A Quick Correction, & A Nice Note & A "Yes" Sensation Reading It

I hope he doesn't mind me reproducing it here from the comments section of the blog, but Andy Gricevich of Cannot Exist, and of many things, not least, "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving," offered up a correction (below) to my post (below) about "Great Hymn."  

I did, in fact, make it sound like Andy alone invented this piece, while it was actually spearheaded (did not know this) by Nonsense Company's Rick Burkhardt, then figured out as an ensemble, i.e., by the three artists.  My apologies.  Hard to keep up with who in Nonsense is spearheading what, as the group works so tightly together.

And Andy, I think, is spot-on regarding Flarf & Nada Gordon's work.  Reason why I (not speaking for Andy here, as I don't know his thoughts on the matter other than the below) don't take up Flarf on this blog is precisely because a lot of it does not interest me (activate me either negatively or positively), and as "movement" "it" seems too contiguous with a lot of ways poets cull, dig up, reshape, and appropriate language in order for me to write more generally to the phenomenon--other than to point out from a distance that some of its parodic-Dada reenactments seem to rub problematically against a sort of false conciousness, yet that there is, as many poets working now will agree, a lot to work with, and a great deal of urgency in examining, webspeak, the google era, from questions about how language has been reshaped to how reliance on corporate platforms might or might not compromise/complicate our ability to communicate with one another.  And yet I have written on Nada Gordon & Kasey Mohammed's work for the same reason (I think) that Andy highlights below: their work, as individual poets and critics, interests me. Not to say they are both all Flarf, either, or to lump them together, but for want of time now: Both have a lot to contribute to poetry & poetics.  In fact, Charles Bernstein said same when we met up here at Evergreen last week, both of us curious as to how, in long run, Kasey's sonnets & Nada's earlier poets theater, will be situated, written on, etc as writers have increasingly focused on identifying them with "Flarf" more than their more diverse bodies of work should probably call for.  I haven't seen any of Nada's work live (the theater pieces, that is, which are several years ago & no longer performed, I think?), but have read Kasey's sonnets, & have dug them since seeing the first couple roll out.  My partner (tho teaching newer stuff on performance & performativity now) is originally--like Kasey--a Shakespeare scholar.  So, we've discussed this work quite a bit, the two of us.  The background, plus a whit & a good ear, mix well here.  So how will these works be positioned in future?  Anyway:

Speaking of good ears, from Andy (wish I could write on the fly like that):

David--

A quick note (I'm at work, which is where I have e-access these days).

Thanks so much for this!

One little correction: I didn't write "Great Hymn;" it's by Rick Burkhardt (though I was intimately involved in the piece's composition as a discoverer of sounds and gleeful guinea pig--and the piece in performance, though exact with regard to the precise instructions of the score, has certainly been shaped by the work the two of us and Ryan Higgins have done as an ensemble--lots of practice in elaborate group speech and instrumental techniques, work on plays that informs the theatrical aspect of the performance, etc.).

Indeed, the link probably doesn't give a great picture of the piece--we've found it maddeningly difficult to record adequately. However, there's a film in the works that's going to look and sound great. Since the piece is in retirement for the moment, that will allow people to see it.

I'd meant to respond at length to Nada's post, and have thought about it regularly since reading it. It's stuck with me precisely because I find her to be the most interesting and thoughtful of Flarfists (most Flarf, I have to admit, fails to excite or even offend me--and I have a particular problem with what I see as uncritical acceptance of irony). If I ever get around to blogging again, I'll write about that.

oof--I wanted to write something about political art here, but have to run back to the circ desk!

all the best,

Andy

Bush-Era's Wittgenstein &...

Since Thom brings up Kocik (post below), here's a short excerpt of an essay on quietism & value neutrality in the age of Bush, as juxtaposed to the multi-directional but referential work in Wittgenstein, Ranciere, and Kocik.  The essays are writing thru the question (or filter): how has art and criticism--aesthetics--played out in the era of Bush?  I'm toying with the idea of titling the book "Necrophiliology," but this implies that most if not all of it is negative critique. Which is not the case.  Despite going negative a lot more than Thom (post below), I'm (hopefully) not putting together a book that slams works of art and particular movements.  Pretty sure not, but rather a series of tenuously connected pieces that I do think seek to examine and dance with, if not always that which I love, then at least what fascinates and moves me:

"Were this a different world"

scraps from various publications or media—

 

Hugo Ball

 

"A not me non-point of view point of view."

 

I’d like to think that as a kid I sensed the mimetic worth (ladder) in this: failure-seeing the culture that brought me up, capitalism’s product, one way, and now another, and then another

 

such that I could resituate myself in the world-box, refractive mirror of sorts

 

looking at things with a new-self-same pair of eyes,

“maybe learn something new” (said my grandpa with that voice people say it with)

  

and essay museums post-proliferation of the differend

 

--I'd keep going yet same output/different day:

veiled metaphysical treatises, crafted thought-experiments so well-refined and bloated they drift off in a heavenly burst of theory wind,

 

catch an updraft of value-neutrality until hitting the

outer reaches of our interpersonal activational atmosphere—

 

jstor

 

* * *

 

so pervasive in contemporary art’s World, now too (conceptualism)

 

—not like a garden hose but a leaky bathroom faucet tied in a loose, makeshift knot. Works of art and acts of violence.  Or acts of art and works of violence

 

art as a kind of violence.

 

A contrast here.  Artaud’s echo, this literal and symbolic marriage

 

—Ranciere’s "senseless sense."  And Wittgenstein.

 

a violent groping for clarity, the attempted and failed execution of skepticism.  Philosophical Investigations, as I read it, has all the markings of plastic surgery’s very placticity: Sentences that are upside down but don’t lack argument.  The sense all of us at some time or another have felt that the world, though so close as to be in our own hands, is I—and so demands only questions that lack affirmation

 

(twenty-nine percent of the sentences in the Investigations end in a question mark.)

 

an inner-violence, an admission of Cartesian doubt, bad faith too

 

the notion that the world need not exist at all, with aesthetic production at once both an expression of this notion and its negation—nonsense.

 

Polemically anti-metaphysical (we cannot move beyond the bounds of language), not the writer needing to obliterate, transgress, or kill off that which is familiar (because the familiar is such only by way of deciding that it be so) nonetheless

 

Wittgenstein’s Notes

 

that art can, in ways that slip beyond our language, bring one

back home, home from

 

The dialectic in Wittgenstein is collage-as-radical re-narration

 

--continual reenactment: re-arranging things like so, building them up, knocking them down, and then arranging once more (desire for proximal stimulus)

 

“this is not a rehearsal,” one wants to say to Crispin Wright: Wittgenstein takes this to be action, not “mere” fiction, but fiction-making

 

--anti-value-neutrality

 

—until a picture (not a total picture) emerges, and with it a kind of submerged being, as Baldwin calls it, which is why, in part, Wittgenstein is so central to avant-garde poetry after World War II despite his political quietism.  The dialectic, in other words, is in the over- and under-lap of all possible language games, the fact that every language game we can think of houses everyday terms of expression that we can decide to use differently, to make them into a new language game (a new “form of life,” a new sociopolitical or cultural landscape becomes incessant question for the socially concerned poet, mosquito buzz in the ear of the necrophile).

 

as with Derrida’s trace, or Hegel’s vestige, there remain the ghostly echoes of the old in the new.  What was originally artifice is now integral to clapping

 

with only its history serving us as a reminder of past use, what was necessary for understanding now seems vestigial, ornamental.

 

“It’s all ornamental,” he says he wrote of someone saying. 

 

Conceptualism, for instance, its popularity and its phenomenon, comes immediately to mind as I write this.   Reenactment of Bush’s Ownership Society, this engine’s engine a territorial carving, reduplicative, data 

mined, gross

 

negligence.  Repositions the want ad as container a steroidal markdown in the service of self-sale, where “self” is busty, muscular—o o what the archeologists of the now will have said:

 

“evidence, evidence!  Google scorched this earth.

 This was a reenactment of Dale Smith's negative critique.  For the record.

--Wittgenstein’s Cartesian pathologies, his self-alienation and now Adorno’s writings on alienation.  In both instances foreignness, dominating discourses,

 

exile are center stage: in Adorno’s case physical displacement, flight--

 

retraction, while in Wittgenstein’s case exile tout court.  Exile from the world.

 

Description of exile’s consequences, its gestures (suicidal). 

 

 

The FTATHIS stumbles over carbonized shapes

 

and if resisting in performing submission to (switching the dial for signals)

 

this landscape

without admitting 

that art, too, is commodity insofar as it has exchange value (poetry is cheap and its cheapness 

demonstrates)—

But only the necropheliac makes strategic use of a lateness while devaluing production,

 

Our poetic habits in the era of Bush, when I read (retrospectively) I see his lips moving on the tv, the famous

 

parody of the monkey underneath an e-card.  And don't we all.

 

the two most dangerous horns of aesthetics in the age of Neo-liberalism, fantasy of a leisure class, now arguably interrupted by trade secrets in the lending industry leaking (wiki leaks needs money at moment, fyi): 

(subjecthoodless) indivdualism and progress.  

In the first instance we stupefy ourselves (at best) and set the preconditions for the second instance—by force (of blogging) if need be.  The swift blade of this grand narrative of bottom-up anti-narrative is only possible when we have the time to think.  And today we have little, if any time to think. The artisan cannot "make time" most days, despite Ranciere's demand here.  And so in contemporary aesthetics, in a great deal of “post-Marxist” theory a great deal of reflexive/reactive self-reflexivity reenacting political engagements with language, and as parroting turns inward the critique circles institutional concern in a provincial rather than local faux pluralism,

 and organizers in Columbia are so far away.  This, one platform

becomes a necrophiliac’s goddamn lunch 

Thom Donovan on Criticism at Harriet

Thom Donovan is doing some guest blogging at Harriet, and this week's post about criticism is very much worth a look-see.  Thom reminds us that whacking each other over the head is but one way we might consider conversing.  From the post:

Another way that I would proceed in writing criticism, would be through the Hippocratic oath of the poet, designer, and architect Robert Kocik: at least do not do harm. When we write criticism one should ask themselves what they are doing, and whom they are serving. How can/will criticism function for power? How for one’s own interests—or in the interest of one’s friends, family, community, institution, nation, world? How can critique be in the interest of the world one would want? Too often ‘negative’ criticism makes claims about what is ‘wrong’ with something/someone before saying what it would want from poetry/art/cultural phenomena? What are the conditions of a work’s making? How is it positioned within a socio-historical context? How are aesthetic decisions co-constitutive with their social context? If we get ‘negative’ guided by these questions then so be it. 

Donovan evokes Deleuze here, & manages to squeeze in one of my favorite quotes, projecting it as way of making more room than currently on offer for a "desiring" criticism: "every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed.."