I’ve been
mulling the idea for the past several days of whether or not to add these two
last items to my list of “essential titles” for Peter Davis & I woke up
this morning with a sense of certainty that they should be included.
Charles Olson, Proprioception & Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism
The first
of these two volumes is the most schematic of Charles Olson’s critical writing,
the second a translation of an early (1940, but written in ‘36) book by the
French philosopher of everyday life. The first appeared originally as a
chapbook in
I’ve joined
these two books because it was their conjunction, rather than either one
individually, that puts them on this list. I found myself reading the two of
them more or less at the same time, scratching my head at Olson’s insistence
that thinking takes place within the body, following Lefebvre’s attempt to
rescue Marx for a western Marxism that was only then starting to emerge when it
became clear to me, utterly & completely, that these two books were making,
with different vocabularies & working out of radically different
traditions, the same argument.
It’s an
argument about the nature of knowledge & knowing, that the first can never
be present without the second being simultaneously active, so that knowledge
itself can never be decontextualized & certainly can
It is
within Proprioception that Olson, so
often characterized as the poet of voice & breath, offers his note on
“Logography”:
Word writing. Instead of ‘idea
writing’ (ideogram etc). That would seem to be it.
Olson goes
on to situate the origin of phonetics in the function of naming. Whether or not
this is good historical linguistics I couldn’t tell you, but what to me is the
most fascinating side of this extraordinary process is the degree to which it
reveals Olson as willing to pursue the consequences of his ideas even when it turns the poet on his head,
right side up. There is an ambition within Olson’s critical writing that is
never more overt than here, a confidence that the simplest focus on a
particular, any given detail, how for example a word is sounded, can, if you
just follow it out, take you anywhere,
& that nothing in turn can be the restricted domain of the expert.
Similarly
for Lefebvre, identifying a Marx that is the furthest thing from the static
intellectual dictator than Stalinism sought to turn him into, a Marx that in
the 1960s & ‘70s will become visible to those who begin not with Capital or The Communist Manifesto, but with the Grundrisse, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte & The German Ideology, transforms the role
of theory within the political.
Finally,
this leaves me with the question of what
about all the other books, all the other titles that have similarly had a
profound impact on me both as person & writer. Here, simply to acknowledge
some, are a few that I have found very nearly as defining as any I’ve listed
thus far: Rae Armantrout, Extremities; Roland
Barthes, Writing Degree Zero; Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations;
