Not such a spectral engagement: Charles Bernstein discusses poetics and OWS at Jacket2

You might want to drop that and head over to Jacket2, where Charles Bernstein and Jane Malcolm talk comprehensively about Occupy Wall Street, poetics, the truth, and what started as a "spectral" engagement on Bernstein's part, only to become a more direct understanding. As Bernstein says about midway through the conversation:

There is a direct relation between OWS and a poetics that sees the representation of reality as always at stake when we use language, that insists on creating our own frames rather than translating our intuitions, aspirations, and demands into the tabloid commodities or Democratic National Committee talking points. But, as you insist on asking, who is this we? What cover does it provide?

Much of the content surround the famous protest slogan, "You can't evict an idea," to which Bernstein adds, "The more you evict, the more it convicts." He also writes, later: "You can't evict an idea. Then again, of course you can, as various sharp-witted friends have duly noted: it happens every time the victors tell the tale. But you can't stop me for saying you can't. And in saying that, against all odds, well it's a kind of poetry."

Cut off its head, more heads grow in its place. But this is all "in theory," which is why it works symbolically, at least for now (since it remains to be seen how any of this will look in a week, or month, or year). The amorphousness also accounts for the ability of different groups to identify with OWS, to see their (our) problems on display. Young people with uncertain economic futures, many unemployed, certainly connect at a visceral level with the mottoes and the primary participants. Labor unions see this as "our" issue. Last night (11/18) on New York 1, I watched a group of astute but complacent New York Times commentators focus primarily on the bad treatment of the press during the Zuccotti Park eviction; the treatment of the demonstrators or the economic inequality they decry was hardly mentioned, but they were outraged that their prerogatives as journalists were abrogated. And this is true, in our own way, of poets. OWS is not about poetry, but poets can project on to the literary coattails: the anthologies, the seemingly poetic "people's microphone" (the seemingly poetic "people's microphone"), the plight of the books ... as if these were key parts of the project. "We" are doing this now ourselves.

Back to poetics. Jane Malcolm asks rather beautiful and apt questions:

JM: I'm intrigued that you describe your role in OWS are "speculative, supportive, but somewhat spectral" (and not just by the alliteration) because each of these words evokes a certain hesitancy, but also they suggest that you are concerned with the distance between the observer and the object of scrutiny, the interplay between proximity and remoteness, perhaps? I was thinking, too, about ironic distance, and that the political stakes of the movement make it very difficult for us to be ironic observers. Irony, though, is so integral to your work, so I really appreciate that you make the distinction between that work and the organization of the movement by non-poets or poets with their citizen hats on. (Of course now there have been so many hilariously ironic commentaries—I’m thinking especially of the various *masterpieces of western art* that have been reinterpreted as “the pepper spraying incident.”) Since Occupy is about inhabiting a space--a time-space, and a space of the mind--I wondered if you think of your role as poet or critic or person of/in but especially *around* the movement as necessarily liminal, by which I mean is it perhaps the role of "unbridled thought" to occupy the space between the movement and the rest of the world, to narrate it neither from within or without, but somehow around? And is it this distance that maintains (I was going to say "polices," but then thought better of it) the distinction between the poetics and the poetry?

They then discuss Robert Hass's editorial in the NYT, campus demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, and income inequality. Malcolm here says:

It occurs to me that the “difficulty” of “facing, representing, acknowledging the poor” is a (quite Baudelairean) way of describing the troubled relationship between subject and object, full stop. And, as you have repeatedly suggested, the artfulness of that representation cannot really be the issue when the human stakes are so high, so Emersonian. I actually have been feeling a strong disconnect between the desire to intellectualize Occupy and the desire to experience it—though perhaps they are one and the same, in the end. Whether or not we are on the front lines doesn’t change the fact, the crisis, of extreme inequality.

Read more--on the eviction of poets from Plato's Republic and that of OWS from Zuccotti Park, Bernstein's use of irony, utopias, the need for reason in such a news cycle, higher education and UC Davis, and much else food for thought--here. Photo from Reckon.