its predicates are so abundant as to be, essentially, free. The result, though, is the bifurcation discussed above; art in this time becomes on the one hand, a series of dematerialized techniques or concepts, and on the other, deformed, entropic ‘piles’ of materials, whether social, linguistic or physical. Conceptualism requires a leaving all out that has, as its other, an included/excluded everything. And because so often the material is unable to exert any kind of counter-pressure on the techniques themselves, conceptual art, in its formalization, diagrammatization and reduction of art experience to a series of protocols often ends up mimicking, as both Jeff Wall and Benjamin Buchloh indicate in their critical histories of the movement, the bureaucratic and technocratic culture of art publicity and art administration which it would, ostensibly, transcend. Lastly, as it turns out, and as Lucy Lippard indicates in her Postface to her annotated bibliography of the flood years of conceptualism, exchange-value is a far more tenacious social form than many of these artists could have expected. Because, as the growing turn to financialization in the US economy makes clear, surplus-value need not always route through the dialectic of capital and labor but can be had by enclosure, seizure or direct appropriation of socially abundant materials, collectors, as it turned out, would, as Lippard writes, “pay money. . . for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed.” Conceptual art, in attempting to escape the commodity form and the gallery system ends up participating in that commodification and rationalization of previously free processes, services and cognitive functions which is, as I see it, the hallmark of capitalism over the last thirty years. Conceptualism carried the germ of exchange value into the social field at large. There is a clear line of development from conceptual art and writing to what the writers associated with the French journal Multitudes call “cognitive capitalism.”

The final pages of Memory dramatize this bifurcation into signal and noise, those two senses of “over.” On the one hand, the acknowledgment that “research isn’t festive, looking for names” and on the other the exclamation “far fucking out what a gas explosion that was, the crowd’s still steaming all energy is loose. . .” But as with the system that Freud elaborates, there is a third element in Mayer’s poem, and it is what separates Mayer’s work from much of the conceptualism of the period. We might call it drive—that latent and primordial force, dwelling amidst the primary process, which is neither the product of conscious thought or new perceptions but instead continuously re-activated by them. In Memory, such a drive is marked not only by the obsessional motif of fire but, at the broadest level, by the relentless, headlong impulsion of the poem, its continual tracing of the surfaces of embodiment and sensual experience. It is this which, in Mayer, opposes the mere “accumulation” of data, and it is this which distinguishes her work in the 1970s from the gray aridity of some of the work in, say, 0 to 9. It is this, also, to which she will more fully attend in the other long works of the 70s. As embodiment, drive allows her to include all and leave everything out—not as two opposed alternatives, but as the same thing. Rather than a pregiven formula, it is a force which, from below, from within materials themselves, arranges and synthesizes.

[1] Mayer’s book, based upon an conceptual project executed during the month of July, 1971, and exhibited as an installation in 1972, wasn’t published until 1975. Three Poems was published in 1972, but “The New Spirit,” the poem from which quote derives, was released as a chapbook in 1970 by Adventures in Poetry. I am assuming, therefore, that Mayer knew the work, and that her variant is a citation and not an accident

The Text in Question

2008-06-04T20:08:00.003-07:00

I'm still not convinced, from the comments on the post below, that I have at all distorted the statement Stan Apps and Matthew Timmons wrote for Fold. Indeed, everything Stan says here, in response, only convinces me of the rightness of my reading. Perhaps I might have better avoided talking about their intentions and merely discussed the ideological positions that are suspended, as it were, within the text. As for my concluding that the piece was about the internet, its invocation of a vast, perduring cultural archive that need be merely replicated or re-distributed for the purposes of art (not to mention its ennui with the book) makes my deduction a rather elementary one, I think.

If I had it to write over again, I would probably put in something about how, problematic though it is, there is something to be said for their imagination of a world without scarcity. Indeed, in the essay for Action, Yes where I first set out some of these ideas, I wrote the following:

5.1 The point, then, is that to the extent that the internet fails to thrust me back onto my own lap, to the extent that it fails to render crystal clear the ugliness and smallness of the life I lead in all its terrible complicities, and to the extent that it fails to fail to escape these conditions, it is a vicious augmentation of the spectacular aerosolization of all that’s solid, a burp in the calculator. We must build a here there, and a there here. To the extent that it fails to remind us of this need, and that it pretends to satisfy it, it is a gorgeous, bourgeois lie. It may be the best bourgeois lie ever, but it is a lie nonetheless.

* * *

5.2.1. Secondly, though, the positive aspect of the internets—of hyperlinked blog conversations, of the endless lateral arrays of information—must also be stressed through a sufficiently dialectical account. Like all utopias, the internet provides us with a ideological model, a vision—crude, blind in places, yes—of a classless society, a system of voluntaristic affiliations, confederations and recalibrations, a labile performance of self as internalized otherness, citation. Nor can we discount the possibilities it has allowed for the author as producer, self-distributing her self-designed books by word-of-keyboard. We can applaud this. Applause, too, to the presence here of intellectuals and artists outside of traditional academic and cultural institutions, who can discuss the philosophy of Condillac, labor strikes in Egypt, and the latest volume of The Grand Piano. And since we like things that are free almost as much as we hate capitalism, we cannot but cheer at the presence of www.ubu.com or www.marxists.org. It is undoubtedly a fine thing that the training or development of writers can now take place, nearly completely, outside of formal institutional space. What we must take measure of, however, is the extent to which such institutions persist in dematerialized forms.

5.2.2 But the extent to which I experience these enthusiasms must be the extent to which I need them as fantasy. The ungraspable, bodiless utopia of the internet, inside the pores of which circulates the same sad non-communication as before, allows for a view of the virtual whose actualization it, in fact, thwarts. We need an internet of the streets. An internet with bodies.

This still seems, essentially, correct. I like Jameson's account of utopia--that its value is that it throws us back upon the present, and shows us the difficulty (though not impossibility) of imagining a future which doesn't, ineluctably, reproduce that present, while at the same time driving home ever more clearly the unbearability of such a present. I don't think I necessarily get a pass here. I don't have all of the answers, and many of the answers I do have are likely to be wrong.

Still, Stan's post clarifies, as have all his remarks, the substantial difference between our positions. It's certainly right that scarcity in late capitalism is largely manufactured. The problem, though, with the utopian imagination he sets out there is that it conflates productive capacity with the products themselves. He's right that there is sufficient productive capacity to meet the entire planet's needs, let everyone work twenty hours and devote the rest of our hours to time travel. But this does not imply, however much this is a truism on the left, that one can simply redistribute the existing products and meet everybody's needs. There may be adequate productive capacity, but there are not adequate products. A post-capitalist and truly post-scarcity world would need to radically recast production. In many cases, there is enough of a certain product (say, wheat) for everyone's needs, but in other cases there isn't anywhere close to enough of what people need, because capitalism only produces things that are profitable. Since Stan likes to use agriculture as an example, let's take the current food crisis. Although it's true that a good part of the crisis has to do with commodities speculators driving up prices, as well as the agribusiness scam known as biofuel, it also has to do with a restructuring over the last 30 years of the kinds of things people grow (and eat) that is completely inconsistent with existing needs (except for those of Monsanto and Cargill). For instance, in the Philippines, as it tells you in this article, there is simply not enough rice. And there isn't enough rice anywhere else. This is because the IMF and the WTO forced the Phillipines to liberalize their economy, transforming them into importers of rice and exporters of cash crops like flowers and asparagus. Similarly, capitalism currently devotes an incredible amount of labor capacity to prospecting for, and developing industries dependent upon, fossil fuels, and ridiculously small amounts to developing alternative energy sources. The people of the earth, especially those who live near sea level, have a need for clean energy, but clean energy doesn't, currently, exist. These problems don't have to do with distribution, but with the kinds of things that are produced. You can't just re-distribute resources that don't exist. As I said in the comments below, the problems with capitalism have to do with contradictions between production for profit and the needs that people actually have; and this means there will be an ample supply of Viagra but a less than ample supply of drugs for easily treated tropical diseases; lots of McMansions, but not enough affordable housing, etc. You can call this lecturing, but somehow I don't feel that this point is well-understood.

Secondly, most products are perishable, or will quickly wear-out. So any plan to merely distribute existing products will require that people continue to work the same shitty, body-destroying and soul-crushing jobs that they work now. Merely focusing on distribution means, in effect, saying that everybody should continue doing what they are doing now, a proposition that a majority of the world will likely (and should) find intolerable. This focus on distribution strikes me as the kind of position that somebody like me, somebody whose job it is to reproduce the relations of production, is much more likely to take when considering the weaknesses of capitalism. But I dare say the maquiladora worker, aside from wanting access to affordable food, health care and housing, also wants a better job.

Trust me, no one will be happier than me when robots do all of the work and the only problems are those of distribution, but that's not what we're looking at now. For now, any kind of alternative to capitalism will have to reform the relations of productions, and overcome the division of labor, so that some of us don't have to do shitty work for twelve hours a day until they die while others of us argue about it on the internet. This is not a problem of distribution. And it brings us back to the question of the revolutionary seizure of the means of production. I don't find Stan's bromides about the impossibility of overcoming the "spine" of capitalism or his worries about the violence that accompanies such radical measures all that compelling, needless to say. Some large measure of responsibility for such violence surely has to be placed on the shoulders of the counter-revolution. I, for one, would first go blaming Reagan and his death squads for the tragedy of Central America in the 80s rather than Marxist ideology, personally. Not incidentally, in my view, the problem with past Marxisms--in, say, the Soviet Union for instance--is that they weren't radical enough. For the most part, while production in the Soviet Union wasn't production for profit, and the masses had more access to the surpluses produced, the relations of production remained, by and large, what they were elsewhere. The same division of labor obtained.

It's almost needless to say, but whether you think I'm right or Stan's right (if either of us are) will mean, if you care, that the current historical moment demands a very particular kind of response. And that matters. At least it matters to me.

Petition

2008-06-02T10:18:00.003-07:00

Here is a petition to restore funding to the UC Berkeley English Department. You should sign it and help save my friends' jobs and keep it so that undergraduates can get the education they pay for and graduate on time.

For people in the UC Berkeley community:

http://petition.berkeley.edu/english/petition.pl?action=petition

For everyone else:

http://www.petitiononline.com/berkengl/

________________________________

We, the undersigned, protest cuts to the UC Berkeley English Department that will leave hundreds of undergraduates without the classes they need to graduate.

Despite the state’s longstanding commitment to the “access, affordability, and quality”¹ of public higher education, and its recent renewed promise to “provide students... access to the classes they need to graduate,”² the May Revision of the state budget proposes to make up for a budget shortfall by cutting the UCs, CSUs, and Community Colleges. UC Berkeley has shifted the cost and burden of these state cuts directly and disproportionately onto students, so that even while tuition goes up by 7%, UC Berkeley is cutting classes, such as Reading & Composition (R&C), which are required for nearly all undergraduates.

Last year, nearly 500 students were turned away from already over-full R&C classes across the university; next year, dozens more will be eliminated. In 2008-09, the English Department alone will have to discontinue 17 R&C classes—meaning more than 300 students will be turned away. At the same time that they are paying an increase in tuition, many undergraduates will have to either pay to take R&C at Community Colleges, or, enroll for a 5th year to graduate.

These cuts also threaten to dismantle graduate programs by cutting off funding for PhD students who teach to pay their tuition. With these cuts, 17 out of 140 students in the English Department alone—more than 1/10th—will lose their means of support. The English Department (#1 in the country³) has taken decades to build its reputation; these cuts will decimate the department, reduce its ranking, and undermine Berkeley’s overall ranking. And English is just one example; the cuts will also affect other departments, such as East Asian Languages & Cultures, which will have to cut 19 teachers, and eliminate places for as many as 1700 students. These cuts threaten to undermine the quality of both teaching and research at UC Berkeley, and diminish the value of a Berkeley degree.

Therefore, we, the undersigned faculty, staff, students, alumni, family, and friends of UC Berkeley, ask Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer, Executive Dean Mark Richard, and Dean Janet Broughton to honor UC Berkeley's commitment to the students it admits, and restore funding to the TAS (“Temporary Academic Staff”) budgets at UC Berkeley.

Also, we, the undersigned faculty, staff, students, alumni, family, and friends of UC Berkeley, ask Governor Schwarzenegger to rescind his cuts to state-funded higher education. We also ask the Assembly Members on the Education Committee of the California State Assembly—Assembly Members Anthony J. Portantino (Chair), Shirley Horton (Vice Chair), Juan Arambula, Jim Beall Jr., Paul Cook, Cathleen Galgiani, and Ira Ruskin—and the Senators of the California State Senate Standing Committee on Education—Senators Jack Scott (Chair), Mark Wyland (Vice Chair), Elaine Alquist, Jeff Denham, Abel Maldonado, Alex Padilla, Gloria Romero, Joe Simitian, and Tom Torlakson—to work to restore funding to higher education in California.

¹ from California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education

² from California’s 2004 Higher Education Compact, signed by Governor Schwarzenegger

³ according to US News & World Report, 2005

The Liberalizing Ideology of the Internet

2008-05-31T09:05:00.005-07:00

written for AGGRESSION conference, Small Press Traffic, 5/31

[for a recent example of the liberalizing ideology in action, see Kenneth Goldsmith's summary of Marjorie Perloff's talk here]

It is spring 2007. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, perhaps as many as a million, have died in the US wars. My government tortures people—it always has, but now it tortures lots of them—and holds them in an extra-judicial space that, like the internet, does and does not exist. The Democrats are hateful because, like the internet, they are doing nothing to stop this. Americans are hateful, mostly, because they like the internet and are doing nothing to stop this. Poets are hateful too. They are like the internet and they like it.

Johannes Göransson asks me to write something for his magazine Action, Yes. At first, I think to write something about poetry in public space and my researches into the theory and practice of the Situationist International, but I’m feeling the hate, I’m liking the hate, I have all of this aggression that’s bottlenecked because it’s supposed to fit through these tiny pixel-sized perforations, and increasingly, what I find impossible to stomach is this idea that the internet is a democratic space, that the technology is democratizing, anti-hierarchical, equalizing, when it seems clear to me that alongside the surge of troops into Iraq, also under the pretenses of democracy, there is a surge of voltages into the space of the internet, and that, instead of one surge stopping the other surge, they are mutually enabling surges, they are pals, these surges, and contrary to predictions about new media enabling new forms of resistance, the internet has, mostly, become, like, a giant deterrence machine, virtualizing and disembodying resistance, it is something like the Free Speech zones set up at protests and on campuses, a merely formal space of freedom surrounded by massive unfreedom, and because I read a good number of books about capitalism, this seems like an old story, this one about freedom and unfreedom, and I want to tell it.

I begin to think about the internet and what it does and what it’s for and I have, at the end of the day, two or maybe three main arguments about it. They are not very original, these arguments, and anybody who reads the same books about capitalism, particularly the ones written by Karl Marx, who was a pretty sharp guy, could probably come up with the same arguments.

I. Information Wants to Be Free

The internet is a screen, a series of screens. It’s true: everyone can have their own blog, can publish their poems online so that the whole world can not read them, can peruse and produce the contents of the internet freely (in all senses of this word). But below this level of freedom, this level of leveling and equalization, the old exclusions and inequalities still obtain—differences in literacy and knowledge, differences in access to free time, differences in positionality with regard to social networks and cultural capital. This is a public that requires, paradoxically, an immobilizing and privatizing of individuated bodies: in rooms, in front of screens. And it is offered, I think, as compensation for the destruction of our cities, the privatization of social entitlement programs, the decay of our schools, infrastructure, etc. The freedom of the internet is, in this sense, the freedom of the marketplace. Its democracy the democracy of, well, the U.S. Its equality the equality of money, the general equivalent, through which equivalency buyers and sellers confront each other as equals. Every dollar is equal to every other dollar, stupid. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar.

In his notebooks from the 1850s, referred to as the Grundrisse, Marx, who encountered similarly vexing arguments about the democracy of the marketplace, decided that the best way to deal with such claims would be to create a mock-up of the market, of the “simple sphere of circulation,” taking at face value the claim that all participants were equals in order to demonstrate the contradictions and impossibilities of such a stance, and therefore force us to plunge into the noisy and highly unequal sphere of production—where capital and labor meet as antagonists—upon which the market rests. I find his analogy for this type of “equality” cheering. For the bourgeois economists, he says, it is “as if it were asserted that there is no difference, to say nothing of antithesis and contradiction, between natural bodies, because all of them, when looked at from e.g. the point of view of their weight, have weight, and are therefore equal; or are equal because all of them occupy three dimensions. . .” And he goes on: “In present bourgeois society as a whole this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which the apparent individual equality and liberty disappear” (Grundrisse, 247). Replace prices with information and you get the picture.

If you believe, then, that the equality and democracy of the internet floats in an emulsion of unfree and unequal social relations—let’s call it the difference between those who do and those do not own the means of production (whether knowledge, hardware, software, or data)—then the supposed freedom of the users resembles, in my view, two types of political subject. First, the nineteenth-century liberal subject endowed gradually with rights (able to vote, to own things, to appeal to the courts) and, secondly, the free and rightless proletarians of the transition to capitalism. This is by no means to suggest that the majority of the people who use the internet today are as brutalized as the lower classes during the transition to capitalism or during the nineteenth century, but merely that, and I owe this insight in part to Standard Schaefer, a similar dialectic is operating, that we should consider the spaces of the internet as ones of enfranchisement and access which sit next to, and cause/are caused by, some of the most extreme disenfranchisement, dispossession, atrocity and destruction in recent memory. That is, we should think of this in terms of Marx’s account of “so-called primitive accumulation,” the process whereby the European peasantry was dispossessed of the access to commonly-held land in order that they were forced to rely on the sale of their labor-power. The argument here, and the actual history, is rather complex, but you get the picture.

It is with some impatience, then, that I encounter positions like that of Kenneth Goldsmith who, for all his salutary antihumanism, must surely be accounted one of the internet’s liberalizing ideologues. In a post on the Poetry Foundation’s
“Harriet” blog, he writes: “Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once—pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities—such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it [sic] has to do with the reconstructed, distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once again to include these as well?” I think Marx already dealt with this quite well, don’t you? What Goldsmith can’t countenance is the thought that whether you get an identity of an infinitely malleable sort or a regulation issue identity has to do with, basically, class, race, gender. Indeed, despite his protestations, this is quintessential identity politics—it’s whitey’s identity politics.

Lest I seem like I don’t get the joke, I should say, at this point, that I’m not immune to Goldsmith’s charms. He has cool hats, and I find his works fascinating and even, if only for short periods of time, pleasurable. I admire his intelligence, however perverse it is, and I realize that he positions himself rather self-consciously as a gadfly. But irony is a great way to disavow things you actually believe. The value of Goldsmith, no doubt, is that he has a sense of humor and under no conditions, blessedly, does he claim that his version of conceptual poetry is in the slightest politically radical, or in the least threatening to the functioning of the political status quo. On the contrary, his is “a pro-consumer poetry,” and as we’ll see in the next section of my talk, his virtue is that he reminds poets how little the experiments of today are a threat to capitalism and imperialism—indeed, in his version, conceptual poetry, as we’ll see, works as advertising, product design, and job training for office managers.

Things are a bit trickier when claims are made for the liberalizing ideology of the internet being politically progressive. Stan Apps and Matthew Timmons, for instance, in their stimulating Editor’s Statement for Fold Magazine, have the virtue of being so clear about their own intentions, and often so accurate in their analysis but so disastrously wrong in the conclusions they draw from this analysis, that they make critique all the easier. I don’t even need Marx. One of their claims is that the new aesthetics of information enabled by the internet are anti-capitalist. “Capitalism,” they write, “has no understanding of what to do in a %100 saturated marketplace in which no significant profit is possible.” The poetries of cut-and-paste are virtuous because the “the romantic paradigm of replication remains gloriously immune to the marketplace—which is to say, these forms of self-expression are produced for selfless reasons.” But this demonstrates a particularly weak grasp of the nature of capitalism—assembly-line work, for instance, depends upon replication and automation. While they themselves note that “distribution is the new production,” this apparently does not lead them to conclude that distribution—the production of new information through consumption of that information—is capitalist. They write: “The primacy of distribution is the greatest lesson of capitalism; ultimately it will be understood that capitalism has nothing to do with money or profit at all: capitalism is simply the recognition that the connections between people are more important than the information or objects they exchange.” By now, such ideas should sound familiar. Ditto the response.

II. The Internet as Work

In what ways is the distribution of information on the internet capitalist? For me, answering this question involves demonstrating that the internet is, largely, work—unpaid work and unpaid job training, and that, similarly, in Goldsmith and in the Apps-Timmons tendency’s accounting, the work of art has become the art of work. I can’t cover much of this argument here, but I’ll do what I can.

The work of the internet is the dialectic counterpart to the primitive accumulation discussed above. Essentially, with the internet, capitalism gifts the masses with a false commons where people can work, off the clock, creating information and relationships that the ruling class can enclose, appropriate, commodify, and sell back to us at a later date. It’s a way of letting the process of primitive accumulation work as a perpetual, and because of the stagnation of the economies in the advanced capitalist countries, vital, supplement to the mechanism of exploitation, and one that should be seen alongside the other forms of primitive accumulation that are occurring right now and are, for sure, much more important: the direct seizure of Iraqi resources, the copyrighting and commodifying of the material of our bodies, and most obviously, the accumulation by dispossession that is occurring in Africa, in China, in Latin America, as capitalism pushes to its limits and attempts to expunge from the earth any trace of commonly-held land.

Thus, back to Kenneth Goldsmith, who writes: “How I navigate—rather than how I create—is what distinguishes me from another writer. I am an intelligent agent carving a unique path through this thicket of language; what distinguishes my practice from yours is the particular swath I carve.” The conceptual-processual poem that he champions, then, is a series of transportable techniques for the management of flows of information; it is a kind of aestheticized Google, one that promises the information consumer an endlessly protean and fungible identity. Despite his somewhat Kantian claim that his writing is purposeless, its consonance with information-management products does not escape me. It is poetry not only for information consumers but for the administrators and managers who work in the distribution of information. Tools for managing and mastering flow of data are also, in this sense, tools for managing and mastering populations—or, what’s better, as with viral marketing, letting populations manage and master themselves. It is a technocrat’s art. The nice thing, though, about Goldsmith’s attempt to aestheticize current working conditions is that he refuses to sex it up, to make it interesting. The mind-numbing boredom of the office job, of phonebank work, data entry, and proofreading, comes through crystal clear. You’ll never clock out, again. Goldsmith’s poetics of boredom is the revenge of work in postmodernity. If, as Adorno and Horkheimer claim, “Amusement under late capitalism is the extension of work,” in his poems the profound alienation of work can longer be covered over, eroticized, or made interesting. We’re dying of boredom and we know it. In this sense, given that the dominance of financialization over the last thirty years has been all about making distribution (of capital, of information) profitable, it seems, in response to Apps and Timmon’s remarks, that capital does, in fact, know what to do. Indeed, Apps, Timmons, Goldsmith and the ideas they present are what capital does—creating and prohibiting the conditions and types of access to information that will allow for the profitability that they claim, somewhat exaggeratedly, is lost by the free exchange of information. It’s true that, as they say, capitalism is all about the relations between people, that its fundamental truth is what Marx calls the relations of production, that political relations are, in a sense, capital’s ontology. But what Apps and Timmons don’t see is that the poetics of distribution is a way of altering, managing and directing those relations.

This is not a blanket critique of all processual writing—some flarf, for instance, does not seem to partake of this technocratic rationality and, instead, by a process akin to what Benjamin calls “profane illumination,” manages to manifest those material conditions and inequalities which subtend the supposedly symmetrical plane of the internet.

I’d like to see more writing like this, obviously, and I’d like to understand more about the effects that internet life does and does not have on the lives we live offscreen. Because you are all smart people, I’m sure you’ve noticed a contradiction in my account. On the one hand, I’m saying that the internet has no effects except indirectly: it’s a smokescreen. On the other hand, I’m saying it’s a tool for mastering and dominating people, for generating saleable information, for directly producing social relations. I think both of these things are true. Sometimes it’s a screen, and sometimes it’s domination, and these two effects are mutually enabling. I do think that there’s an uncanny timing to the arrival of the internet as a full-on social force directly after 9/11. In my view, in the last decade, people were essentially given this domain for experiment with alternate forms of communication and confederation and, in ways that served the interests of the ruling-class, an ideology developed which encouraged people to conflate manipulation of political symbols with the manipulation of political bodies. It’s an old ideology but it has come in handy over the last decade.

Sometimes symbolic freedom is just that, symbolic, and sometimes it’s something more. Symbols can be powerful, and the manipulation of them can have real effects that need not be technocratic and dominating. My piece in Action, Yes, finished with a call for a translation of poetic strategies into strategies for activism in the world at large. I still think that’s what’s needed. And I still think the question for us is how connections between symbols and bodies, languages and bodies can be consciously and effectively put in the service of, for lack of a less ambiguous term, equality.

2008-05-29T21:38:00.002-07:00

I'm giving two talks in the next couple of weeks. These are the twins of the twin readings I gave in February.

1)This Saturday, as part of the Small Press Traffic's conference on Contemporary Poetry and Political Antagonism, @ 11:00 a.m / CCA's Oakland campus / Macky Hall. This is sort of a follow-up to On the Poverty of Internet Life. Those who were irritated by the style of the Action, Yes essay will, perhaps, find my offering on Saturday a bit more lucid. There are some links to materials you can read/view on the website. I also wanted to point people in the direction of Tony Tost's "System Says" (commentary here), which is rather germane to my thoughts, but I forgot to tell Stephanie Young to link to it.

Thanks to Cynthia Sailers, Chris Chen and Stephanie for putting the conference together!

2) I'll be giving a paper on Bernadette Mayer at the National Poetry Foundation conference in Orono--June 13th (a Friday!), 2:30. You can see a list of the papers here, but no schedule yet.
Publish Post

pedagogue, pedagog 1. Originally, a man having the oversight of a child or youth; an attendant (or slave) who led a boy to school; (now obsolete)

2008-05-25T09:28:00.015-07:00

Thanks to Voyou: I almost never do memes, but I like this one. There are nine pictures instead of one.

I usually teach writing courses or literature courses. In all of these, even in creative writing, I think my primary job is to teach students what to do with a poem, a novel, a story, how to talk about it in a way that will be useful to others.

At the most general level, what I want students to ask themselves when encountering a literary object is an adaptation of the perennial question: Why is there this object and not another?

I want students to look both at and through texts, to see poems and novels and essays as constructs, as arrangements of given materials that, if not indifferent or endlessly pliable, at least permit a small multiplicity of configurations. I’ll let them run with any number of notions of causation for these arrangements: authorial intention, psychology, intellectual and social histories, metaphysics, little green martians, whatever. What’s most important, though, is that they see the text against a backdrop of social, cultural, historical and biographical material, and, as such, attend to why it is the way it is. It’s dispiriting to me when, after I work to convey these concepts, it’s clear that students still think that a character who is mediated by a third-person narrator is speaking in her or his own voice, when they don’t attend to the way something is plotted, to forms of syntax, diction, rhetoric, tone. This takes time to learn, of course, and it takes even more time to be able to see this in relation to the forces, narratives and processes of historical conflict, which is of course the way I prefer to read things.

Robert Smithson, Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point), 1968, Part I

Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point), 1968, Part II

Smithson’s dialectic of site and nonsite, I think, forces the understanding of figure and ground, material and relation, historical force and textual object, that I’m getting at above. If you look through the books in his library at the time of his death, you’ll notice that there is no Hegel and no Marx. I’m sure he read these authors, but it’s interesting that he does own copies of Plato and Mao. I don’t have a copy of his essays at hand, but it seems fair to say that his dialectic in the later works is, in part, classical (rhetorical) and in part Maoist (Manichaean, refusing totalization). He has a few Lenin books, too.

The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, Martha Rosler, 1974-1975

And, of course, I want students to think about the shape of their argument, that they are themselves going to have to take a certain slice of the given objects, and form it according to a certain insight, a certain aperçu, cut:

Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque, 1977

There is almost never time for this, but one thing I’d like to get better at is stimulating in the receptive portion of my students an appropriate feeling of rage and resentment. I’d like to get better at setting the pleasures of the text in relation to the misery of history and the present. This has to come after the other work if it’s going to work. But I’m increasingly dissatisfied with the liberal-humanist philosophy of the university, in which I simply present critical thinking skills to students and allow them to make their own decisions. What I’m dissatisfied with is the fact that I’m encouraged to think of this as a mechanism of emancipation and equalization when it is, in fact, a mechanism for reproducing class relations. But how develop a committed pedagogy, one that doesn’t cover up political antagonisms with false universalism but teaches to them? Or, differently, how to make the false universalism a real one?

Two Stills from Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

Los Angeles, 1992

VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969

Ice ICE, Baby, 2007

Schwarzenegger as Bartleby?

2008-05-17T10:40:00.002-07:00

On the recent Californian Supreme Court ruling that overturned same-sex marriage ban. (I can't find a link to the quote, but it was on the evening news):

Governor Schwarzenegger:"I have no problem with it, but I'm against it."

Ah, ambiguities of the indeterminate pronoun! This is increasingly the rhetorical form of all American politics within the two parties.

News from the University of British Petroleum

2008-05-14T08:59:00.007-07:00

So I passed! I'm ABD.

And then, afterward, meeting Anna for dinner, who should I run into in the restaurant? My 20th-cent. examiner, Charles Altieri! Oh, eternal return of the same!

*

I have a stack of grading to get through, but among my immediate projects is working with other graduate students to protest the truly devastating funding cuts to the English department and to other departments within the university (particularly French, German and the truly savaged East Asian Languages and Cultures). Graduate students at UC survive, and are able to complete their dissertations, by teaching sections of Reading and Composition courses (R&C). This year, the English department staffed 58 of these courses, and asked the university for funding to teach 65 next year, since undergraduates are required to take a full year of R&C and since these courses are already massively over-enrolled. Some students can't complete the requirement until they are in their 3rd year--fairly absurd for a course that's supposed to give them the core writing and critical thinking skills that they'll use in upper-division courses. But the tentative budget we've received for next year gives us funding to teach only 42 courses. Which means that close to 17 graduate students are without any support whatsoever. Many undergraduates will not be able to complete their degree in four years.

GSIs in the UC system are unionized, and we have a decent contract, even if we can't expect all that much from the rather feckless UAW. But our contract does not have any stipulations for job security. The Graduate School only guarantees us 2 years of teaching, despite the department's implicit guarantee of 4 years. This is barely enough, given that most students only have three years of fellowship, if that, and only go out on the job market in their 7th year, and increasingly stay on the market for 2+ years. For the most part, professors in the department have been really terrific in their commitment to try and find ways to keep students alive--giving up money from their endowed chairs, from research funds, etc., and yesterday at the department meeting, a few of them even suggested such radical options as a strike (although most likely the fake kind of strike that happens at colleges, where people continue to teach off-campus) and refusing to admit any graduate students next year. I doubt these options will find support among the majority of the faculty, but the professors who suggested them have earned my admiration. I'd definitely be happy to stand next to them on the barricades.

These cuts are the UC Regents' response to the brutal budget that Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing (he is the Terminator, after all), and because of the byzantine complexities of funding streams, another name for division of labor, and because professors' salaries are guaranteed, they hit hardest the people who are least able to support them--the already brutalized staff, GSIs and lecturers. Furthermore, the R&C courses are crucial for equipping the under-represented students who didn't get a great high school education with the skills needed to excel at UC Berkeley. The better-off students, who took AP classes and SAT prep courses in high school, could survive here without the courses. Given that the diversity in terms of class and race at UC Berkeley is already declining due to Prop 209, UC is essentially fast becoming a private university. The goal, I suppose, is to reduce guaranteed labor to a skeleton-crew and then rely on precarious, part-time labor to adjust the workforce as needed. As Marc Bousquet and others have been pointing out, this is the nature of the neoliberal, corporatized university.

----------------

It's worse in other parts of the California education system, and truth be told, I place more value on the funding of high schools, community colleges, and public assistance programs for those without food or housing (a growing number), all of which have been slaughtered by the Governor's budget, over support for the UC. If the talk that Robert Brenner gave last week is correct, these are the initial symptoms of an economic crisis on a scale equal to the Great Depression. Firing 100,000 California teachers (pdf!), cutting people off of public assistance, and spending money on Iraq and bailouts for investment banks, seems like a pretty good way to reduce the consumer demand that keeps the economy afloat. If there was ever a time for the left to get its shit together, it's now. Obama, it must be said, won't do a damn thing here. He's a democrat of the "balanced budgets" sort, where balanced budgets mean slaughtering the poor.

What might the governor do in response to our demands to diminish the force of the cuts? Well, since food prices are already skyrocketing, make the poor pay for it with an increase in the sales tax, of course! And build prisons to house all of the people that are driven to crime in order to survive or who, perhaps, might find in the use of illegal drugs some relief, however illusory, from their current predicament. Oh yes, and let the federal government round up immigrants like cattle . . .

------------------

Following are my proposals for dealing with the budget shortfall in the UC:

1) Socialize the university, of course! Make the university free for the poorest students, cheap for others, and as expensive as Stanford, Harvard or Yale for students who can afford it.

2) Turn the president's house into a sex club (for the meeting of mutually-consenting partners, of course), marijuana club, and delegalized drug zone. This could be staffed by Lacanians and Deleuzians from Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, who would offer seminars on becoming a body without organs and sinthomaticity.

3)Institute a white privilege and patriarchal privilege corvee. All male students, and all white students, would be forced to volunteer a nominal amount of time each semester (10 hours perhaps).

Any other suggestions?

-------------------------

P.S. We're interested in learning about what other graduate students in the UC system are facing. If you have information, let me know.

2008-05-03T08:38:00.004-07:00

Going over my notes, and distracting myself with silly jokes, I'm tempted by the idea of a Faulknerian workout video: Abs! Abs!

Man-Horse-Demon: Sutpen's Hundred.

More later.

What I Did This Year

2008-05-03T07:38:00.005-07:00

Below are my lists for my qualifying exam, which I take on May 13th (not a Friday, sadly). The irony of doing a independent study on the Situationist International on the 40th anniversary of the "évènements de mai" has not escaped me, of course. But I can't shut down a university all by myself, can I? There were about 50 people at the immigrant rights rally at Berkeley on Thursday, so I fear that the inspiring dockworkers strike and the marches over in S.F. on May 1st are about as good as things are going to get this month. First time as tragedy, second time as documentation. Better luck next year, I suppose. The historical fields are partly a negotiation between my own predilections and the "canon," such that it is. There are may holes. History is ugly, the present world is ugly (and the people are sad) and thus are these lists a record of violence.

I. 19th-Century American (Mitch Breitweiser)

1. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

2. William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis” (1817)

3. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819)

4. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

5. Nat Turner/Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson

a. “Nature” (1836)

b. “The American Scholar” (1837)

c. “The Snowstorm” (1841)

d. “The Divinity School Address” (1838)

e. “Self Reliance” (1841)

f. “Experience” (1844)

g. “The Poet” (1844)

7. Margaret Fuller, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (1845)

8. Henry David Thoreau

a. “Civil Disobedience” (1849)

b. Walden (1854)

9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

a. “A Psalm of Life” (1838)

b. “Hiawatha” (1855)

10. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snowbound: A Winter Idyll” (1866)

11. James Russell Lowell, “Fable for Critics” (1848)

12. Edgar Allen Poe

a. Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)

b. “Ligeia” (1838)

c. “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

d. “The Tell Tale Heart” (1839)

e. “The Man of the Crowd” (1840)

f. “The Purloined Letter” (`1844)

g. “The Raven” (1845)

h. “To Helen” (1845)

i. “Sonnet: to Science (1845)

j. “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)

k. “The Purloined Letter” (1844)

l. “Annabel Lee” (1849)

13. Nathaniel Hawthorne

a. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832)

b. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

c. “The Maypole of Merry Mount” (1835)

d. “Wakefield” (1835)

e. Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844)

f. “The Birthmark” (1846)

g. The Scarlet Letter (1850)

10. Herman Melville

a. “Hawthorne and his Mosses” (1850)

b. Moby Dick (1851)

c. Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852)

d. “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)

e. Benito Cereno (1855)

f. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)

11. Frederick Douglass

a. Narrative (1845)

b. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852)

c. My Bondage, My Freedom (1855)

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

15. Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1855)

16. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

17. Walt Whitman

a. 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

b. “Song of Myself” (1855)

c. “The Sleepers” (1855)

d. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1856)

e. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1860)

f. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (1865)

g. Drum Taps (1865)

h. “Respondez!” (1871)

18. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems (1850-1888)

19. Mark Twain

a. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

b. Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893)

20. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

21. Henry James

a. Daisy Miller (1878)

b. “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896)

c. “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)

d. “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)

e. The Ambassadors (1903)

22. Stephen Crane

a. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

b. “The Open Boat” (1897)

23. Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)

24. Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Country of Pointed Firs”

25. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

26. Charles Chestnutt

a. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899)

b. The Wife of His Youth (1899)

27. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

28. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)

29. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

-________________________________________________________________________________

II. 20^th Century (Charles Altieri)

1900-1910
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

W.E.B Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Edith Wharton, House of Mirth (1905)

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1909)

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909)

1911-1920
James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

Robert Frost, North of Boston (1915)

T.S. Eliot, Prufrock (1917)

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1918)

Willa Cather, My Antonia (1919)

T.S. Eliot, Poems (1920)

Ezra Pound, Personae (1912-1920), Gaudier-Brzeska (1916)

1921-1930
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1923)

W.C. Williams, Spring and All, (1923)

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, (1923)

Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker (1923)

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925)

Hart Crane, White Buildings (1926)

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930)

Poems by Laura Riding, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Countee Cullen. Essays by Eliot and Pound.

1931-1940
Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, (1932), Lectures in America (1935)

Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos (1933) / XXX Cantos in New Directions vol.

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, (1934)

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936), Owl’s Clover (1936)

----, The Man with the Blue Guitar, (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Laura Riding, Collected Poems (1938)

Nathanael West, Day of the Locust, (1939)

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, (1939)

Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

Selected poems by Oppen, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Marianne Moore.

1941-1960

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947 /1952)

Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Necessary Angel (1942)

Gwendowlyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville. (1945)

Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1958)

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, (1959)

Barbara Guest, The Location of Things (1960)

Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry (1945-1960)

1961-1970
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

John Ashbery, Tennis Court Oath (1962)

Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (1964), Odes (1969)

John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (1964)

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains (1966)

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (1968)

Amiri Baraka, Black Art (1969)

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

1971-1980
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)

John Ashbery, Three Poems (1977)

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1978)

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1978)

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1979)

Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)

1980-1990
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (1988)

____________________________________________________________________________________

III. Spectacle and its Interlocutors (T.J. Clark)

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” “Notes on Gesture,” Notes on Politics.” Means without Ends. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2000.

Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. New York: Verso, 1998.

Atkins, Guy. Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years: 1954-1964. New York: Wittenborn. 1977.

---. Asger Jorn: The Final Years: 1965-1973. New York: Wittenborn, 1977.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.

---. Simulacra and Simulacrum. Cambridge: MIT, 1991.

---. The Mirror of Production. New York: Telos, 1975.

Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: UPNE, 2006.

Bernstein, Michèle. Tous les chevaux du roi. Paris: Buchet/Chastel,1960.

Berréby, Gérard. Documents relatifs a la fondation de l’I.S. Paris : Edition Allia, 1985.

---. Textes et documents situationnistes: 1957-1960. Paris: Allia, 2004.

Clark, T .J. “The Origins of the Present Crisis.” New Left Review: No. 2, March-April 2000.

Constant, The Activist Drawing. Drawing Center/MIT. Ed. Mark Wigley, 2001.

Debord, Guy, et al. Sur Le Passage De Quelques Personnes à Travers Une Assez Courte Unité De Temps : à Propos De l'Internationale Situationniste, 1957-1972. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989.

---.Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. New York: Verso, 1998.

---. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. Trans. Lucy Forsyth. London: Pelagian, 1991.

---. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. Paris: Gallimard, 1999

---. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

---. With Asger Jorn. Mémoires. Paris: J.J. Pauvert aux Belles Lettres, 1993.

---. Ouevres Cinématographiques Complètes. Paris: Gallimard 1994.

---. Panegyrique: Volumes One and Two. New York: Verso, 2004.

Donné, Boris. Pour Mémoires. Paris: Allia, 2004.

Harvey, David. The Conditions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into its Origins. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

---. The Cultural Turn. New York:Verso, 1998.

Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. Berkeley: UC Press, 1999.

Jorn, Asger, and Guy E. Debord. Fin De Copenhague. Copenhague: Permild & Rosengreen, 1957.

Kaufmann, Vincent. Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2007.

Knabb, Knabb ed. Situationist International: An Anthology (Revised and Expanded). Oakland: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: Vol II. New York: Verso, 2002.

---Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes September 1959-May 1961. New York: Verso, 1995.

---. The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991.

Lotringer, Sylvere ed. Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. New York : Semiotext(e), 2007.

Lukacs, George. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press, 1971.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

McDonough, Tom. "The Beautiful Language of My Century" : Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.

--- ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International : Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

RETORT. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. New York: Verso, 2006.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT, 1994.

Vaneigem, Raoul. A Cavalier History of Surrealism. San Francisco: AK Press, 1999.

---. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press, 1993.

Vienet, René. Enragés and Situationist in the Occupation Movement. New York: Autonomedia/Rebel, 1992.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e), 2003.

--- “General Intellect.” Historical Materialism. Volume 15, Number 3 (September, 2007): 3-8.

---. with Michael Hardt. Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1996.

Wigley, Mark. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998.

Statement

In Guy Debord’s film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, while an appropriated scene from the 1936 film The Charge of the Light Brigade runs on the screen, a voice intones the following: “Avant-gardes have only one time, and the best thing that can happen to them is, in the full sense of the term, to have had their time. After them operations commence on a vaster scene.”[1] This remark—it is one of the central points of his film—goes some way in explaining the curious status of the Situationist International today and, specifically, Debord’s theory of the spectacle—universally mentioned, familiar as any number of departmentally-approved names of French theory, but rarely engaged directly. More militant tactician than philosopher, Debord suggests that his theoretical contributions were historically delimited, meant to disappear and surreptitiously infuse the social field once they had outlived their moment: “These perspectives have today become part of some people’s way of life, and everywhere they are fought for, or against” (In girum, 159).

Debord’s remarks have proved prophetic. For instance, a recent book, Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle heads many of its chapters with quotes from Society of the Spectacle, but does not theoretically engage with the work until its fifth chapter, and then only cursorily. With a few exceptions, this is an exemplary engagement with Debord, rather than an anomalous one. Thus, the researches I project for my third field would trace the impact that the ideas of the SI and Debord could have—and could have had—on our understanding of late capitalism, art after modernism and political organization after the failure (however this is understood) of the project of an international socialism. In many cases, this will require teasing out—in Fredric Jameson, in Jean Baudrillard, in Perry Anderson—the contours of an absence, a potential engagement that never occurs, and imagining the corrections or syntheses that might have been possible on both sides had this occurred. For the writers above, the SI is rarely ever more than a noun phrase, a fragment, a historical marker, something one supposes is too obvious to warrant any critical attention: the society of the spectacle. As Debord predicted, his work has become part of culture, as anonymous and undetermined as he himself was in the last two decades of his life.

And yet, it seems that spectacle in Debord’s very specific account remains poorly understood—either confused with the image-machinery that is its synecdoche, or given, by way of various currents in poststructuralism, a quasi-ontological, fatalistic contour that does not match with the complexion of Debord’s thought. As for the theory and practice of the SI itself, the full range of its (sometimes contradictory) pronouncements and activities still seems to me not fully digested within any of the available studies—marred on the one hand by a will-to-hagiography that is incapable of speaking clearly of shortcomings, and on the other hand, by attempts to use the earlier period of the movement, with all its cultural flowering, to authorize certain artistic developments in the 60s and 70s while, at the same time, disregarding the larger, yet nonetheless central critique of art in late capitalism that accompanied it. Furthermore, aside from its assimilation into the Italian autonomist Marxism of Paolo Virno and Toni Negri, for example, few people have explicitly engaged with its critique of revolutionary organization, of the changed nature of ideology and value production in late capitalism, let alone assimilated this to its pronouncements on art. Aside from a few people whose remarks on these subjects are rather abbreviated, where this work has been done, it has gone on under other names.

A proper study of the movement would need to do several things. The first order of business is a thorough account of the notion of the spectacle that locates its origins in the Western (or Hegelian) Marxism of Lukàcs, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others, and sketches its coincidence with and departure from these models. Secondly, we need an immanent critique of the multi-form and complex notion of spectacle, which as I see it complicates three crucial notions in Marxist theory: 1) ideology 2) reproduction of class relations and 3) value production. It is my contention that spectacle is an account of a supplementary mechanism of value production that is not figural—as in Baudrillard—but actual. Some attempt to expand upon this aspect of spectacle is found in the Italian theory mentioned, but the connections are tenuous as they stand now and problematic in several ways. If these aspects of spectacle were clarified, however, it would become clear that spectacle is not a new name for Lukàcs’s reification but an actual dialectical shift within capitalism, one with real consequences for the left. Thirdly, we need a study that ties the various (and perhaps irreconcilable) aesthetic positions within the SI to their political and social consequences. Too often the earlier, more generous stance of the SI around the time of its founding is used to authorize art that the later SI would have anathematized. Perhaps the position of the SI in 1967 vis-à-vis art is incorrect, untenable, or overly utopian; however, only argument and not repression will establish this. My sense is that one cannot have the SI of ’62 and the SI of ‘67 unless a new theoretical framework is found. Obviously, for those who are interested in researching art and writing in the 60s and 70s, such a theoretical project is indispensable. It is also of utmost importance for those who would consider the place, or non-place, of a politicized art and writing in response to the calamities that confront the world today.

[1] Guy Debord, “In girum nocte et consumimur igni,” trans. Lucy Forsyth, No: a journal of the arts (# 6, 2007), New York: 166.

Two Readings

2008-02-13T20:11:00.006-08:00

I'm reading here in Berkeley and in LA in the next couple of weeks. Details:

1)Triple J / Feb. 21st /~~6:00~~ 6:30 /Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley/ with Jessica Fisher and Javier Huerta. [***Update: time moved to 6:30***]

2)THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2008

With featured readers

Jasper BERNES
Anthony MCCANN

The Smell is located at
247 S. Main Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
The entrance is through the back, by way of the alley, west of Main Street.

The doors will open at 6:30 pm. Five dollars at the door.

2008-02-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

There's a review of Starsdown in this month's issue of The Believer. Thanks to Stephen Burt for the generous read! He also wrote a note about the book here.

*

I'm not writing much here lately, as is obvious, because I'm deep in the dizzying bookpile that is my reward this year, studying for my qualifying exams in May. There's nothing like reading as much as I can of literary product from the last two centuries (American, mostly) to induce a sort of aphasia, or convince that there's very little that can't be said better with the backspace key. I'm sure I'll figure out some enabling delusion soon, and then I'll be back. But probably very little until summer.

I is an Arthur

2007-11-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

I'm Not There is terrific. The idea, I suppose, is to play Bob Dylan as a series of covers, and part of the frisson of the film is to watch Dylan's doubles, despite their will-to-elusiveness, to fiction and Rimbaudian auto-exile, coalesce into the mise-en-scene of the all-familiar album covers, the all-familiar quotes, the freeze frame of celebrity. "The individual who in the service of the spectacle is placed in stardom's spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual, and as clearly the enemy of the individual in himself as of the individual in others. In entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomy in order himself to be identified with, he renounces all autonomy in order himself to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things." That's the rub, no?

I'm still trying to work through Todd Haynes's gambit with regard to minstrelsy in Dylan (and American music generally). Casting the teenaged Dylan as a twelve-year-old black boy (the terrific Marcus Carl Franklin) named Woody Guthrie, Haynes might succeed in indicating the distance between the young Robert Zimmerman's self-fashioning and the actual experience of African-Americans incarnated, freely or not, in American music. Or not.

And wasn't this, also, what Godard was trying to work out in his own problematic way in Sympathy for the Devil, by juxtaposing The Stones' appropriated blues with the Black Panthers' training for an armed reappropriation? In fact, I'm pretty sure the scene where Blanchett-as-Dylan chases Michelle Williams's Edie Sedgwick character through a winding English garden is an allusion to the great All About Eve vignette in the Godard film: "He doesn't want to answer?" "No." "You're calling LeRoi Jones?" "Yes." "Or Cassius Clay?" "Yes." "Or Rap Brown?" "Yes." Yes I said yes.

The chance meeting of Jeremy Bentham and Friedrich Schiller on the floor of the NYSE

2007-10-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

The following quote, from an article by Brian Holmes about recent art-into-life experiments and their unexamined collaboration with techniques of people-management, is exactly what I was getting at in my essay over at Action, Yes. Worth checking out.

_________________

The concept of ‘deep play’ – or the quality of artistic excess that Bruegger and Knorr
Cetina wanted to transfer from Clifford Geertz’s Balinese cock-fighters to their own
postsocial traders – was itself, as a kind of intellectual fate would have it, an invention
of Jeremy Bentham. He used it to describe the irrational activity of inveterate
gamblers, whose speculative excesses could not be resolved into any calculus of
individual pleasure, and should therefore be outlawed. Geertz sought to go beyond
Bentham’s shallow moralizing by portraying the deep play of Balinese gamblers as an
arena for the meeting of self and other, an affirmation of the social tie. But in a further
turn of the screw, it is now this speculative irrationality that lies at the heart of a selfdenying
and ultimately self-destructive tie, in the age of a fully realized post-social
Benthamite utopia. And this is what we are being taught to calculate, this is what we are
being encouraged to create in the cultural field.

What has to be understood, expressed, and then dismantled and left behind in the
movement of the artistic experience, are the specific modalities whereby the planetary
middle-managerial classes share, through our work, our labour, in the concrete
deployment of sovereign, disciplinary and liberal devices of power, and in the depths of
systemic madness they together configure. I have focused on the relations between the
cultural and financial spheres as a key articulation that permits, structures and at the
same time hides this deployment of power over the movements of both body and mind.
It is precisely this articulation that should be challenged, questioned in its legitimacy
and its very sense, so that the entire communications machine of cognitive capitalism
can be used to open a debate on the crisis of the present. The systemic ‘device’ must be
confronted by deliberate and delirious processes of social experimentation, which can
dismantle it, derail it, while opening other paths, other modes of production and selfproduction.
This is the counter-urgency of our times.

Equinoctial

2007-09-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

By pure coincidence, two products of my summer's leisures are now available.

1) I guest edited an issue of the online journal (Counterpath Online) run out of Counterpath Press. It features works by Karen Leona Anderson, Joshua Clover, Dolores Dorantes, Gabriel Gudding, Charles Legere, Ange Mlinko, Jennifer Moxley, Jennifer Scappettone, Suzanne Stein, Rod Smith, David Weiss, Allyssa Wolf and Mia You. Please do read my editor's introduction, as it explains the experimental format for the issue.

2) I also wrote an series of theses, "On the Poverty of Internet Life: a Call for Poets," for Joyelle and Johannes's Action, Yes. My hope is that they will provoke some conversation, and that, moreover, around them some political (in)activities or (dis) organizations might emerge in which the special skills and maladapted bodies of poets can be made useful. Action, Yes has a discussion board, so you should chime in. Or, you can send me a message by destroying your local INS or military recruitment office with a poem by Mallarme. That's actually much quicker than e-mail. [Note: just so you know, I think my piece reads a bit better in the printer-friendly format.]

In all, it looks like a terrific issue. I've already read Josh's talk on the baroque--a subject that won't leave me alone of late-- and Ariana Reines's poetics statement. Both pieces are, I think, in dialogue with each other (and with my essay) in ways that seem, at first glance, fruitful.

Reminder

2007-09-05T20:40:00.001-07:00

OK, so the reading/book release in Brooklyn is more like 6:45, Sept. 10th: I read and Jeffrey Jullich reads; there is film by Brandon Downing and introductions by Joshua Clover and Mike Scharf, all of this in celebration in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, and therefore perfectly uniting the form and content of perdition.

At Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg (77 North 9th St. Brooklyn, NY). Not Leipzig, sorry. See you there.

Because I've Been Reading Lots of Ange Mlinko Poems

2007-08-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

Announcing my trip to New York got me thinking about how much I love the neighborhood where I usually stay when I go there these days, where one of my oldest and dearest friends lives, in a swaybacked, tilting edifice that will soon, if it's not condemned, collapse, taking with it the rest of the doomed neighborhood. Barricaded on three sides, more a cul-de-sac than a neighborhood, it’s not very well known, even among friends who’ve lived in NYC for decades. Recently, he tells me, one of the many, ancient out-buildings on the property collapsed, and the tenants, knowing that they lived in some of the very last affordable apartments in all of New York City, rented a van and quietly cleared away the debris before it alerted the no-doubt senescent, probably fictitious, owners to the perilous state of suspension in which the building proper stood. The property abuts a vacant lot of dead cars and other gorgeous detritus the exact dimensions of which I've never been able to gauge, so overgrown is it with the kinds of prodigious trees that no-one bothers to remember the names for. Perhaps it's infinite, that lot.

Behind this property is a first-five-minutes-of-a-horror-movie gated mansion with many once-elegant vehicles parked on its premises, and behind that you can see the open tanks of the sewage processing plants they like to put in these neighborhoods. Anywhere anybody I know who lives in New York lives is always within olfactory range of one of these. And, behind the mansion, the barracks and officer’s housing of the Naval Yard. Or, depending on which way you look, the projects.

In the other direction, far too close actually for an encounter with the industrial sublime, there’s a Sheeleresque power plant that, on hot days, in summer, emits the kind of noises a power plant might make if it thought it were imitating a sick cat. The heat waves roiling off it are entertainment enough for drinking on porches.

But then, the neighborhood itself, the neighborhood proper, is cobblestone streets, 19th-century storefronts, and street names that bespeak a vanished world of small merchants and craftspeople and other non-existents: Gold St., for instance. It’s Whitman’s Brooklyn, and indeed, his beloved ferry is only a few blocks and one-hundred twenty years away, where it meets Crane’s Brookyn, on the other side of the two bridges.

So, it’s a dialectical image, this neighborhood. The smaller, picturesque scale of the 19th century, seemingly livable only because of the patina of time, meeting smack against the inhuman, definitively unlivable dimensions of the 20th. Rendering both parties, once tragedies, farcical. And between them both, home. Except that, everywhere, in every direction on the horizon these days, the new farces: the gentrification-lesions, the sleek speculative highrises of 21st-century Brooklyn come to end this little détente of the dialectic. If the timing’s right, the sound of the trucks on the BQE bouncing off their shiny, echoic and life-resistant surfaces makes it sound as if they were whispering to each other more gossip about Frank Gehry.

Book Release/Reading

2007-08-23T11:00:00.001-07:00

It seems like it might be now neither too early nor too late to announce that I'm having a book release/reading for Starsdown in Brooklyn, at the Pierogi Gallery, on Sept. 10th (come at 6:30, reading at 7:30). With Jeffrey Jullich.

Since any city is better than no city when writing about a city and living in the country, it just so happens that I wrote much of the book in Williamsburg and across the river and north in Greenpoint. I'm happy, then, to share it there.

So: come. It'll will get you prepared for the next morning when you will wake up and realize that it was six years ago that neoliberalism and neoconservatism found the perfect opportunity to work out their differences, make a pact on the floor of the Oval Office, marry their contradictions and play goodcop/ badcop unto our interminable ruination.

Pierogi Gallery: 2000 Gallery, 177 North 9th Street in Williamsburg (Bedford stop on L train).

I'll be in town from the 6th until the 11th. I'm excited to catch the Richard Serra show at the insanely overpriced Mausoleum of Modern Art. I'll probably be at the book party for American Poets in the 21st Century on the 8th at the BPC and J-Clo's reading in Bryant Park on the 11th.

2007-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Anne has very insightful things to say about Starsdown (and Mike Scharf's terrific For Kid Rock Total Freedom) over at Odalisqued. It may not be a review, but it is un rêve, vu . . .

It is true that the book is partly about money, a phenomenon which, despite all of my distasteful reading of texts that talk about capitalism as if something else were possible, I still do not understand even a little bit. I realized (again) how little I understood money when Noah asked me, on the way back from his swim class, where the quarter I had given him (because he's into bald eagles, not as payment for goods or services received) came from. "That, as it turns out, is a very long story. "

Tonight, before bedtime, instead of the stories I make up while lying on my back next to his crib (about owls and allosauruses and deinonychuses and little boys named Noah), we're going to start with Capital Vol. I.

2007-08-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

I keep forgetting things. Along with Kasey's post, one of the things that got me going on this line of thought was the following quote from Jameson's afterword to the terrific Verso book Aesthetics and Politics (1977), a collection which has the salutary effect of leading one to recognize how many current arguments merely recapitulate those between Ernst Bloch/George Lukacs or Adorno/Benjamin in the context of early 20th-century modernism and the avant-garde:

For when modernism and its accompanying techniques of 'estrangement' have become the dominant style whereby the consumer is reconciled with capitalism, the habit of fragmentation itself needs to be 'estranged' and corrected by a more totalizing way viewing phenomena. In the unexpected denouement, it may be Lukacs--wrong as he was in the 1930s--who has some provisional last word for us today. Yet this particular Lukacs, if he be imaginable, would be one for whom the concept of realism has been rewritten in terms of the categories of History and Class Consciousness, in particular those of reification and totality. Unlike the more familiar concept of alienation, a process that pertains to activity and in particular to work (dissociating the worker from his labour, his product, his fellow workers and ultimately from very 'species being' itslef) reification is a a process that affects our cognitive relationship with the social totality. It is a disease of that mapping function whereby the individual subject projects and models his or her insertion into the collectivity." (212)

Many will, I'm sure, recognize how this early formulation presages his later work on postmodernism, not to mention his contentious reading of the status of the fragment in Bob Perelman, a reading which someone once dubbed (who was it?) "the primal scene of language poetry."

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The link to the SPD page below was broken. It works now. And for some reason, my e-mail was not displaying in my blogger profile. But that's fixed now too, I think.

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Also, how awesome is Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures? Along with Harryette Mullen and the obvious ones like Shakespeare or Joyce, one of the best all-time punsmiths. (Sadly, I see that ECLIPSE has removed its pdf edition in advance of a reprint from Barque Press. I suspect that the availability of the former would diminish sales of the latter not at all, if it did not, in fact, increase them. What do others think?)

"Pass me a little of that petit pain."

Estrangement and Comfort

2007-08-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit late on the uptake, but I wanted to note how useful I found this post, of Kasey's, about the constitutive tension between, on the hand, the negative, estranging (ostranenie or verfrumdungseffekt) aspects of contemporary poetry and, on the other, its will to presence or immediacy (projective or breath-based poetics, for instance). I do think that, in post-45 American poetry and poetics there is an unexamined conflict between a poetry of immanence and a poetry of artifice. Unexamined because, due to other similarities and values, writers who work one end or the other of this spectrum tend to get run together in the great hagiographical encyclopediae of our day. It's worth saying that an attention to these differences might--like Hejinian's sense of "experiment" as a relation to the real--allow for diagonals and diagnostics that cut across the quietude/new American binary.

But more importantly, the post makes me realize that I might not have expressed as well as I wanted to one of my points vis-a-vis Juliana Spahr's The Transformation. That is, I think that there's a kind of habituation curve to negativity in poetry, a process whereby the initially estranging or alienating technical effect--the fragment, for instance--becomes either strangely comforting or, alternately, gets so subsumed by mass culture, as to become somewhat toothless. The Dadason Avenue problem, we might call it. In such a moment, without an attempt at reinvention or an acknowledgment of the changed conditions, the mechanical continuance of such techniques becomes either amnesiac or cynical.

My sense is that Spahr understands her post-New American audience well enough, and is at least partly directed to that audience enough, that she realizes that a poetics of simplicity, referentiality, honesty, that at the same time continues to employ some of the stylistic markers of "fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax," will, in its own way, really fuck with people. She creates an especial estrangement for readers who have become habitutated to estrangement, readers for whom there has been a kind of ostranenie saturation. For example, in the aftermath of 9-11, while the characters in the book are in New York, Spahr notes this curious reversal with a tone of optimism: "And they began at this time to think of the poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on not as a radical avant-garde break but as the warm hand of someone they loved stroking their head, helping them to relax the muscles in their head and inviting them to just close their eyes and relax for a a second with words of someone else. This feeling somewhat answered that constant question about the use of the avant-garde in a time like this" (188).

At first glance, I find this formulation completely inadequate, a sentimentalized notion that sells poetry short. And, of course, this is precisely what I'm supposed to feel. Indeed, by feeling that way, by attending to the balance of both estrangement and comfort within the book, I have fallen right into the trap-of-sorts that the book has laid for me. I do not think it is incorrect to assert that this is an extraordinarily strategic book, one that understands its readership well, and one that seeks to work with and against it. And it's precisely Spahr's acknowledgment of the conditions (embarrassing to many, I think) of her readership that allows her to do what she does. Has any poet ever so cannily worked the dialectic of comfort and estrangement? Maybe Stein's deterritorialization of the spaces of comfort and domesticity in Tender Buttons.

I use the word "canny" as my own strategic move, for I think that Spahr's work is quite close to Freud's essay on the uncanny. Both writers have a remarkable sense of the dialectic whereby the familiar (heimlich) is repressed and returns as something uncanny (unheimlich), but uncanny precisely because it retains elements of the familiar. You can see this dialectic at work in the changing political conditions of the move from Hawaii to New York that I mentioned in the earlier post. It's worth saying that this is the kind of effect that those whose accounts of poetry are entirely technical or impressionistic (which is, to say, 4/5 of all poetry reviews) will never take the measure of.

While I do hesitate to open a can of assvagina in a studiedly neutral post, this may be the key to the work that elements of the "cute" do in some Flarf, where, amidst all of the estranging verbiage and allusional range, the cute serves the same purpose as the familiar/comforting does above. For a brilliant reading of this exact issue, check out Sianne Ngai's essay "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." (If you have no JSTOR access and want to read it, e-mail for a pdf). I love to steal from the institutions of High Theory! Death of the author, put your money where your mouth is!

I am an author

2007-08-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

now available for purchase through SPD . Alternately, you can save a few dollars and buy the book from me directly (e-mail is above). Review copies are also available.

Jasper Bernes’s magnificent and multi-layed first book, Starsdown, emerges to take the measure of the last American city as its physical space collapses into specters and marks, where “the sky is a swimming pool,” and the signs and stars keep switching places. Beneath Los Angeles’ glittering, flat surface, the blurring of utopia and ruin: this book animates the profusion of irreconcilable vernaculars and histories that the city’s “pastel-washed meta-burglaries” have contrived to make disappear. In Bernes’s vision, hardboiled and crackling through the post-Pynchonian circuitry, the bars are named The Regrettable Incident and the cry is for “Socialism or Barbie.” Here Walt Whitman and Walt Disney, Adorno and Ice-T, gumshoe noir and Divine Comedy meet in the parking lots and derelict spaces that Nathanael West once described as “a Sargasso of the imagination.” An archaelogy of futures past and futures to come, Starsdown improvises a poetry which stands finally as actual invention and possibility: “a field the discovery of which / might mean a / Northwest Passage cut right through every home, car, tower / fear monumentalizes.”

Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007; Michelangelo Antonioni 1912-2007

2007-07-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

What are the chances? Bergman one day, Antonioni the next. It's really over, the 20th-century, modernism, all that.

I thought of Antonioni, yesterday, as a point of comparison as I mused on what I might say about Bergman's incomparable films.

About Bergman, it's this: in both the b&w and the color films, I do not think that anyone has succeeded in giving light itself so many variable and ambiguous meanings, such substance. That eternal twilight of the idols, beyond good and evil, on his personal island, etc. . . I cannot but feel impatient, after Bergman, with a film that returns to the Manichean symbolism of neo-noir chiaroscuro. Although it seems perverse to focus solely on the visual with a filmmaker who is so novelistic, so theatrical and psychologically sharp, as in Fanny and Alexander or the Passion of Anna or Persona or Through a Glass Darkly, for instance--still, it's mostly light I'll remember. Everything seems great now, in retrospect, even the early allegorical films.

And Antonioni? No-one, I think, has better fit the dream of Malevich and Picasso and Mondrian to the space of the screen-projection, the dream of abstraction. That qualities might float from free from all substance, migrating somewhere else, somewhere better. That you could refound the world on a color, a shape, a sound, an itch. At the end of The Passenger, that anxious and yet solemn circling of the camera in the dust, so much more of a person than most of us ever get to be. Something sat down in the middle of the bourgeois world--an organ of non-communication, some call it spectacle-- and Antonioni took its picture.

But Antonioni lives on in Taiwan and Hong Kong and China, in the films of Hou-Hsou Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang and Wong-Kar Wai, Antonioni does. Where Bergman is I don't really know.

All the people I mention in this post who are not fictional are men. That's another part of it.

How to Not Think and Dominate People

2007-07-27T10:04:00.001-07:00

Over dinner last night, Tim Kreiner and I decided that the proper response to the Sarkozy government's remark that "the French think too much" would be a gesture of American solidarity in non-thought. We could immediately send Bush and the rest of his government to France as special envoys of not-thinking. He could head his own department of sophism, rhetorical misfire, and false commonsense. The new propaganda: a blank page. The new early warning system: 4'33''.

I think I know what "not thinking" means, a special kind of thinking too much, the thought of what is, of the status quo over and over, that complicity stitch. You see: as the baptism-gift of my class, I was given at birth a special certification in not-thinking: no alternatives, no discontent, no political solutions that involve doing things, just the non-thought of the market, the war, grinding away at bodies and lives. But for the fortunate classes, freedom from thought, from necessity! What glories: an underlit Ketamine lounge, where the placid, pacific sounds of TINA and the End of History gurgle away in the background .

Thought: current that leaps the distance between what is and what could be.

2007-07-24T12:32:00.002-07:00

Daddy, I'm going to turn you into a plant, and then you can't tell me what to do, and I'll keep you in the house and water you around your eyes.

Later:

Daddy, you are a toy! You can't tell me what to do. You are plastic! You are a sidewalk! You are a beard!

2007-07-24T12:32:00.001-07:00

Cogito 2.0: I think, therefore I'm spam.