Comments on: Late Review 03

By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:19:33 +0000

Christian,
(To follow on from the discussion here) in your post you seem to argue (that the work under review argues) that “meaning” is the main part of what allows a poem to be commodified and that not making sense automatically becomes a way of resisting capital. While this seems to make sense on first blush, a little further thinking makes me feel that it completely misses the point as a thesis, that it’s as disastrously wrong as the notion, eerily echoed in both early 1980s langpo and new formalist formulations and regurgitated from time to time even today, that naively misses the distinction between the internal structure of forms and their usage / context (the sonnet as being somehow inherently regressive or traditional etc).
Such a class of thesis seems wrong both on a philosophical basis (because it valorises the internal economy of a poem while ignoring the actual circumstances of its circulation, use, and context) and wrong as an act of hubris–since it appears to claim that these piddly poems are actually going to make a dent in capitalism, rather than get absorbed into its capacious funhouse.
Isn’t it rather that the surplus of meaning in a poem is finally what possibly allows it to resist commodification, that the very first act of commodifying a poem is to detach and make irrelevant the question of its meaning and market it simply as the product of a valorised author and, indeed, as required reading because it is the product of a “movement”, ie. brand? Isn’t the attempt to clutch at marxist straws in the book’s epigraph the very attempt to hold on to some kind of meaning, to stabilise the work’s supposed purpose and duty in the world? I have read too little flarf to comment on who might be its good or bad practitioners, but I’m not convinced by its own, somewhat dubious, theoretical self-hagiography. “Flarf” does sound very much like a brand name to me, and the delicious irony that a kind of window dressing of marxist theory in epigraphs is used to fetishise the poem-commodity and then sell it– just goes to show you how resilient capitalism really is. But then perhaps the author here is more intent on failing at rebellion than actually succeeding?

By: david chirot

david chirot — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:13:12 +0000

“A usual, the only symptons were in the language.”–Pier Paulo Pasolini
Many thanks for a really interesting review Christian. A lot of times when i see flarf al i can think of is “marshmallow fluff” as it brings back memories of i think it was second grade when we had little projects like cutting up the weekly reader and making our own “stories” from the words and phrases.
What would emerge often revealed many things which today would be reason for sending little boy Z and little girl A to the office, the psychologist and maybe even get homeland security involved, but in those days was just clean fun.
But i have yet to see a really “explosive” kind of poetry emerge fro this manner of going about things, which curiously smacks not so much of “overtime” as “free time” as they called it in second grade.
This analogy doesn’t mean i equate Flarf with chilidshness at all, as i know the poets are “deadly serious.,” and I don’t mean any disrespect.
I think it saddnes me, because now persons find “deadly serious” things that one was doing a a child as an assignment. And having done that assignment–it opened a great many things for good in relation with language, which made on wonder why it was tht people had not noticed al their lives how much of language is al about control, dominination, exploitation, deceit and bullshitting one out of anything it can take?
Very early one learns the groovy person who offers al sorts of goodies that the “Man” wont’ allow you to have–is just as corrupt and manipulative as the “Man.”
In fact, that groovy person usually is the next “Man” or one of his cohorts.
What’s sad is that so many things that are “signs taken for wonders” are just that, signs, which in turn are the symptons Pasolini notes, of a an ongoing reduction of the ways in which language is being allowed or allowing itself to function.
“It’s just my imagination/run away with me” as the songs says.
I’ve grown increasingly interested in considering writing from a more literal “avant-garde” approach which is that of the military, which after al is where th term came, and with which the first self professed modern avant-garde, Italian Futurism, allied itself with.
The interconnections among the terms employed by the military and those abounding in Melanie Klein’s The Shcck Doctrine have led me to investigating what i call sometimes “the new extreme experimental american poetry” i which what one is finding are the symptons in language of fascism of the corporate-military-State kind.
For example, to what degree does the kind of anomie and mutated acedia you describe among younger poets bear a resemblance to the following:
“Called the Sentient World Simulation, the program uses AI routines based upon the psychological theories of Marty Seligman, among others. (Seligman introduced the theory of “learned helplessness” in the 1960s, after shocking beagles until they cowered, urinating, on the bottom of their cages.)”
While flarf purports by using the language that it does to be a crttiqiue of it, is it not possible that it is rather its reflection?
Or really just a kind of “service sector” helping to make more palatable the daily grind and endlss passage in front of one of words which are–words–of which one becomes afraid because their passage is augering death?
In some ways flarf might be thought of as a desperate attempt to resusciitate meaning from the barrage of noise of words with which one is continually assaulted electronically and in very other possible way.
It may be timid about this, but then that is part of “learned helplessness,” is it not?
Flarf might then be actually a form of nostalgia and what Freud called “the work of mourning.”
I think in the Language Movement there is a strong reactionary element in that what it is really about is the displacement of one system of primarily instittutional writing with its attendant theories, reviews, critiques, anthologies, histories, commentaries, canon heirarchy, stars, satelites, allies, off shoots and off spring and so forth–by another. That is, it is a way in which one particular mode of resurrecting Formalism after the demise of new criticism was put into operation, by using a different “diction” than had the previous one.
Basically the construction of a new bureaucracy within the shell of the old to paraphrase the IWW slogan.
As much as possible of the “radicalisms” of the recent past and the au courant in terms of models to cite as influences were cherry picked in order to create what “appears to be” a leftist leaning program with an agenda be fitting a nostalgia for perhaps not the Bolsheviks so much but Trotsky.
As Lampedusa wrote, “To change everything so that nothing is changed.”
The good thing about is that it expanded the “canon” and anthologies to include a great deal of Modernisms outside of the USA which had hitherto been neglected by the American tendency to isolation,. On the other hand, this has also often been accomplished with the usual American flair for reducing things to a different denominator so that they may in effect be considered as the works, really, of those Americans who appropriated them for inclusion into the fold.
A drive towards reductivism operates with efficiency, cleanliness, and in a post modernized version of the old Fordist systems of the assembly lines., which falling on hard times are redone as new forms of the service sector, and, in this reduced position, de-unionized as it were and both more narrowly confined in outlook and more dependent than ever on the sytem in which they are operating as an “alternative” channel on the basic menu of types of songs or poetries one may select from.
In this situation, the fear becomes of rocking the system too roughly, and so one becomes more cautious, conservative and complicit all the time.
The reductivist method which Orwell predicts and outlines in the sections at the back of 1984 on language, allow for the realms of “choice” to be able to appear “open,” while in fact they are tightly controlled.
By vanishing words and terms and forms, by banishing others to gulags and reducing yet others to yes/no types of response, it becomes ever easier to control what is considered possible and contain whatever is considered to be “oppostional” in terms beyond those narrowly defined.
More and more, words mean the opposite of what they on the surface are still thought to say.
The meanings which are produced as actions are usually the oppossite of what the purported dictionary meaning or assigned-bya-group meaning is “assumed” to “mean.”
The basic function of language becomes more and more at the service of disinformation and the dessemination of a narrow bandwidth of approved ideas, conceptions, dictions, modes of address and the like.
So many aspects of language centered writing and others considered “oppostional” or “radical” and “innovative” may be so in terms of form, (but even there in only very narrow ways–) but in terms of any form of questioning of the system in which they exist, there is never any doubt but they are a fully functioning and contributing part of it.
The primary objective is to form new “Authorities” whose work basically, being by “Authorities” is part and parcel of an Authoritarian system.
The manner in which persons will accept almost anything one of the “Authorities” in any area of the society and its culture says is breath taking in its Pavlovian performance.
The real “triumph” i think of flarf and language centered writing is in the ability to play the game with a much more organized and network aided and ever better connected set of supporters.
It functions as a new form of maintaining a certain “class” status for poetry, at once elite and powerful –or “marginal” as it prefers to be described–within its realm, and at the same time at the service of the system.
I is a way of constructing a copy of what it opposes, by often simply using an “exchange of words,” that is, to find for each word its opposite, so that the opponent may know that what one is really doing is not “opposing them,” but “supporting them, ” while providing a “healthy alternative” for the young.
It is perhaps also a way of –again nostalgia–hanging on to the allure of one’s fading youth, in thinking of oneself as in “opposition” still to the system for which one has worked a lifetime?
The real accomplishment then is to create a manner in which one may become allowed to accept one’s situation perhaps–? and at the same time find it as a means to a career, access to possible power, prestige and the other perks of the system, within the confines in which one has chosen to work?
I don’t pretend to know the answers remotely–
yet often i feel in much that i read a kind of retreat from the world into a realm not unlike that which Karl Rove described: “We create reality–” simply because one is part of American Imperialism.
There often seems to be no questioning of this, at all either.
For being part of the system means that one is part of the mass murder and torture going on, the scrapping of the Constitution, the removal of ever more rights, the belief in the deceits around one even when turning them into poems–
Because in a sense, has not one already surrendered–quite some time ago?
And so one finds that flarf and language have made and wil continue to make a steady progress within their spheres which constitute the system as it is.
They are part of an official landscape–
And so constitute a means towards an advancement within officialdom–
Which for a great many poets throughout history has been a role they have chosen to play–

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:01:36 +0000

Thanks for the concession on the point, Christian. I will try to temper my propensity toward pedantry–though in that last post it was proffered with a smile. And you may well know the minutiae of Capital better than I: it’s not like I didn’t have to go back to that section to double-check…
Again, though, on your comments above, I don’t have any misgivings whatsoever about deploying Marxist diction in talking about matters pertaining to the *sociology* of the poetic field. Bourdieu is the man, as far as I’m concerned, for helping us to figure what the hell has happened to the “avant-garde” in our moment. I wish some of the younger poets would pay more attention to him than they do to certain fashion names-of-the-moment, the more or less unrepentant Stalinist Badiou, for example (though I favor Badiou’s rapturous enthusiasms for Pessoa), or the now-clearly deranged Zizek.
So the issues you raise above I would see as sociological ones, and certainly worth attention. I am very interested in the problem of copyright, myself, its history and implications. And in terms of Flarf, which you mention again, I am very interested in the why’s of how their plagiarizing aesthetic gets insistently dressed up in vestments of private-property Authorship designed and cut in the haberdashery of capitalist Copyright. How interesting it is (well, at least to me) that a poem by Kasey Silem Mohammad is a poem by Kasey Silem Mohammad in the same way that a poem by Mary Oliver is a poem by Mary Oliver… Two sides of the coin, one might say, good for buying what you need at the Campus bookstore. On which, seriously, see my last comment where I mention cash bars at the AWP.
No, I think you raise an interesting question with this copyright issue. Do you really think we are likely, in poetry, to deal with it, without also dealing with the ways so-called experimental poetry has completely bought into the ideology of the Author Function? I am, myself, amazed (though in other ways I suppose I’m not) that more people don’t seem to think the question of authorship is relevant nowadays. The circulation of cultural capital–its appropriations and its investments, the marketing of its brands and the status of its stock–flows from the mode and relations of its ownership and production.
And that’s why we now have Language Poets in Endowed Chairs in the Ivy League, still pretending they are challenging the culture.
Kent

By: Christian Bök

Christian Bök — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:19:08 +0000

Hello, Kent:
Thanks again for further refining the context of the quote by Marx (and let me simply concede, in order to avoid further pedantry, that I do requote the epigraph without adequately qualifying the terms for its use in the book by Fitzpatrick…).
I do not, however, understand your misgivings about the deployment of Marxist diction (by me, or by the Language Movement) in order to discuss the “dynamics of poetic language”—particularly when capitalists now argue for “intellectual property rights,” whose onerous notions of “copyright” might make acts of aesthetic plagiarism all the more thorny for a Flarfer like Fitzpatrick (or even an Ububoy like Goldsmith) who might “steal” the raw materials for their work from a digital commons. I think that, in a world of such freely traded data, all of us recognize that even our “lyrical moments” in the leisurely production, if not the leisurely consumption, of such information also constitute an untapped element of profit (hence, the attempt, for example, by the record labels to “protect” the surplus values of music via malware and lawsuit—not to mention the attempt by hosts of creative, personal websites to turn our own user-info into marketing databases). I think that, under such circumstances, we might feel justified in borrowing some Marxist diction in order to make speculations about the degree to which poetic “meaning” for us results in poetic (if not fiscal) “payoffs” for others….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:48:44 +0000

Hi Christian,
Actually (sorry), that’s not a “lowly laborer” who is quoted by the inspector Marx is quoting, but a propertied tradesman, a craft-shop owner of some kind (”a highly respectable master”), who is referring, disapprovingly, to the working-day regulations of the Factory Act and talking about how much more he could pocket if he were allowed to work his laborers just ten more minutes a day. How’s *that* for pedantic?
I had to read Capital, too, though not for my doctoral dissertation, which I completely plagiarized from early-phase Langpo theory (they were still obscure, so no one noticed; god, I hope no one ever checks the microfilm!). No, I read Capital (a bitch) as a lowly provisional member of the Socialist Workers Party in Milwaukee–the local Central Committee wouldn’t let me drop out of college and go do trade union work on the railroad before I passed the test about it! Well, then I got the crap beat out of me, twice (once by Larouche fascists, once by fellow workers), trying to sell copies of The Militant after work, so a lot of good that did.
OK, glad I now know you know the passage from Chapter 10 in question, but I couldn’t tell from what you’d said that you really did. But that wasn’t so much my concern, Christian: I was more concerned, rather, by the North-of-Intention-like suggestions of your conclusion: that the “discursive economy’s” exploitation of “meaning moments” in poetry may somehow be credibly equated with the capitalist economy’s appropriation of absolute surplus value, and that such equation is allegorically implicit in Marx–implicit, even, in his econometric study of… overtime!
And now I am even *more* concerned, because you’ve confirmed, if I am reading you right, and whether or not the claim is just part of a “review,” that you really do think it can be.
Don’t think I have anything against Marxism: I’m all for employing it to talk about the sociological dynamics of the poetry field–as a tool, for example, in trying to better understand why the so-called avant-garde now has its own cash bars at the MLA and AWP. But using economic categories from Capital, as you are here, to talk about the dynamics of *poetic language* is a bit like using equations from a manual on thermodynamics to figure out the paradoxes of love.
My thanks for the kudos regarding my comment on Flarf, a minor, decadent, petit-bourgeois late-capitalist phenomenon that Marx alludes to sarcastically, as you surely know, in the Grundrisse.
And none of which, I’ll say, is to take anything away from Eunoia, which is really quite an amazing work…
Kent

By: Christian Bök

Christian Bök — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:28:04 +0000

Uh, Kent—I had to read Capital for my doctoral training in theory, and you may be missing the point that Marx cites the report because the tradesman so aptly sums up the thesis of Marx himself, who demonstrates that even the lowliest labourer knows the power of the truism, “time is money” (particularly when overtime encroaches upon freetime, thereby preventing labourers from recuperating their earning-ability through rest)—and hence Marx notes that, according to the logic of trade, both the working classes and the capital classes have an equal right to protect the value of their time by extracting as much worth as possible from both its expenditure and its consumption: “there is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges”—and “between equal rights force decides.” While I can understand your concern that I might have given abrupt shrift to the context of the epigraph, your quibbling seems tiresome and pedantic, given that I am only writing a set of cursory reviews, not an extended, doctoral treatise, and I am doing little more than summarizing the way that Fitzpatrick himself has appropriated the original citation in order to make his own sarcastic complaint about the value of “lyrical moments” in modern poetry.
Your quibbling aside, I like your idea that Marx is actually a member of Flarf, avant la lettre….

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:13:33 +0000

I’d remarked above (in questioning Christian Bok’s recycling of early-Langpo theory regarding “meaning” as a form of surplus value) that the attitude expressed by the shop owner Marx cites, via the Factory Inspector’s report, was “anachronistic.”
That was a poor choice of word. The attitude in the citation speaks to a form of accumulation Marx did regard as “primitive” vis-a-vis the “relative” exploitation of labor he picks up on a few pages later in Capital, but it was certainly very much an attitude and practice of the day. As it still is, if in more “sophisticated” forms.
This is quite secondary to my main point, of course, which is that post-avant poets (Bok is only one example) might do well to cool it a bit with the fashionable, paint-by-numbers application of Marxist categories to poetic and linguistic categories. THAT is really beginning to take on the odor of the anachronistic. And with the aging guard of Language still around, struggling still to figure out exactly who they poetically are, and no doubt mortified by their Reference-as-Commodity-Fetishism origins, it’s bad form…
Not that Marx is irrelevant, and far from it…
But I just thought I’d point out my misleading phrasing in the prior post.
Kent

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:18:12 +0000

Christian Bok said:
>Fitzpatrick in his epigraph cites Karl Marx, who argues that “[m]oments are the elements of profit”
There’s an interesting doubled, or tripled (quadrupled?) irony haunting this “quote” Bok authoritatively claims to be Marx’s (i.e., something Marx “argues”), as it’s actually from a passage where Marx is quoting the chief Inspector of English Factories, who is quoting, in turn, a traditional tradesman he interviews during his research rounds for the Factories Regulations Act report of 1859.
There must be a less tortured way of putting the above, but anyway, what Marx in fact *argues* in this section of Capital–or so I recall from my distant 4th International days–is that the “absolute” extraction of surplus value via overtime is, in his phrase (*and as illustrated in the anachronistic attitude of the tradesman*), a primitive form of exploitation compared to the “relative” extraction of surplus value via mechanization.
(There must be a less tortured way of putting the above there, too, sorry.)
In any case, this bit of arcana would have not a whit of importance were it not that Bok had more or less premised his “Marxist” analysis on a citation whose original context and *meaning* he appears to be ignorant of. And this perhaps calls into question, just a bit, the relevance and authority of his rather abstract argument regarding Profit’s relation to the literary sphere. Or perhaps–though this is just off the top of my head–it suggests other things about cultural profit and some of the forms of its accumulation in our current poetic moment…
If “meaning” under capitalism, as Bok portentously intones, “constitutes a desired (i.e., exploitative) surplus,” and if it is true that “poetry must not record such ‘meaningful moments’ so much as upturn their ‘discursive economy,’” it might be good, before plumping for Marx and poaching him in avant polemic, to read the old-fashioned rationalist with a bit more care.
Or maybe fogeys like me are behind the curve and Bok, with his cut and paste dialectics, is making a more subtle point: Even Marx was a flarf poet and didn’t know it.
Kent

By: ryan

ryan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:50:39 +0000

Thanks for the review, Christian!