G O -- (a mapping / to & fro Gil Ott)[Politics as Explanation, Politics as Prescription] ---- what must be done ---- [Praxis nests on understanding, resists the know-nothings] ---- A primer little more than no explanation. ---- [But words' reach can be explanatory. And we can tease prescriptions out of them] ---- Steps prescribed, resistance turns a minor note the gathered // in animal defense ---- Doubt to surer politics, braking downhill.
A 1. TRANSCENDENCE
[Idealisms don't work as politics. The vanities of transcendence -- as a premise, or as destination -- start to seem like a phobic reaction (to materiality), a big-scope skepticism (as dematerializing), the rejection of closure reconfigured as the embrace of indeterminism.] ---- makes no sound ---- The regimentation of meaning is criminal, even in the least increment ---- oppose // iconophraty to determination ---- [Construction would put 'on suspension,' so would everything non-natural:] ---- the putting / together of parts, artifice ---- [But downgrading these, or inattention to these, risks escapism.] ---- utterance / in sensation / duplicates / flight ---- past the eternalA 2. REPRESENTATION
[Transparency, or Translucency: as the basis for representation, for easy access to Image & Identity; pictures & expressiveness.] ---- eye that startles ---- prudent to the objects ---- FIGURES ---- audience / always less than one ---- [To mirror; to enmirror] ---- or the eye cannot confuse ---- given ear given access ---- Filled by throat. ---- smoothly / moving / in and out, / the facsimile, / deeply / felt ---- [Representation isn't necessarily static; it can move, it is 'moving,' yet still at risk of Possessive Identitarianism.] ---- Control's conceit, out of each substance's specificity gobbled, flickers at the idea. ---- violated, by a language making so much fucking sense to me.A 3. NONREPRESENTATION
[Big Question Marks, Empytings.] ---- culminating the image / no longer engaging ---- the insubstantial images ---- to opposite image ---- as your losses / become opaque ---- [Presence, representation, in doubt; or with matte overlays.] ---- ceremony / forgotten ---- In the negative dream ---- Every object blank when I am looking in my mind among injures. ---- Ignoring the word in me. ---- I've got nothing more to say. Dig elsewhere. ---- [Critique as anti-doxa, as liberation?] ---- Will to erase will be damaged by orthodoxy. ---- effects / object object believing discarded ---- words untutored ---- [Dissensus / Unsensed, Unsensible] ---- in the dark / extendedA 4. PROCESS
[In the wake of all this romanticized (enfeebling?) nothingness: a reaction, a micro-materializing, a micro-content. A miniatured clarity, or presence or gesture -- at work, fragment to fragment, moment to moment parataxis showcase.] ---- a line drawn thinly / to define a plane / of particular resonance ---- [Processural leverage] ---- outside out text's necessary reference. ---- The heart mismanages // tactile share. ---- materialize... accord with experience --- in the immediate --- leaping out the condensery! ---- gesture's / pure / means / accumulate / the vertical ---- [Or, if not miniatured verticality/ content, then: preoccupation with the 'top note melody'/surface of Process-based formalism.] ---- scrape up art from surfaces unbidden ---- metaphor // thin / as // the laboring hands / withdraw. ---- in headlights / or a head throb, doting on minutiae ---- Ate my fingertips ---- this precise increment / distances --- That that that. ---- [Microprocessor: the New American Poetry, say, with its underpinning dependence upon Image & Identity. Fragmented self-conversation, self-talk -- as nest.] ---- the disorganized proximate / making of meA 5. MEDIATION
[All of words frames path. Form -- a fuller mediation through the body of Language; less literariness than languageness.] ---- Anybody's guess assumed a map of alien terrian ---- Inequivalent in method, but essentially questions ---- that place your mind only / accommodates hemorrhage ---- whatever is to hand / unravels ---- [Gesture disintegrated by wide-angle (& not so wide-eyed) attention to language, while -- by something akin to overall mediation, maybe even meta-mapping.] ---- Let the device destroy us. ---- [Form as mimesis -- to spin & sweep in circles, or concentrically totalizing.] ---- vague potentialities pass into circular imitation ---- [Generalized Abstraction] ---- for the word / grants latitudeB 1. SIGN SYSTEM
[Signification: the rawest of raw material gives us atomic & subatomic opportunity.] ---- Serially fixate ---- fragments value ---- the less and less form assuming ---- of particles / composing ---- Full of paper's bobcat ---- [Abstraction is part of it, but now we also have Unitizing/Nominalizing. Display Grid Adventure: defamiliarizing all by itself, & especially when set in motion.] ---- Raw sensory equivalence an animal tongue ---- Ennerved ---- cell-rigid ---- what gathering of atoms ---- one / of-a-kind / without value ---- a model strung / binary, unity of resistance / mesh ---- a pinprick in a poem ---- times / mute spasms.B 2. SIGN TROUBLE
[Signs are made to be ...] ---- breaking the code ---- in definite trouble, tie / down those already secure, friend ---- [Politics as explanation as breakage] ---- quickly cored / to cacophony's / mazes ---- One equals a sum of transgressions ---- [Discombobulation, Gibberish, Nonsense, Arbitrary organization, Dissolution of Subject.] ---- Signifying not at all or everything evades identification ---- out multiplying signs, actual voices out / of synch ---- spin convulse ---- the subject / liquid / seeping ---- Unbalanced to the next // without a subject, belonging elsewhereB 3. DISCOURSE
A word; nowhere to rest. ---- Person unncessary, address diffuses. I can report to you that he. ---- fenced to burn individual meat, acting out me, the author, the pleasure of every company ---- [Discourse as language's address to itself -- recovering form as something mediated through use. Framing -- or rooting, or constellating -- even the most extravagant flip-outs of 'raw' material.] ---- how plain expression accumulates a code. ---- [For writing to navigate within discursive seas, studded by personal handles. Discourse as Dissemination, Osmotic Theatricality. It frames (& empowers?) a less individualized action. It trumps the isolated voice; it trumps Formal Systematicity -- we're not just talking langue/parole here.] ---- only patterns seem brilliant, and fade. ---- I will build a body of utterance, that fooled me. ---- But each has his use. Squeam a little here, a little there, soon everyone knows you. And you are abundant, available ---- that illusion of form address implies ---- An agreement we rewriteB 4. READING SUBJECT
[Readership defines the individual as active appropriation of the collective] ---- My daily appetite insults a system. Grace at prey, convective after. ---- and I am the body of this moment ---- I may not own the language but the meanings are mine. Whose homogeneity? ---- equating solitude with labor ---- a man aa complex / of the between / cohderence --- two // as town at once, but from / oneself curiously ---- PRIVATE LIFE ---- the interior recoveredB 5. DIALOG, AURA
[Absorption, & a static a-social kind of absorption at that, returns as dialog with Language] ---- is instransitive implies you. ---- magnified parcelling you out teases alterity. ---- [Mimesis, a domesticating mimicry, a copycat trick with mirrors. Not through depiction of persons.] ---- in animal defense ---- more opaque // to our accord ---- [Presence as Opacity, a bedrock collective impossibility] ---- I may lose consciousness, but society continues. ---- [Especially as a language -- in which even what you don't remember is written.] ---- dialog, / the plane variously / open ---- dances to reconcile ---- are reconciledC 1. DISTANCE
[Artifice & non-artificial distance -- to liquefy, defamiliarize.] ---- Moving, variant ornithography ---- in what show fluid ---- the self-evident over ----- less... than presence, the transmission... or any other problem set to right ---- separated from me / by a device. Practice ---- reliable disintegration ---- [Contradictions endistance; they create the basis for authorizing, for sustaining authority.] ---- to dominate, again, to suggest a safe distance ---- [Or: to suggest an unsafe distance.]C 2. SOCIAL CONTEXT
Language accretes, and molds itself around the precipitant moments of a culture. ---- World once in a grid spies the natural it out of it filth ---- [Smorgasbord] ---- turned their propaganda on themselves ---- [As a tourist in my own life....] ---- and simultaneously finite the subject of classification can't rebel. ---- [The relentless particularizing process] ---- fill my silhouette ---- responsible / surrendered, meek ---- tamed irony / counts / pulses ---- by opposition detonated / bodies of men ---- habit to gloss ---- [Put the gloss back in glossolalia.] ---- have at me, all you want ---- Habiting ... inkling who, to whom I'll receive my utilization. ---- body / 's troubles subsumed ---- a tense identity violating mere whereabouts ---- [Social context: badge or angle, domesticating or enlivening: 'identity' in a still only depersonalized, prepackaged version.] ---- Questions, toasts, confession, suggestions.... lead. To me. Look at it from my point of view. From consensus hums like a house, or other pleasant-sounding logic ---- The rest of language is out on strike.C 3. SUTURE & INTERPELLATION
Welcome to this image of yourself, sure as I imagine you. ---- He is divided, and becomes himself. ---- all puffed up, a caricature. My disagreeable bifurcation as well ---- Able solitary laws to grow in me ---- If we're figures to ourselves, / what device will free us? / Some play. / Characters have characters / to trip us up. ---- [Role theory] ---- heart's a machine ---- identity, mine determined / to undermine a diagram. ---- Be be be baby. ---- you / recede and grow numerous.C 4. APPARATUS
[What's not to like? For example, beyond interpellation, the current shape of a fuller Social Semiosis, Consumption as Reproduction, the Spectacle, Simulacra & Machinic Reterritorializing. No longer are just codes at issue, but an extra layer of materiality: regimes of bodies, code-dissolving spectacle, institutional apparati.] ---- Reproduction itself. ---- the vehicle, who only a moment ago though herself a machine. ---- Am rhetoric could kill the speaker ---- The imperative levels address. ---- fuse / an engine's power to your threat / that we / remain divided ---- become domesticated corn ---- Reduced to a twitch ---- It is our smallness / frames criminal use in the world ---- [Size -- of subject & object --- as complicity, as malleability] ---- consumption ---- reinstate / distraction --- under capitalism... ---- [Beyond the commodity's ability to absorb all opposition is our championing of interactive (not microphone-vatic or stroked passive intimist) reading experience: an informalism taking shape inside, between, & outside the words.] ---- by commerce / the compact given to doubtC 5. PRAXIS
Need keeps the book of lying open, the language common to all ---- Yet this is a counter-utopia, as if language were only a communal scarcity -- with its part/whole relations sparkless] ---- Small angelic accomplice / lost to night, fuse ---- whole scrabble to douser ---- [Yet the particular instances of weighted freeing offer something extra, something of a social mimesis.] ---- My currency in yours, grace. ---- out of us shocked a full life. ---- [And rematerializings. An encompassing dialog made out of 'social outtakes' -- & already socially coded materials, sometimes already commodified into equivalences, currency, atoms -- from person to duo.] ---- Make / a dance of that. ---- night's signs ---- trace extremities ---- a pace implies home, identity ---- wide and wide ---- Operative we, the varieties of pace argue and agree ---- [An informalism, une musique informelle. Carried far enough through through the social (through & through):] ---- investing the commong, redeemable dream.
[NOTE: All the language inside the brackets is mine, as are the titles & the long, separating dashes. All else: citations from Gil Ott -- from his The Whole Note (Zasterle, 1996); Public Domain (Potes & Poets, 1989); Traffic (Singing Horse, 1985); The Yellow Floor -- Poems: 1978-83 (Sun & Moon, 1987). A collage, taxonomized & pointed toward the 15 part 'Tips for Totalizers' essay project. See "Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis," the title piece i the (1996) Northwestern University Press collection of my essays. -- B.A.]
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