News from the University of British Petroleum

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 . . .

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.”