Brought to You By Phoenix Online

In an e-ffort to widen the discussion in my class, or, if you will, to open the windows, here's my post from my Evergreen State College course blog (Radical Poetry, Politics & Pedagogy).  It's a reading list and ahead of that a brief summary of the discussion we had during last week's lecture.  We're working with two primary texts at moment, Oppen's Of Being Numerous and Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics.   If any of you have anything to say on agency and identity in relation to the readings below (the start of a series of readings on this strand of a poetics of "witness"), feel free...

Below are the readings due by Weds, along with some non-required materials (suggested readings).  This time a little longer, but not as dense/difficult.  Enjoy.

Why the experimental poem? asks Joan Retallack. Poetics has affirmed, undermined, complicated, and otherwise wrestled with any shared concept of identity and/or selfhood (from last week: Oppen's struggle to articulate the constructed and multiple "self" as opposed to the "freely autonomous and essential Self").  The constructed identity in the world of catastrophe (catastrophe, in part, constructing our conception of who we take ourselves to be) is taken up by Nonsite Collective, as is the invisibility of both a) what/who it is that, at least in part, constructs us, and b) of individuals and whole groups of people--the "ghosted," "occulted," "marginalized" subjects and their (our?) ideas, desires, and needs.  If the "self" is more complicated than it appears to be, then so too the function(s) of art (poetry, prose, etc).  And if our arts are more complicated (not just in terms of "nuance" but also in terms of "problematic") than they may appear, then so too is the notion of who is author/artist, as this is one identity of an already "numerous" (Oppen) identity that goes into "who I am (we are)."

Note how thick our ideas are already, and how many materials--written and otherwise--we've looked at that have made these ideas so thick or rich.  This is one way we can think about text arts--as generating these questions in ways perhaps unique, say, as sensuous materials for which these questions aren't just "cognitive" but bodily, sensorial, etc.  We'll unpack these ideas further both thru making more "art" and thru taking in, or "remaking" more "art" (thru continuing our aesthetic practices).  We'll also see how they play out viz.pedagogical practices.  That is, if the author/reader binary breaks down, and the "art"/"non-art" binary breaks down, then certainly this relates to Freire, and to Ranciere, and to Nonsite--all pedagogical models differing but sharing in a desire to rethink the "teacher/student" binary, or opposition.  

More fundamental questions arise: why difficult poetry?  Why desire these complications, contradictions, and in some cases, collapses, in the first place?  Especially if they seem to "work"? Do they work?  Does the lecture-seminar mode we are in right now work sufficiently?  Is sufficiency the goal?  If not, what is?  Maybe it works for me, but does it for person X?  Is there a difference in viewpoint, generally (in our class) here that can in part be "gendered"?  That is, maybe taking gender inequalities into account will shed light on why sufficiency might not be EVERYONE'S goal, or experience?

We'll build on what we discussed last Wednesday, discussing how the re-narration of what an "author" can be and how "identity" might be constructed, this time looking thru the lens of translation--the concept of translation and the wider application of the processes that allow us to translate.  This is yet a different frame or lens through which to peer, different from Nonsite's concepts of the site and the nonsite, yet very, very related.

READINGS FOR WEDS:

Kent Johnson, Notes on Notes on Translation  HERE

Rachel Zolf, Tolerance Project  HERE and HERE

Joan Retallack on Experimental Poetry  HERE

George Oppen: Of Being Numerous 1-22  HERE 

Wiki Article on The Kootenay School of Writing  HERE

Re-Read the Nonsite Collective Draft Proposal  HERE

OPTIONAL/SUGGESTED READING

Charles Bernstein on Oppen's Of Being Numerous  HERE

Translation in Performance  from XPoetics  HERE

Poet Rae Armantrout Interviewed (writing as politics as pedagogy)  HERE

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 

Writer Lourdez Vazquez

Lourdes Vazquez, former curator of the Latin American collection at Rutgers, and wonderful poet, playwright, & experimental fiction writer, just sent me word that she'll be placing my short essay/review of her work in a Spanish language journal in the coming weeks.  

I'd totally forgotten about this work (not hers, mine!), as when I sent it to her a long time ago to look at (maybe three years ago), we were both not feeling well, moving from one country to another, etc.  I'd sent this to only one place, The Boston Review, and they nearly published it, but didn't quite, if I remember, for length reasons.  Always wordy I seem to be when doing critical writing.   Anyway, kind of Lourdes, who is now finally feeling better and settled in, to have culled from the depths this piece.  I'm putting it here on the blog in part because I'm somewhat amazed that Lourdes' work hasn't gained that much traction in the U.S., despite Lourdes being known quite well in Puerto Rico as avant-garde poet and critic.  This is an old essay, so it's interesting for me now to look at it, realize I disagree with some of it.  To the extent that I do, I very much enjoy the process of arguing with myself.  It's not unlike those fleeting moments when you are writing, or doing something poetic (hell, it can skiing for all I know), and you sense your own alterity.  Or that you are, indeed, alterior (an acknowledgment rather than an understanding, I suppose).  For those interested or for those who do know her work: 

Lourdes Vazquez: The Caribbean In Exile

 

We are struggling with language.

We are engaged in a struggle with language.

--Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 11e

 

 

Why repeat ourselves? Why, I repeat, repeat ourselves?  As almost axiomatic, I take the construct of “selfhood” to be an extension of our languages, and our languages extensions of (often) forced assumptions born of mediating forces.  “Words are deeds,” states Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. When we repeat ourselves as we speak, we often repeat ourselves publicly, explicitly, and, in some circumstances, out of necessity. An activity born of the need to imprint sub-dominant narratives onto the familiar, dominant narratives of the total (and given) story-commodity, the well-rounded declamation that is the normative narrative loop in the head.   Othering discourses frame the repeated repeated utterance as pathological, imbue such self-same echoes with the term “madness.”  To repeat is also an exilic mode of becoming, according to Adorno.  Or, according to Wittgenstein, a Cartesian exile, exile tout court.  Exile from the world.  A poetic mode of utterance.  Strange thing, repetition. 

 

There is an historical kinship between poetry, exile (in the true sense, the non-literary sense) and what has been, and is, deemed madness (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic).  A relation strung by the thread of repetition.  Here, exile’s relative distance need not be oceans: one can be ghosted easily amidst otherwise familiar terrain.  In reading Hyden Carruth just recently, I was reminded of the schizophrenic on the subway, his constant need to speak to himself, repeat himself to himself (in clinical circles they call this phenomenon “clacking”—as if putting a word to a way of being makes it less mysterious, or horrifying to the person who is clinically ascribed).  From “Contra Morten” (1966) we find the musicality of madness, its twin, the need to force language into a circumscribed, ordered kind of familiarity:

 

   

Such figures if they succeed are beautiful
because for a moment we brighten in a blaze of rhymes
and yet they always fail and must fail
and give way to other poems
in the endless approximations of what we feel
Hopeless it is hopeless  Only the wheel
endures   It spins and spins winding
the was the is the will be out of nothing
and thus we are   Thus on the wheel we touch
each to each a part
of the great determining reality   How much
we give to one another   Perhaps our art
succeeds after all our small song done in the faith
of lovers who endlessly change heart for heart
as the gift of being   Come let us sing against death.

 

 

Note the way Carruth at once clarifies and obscures “hopeless” here, as if that word were embodied formally within the text-line, where art in stanzas succeeds only if it manages to bring us back to a kind of clarity, and with clarity, a “re-apportionment of parts,” to use theorist Jacques Ranciere’s terms.  This is a kind of knowing ourselves (the self’s multiple and contradictory understructures)—and each other.  And to know ourselves, our languages, is, for Wittgenstein, to bring ourselves back home. Where “home” is not the homogeneous world of commodity discourse, but the heterogeneous landscape of any household, no matter how small. Perhaps a temporary reprieve, the proprioceptive quality of the act of repetition, its successful employment in a poetics, it brings us back home to the state of skepticism that is tantamount to a “free” society, free in Paulo Freire’s sense of the term, which links so firmly to the act of hearing an other “sing.”  By successful I mean a poem’s acknowledgement of its getting close to familiarity, groping, yet never quite making it—a wayward journey home, an Odyssian journey with twists the likes of which we wake to every morning, and every morning, though a repetition, varying to the last day only so much, the day or the poem’s “success” is here measured in its acknowledgment of presentness, its temporal, limited capacity to do what needs doing—but coming up short.

 

Why repeat?  This tactical maneuver, its formal employment surviving in poetry when its most of its formal counterparts have long since been shed as inadequate.  Imagine an infinite parabola, like a differential function, representing all the narratives ever written or could be written. Look at the bell’s tails, utterances approaching near total a posteriori impossibility: on one end, we may have sets of lines or stanzas that lack repetition entirely; on the other, those that repeat ad naseum.  We would like to say: those on the end without repetition are not poetry—this set of sentences approaches something, but whatever it is, it’s not poetry.  While those on the end that simply repeat, with no variance, with no slightly altered position of words, lines—those are sentences that lack meaning; they are senseless.  Stein awesomely rubs up against the senseless in such poems as “Picasso,” using the blues twelve bar structure, deeply repetitious when transliterated, to both paint and sing a becoming that gives us one major aesthetic trajectory of modernism. There is “an art” to straddling the line between nonsense and poetry, and the great sagging middle of unchallenging, utterly forgettable scrawls of sap, shows this.

 

Meet Lourdes Vazquez. Unknown to many readers in the United Sates, Vazquez is one of her native Puerto Rico’s avant-garde poets.  Having lived in Brooklyn for many years, now cataloguing and curetting the writing of Spanish writers by way of the Rutger’s library, she is, in her own words a “Caribbean living in exile.”  She writes mainly in Spanish.  Some of her works are translated (by her daughter as well as others) and yet many remain—due to the American sensibility of knowing no language but that of one’s native tongue—absent from many poetic lexica.  This is a shame.  If there is a reason for kids in schools around America to learn Spanish, beyond the dire necessity of communicating with nearly half of the country’s population, it would be to encounter to the great Latin American writers, among them Lourdez Vazquez.

 

Ron Silliman, one of the few in this country who have delved deep enough into her work to review it says of Vazquez’s Park Slope that “there is a troubled relationship around which so many of these poems turn – yet not one articulated with beginning, middle and end.”  Silliman, and editors of Forward, quite rightly highlight Vazquez’s modern feminist challenges to the reader, her anchoring to the things of neighborhoods and families that are decidedly not kitsch ironic Americana—the Starbucks on every corner, the commodification of even the most densely insular immigrant populations in and around Brooklyn.  It is spot-on to say that Vazquez covers terrain that is stubbornly provincial rather than cosmopolitan, deeply personal-political rather than overtly, grandly ideological, lyrical more than anti-lyrical. 

 

But subversive is here in Vazquez’ work to a very high degree, and this subversiveness often takes the shape of a repeating longing: the worlds in her poems are whispers to the air—phrases, deceptively quiet at times, raging at others, reaching out to that which is right in front of the poet, real in every sense, yet unfamiliar, strange, and dangerous.  Lines fall back on themselves, repeating themselves so as to know themselves—to hook up to something that has been either lost or somehow killed.   In “It’s Been Like This Being Born” each “stanza” (paragraphs in the prose form) challenges the work’s main premise: the familiarity of a catastrophic heartache metaphorical of catastrophe as massive loss of life, brought into focus through the narrative of losing a lover.  Though the body of each section speaks of that which is familiar enough to destroy—“Violently, her clothes become dislocated, she opens her delicate lip and we cross, entangled her wood’s knots”—at the same time each comes back to a refrain of skepticism about its own inner-life:

 

It’s been like this.

It’s been like this.

It’s been like this.

 

This, what things have been like, is how each section begins, and is where the work acknowledges that what follows is not how things are but similes—what things are like. Everything about a woman, a love, a loss, becomes lost, unfamiliar, distorted by a closeness, a proximal valley where we want more than what we see, though we know what we see is mediated in ways and by forces often not benign.  We know this, and then we forget this.  And so the poem swan dives into the kind of confusion that comes with eyes that simply and immediately stop functioning.  “I embrace you,” the poem aches. 

 

“I embrace you.., I try to embrace you with a hold that approximates the straight line of death.”

 

A first reading of any of her poems in translation will hit us with their immediacy and lyricism, where what is lost and unfamiliar is a person, or people.  Vazquez deftly applies the revolving, evolving construct of personhood here as metaphor: all of the constraint, weakness, and loss of focus that comes with trying to bring another close, to know one, can equally be applied to the notions of homeland and exile.  The characters of Vazquez’s poems, the places and people who inhabit them, are in exile.  And her voice is not her voice but a collective, disembodied several.  Repeating, going back, constantly returning to particular themes and lines of text, even words such as “line” (Park Slope) these works ask the vital question: Where are we?  And a moment later: What is the “I” that speaks?  Where is it/they located? 

 

Here, again, I come back to Wittgenstein.  Wittgenstein and Adorno.  Two writers almost never mentioned in the same breath to be sure, their individual worldviews perhaps polar opposites, but both, in some way, in perhaps opposite ways, in exile.  Two quotes can be of service here.  There’s Wittgenstein’s, a rather famous quote from his journal: “When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course I was surprised.”  And then there is Adorno’s: “If all philosophy is homesickness... then homeland is the state of having escaped.”

 

Vazquez at once gives us the feeling that we are homesick, and that our longing for a homeland—a world familiar—is in some sense a consequence of escape.  But an escape from what?  Memory?  The reality of what it was like to expect unfamiliarity, since when at home we paradoxically feel more comfortable in a state of discomfort, alienation?  Linking up to Wittgenstein’s surprise: have we suddenly jumped from the formula of surprise—a gift, say on Valentine’s day—to surprise itself?  Ineffable, essential, surprise?  That of arriving at a foreign destination, where to be is to become ghosted? Memory serves as the poet’s excuse, the poetic doomsday device, nothing nostalgic about it (from Park Slope):

 

To close my eyes.

Let memory disappear

Let time cease and my sheets never remember.

 

But for repetition in verse to have use value, to be difficult, to be part of the voice that is not Voice, but in a dialectical sense sublation, this Adorno takes to be one element working in the service of the function of art at its core.  Such repetition, in as many ways as there are poets, must somehow approach the horizon, come close to the infinite narrative parabola's tail of total or wrote repetition, yet never quite get there.  As philosopher Lydia Goehr writes—in her case about music—taking time to learn or read something over and over again, repeating this process, is, when cultic, nearly the opposite of wrote memorization: “a process of coming to understand, and one aspect of coming to understand is that a change in thought occurs: we see something one way... then we come to see it another way...”  The danger, of course, is that repetition serves to block a kind of didacticism that is associated with becoming, that shift, that change necessary for the discourse between poet and reader to somehow pivot around praxis.  One aspect of Vazquez’s art is the mastery of repetition, infusing repetition with use value by varying tone, timing, and sequence.  Here, her refrains are truly refrains: they serve to offer all of us a fleeting glimpse, a minute understanding of the banal, the real, the people, places, and objects of her world an ocean away, a “territory”—which is our world, that which we are complicit in ghosting and also affected by.  A world that, when in exile, appears before us as a landscape unfamiliar, populated by phantasms, unendingly elusive.

The Ideal Glass: On Laura Elrick's Stalk

I just watched/listened to Laura Elrick's Stalk for the second time and again was deeply unsettled. This is a deeply unsettling piece, yet one that we can, like the glass window of a city, pass by.  Or, like the body of another, manipulate just this much: turn on, turn off, rewind, fast forward, skip & let go.  Interrogate.  As poem, the digital artifact becomes fleshy and vulnerable.

This time in viewing the work I was interested in looking, in seeing or sensing on the micro level, those moments, planned and unplanned, that occurred just at the edge of the frame.  

Elrick and her collaborators here--Kythe Heller, Kristin Prevallet, several others--as well as Kaia Sand, who gave a talk on Stalk for Nonsite Collective several months ago called Poem/Nonpoem, are interested in projects of dissensus, events where aesthetic and political practices collide, as Sand puts it, works that "allow the two to be translated into and through each other."  Elrick's piece is certainly working at this level--not unlike David Buuck's BARGE or Sand's own Remembering to Wave (out now thru Tinfish Press).  There has been a resurgence in contiguity between poetics and political intervention in the past decade, a re up and rethinking of Ranciere's "redistribution of the sensible."  Though still unusual in today's contemporary poetic landscape, a re-imagining of a sort of poetic terrorism, of a politicized recalibration of the happening, has become a tactical concern for increasing numbers of artists, and this interest is every bit as conditioned by our eternal present's situation of deepening crisis as it is a response to a long (in art time) period of underwhelming aesthetic production--both in poetry and in experimental music and visual art. 

The landscape of crisis is what Elrick's Stalk unearths, is what the film's tagline calls, not wrongly, "part dystopian urban cartography."  Here crisis embodied is the fragile and self-same subject, the ignored, and transparent, where a question of whether it (not I) is breakable and/or visible, is tested.  Is the crowd that which washes it ashore, or away?  Are we that crowd?  Am I both or neither?  "Is that a person?" begins the poem, the screen dark for nearly a minute of forefronting language that Elrick and others overheard, recorded, individuals who voiced from within that crowed some response to the lone, hooded figure in orange jumpsuit, shackled.  "I feel like asking: do you want me to call somebody?" Where "to call somebody" is to suggest that the figure is either crazy or the act frivolous, in need of professional cleanup.  Sand beautifully discusses the multivalent signification:

Elrick’s trudge through New York streets juxtaposed prisoner and public crowd while drawing a contour line—as geographer Cindy Katz terms it—to the prisoner that is not juxtaposed, the out-of-sight prisoner, caged at Guantánamo, for whom we are the same public crowd.

On one level of reading this work, there is the obvious interventionist centrality of the hooded figure wearing the iconic Guantanamo orange, the walk (or stalk) as both overt political protest and as dissensus--as reminder to anyone who sees and is confronted by the work (either the event or its archive in the form of video poem) that there are hundreds of detainees being tortured at this moment, right now.  But, as Sand points out through Herbert Marcuse (and this is the question that's central to my work, at least the question I grapple with consistently), what alternatives are there to work that is simply "consciousness raising"..."puppets and protest"? That is, the artform that collides politics and art without leaving both, or either, normatively fixed, intact?  How to transform both "politics" and "art" in and through this collision?  Elrick gives us one kind of tactical move in Stalk. 

I'm reminded in posing this question of Buuck's review of Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Series for Artweek, wherein the controversial paintings of tortured men, beautifully wrought, erotic, stylized gained a lot of negative and positive excitement, praise for the "empathic" and "humanizing" images.  For Buuck, these paintings are, however interesting, lacking in dissensus, perhaps (in my estimation) because under all the juxtaposing of the erotic with sadism, pain with our pleasure in watching it (Sontag echoes here throughout), the work recapitulates old divisions, normative vocabularies, becomes itself a mode of "consciousness raising" on the one hand, and painterly skill on the other, the two only joined by the singularity of the painting, and not much more:

Ultimately, it will take artists, critics, and everyday image-consumers to construct new idioms of visual criticism by which to engage such images in a manner that attends to the complexities of such travesties while at the same time risking the same kinds of confused and contradictory responses in our own politics and protests, that might move beyond the necessary exclamations of disgust and/or empathy, towards active dismantling of the image-worlds and militaristic policies that give birth to these new forms of torture and image-making. 

Then what is the vocabulary of atrocity?  What would a new aesthetic language that confronts our contradictory impulses to these particular atrocities--these images and reports of torture--look or sound like?  As if in direct response to Botero and his work's positive reviewers, Elrick's voice, with a strange, detached sadness, reminds us to shine a light on our eyes as they watch, to see in them the contradiction:

     Empathy intoxicates the premise of this place... We... We that is temporary and abundant, 

     something that waits...

Stalk takes us out of the gallery, away from the normative in many respects.  Gone are the usual conventions of the poetry reading, gone is the page with its lineations, allowing us to see where the report begins and the lyric ends, where they blur. And gone too is the straightforward didacticism of "message," as the central character in this narrative is not the hooded figure (the hooded figure is only the trigger), it's the crowd, and at times, individuals within that crowd, and the city which is us insofar as we construct it (to paraphrase Kristin Prevallet from her A Catalog of Lost Glimpses).  

During a proceeding viewing, I took notes, scene by scene, pausing, of the crowd's reactions. Sand rightly takes note of the predictability of it all:

In June, her walk through the city was planned with precision, but submitted to the unpredictability of the city. Yet much was predictable about the reactions of crowds of people.

Homeless woman under a blanket. Fervent believer shouting scripture. Orange jumpsuited prisoner shackled and shuffling. We among the crowds don’t respond, part urbane (nothing surprises us); part safe-sure (less contact, less mugging); part co-habitationally respectful (we can all do our “thing,” living in close contact while retaining partial autonomy). 

True, much of the film shows Elrick going seemingly unnoticed, or noticed but not noticed. In all, by my count, there were only two occasions in which (interesting in itself) a person took a photo (camera, phone camera) of Elrick, and only once did a person (man, striped shirt, midtown) try to talk to Elrick (since I have yet to talk to Laura about Stalk, I don't know what was said, and so will be one of the things I will ask).  For the first ten or so minutes of the work, I saw very few (hardly any) double takes, or obvious stares--yet for the second half (mostly filmed in midtown Manhattan) there were several (whether this was a purposeful edit, or whether part of midtown's psychogeography entailed this "naturally," I don't know).

The lonliness of the hooded figure, and the crowd's dynamic as crowd (it's easier to ignore the othered, the marked, among a sea of strangers) is a deeply haunting feature of the work, with Elrick's lyric interspersed with lines by Baudelaire, Silliman, others, especially at the beginning, where most of the crowd seemed not to notice or care to notice the hooded figure, this lyric dissolving into detainee reports, which, having worked with these myself for a forth. book, are both horrifying and emblematic of the way we treat each other whenever threat (unknown, othered) approaches. 

     The ideal glass, big public... again detainee was shown 9/11 video. Detainee did watch,

     but this time without exhibiting any emotion... averted his eyes... Great place for people

     watching...

And this ghostliness, this haunted glass sea of individuals, speaks to that dystopianism in the tagline, and occasions Sand to ask if we are too urbane:

Are we always among a crowd, the prisoner—shackled on the street, the prisoner shacked on an island—while we are urbane, safesure, cohabitationally respectful?

It's hard to conjecture on a whole scene of multitudes, what the mind-sets are here, and whether there is some uniformity of intention, so to speak, as there is of behaviors.  But to elaborate on what I take Sand to be getting at in suggesting the individual might "always be among a crowd, the prisoner":  what I noticed, beyond what Sand really nicely points out above, especially in the second half of the work, or what I felt I noticed, was an interest in the hooded figure, but a hurried one.  Like the man who approaches Elrick briefly, everything is brief, everything is hurried, everyone is on their way, in a hurry, always on their way.  Where are they going? We may be urbane, especially in New York, given the term's association with this diverse city of high end purchase, but we're also alienated.  We're going to work and in a hurry, and if not in a hurry to get somewhere because that is what we're told we must do, we're often thinking about being in a hurry--soon, which is also being in a hurry.  Propelled like buckshot from a gun we hurry, or we stand and ponder as marionettes on crank, and the hooded iconic figure of the detainee is a flicker in the corner of our eye, and if you only had the time to stop and ask yourself... "is that a person?"  That is, is the detainee (terrorist) a person?  Were you a tourist in one of those shots, your reasons for looking the other way, or beyond, or briefly, might not be dissimilar: you have no time for troubling matters--maybe you're liable to be dismissive even ("stupid radicals!"), because your boss gave you exactly 5 days to see EVERYTHING NEW YORK HAS TO OFFER, which includes the statue of liberty, the museums, the Empire State Building, and Ground Zero.  You'll ponder art in relation to politics, you'll have to ponder the U.S. policy on detainees and torture, later, because how are you going to fit ALL THIS IN IN 5 F-ING DAYS? I would call someone, but I have to be downtown in ten minutes, someone else surely will...  

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno gives us a rich sense of how, in part, successful art operates.  Where "success" is to have use value, and to have use value as transfiguring and transgressing sensuous material that points in its negative articulation to a world that could be, to a future that isn't necessarily a worsening of present conditions, the liquidation of the subject, the person:

“Only by immersing its autonomy in society’s imagerie can art surmount the heteronomous market.  Art is modern through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent.”  (AT, 31) 

Stalk retains the contradictions of the crowd, which is to retain and amplify the contradictions of its own behaviors and effects, the conditions of its own production.  The stark reality of our alienation bubbles up to the surface in Elrick's Stalk (and does so in different ways if you--sorry Laura--turn off the sound, which, of course, also makes it a different poem).  The great love affair between capitalism and militarism is worn not just on our faces and in our gestures, but in the temporality of our behaviors.  We are walking the streets of New York; we are individuals given over to the picnolepsy of another's performance, and in turn, our own performances: of the rushed and pushed, and of the "something that waits" for an alternative social existence.  Our eyes project back the effect of our information gathering and dispersal, the beautiful delete button talk talk talk of cable news living.  Like they say, you are what you are (made to) watch.