Comments on: What’s a Political Poem For?

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 06:04:09 +0000

I’m not sure that there’s much contention to be had, aside from wondering out loud about the historical vicissitudes of what gets classed as aesthetic, what political. And how the entire question sounds differently in the context of identity understood as cultural representation, where it seems imperative to examine specific histories of constraint and capacity.
Under these conditions, an either/or might still sound better than a both/and.

By: john

john — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 01:32:31 +0000

Dear Jane (again),
You are right that “socio-biology” was the word I was looking for, and not finding. (Temporary aphasia, alas.) A case could be made, and I didn’t make it, for socio-biology-as-materialist worldview.
In any case, I regret my snotty reply. I didn’t actually expect you to reply to my sloppy verbiage, though I did wonder. My apologies.
Animals and culture: people have observed apes using tools and teaching the use of the tools to others. Obviously, homo sapiens (a typically conceited self-description!) can be distinguished from our fellow animals any number of ways, including our matchless capacity to wreak havoc on other species, a possible example of which, if memory serves, occasioned this whole discussion.

By: john

john — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:24:30 +0000

Dear Jane,
Thank you! I was expecting that you would respond to my joke with a tut-tut about my use of the word “materialism,” and you didn’t disappoint!
Just for the record: Animals do produce culture. Whale song, for example, is constantly evolving. Whale song within a species may differ according to geography. Humpback whales from one group may influence the song of humpbacks from a different group. The scientific consensus on the function of the song lacks certitude, but most scientists believe it to be a form of sexual display, and as the Coasters said, baby that is rock and roll.

By: jane

jane — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:24:38 +0000

Dear John,
not so much. Materialism and socio-biology are scarcely the same. One of them is silly. And “the animal world,” being distinguished form the human world in several rather easy ways (e.g., animals neither produce culture, nor extract surplus value from other animals), is exactly a measure of what not to measure for, in conversations such as this.
@Chris: I’m not sure I recognize the point of contention, if you allow that “aestheticizing” is something other than the present participle of thee verb form of “aesthetic.” “Aesthetics’ is a category; “aestheticizing” isn’t the activity proper to that category, but the reduction to that category. Yeah?

By: john

john — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:58:26 +0000

In a materialist view, in which culture is subsidiary to biology, Mallarme’s (& Jane’s) Aesthetics and Political Economy are subsets of the question, “Who’s getting laid?” In the animal world, “status and resources” are the words they use instead of Mallarme’s. Britney’s right. Grrr, indeed.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:31:56 +0000

Hmm. I take your points, Ange, Jane, and Jasper. A curious maneuver indeed to preface a post on inextricability and interarticulation by bracketing such an essential and complex term as the “aesthetic.” Although my response was primarily to Ange’s desire “to see political outrage from minorities over something with economic rather than symbolic ramifications,” or the contention that “identity politics isn’t politics.” One of my major concerns here is how movements for racial justice are misread as being “particularistic” because they are premised on a reductive notion of “identity”–that is “identity” as an isolated thing, a monad, rather than a power relationship that’s inseparable from the larger workings of the economy. One could say the same of feminism.
I’ve been struck by how much the online commentary, over the issue of gender inclusion in various poetry anthologies, has relied on arguments that are essentially identical to the kinds of twin charges one hears again and again leveled against ethnic literatures (as simultaneously too much of the same, “there are only negligible difference between cultures”…or what Bernstein called the “official space of cultural diversity,” and too divisive, evincing a deficient understanding of our “common culture”…or the liberal narrative of the traumatic fragmentation of the New Left).
As for the relationship between “identity” and the “aesthetic,” oy, perhaps this is an opportunity to take up a longstanding argument with Jane, not about the relationship between the two (which is, I’d agree, a given), but about the peculiar trajectories of the arts after a blanket call for the politicization of the aesthetic or for the aestheticization of the political.The latter being Walter B.’s surefire formula for fascist aesthetics, and the former, well, one could read the volatile and contentious interactions between various contemporary ethnic poetries and Language writing to see how the very terms of what constitutes a “dialectical” relationship are up for grabs.
The “aestheticization of the political” could be read as a moment of that institutional multicultural project, that endless parade of equally contingent particularities, where race morphs magically into ethnicity, into “culture.”
Not exactly a progressive development.

By: jane

jane — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:48:16 +0000

Dear Britney,
you want a piece of me
Jane

By: Britney

Britney — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:13:03 +0000

Dear Jane,
Do you talk like this in bed?
Yours,
Britney (Grrr)

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:56:33 +0000

Well, Jane’s with me, and I’m with Jasper, who’s also with Jane, so we agree pretty much.
My political/moral failings are on display in my newest post.

By: jane

jane — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:17:29 +0000

I’m with Ange; it’s actually not clear what it would even mean to “leave aside aesthetics” on a Poetry Foundation discussion board. However, including aesthetics in is a far different matter than isolating aesthetics as an independent category that can be debated, evaluated, championed without explicit reference to politics, or economics, et cetera. That is to say, they are mutually-informing (dare I say “dialectical”?) categories. The folks who fail to think this condition, and instead isolate any such categories from each other, end up looking silly:. This would be true equally of folks who reduce poetry to historical effectivity, and folks who think that aesthetic matters are independent of history, and have fixed values that can be deduced from a poem as some independent object.
Just as it would be absurd to leave aside aesthetics in this venue, it would similarly be comical to leave aside the political and economic on the wealthiest poetry discussion board in the history of the world, especially where some participants are being paid to participate, no? What was it that the great aesthete of modernity, that “art for art’s sake” guy, said? “Everything can be summed up in Aesthetics and Political Economy.”