hawking and gawking, and yawping at AWP

Skimming through the AWP schedule for this year's massing of the troops, I had to stop after looking at the first big day's worth. I did see a lot about blogging there. This is now a functional sales tool recognized by the industry; ahhhhh...

It all puts me in mind of an album title by the revered Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Volunteered Slavery.


 

No, Object #3: Zizek, Eagleton, and the AWP

If we take Zizek's notion of the "sublime object" built on Sohn-Rethel's thoughts about commodity exchange (in The Sublime Object of Ideology 1999 imprint of London: Verso, 1989) and combine it with Eagleton's thoughts about The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, Oxford, 1990), AWP conventions become exposed in all their glorious merchandising of sublime objects--along with the whole world of poetry as we have it.

In the commodity exchange (mediated by money or not), an object takes on an actual abstract being that facilitates the judgments of equivalency (value or taste) beyond its practical being--a sublime status of sorts. As Sohn-Rethel puts it, "the exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought" (qtd. in Zizek 19). This thoughtful abstraction has always already taken place before any thought of the equivalencies, any bargaining, begins. Zizek calls it a "material" form (and makes it the basis of his renewed "materialism"), though it is necessarily unconscious, and he refers to it as a stage or theater (19) that makes the exchange seriously possible. It is "immaterial to" the action, as any particular stage is to any set of actors, but it is the space in which their action plays.

Aesthetics, with its sense of self-reflexive autonomy, is a "prototype" of capitalist subjectivity at the same time as being a vision of radical energies (Eagleton 9). Eagleton shows us that the philosophy of aesthetics has its basis in the Greek word referring to sensations of the material body, and he tells us that its 18th-century manifestation seems to be "the first stirrings of a primitive materialism" (13). He emphasizes the valuation of aesthetic attention to lived experience and "the human and concrete" (2). Our recent turns toward the body seem to Eagleton to be a kind of extension of this 300-year-old effort, and his effort is to renew materialism by showing that and its material social effect.

My effort is to engage both of their efforts in service of a critique of the descent into aestheticisms in the practices of today's poetical avant-garde and of the writers and teachers in general who associate through the AWP, which is anything but avant. The AWP convention is a marketing convention full of little sales meetings; I saw many such massings of commodification when I was an electronics industry sales manager once upon a time. At the AWP, though, persons and concepts are marketed as much as objects or systems. The perpetration of creative writing as an advancement of consciousness is a sales pitch originating in the rise of aesthetics in the 18th century and carried forward on the basis of exchange values, with a sublime-ation at its heart.

No, Object #2

The Law is drawn up actually as a dis-alienation device where the subject reaches for the Real and cannot reach its object, so the perverse need to be told "no" arises (I'm paraphrasing Zizek in that "know not" book, 265). The breaker for this is the choice between le père ou le pire (Lacan's pun), the fatherly Law or the worst possibility: desire's impasse, the inattainability of the object (Zizek's page 267).

No, Object #1

Zizek asserts that "the (form of) Law emerges at the precise point where representation (of the Supreme Good) is lacking ... . The form of Law is thus not simply the form of a certain content ... : it is so to speak the form supplanting, holding the place of the missing content" (p. 230 in they know not what they do, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2002). This has to remind a modern American poet of what plays out when Olson's formulation that "Form is never more than an extension of content" crosses into the Creeley response that "Content is never more than an extension of form." It is the place between where one turns into the other (Moebiusly) that reveals that the content of the Law is the form it takes for us, the cop or the judge or the classroom teacher turning a dictate into a reason/excuse for an action and suggesting it is "for your own good." Every kid hears how hollow that is.

No Object #10: Can't get into place

No moment has an outside until we give it one retrospectively.

No Object #9: Note on Buddhist Thought and Hegel's Sense of Limits

On page 112 of "For they know not what they do", Zizek comments in an attempt at clarifying Hegel's concept of "limits" that the signifier reaches toward the Real and falls short inside the limit of signifying; it always already "goes wrong in relation to itself and the object inscribes itself in the blank opened by this failure." Madhyamaka philosophy says the object is built of three things: causes, relations to/of its parts, and our conceptual apparatus attempting to signify all this at the limit of re-ification. Both angles say the same thing in their tangled idioms: we meet the world in a ground established by our limits at the task of meeting it; this is its existence for us.

No Object #8: Charlie McCarthyism & Palimpsestasis

 

The idea of “class struggle” does not

name a thing but rather the urge

to again expose class as we must when

the Democrat-wing of the Hegemony tries to become

“the voice of the middle class” and thereby

avoids the fact of its

“ventriloquization” by the 1 %.

When the Honors program at your college

turns away from race to questions of

beautiful thought or non-racialized

environmentalism or pro-choice or

anti-death-penalty politics, we have

stasis because class is

actually erased or written over as if in a

“palimpsestasis.”

The party provides something new to worry over

while forgetting that women, prisoners, and species are

victims of money: “tutto che scintille…”

can draw your eyes away,

and money  confers “aristo”-cracy

only thru the myth of how naturally

“cream rises to the top.”

The struggle to bring a new layer of struggle

to public attention fails when

it gets translated back into

this tongue of power that comes from

the belly of the invisible beast:

ventriloquism for the dummy is

spouting talk from another’s guts

while the mouth just smiles.