Comments on: In Barry Bonds I See The Future of Poetry

By: Kenneth Goldsmith « The Rabelaisian Web

Kenneth Goldsmith « The Rabelaisian Web — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:17:36 +0000

[...] In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry, Kenneth Goldsmith http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/08/in-barry-bonds-i-see-the-future-of-poetry/ [...]

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:16:26 +0000

Man, dudes so serious. I miss Kenny.

By: E. Bruce-Jones

E. Bruce-Jones — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:44:19 +0000

Mr. Goldsmith’s post was dangerous, and this discussion is very important. I stumbled on this discussion by chance, please excuse if this sounds pedantic, since I don’t know you, Mr. Goldsmith.
What Mr. Goldsmith aims to point out may be about poetry, maybe the omission of Duchamp, maybe the aspiration to transcend an aesthetic form of humanism. But as poets, we have to be willing to look critically at the choices we make, the images we choose to broadcast, and the world we create with those images. The original post ondoes (in advance) what posthumanism aspires to do, making posthumanism itself (ironically) a simulacrum.
Mr. Goldsmith demonstrates two things:
1. The posthuman subject is white. First, the message about theory gets lost when its aesthetic of it is washed out with dirty water; the image of Barry as maniacal (see Toni above) and the roboticization narrative do more to, as Micheaux (above) phrases, DEhumanize Bonds than it does to POSThumanize him. These renditions of Blackness are not new or benign–they are steeped in modern discourses on race–nor are they applicable with the same degree of saliency in the American imagination to everyone, particularly not to our white brethren. We don’t need details, we know the examples, and we know that a maniacal image of a white person is taken to represent an exception rather than the rule. Said differently, De-(again, not post)humanizing images like the one painted of Barry trick the careless reader into believing that we’ve already slipped into having this discussion from within a universalist utopia, instead of one where white is the universal, the only subject of posthumanism. In order to get to a discussion on posthumanism, we have to first survive the legacy of humanism. And to be able to imagine having already survived humanism, we have to be extremely careful about the aesthetic worlds we create as entry points. It can not be Barry Bonds.
2. Technology facilitates oppression. Let me explain. Posthumanism is a continental European philosophy of the technocratic way of looking at life, humans. It is, among other things, a strategic attempt to erase and exhonorate other flawed European taxonomies of life. To be swept by an inevitable flow from somewhere inside our humanity to a place beyond it. The strategy to erase and exonerate ideologies of oppression born out of European Enlightenment is part of the content, defining the flaw. We can not be posthuman robots transcending through technology that is itself enabled and structured by racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, etc. Foucault uses the term “technology” to express how institutions enable certain ideologies of power and thus narratives of authenticity around having access to “the truth”. Scientific advancement is immersed in racist (and other –ist) epistemologies. The dirty secret delight that some see in Bonds winning—is that because he is a robot or is it because we control the robot that we’ve made him? What other robots do “we” enjoy seeing win? Tiger woods when he’s in a zone? Probably not menacing enough. And we don’t “dismiss him as a fraud.” The Barry Bonds phenomenon is not because of his phenomenal baseball skills alone. His performance is a total picture, a racialized picture of contemporary humanism doing what it does best—allowing a bit of biological determinism in through the window.

By: Richard Villar

Richard Villar — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:35:46 +0000

That would be interesting insight, G, but it actually wasn’t Patricia Smith who made this post. It was Kenneth Goldsmith.

By: Dr. G

Dr. G — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:16:45 +0000

I think Ms. Patricia Smith’s commentary about the potential posthuman future is a brilliant warning to us all. I disagree that it must be accepted. More and more I am beginning to unsee some of what passes as normal for U.S. insular contemporary American poetry. A poem like Allen Ginsberg’s “The Lion For Real” recently blew me away when I read it for the first time, and I bet it will blow people away years from now. Many posthuman highly technical poets hopefully will not matter.
If Ms. Smith is that Boston-based slam poet, than I remember her well when I lived in Boston in 1991, 1992 and saw her perform her poetry as an amazing actress (and once lost to her). That performance I recall was human and humanist to the core. In contrast this steroid-laden, machine-wearing posthuman future that Barry Bonds and others represent need not be embraced. If obscurity to the machine’s media and awards is the price, I’d say not a bad price to pay. To put it in baseball terms, be Derek Jeter, not Barry Bonds.
As some have pointed out, this posthuman machine future has been long in coming, and John Ruskin described capitalism as attempting to make people into “animated tools.”
For instance I just read Theordore Roethke’s “Highway: Michigan” poem written in the 1930s from his “Collected Poems”; it might as well describe today. Here are the first two stanzas:
Here from the field’s edge we survey
The progress of the jaded. Mile
On mile of traffic from the town
Rides by, for at the end of day
The time of workers is their own.
They jockey for position on
The strip reserved for passing only.
The drivers from production lines
Hold to advantage dearly won.
They toy with death and traffic fines.

By: tom meacham

tom meacham — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:41:14 +0000

What Mr. Goldsmith is saying is very simple, poets who choose to ignore the advent of Duchamp are doomed to mediocrity. Duchamp brought with him post-modern self awareness and to deny it as opposed to working through it or with it is to pretend to be living in the 19th century.

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:17:09 +0000

I am still mystfied about what this blog has to do with poetry or literature or language or humanity or truth or beauty. Take your pick, it’s just typing. Like someone speaking into a tube that loops around to their own ear. Fiction or prose has gone from metafiction to medifiction in the sense of medicated dissociation and so has poetry. Why hasn’t the L=A=L=A poet done some mathematical wordplay with: Prozac (prose) and the symtom of aprosodia and language cognition and the idea of poetry and POETRY and the Lilly gift. Fertile ground for something really interesting. Did Ruth Lilly have some sort of vision that poetry could be the spiritual corrective from the insanity of her uncle’s invention?
THE ADDICT
Sleepmonger,
deathmonger,
with capsules in my palms each night,
eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles
I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.
I’m the queen of this condition.
I’m an expert on making the trip
and now they say I’m an addict.
Now they ask why.
WHY!
Don’t they know that I promised to die!
I’m keeping in practice.
I’m merely staying in shape.
The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I’m on a diet from death.
Yes, I admit
it has gotten to be a bit of a habit-
blows eight at a time, socked in the eye,
hauled away by the pink, the orange,
the green and the white goodnights.
I’m becoming something of a chemical
mixture.
that’s it!
My supply
of tablets
has got to last for years and years.
I like them more than I like me.
It’s a kind of marriage.
It’s a kind of war where I plant bombs inside
of myself.
Yes
I try
to kill myself in small amounts,
an innocuous occupation.
Actually I’m hung up on it.
But remember I don’t make too much noise.
And frankly no one has to lug me out
and I don’t stand there in my winding sheet.
I’m a little buttercup in my yellow nightie
eating my eight loaves in a row
and in a certain order as in
the laying on of hands
or the black sacrament.
It’s a ceremony
but like any other sport
it’s full of rules.
It’s like a musical tennis match where
my mouth keeps catching the ball.
Then I lie on; my altar
elevated by the eight chemical kisses.
What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum-
Now I’m borrowed.
Now I’m numb.
ANNE SEXTON

By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:06:38 +0000

It is pointless to bash or defend Barry Bonds as an athlete or a baseball player, at least in this forum, because this conversation isn’t really about sports.
Mr. Goldsmith, if your post isn’t sarcastic or racist, then it is at the very least behind the times (ironically enough). Chemically enhanced, you say? Moving awkwardly, festooned with machines? Cameras following his every move, immune to criticism? Then where within this rubric is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? For that matter, where’s Mark McGwire? I’d say you missed the boat by quite a wide margin.
I second the thoughts of Mr. Micheaux. I would add that if THIS is the avant-garde future, where a black public figure in the United States is held up by an academic as some sort of superhuman, steroid-juiced machine (in much the same way that slaves were prized for broad backs and stong shoulders), then I’m content to find myself another way forward.

By: Albert Min

Albert Min — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:41:58 +0000

I’m in agreement with Dante Micheaux. Nothing against the notion of the Posthuman, but this is definitely the wrong approach. So says Adorno, “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.”

By: Brian Gilmore

Brian Gilmore — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:19:42 +0000

Bonds is, indeed, human, but I urge everyone to read “Game of Shadows,” (only a few chapter will suffice), you will probably come to realize that his version of human is so flawed and absurd, he is not worthy of anyone’s defense. You will know that this one is going to play out (and it will) and it is going to be sad and ugly, folks, I assure you, it always ends up badly. I do hope his health holds up because history says it won’t; steroids is a mutha on your body. It is package deal, everyone knows that, but for the fleeting glory they seek, the athlete takes the chance that it won’t get them. That they are one that will escape its nasty course on the body. His hair has fallen out, and he has other issues but I hope he is able to get around it. And lets hope he doesn’t go out of his mind. The good thing is, he has lots of money, but I wish him well even though I think the bad place he is in now, is lonely and pathetic.