No Object #5

It is the urge to read the picture showing up with the words as "illustration" that makes possible the slight delay entered when there's some doubt about that. When it is not so obvious that the picture shows what the words are saying, what becomes obvious is the delay itself. As Zizek wrote in For they know not what they do (Verso, 1991, rev. 2002): "This dialogical economy therefore implies a purely logical temporality: a temporal scansion between the moment of expectation and the moment of its disappointment, a minimal delay of the second part of the tautology. Without this minimal temporality, the proposition A = A remains a simple affirmation of identity and cannot produce the effect of pure contradiction." He is talking about Hegel's commentary on "God is ... God," but the dissolution works likewise, as it can do in words alone when reference is delayed; however, there people turn away or merely back to some quality in the words themselves.

No Object #4

For Kipling

If
the assumption is that the world is badly screwed up,
If
we realize that both social relations and personal relations are screwed up by the social system of capital investment and growth,
If
we get it that this is what makes even the environment steadily deteriorate,
If
the sense of relations sweeping thru the social, personal, and environmental also extends to the inner (intra-) personal,
If
language can be seen to be a focus at the core of all this,
If
consciousness shows thru as the very core,
If
consciousness can be changed by experience of awarenesses playing across language and other perceptual relations,

then

poetry matters, especially where it can stop objectifications from reifying "the world."

No Object #3

Nicole Brossard writes in French but has her books readily translated. In her most recent in English, there is this that fits this project:

in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a Neues museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention

This is a section from a serial poem called "Piano Topology" in a series of poems called "White Piano" in a book called White Piano (Toronto: Coach House, 2013). It deals with the image on the cover of that book too, a photo of an installation called Missa that is made of many identical pairs of shoes hanging all in the same walking pose from wires, piano wires perhaps to be bowed. The resonance "deflects our attention" and calls it toward resonances. This is the no-object theory at work with and beyond imagery. Now you see it and you don't.


 

No Object #2

Please, look back at Kevin Cashen's video of my reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz (May 8, 2012) and my remark there about "incommensurability." It was posted here on May 22, 2012. It can also be reached directly on You Tube at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y693tTrBGJg&feature=youtu.be

Then, look at the talk from the University of Washington @ Bothell's "Convergence" conference on poetics (Sept. '12), where the pictures play another role in "illustrativity." This video was also put together by Kevin Cashen (thank you). Its link is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Echx5aBCjg

No Object #1

     What you see is what you get. Examine that and it opens again and again, like a joke. It never says what you see is what is, although "the moons are as they are" (Dogen, again). What you get is what you will see, mountain/snow for instance. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a song by Donovan, then there is a great jam version by The Allman Brothers, and the Dead incorporated it too. You can only get what you've actually seen, and the way words become part of that is where money comes in. And as long as money's coming in, the music gets heard. And that's basically all you can get out of the Sixties' system unless the words bang into themselves while crowding towards their object, as in the "Mountains and Waters Sutra" of Dogen. This piece was collected in what the English-speaking world calls the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, but the French call it La Réserve visuelle des événements dans leur justesse. "There are mountains hidden in treasures," asserts the final section of this "visual reserve of events in their justice." As we try to see what we can get from this, it occurs to me that in such a dialectical "Hegelianism without reserves" (as Reb Derrida called it), incommensurability might just be just.

No Object #0

     The object here is to bring the concept of the object into view, and to object to it. Many resources will be marshaled into this project. Baudrillard is a big help, as he was for the "Follow-Up" pieces, but so are the Tibetan Buddhists who have been writing about this for many centuries. Good old cartoons, too, will be of use because they play with images of objects. Poetry seems to have gotten stuck short of the requisite play, again, and the plastic arts (incl. photography) hesitate to object to the object most of the time and get "drawn" back into objectification.
     The American Zen thing of truly objective seeing and being falls short, and so does the effort to scramble and deny realities. As Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime says, there is "no longer any need to confront objects with the absurdity of their functions, in a poetic unreality, as the Surrealists did" (73). Our arts have hovered over various versions of this absurdity for a century now, grasping it and rejecting it. Recent avant-garde poetry has tried to include critique of social constructions in language by going both ways: some absurdist and some as anti-absurdist as the sentences of Ron Silliman. Claims are made for the value of parataxis over hypotaxis or the twists of hyper-hypotaxis or the exposé of phrasings like those in adverts or political memes through echo or translation, but still at the still center of it all is the assumption of a reality/unreality divide and the idea of a need to confront the reality we all live with/in.
     The point that Baudrillard builds beyond these attempts is that there is "[n]o longer any need for a critical consciousness to hold up the mirror of its double to the world:" that art and thinking that would expose the falsities or positionalities of the world have been undone by our world itself. "[O]ur modern world swallowed its double when it lost its shadow, and the irony of that incorporated double shines out at every moment in every fragment of our signs, of our objects, of our models"; in this post-modern world, "things move to shed an ironic light on themselves all on their own." The fresh need to present this calls for something like parody but not resolvable into a reality opposed to the laughably ironic in our world of things--not simply "meaningful" mockery. Because things "discard their meanings effortlessly," they need only to be presented in their "visibility" for us. "This is all part of their visible sequencing, which itself creates a parody effect" (73).
     The 800-year-old writings of Dogen can take us to a Japanese foothold in this area of thinking too. His moon, his finger, his words, all are pointing to it. His moon (tsuki) is total (tsu) possibility (ki).

                            Snow

All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.
Playing with the moon, ridiculing wind, listening to birds....
Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.
This winter I suddenly realize: snow makes a mountain.

            translated by Philip Whalen with Kazuaki Tanahashi
                    from Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen,
                    ed. Tanahashi (North Point: SF, 1985).

"Follow-Up" #11

It is not a question of defending radical thought. Every idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that cannot defend itself deserves to disappear. On the other hand, one must fight all charges of irresponsibility, nihilism, or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On this point, there is nearly total misunderstanding. Ideological and moralistic critique, obsessed with meaning and content, obsessed with the political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing—the act of writing: the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of the juggling with meaning. It does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there—in the form itself, the formal materiality of expression.

         …

         Critics, being unhappy by nature, always choose ideas as their battleground. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing, for their part, always create illusion; they are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the felicity of language. And this is surely the only political—or transpolitical—act that can be accomplished by the person who writes.

again from Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime.  Trans. Chris Turner. (London: Verso, 1994) 102-103.