Action Yes would seem to be a great online journal, given what I've had a chance to read so far. I've given a thorough skim to
Joshua Corey's typically thoughtful
essay on the possibilities of the Baroque for contemporary poetry (it deserves a more thorough reading, and will get it), and have scanned James Pate's intriguing
writing on Wittgenstein versus "body philosophers" as influences on poets (I'll also read that one with full attention).
The one I've read through more thoroughly is Jasper Bernes' "
On the Poverty of Internet Life: a Call for Poets," a great, relieving and sometimes frustrating critique of the depiction of the internet as a liberatory, democratizing non-space. Bernes runs very much against the grain here. Thank goodness. While I admit the unparalleled usefulness of the internet for many purposes, and certainly think it's done more good than bad for poetry, I'm thoroughly skeptical about the giddy postmodern glee so many express in relation to it.
I like Bernes' writing here. It's not just that I'm not particularly bothered by jargon and kind of attracted to polemics. What's compelling is the way Bernes deploys a lot of the same language often used to paint glowing pictures of the deterritorialized internet in order to make that picture look pretty ugly in a lot of ways. Here are a couple of bits that made me laugh:
In this, the funhouse mirror of the commodity, in which things appear to be more real than the social relations that produce them, in which commodities appear, in fact, to produce those relations—in this, the primary inversion of the commodity fetish that Marx described is itself inverted in the pseudo-emancipatory fetish of de-fetishization that is the user-generated internet. Opposed to relationships, here products and objects seem, in fact, the mere effluvia of an immense, acephalous process in which one futilely stakes out a section of the common and calls it “mine” or, more colloquially, “my shit.”
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.Great stuff--and these excerpts don't give a sufficient indication of the ethical drive of much of the essay, its committed seriousness about U.S.-backed murder and colonialism. Bernes' discussions of IDF tactics as perfectly Deleuzian is terrifying. I love Deleuze, and this gives me chills.
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It's when the discussion turns to poetry that I start to have some problems. Bernes claims that "American poetry is the cracked mirror of contemporary capitalism"--a familiar kind of statement about art as the reflection of society. It's been said a lot about the so-called 'so-called Language Poets"' (or SCSCLPs) who, the story goes, reflected in their early work the fragmented, postmodern, thoroughly commodified world they set out to critique. This story has always missed the constructivist side of the SCSCLPs' work--the astonishing variety of their literary production, the use of parataxis to produce new literary effects and new kinds of thinking in writing that, I'd claim, one certainly can't find "out there" in the sphere of consumer-capitalist consumption. The production of texts (like, I'd argue, Silliman's
Tjanting) that, through their arrangement of materials, make an analogy for the everyday synthesis of experience that dehabitualizes that synthesis, bringing it into conscious view--an invaluable political effect for a piece of writing to have.
Perhaps the all-too-familiar critiques of SCSCLP lean all-too-heavily on the early theoretical writings, and not enough on the actual poetry. But that's an argument that, with its holes, belongs in another place.
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Bernes' portrait of contemporary poetry as structured by the anxious Father, one "Son Realman," and by Oedipalized sons such as "Bomb Early," is all-too-familiar and none-too-true. The advantage of painting this portrait here is twofold: it makes explicit the situation that many poets (mostly poet-bloggers) enact without admitting it, and the situation itself is no less concretely effective among these poets for its unreality (just as the unreal value of money has very real effects). The problem with the portrait is that, while Realman may to some extent allow the power granted him to accrue, most of it is attributed by others (I've seen it happen over and over in Realman's comments box). Realman's authority as an arbiter of all things poetic is, in actuality, less weighty, worthy of fear, institutionally backed than the imaginary-symbolic figure the Bomb Earlies create in their attempted destruction of it. The anxiety lies not with the Realmans (who have little to gain or lose), but with the Earlies who go into conniptions every time the "school whose name cannot be spoken" is mentioned, each time an unapologetic pronouncement is made.
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Thoughts on section 7.2:
1) Bernes' general proposal for intervention by poets via work that isn't poetry
per se is a fine one ("an improvement of, or de-sterilization, or re-politicization of public language").
When one gets into the specifics of this, the problems become particularly difficult. By way of getting into a couple, I'd like to draw attention to a few distinct art-interventions in more or less recent times:
2) When I saw the film about the
Yes-Men, I was struck by the differences in efficacy between their projects. On the one hand, there are the various presentations they've made at corporate conferences and universities (pretending to be representatives of corporations or consulting firms). These generally involve taking what sounds like an innovative business proposal and pushing beyond the bounds of what the attendees would accept as believable or ethically viable (either by proposing an utterly ridiculous product or a truly horrifying process, like piping processed feces from western McDonalds restaurants to "third world" restaurants, where they'll be made into new sandwiches). I'll also put their tour as fake Bush campaigners, in which they blatantly proposed massive environmental devastation to the residents of various small towns, in this category. In almost all these cases, the audience made no objections whatsoever; the proposals were often met with applause.
On the other hand, the project in which one of the Yes-Men posed as a DOW chemical representative and apologized, on international news television, for the Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal back in the '70's, promising massive remuneration and environmental cleanup, was highly effective. It forced the actual DOW people to tell the world that they did not apologize, took no responsibility for the spill, and would make no such promises--in other words, they had to appear on international news and admit that they
were responsible and would do nothing about it.
3) When I was in Philadelphia for the protests around the 2000 Republican National Convention, I saw a Jenny Holzer project: sentences scrolling by on a board erected on a downtown street corner in front of a construction site. I'd seen and loved Holzer's work for years, but this context gave it an entirely new function. Her charged sentences about violence, ethics, money, value, sex, power, etc., some of which I'd seen in museum pieces and on a stone table at UCSD, took on
entirely different meanings in a large city where people were having their homes and meeting spaces infiltrated by the police, having equipment destroyed, being arrested and beaten in jail, blocking routes to the convention center, confronting local and national political figures and screwing up everyone's downtown shopping experiences. Holzer's sentences seemed to address this context
directly.
4) Hans Haacke, commissioned by a major museum in Germany, once undertook a project that involved making meticulous reproductions of the most famous works in the museum's collection, one copy for each previous owner of that painting. The caption for each copy detailed the owner's finances, social status, and how he or she acquired the work. These lists of dry facts revealed a lot about the owners, particularly the more recent ones: some acquired the paintings through associations with the Nazi party during their seizure of 'offending' works; some made the money required for the purchase through highly unethical business practices; some simply ripped off previous owners who couldn't afford not to make the deal.
5) As interventions, the first set of the Yes-Men's presentations failed (though they're hilarious, brilliant and troubling performances). Instead, they
revealed a problem. I'd argue that the audiences for the Yes-Men have been able to accept their proposals largely because they fit
formally with what's expected in the context of a conference or seminar. If they hadn't fit so well, the ruse would have been up, and the performers would have been driven from the stage--but the fit that allowed them to say whatever they wanted, as long as the form remained acceptable, prevented their content from having effects that were particularly distinct from those of the genuine presentations in such contexts.
If we're to alter or intervene in public language, we have (by definition) to do it in contexts in which that language appears. Given that, we need to find a way to build
surprise into the work, perhaps by choosing media that will get attention by its public nature, but using, within those media, kinds of language that shouldn't be there.
Kinds of language, not just amplified, distorted or mutated versions of the kind of language that 'belongs' in a given medium. At the same time, the degree of fit has to be engineered with regard to the specific medium. Media like caution tape (which Bernes proposes) might allow a certain degree of freedom with regard to this problem, since the set of kinds of language that belongs on caution tape is so small, and since people are used to seeing it but not absorbing it. The newspaper, on the other hand, is trickier; how to push past the point at which no-one will notice anything you've put in, without turning it into an obvious fake (like
The Onion)? How to avoid either too close a fit or too great a mismatch?
6) Speaking of
The Onion, there's the linked problem of irony. At this point, ironic methods ("Home Depot for President, for instance") are usually highly ineffective. Irony is so ubiquitous that everyone is used to it; it's the place where nearly everyone can feel at home. Almost no-one is made uncomfortable by
South Park. Irony would capitalize (for example) on the president's bumbling, whereas the truth is that the bumbling image has been historically encouraged in order to take attention away from the hideous truth (as when the CIA, sued by patients whose lives had been ruined by the agency-funded electroshock/sensory deprivation research in Canadian hospitals in the '50s, portrayed that project as a clumsy, misguided and failed attempt to learn something about 'Communist brainwashing' of POWs, rather than as intentional and highly successful research into the torture techniques now employed in Iraq, Guantanamo, etc.). This is not to say that irony has no place--just that there has to be something besides irony at work. Otherwise, one simply thickens the skin of the reader at best (a
sterilization of public language), or (at worst) contributes to the obfuscation of reality.
6) Holzer's kind of context-ready writing has more appeal for me. The problem might be that it's easily dismissable as art. Even in that Philadelphia context, I don't know if someone who wasn't interested in being affected by the work would have been.
7) The Haacke project, by contrast, places itself explicitly within the context of art, while linking art just as explicitly to the extra-aesthetic--and all this in a relatively public place, albeit one that only museum-goers would attend. It's an intervention within a smaller public sphere than that of Holzer's work or the Yes-Men's Bhopal apology.
8) All this points toward the notion (already there, more or less, in Bernes' essay), that the interventionist projects poets undertake need to be of a wide variety, in lots of different locations and media, taking place on different scales. Any general statement I've made here is bound to find exceptions in specific work, and there can be no all-encompassing prescription.
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One of the tragic aspects of post-9/11 activism is the loss of the variety, creativity, and vibrancy
(not to mention, in some cases, success) that characterized the anti-globalization work of the late 1990s. Since 2001, we've seen a disappearance of that 'de-issuization,' the linking of many interests, concerns, strategies, and have instead been left with a pale shadow of the same old protest tactics, the speeches, signs and chants. In Philadelphia 2000, we had clowns, goatheaded bicyclists performing elaborate raps, puppets (those that weren't destroyed by the cops). In LA that year there were environmental activists in frog costumes, clown cops, poets, the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore). This wasn't just a colorful pageantry--it was a way of reaching out into a great variety of modes of public discourse, attitudes, interests. I miss it, and think we need it. Activism needs art, as it always has--but now more than ever. Bernes skewers the comforted flight of this kind of variety onto the 'net, and asks us to put it back into material society.
Labels: ActionYes, Jasper Bernes
