Peter Davis must be in the process of gathering together a second volume of his anthology, Poet’s Bookshelf, collecting the lists of a new set of writers as to the ten or so books that most were or are “most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet,” since Barrett Watten, not one of the 81 contributors in the first volume, has been asked to prepare a similar list. Barry has responded with great gusto & offers a list not just of ten books, but rather a 15 or 16 works in twelve different categories that proved “most formative” for him. Even the categories chosen deserve a look-see:

Modernists
Postmoderns
Proto-Language
Language Writing
Hybrid Texts
New York School
Word/Image
New Music/Jazz
Literary Theory
Cultural Theory
Film
Great Books

For each of these categories, Watten offers a half dozen or so key works, highlighting one or two in boldface that are the ones he would ultimately list – “had these works not existed, all would be otherwise,” he writes.¹

I certainly understand the impulse to expand beyond just a blank list of individual volumes of poetry. My own selection in volume one contained 12 items², just six of which were individual volumes of verse in any usual sense. One was a volume, Spring & All, that contains both poetry & critical writing – it is in fact Watten’s selection under Modernists. Another was the Allen anthology. A third was a “box” of poems, rather than a book, Robert Grenier’s Sentences. (Watten lists it as one of his alternates under “Proto Language.”) One was a novel – Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (Watten lists a different Acker novel as an alternate under his “Hybrid Texts” category). One was a book of theory by a poet – Charles Olson’s Proprioception – and one a book of political theory – Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism from the old Cape/Grossman series that included such classics as Olson’s Mayan Letters and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 22 and 23 (one of my six “regular books” of poetry).

Watten carries this contextualizing impulse much further than I did. Where I listed one volume by Olson that could be called theory (Proprioception), another by Lefebvre, two of Watten’s twelve categories are theoretical, containing a total of 14 books, none of them by poets unless you count Roman Jakobson’s flirtation with the craft during his days as a student in Russia. I have to admit that Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning as well as Victor Shklovsky’s Third Factory would be on any expanded list of literary theory texts I chose as well, tho I’m surprised, I guess, not to see Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, anything by Olson or Creeley’s A Quick Graph. In fact, my personal list might well include Watten’s own The Constructivist Moment, Bob Perelman’s anthology of talks that appeared as a double issue of Hills, Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry or Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, an instance of biography of critique that is one of the great books in its own right.

What Watten calls Cultural Theory I would be more inclined to characterize as social or even political theory. And while I like all of the books Watten lists, I don’t think any of them would be on my own personal roster – this is probably the one area where we have the least overlap (as in “none” tho I don’t actually believe that our thinking is that far apart). For one thing, I couldn’t imagine the category, at least as category, not only without Lefebvre, but without Marx, for whom I would have picked several items from among The Eighteenth Brumaire, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, the first volume of Capital and possibly even the Grundrisse. I certainly would have had Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, the book that made him a cult figure in the U.S., and Sartre’s What is Literature? (necessary for Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero) , perhaps even Search for a Method or Critique of Dialectical Reason. Would I have included Louis Althusser or Antonio Gramsci? I certainly would have entertained the idea. But I also would have stretched out in some other areas not covered by Watten’s list here – such as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, or Claude Levi-Strauss’ magisterial memoir, Tristes Tropiques.

Another category that is interesting to think about is New Music/Jazz, for which Watten lists both recordings (Anthiel, Webern, Braxton, Cage, James Brown, Steve Reich, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy) and books (by Clark Coolidge & Ted Pearson). Here we have some interesting overlap – I would almost certainly include Braxton’s For Alto and Steve Reich’s Drumming – Barry & I heard the West Coast premier of the work at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum together in 1974 (and it was formative enough for me that I began writing Ketjak within a fortnight). But I might include Reich’s earlier tape works as well, along with some work by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (including the “unrecordable” performance piece The Hive), some different Lacy (Sidelines with Michael Smith on piano), and just maybe some folk and blues music, The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band, Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde by Dylan, the recordings of Robert Johnson, Drum Hat Buddha by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer and the jug band blues of Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel & Hammie Nixon. There were also some live jam sessions at Pangaea on Bernal Heights in San Francisco involving members of ROVA, John Grundfest, Greg Goodman, Henry Kaiser & others that proved formative, for me at least (ensconced as I was on the bleacher seating there, writing rapidly into a notebook) tho nobody thought to have a tape running. Another obvious piece for me would be an item of ersatz world music, the Balinese oral piece called Ketjak, which was cobbled together by Colin McPhee for the sake of tourists from pre-existing Balinese sources.

Like music, film is a category where I would expect any writer to select on deeply personal grounds whatever works might be thought of as “most formative” in the creation of an aesthetic. I’m fascinated at the idea that Barry picks Wojcieck Has’s Saragossa Manuscript just because it also is one of my favorite films of all time as well, and I didn’t realize that we shared that opinion. It’s not the “most important” or “best” film ever made, but it had a powerful impact on me when it made the rounds – with some regularity – at the Cedar Alley Cinema in San Francisco. If I don’t make the same argument on behalf of the film as Watten, it’s only because I didn’t learn those particular lessons (that “all art is a construction”) there. From the perspective of my own personal history, that was Antonioni’s gift. Of the other films and/or filmmakers on his list, the ones I just might include in a similar list would be Godard’s Breathless and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The Godard films that actually had the greatest impact on me – Pierrot le fou, and Weekend – may have more to do with when I saw them than which films they were. Other films I would have to include in such a list would be Les Enfants du paradis, Juliet of the Spirits, Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew, Vertigo, The Conversation, Chushingura and almost any film by Ousmane Sembene or Abigail Child, especially Pacific Far East Line. It’s worth noting that all of the women filmmakers who write and publish theory in English are named Abigail Child – her importance in the history of cinema cannot be overstated.

I’ll look more closely at Barry’s more purely literary choices next.

 

¹ Full disclosure: Ketjak and Tjanting are the works so chosen in boldface for language writing.

² Full disclosure (part 2): my selection included a volume of Watten’s: Plasma / Paralleles / “X”.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has a fascinating, even disturbing, critical piece in Jacket 31, which is technically the most recent issue of this by-now-fabled online literary project. Called “Manhood and its Poetic Projects,” the essay close-reads texts by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley & Charles Olson, looking at how their work embodies, indeed creates, a code of masculinity in the 1950s that challenges traditional definitions of what it means to be masculine, but without any ancillary analysis of the role & social position of women. DuPlessis goes so far as to incorporate material concerning Olson’s professional behavior as an academic:

As has been documented, Olson made sexist remarks to women in the classroom (mainly sexual innuendo), and sometimes excluded women from the educational experience. For example, as Michael Davidson has carefully noted, Charles Olson told Nancy Armstrong “that [his] course [at SUNY-Buffalo] was going to be about ‘Men’s Poetry,’ and any women who wanted to attend would have to watch from the hallway” — an incident probably from the first of Olson’s two years at Buffalo, 1963….

DuPlessis goes on to note that Olson was hardly alone in this sort of abject nonsense during that period, nor was it a phenomenon peculiar either to poets or to one kind of poetry.

But I’m not sure that I would have read DuPlessis’ piece when, or how, I did, had it not been for the comments stream that flowed from my note awhile back on the selected poems of Edward Dorn. I may joke from time to time about there being a “Wounded Buffalo” school of American poetics, but it comes as a dousing of ice-water to think at times just how thoroughly gendered some reactions to certain comments and issues can be. I had not thought of Dorn as an index for White Male Rage, nor for that matter of many of my regular comment-stream nabobs as participants therein, but there isn’t much question that the comments stream skews heavily male nor that some of the commentators there seem perfectly content to characterize such behavior as the public wish of “the gift of AIDS” on Allen Ginsberg as merely “provocative.” What is the level of behavior required to cross the line, one wonders, if one is prepared to excuse that away?

I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t read Dorn or Tom Clark. In fact, I think quite the opposite, even when I find it troubling or, as I noted re the last 20 years of Dorn’s writing, disappointing. But I do think one has a responsibility to discuss such events & behavior in any piece of writing one does about them. It’s as much of an 800-pound elephant in the room of their poetics as is Pound’s fascism or the anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings. And to say nothing says far more about the critic than it does about the poet in question.

More subtly, tho, DuPlessis’ piece brings up the issue that there are certain poets – Dorn & Olson among them – who are peculiarly men’s poets, by which I mean that not only do they write as men for men but that the vast majority of their readers are guys as well. This is not the same, at least I don’t think so, as seeing the writing, say, of Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich or Susan Griffin as being women’s poetry in a separatist model of feminism (tho the three did not all take the same position with regards to that, nor always express the same sense of that across time either – as Judy Grahn has said, separatism was a tool, not necessarily an end in itself). Or, for that matter, a somewhat parallel male gay liberation aesthetic that once would have included, say, the early poetry of Aaron Shurin.

Part of what makes DuPlessis’ piece worth reading is the inclusion of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as one of the texts she takes on, and the ways in which she demonstrates how the homosocial construct of the New American poetry plays out “the same but different” in the hands of at least one gay man. She notes, of course, that it would have been different had, say, she focused on Jack Spicer rather than Ginsberg, although it might have been interesting to look further and ask how it might have been different in the hands of John Ashbery or Frank O’Hara, or of Robert Duncan. Or, for that matter, Amiri Baraka or Steve Jonas. Or if she had looked at other poetry by Ginsberg that touched on his relationships with women, most notably his mother in “Kaddish” or his Aunt Rose.

One of the dynamics that DuPlessis is most interested in – troubled by – is precisely the double-nature of this male critique of masculinity that could be shared by such poets while at the same time not expanding its reach to incorporate women. She quotes Susan Howe from a conference on Olson to drive home the implication:

After hearing conference papers by two of Olson’s committed commentators, Don Byrd and John Clarke, Howe remarked: “I am a poet. I know that Charles Olson’s writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice.” Then, playing on her status as a “respondent” to conference papers: “Can daughters ever truly respond to factors that come into play in such a patronymic discourse?” (S. Howe, 166, 168). She follows with a cited catalogue of intensely misogynist passages by Olson and then balances this impression with some other citations. “When he is at his best, frontiers are in constant flux” (S. Howe, 172).

Howe’s point here strikes me as very much on target because it acknowledges the degree to which writers, including the most problematic among us, are not continuous monoliths, but indeed ensembles of complex layerings, some of which can be at complete odds with one another. There is the Gertrude Stein whose writing completely flung open the doors of possibility for women & especially lesbian women in poetics, whose attitude toward other Jews could best be characterized as ambiguous, and whose attitudes on all issues of class & privilege are cringe-worthy. Her presentation of African American female voices in her early prose is generous, but it is also condescending. She is always all of these writers. Leaving one or two of them aside robs you of the whole of Gertrude Stein, even if including all of them might not be as much inspirational or as much fun.

As the absolute number of poetry books expands so dramatically as it has in the U.S. over the past 20 years, it increasingly becomes possible for younger poets & readers to self-select & even balkanize their own reading, to become enmeshed almost exclusively in this particular branch of the post-New American poetries or that particular variant of the School of Quietude. And while it is certainly the case that it is better to be passionate about something than merely a tepid sampler of everything, I do worry about the ease with which these problems can all be avoided through the worst of all solutions, selective ignorance.

There’s no question in my mind that I think every woman writer needs to have both the collected Olson and The Maximus Poems on her bookshelf. Just as every male poet needs to have a comprehensive collection of the work of Judy Grahn on his. Even if her later poetry is, to my reading, as problematic as that of Ed Dorn’s. But it also means dealing with all these issues, whenever & however they arise, with some generosity one hopes (Susan Howe & Rachel Blau DuPlessis are both good examples of this, frankly), but always with eyes wide open.

What Do Cyborgs Want?

(Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century)

In this "Xerox degree of culture" that has come to be known, for reasons as paradoxical as they are historical, as post-modernity, what we notice first – because it so loudly and vigorously calls attention to itself, like the stereotypic masochist begging "Beat me, beat me" – is the self-flagellation of theory. We have seen the dispersal of theory, as with the grand diaspora of post-structuralisms, theory posed against theory itself, sometimes for very different reasons, theory sealing itself off and declaring its sole horizon to be a critique of the history of itself, theory that wills itself to become what it once took for its object or Other – this is particularly visible in those sophomoric critical texts that imagine themselves to be art –, and we have even seen theory that is apparently willing to erase its own characteristic feature of the critical gesture, that fundamental distantiation which is the presumption of all analysis, until it slides over from a critique of high culture, so-called, into becoming simply one more wavelength among many in the limitless spectrum of mass culture, a move by which the theoretician is transformed into a kind of celebrity, a talk show host for ideas, perhaps, or a standup comic on the new vaudeville circuit of college conferences, but a person who is most certainly subject to the rules of the game of celebrity far more absolutely than to any for the game of theory. Much of what makes the work of Jean Baudrillard interesting, even fascinating, and which has enabled it to remain resilient over these past three decades, has been a willingness on his part – knowingly and even laughingly, since humor is as much a part of his repertoire as is insight – to occupy so many of these incommensurable positions. Baudrillard is, to follow his own metaphor, the grand drag queen of theory. He gives us theory at its most provocative, at its most pornographic. He is, in some sense, our own Cicciolina, that Italian representative who, it has been alleged, sometimes urinates on the spectators in the front rows of her naked entertainments. What will Baudrillard say next? How can we not hear, whenever he asks that question, "What are we going to do after the orgy?" the real question: what are we going to do after this talk? Baudrillard, at least at one level, is the orgy. Or at least would like to be. No wonder he says that sex is no longer of much interest.

So to be asked to follow Baudrillard, to respond, is a little too obviously a set-up. Here he is discussing, amid much else, the disappearance of art...and I'm a poet. Here he is, the maverick apotheosis of the theoretical, that most critical and academic of discursive formations...I'm still a poet. (Even worse, my terminal degree is from a high school: I'm an unlettered poet.) Here Baudrillard is talking beyond politics, toward what he calls the transpolitical, and I'm a longtime political activist, a veteran, respectively, of the anti-war, prison and tenants' movements, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, part of the collective that publishes Socialist Review and until one month ago the executive editor of that publication. There is even a generational angle here: Baudrillard, after all, is just two years younger than my father. It's all too perfect and Oedipal a match. So if I decline to slay Baudrillard today, in the way that every response to a keynote speech is a form of ritual public disembowelment, Baudrillard posed as the bull and I as the matador, the way I once watched Arthur Kroker slay Fred Jameson in Lawrence, Kansas, I hope you will forgive me. Frankly, I have a larger target in mind: the problem of the transpolitical itself.

But it is impossible to approach the horizon of the transpolitical without considering the context within which it first comes into view. It is significant not only that this first sighting should occur within theory, nor even within theory of a certain type, but specifically within theory inscribed under the name Baudrillard. As the translators of Baudrillard's books have learned, whenever they have sought, without success, to locate the precise quotations that ornament and substantiate his arguments, the most distinctive methodological feature of his work – beyond even its reliance on metaphor, that old structuralist gambit, and his weakness (somewhat held in check tonight) for incredible, amazing, unprecedented, unbelievable intensifiers – is a flagrant and unparalleled sloppiness. At least that which appears to be a callous disregard for the documentable and the defensible. There is no graduate student in the United States who is going to be able to get away with playing anywhere nearly so fast and loose with details and critical terms in his or her orals or dissertation defense. As the saying goes, "Kids, don't try this at home."

Here, we find its most glaring instance in Baudrillard's conflation of two radically opposed conditions: transvestitism and transexuality. Transvestitism is more or less the practice he describes and what is apparently intended by these terms. In contrast, transexuality need not entail any such liberatory movement on the part of its experiencing subject. Phenomenologically, the transsexual's principle state seems to be a condition of horror, of the self trapped within a body that is explicitly and profoundly Other. The gendering of this experience may very well be a social construct specific to the codes and history of Euroamerican culture. The tragedy of many transsexuals is that this sense of otherness and horror is often not resolved by surgery, and that the suicide rate among post-operative transsexuals is quite high.

Liberation and flight are moves within a game that might be conjoined, as they were for Afro-American slaves moving north along the underground railroad, but they are not identical. The flight of Kampucheans from Pol Pot's killing fields into the inner-city ghettoes and minimum-wage jobs of North America, like that of Palestinians a generation ago from their homeland into the camps of Lebanon, can scarcely be called liberation. Like the parallel concept of speed, that fleeting state which is perhaps best analogized to the phenomenon of acceleration in an already moving vehicle, there can be no representative instance of the pure condition. Purity is a methodological fiction. Like silence, whether in the desert or in an anechoic chamber, it does not exist: the perceiving subject is perpetually stuck with the roar of the blood vessels and the whine of the central nervous system. As recent developments in the theory of superconductivity ironically reveal, even something such as electricity is organized not around the free flow of electrons, but rather as a series of practical responses to the problem of resistance, the impure. At the level of generality that is necessary for Baudrillard to deploy them, categories such as transvestitism never exist. This world is composed only of particulars.

This flagrant disregard for facticity drives Baudrillard's detractors bananas. It counters the fundamental positivism and fetishization of the empirical that lies at the heart of the orthodox academy's concept of professionalism. Thus, in North America, where the traditional left, in both its social democratic and Marxian modes, has been historically centered in and around the social sciences, a domain virtually constructed around its anxiety over the notion of a fact, much more energy has been expended in fighting off the ideas of Baudrillard than in listening to them. Sometimes the sheer anger behind such responses is amusing. Recently, at Socialist Review, we received a submission of a review of Baudrillard's most recent scandal, America. This review was simply an excerpt from Mark Twain's journals of his travels to France in which the French are reduced to those barbarians who taught Native Americans how to scalp their enemies.

But it is often more useful to ask ourselves just who is being offended and why. For Baudrillard's cavalier attitude toward his verbal chess games of abstraction, characterized by hyperbole, the broad stroke and the sweeping gesture, is certainly no accident. As computer programmers like to say about peculiarities in software, "that's not a bug, that's a feature." This in fact may be Baudrillard's peculiar genius, and his greatest methodological gift. Here is a strategy for escaping, however imperfectly, the filters and blind spots inherent in those discourses that are constructed upon the disciplinarity that is at the heart of empiricism. Forever held in check by their fear of the impure, which they conceive of as allegiance to the empirical, and even, at its most pathological, to quantification and statistical significance, these discourses can only proceed incrementally, anchored in the framework of previous positions. It's a narrative mode that aspires to hypotaxis – this is why impurity is so threatening – and the teleological function is structurally implicit within it. This is why paradigm shifts are registered as such deep shocks to the system that the vocabulary of revolution is invoked. It is a negative definition of rigor and Baudrillard simply abolishes it.

In fact, even Baudrillard is not yet entirely free of the dubious vestiges of theory's pseudo-scientific rules of discourse, where simplicity and grace are taken for virtues rather than as mediations. Thus, here, we perceive a felt need to carry the prefix trans over several fields of evidence – the transpolitical, the transaesthetic – where it might have been better to have focused the model of transvestism per se upon that distinct sub-category where, typically, males dress as females while consciously foregrounding elements of their masculine gender by retaining beards or wearing lowcut gowns calculated to reveal massive tufts of chest hair. The theoretical term for this is radical cross-dressing, although its practitioners in San Francisco just call it gender-fuck.

The advantage to Baudrillard's method is that it is structural, in the best sense of that term, and proceeds from the broadest and most general features, that domain which is most apt to remain occluded if not outright invisible when approached from any other direction. Baudrillard's term for it is fractal, and his analogy of the hologram cagily presents a perspective that can only operate from above and outside. This perspective is what so often gives Baudrillard's texts their eery air of rightness even when the reader knows full well that massive amounts of evidence, impurities, could be marshalled together to counter this or that assertion. It is this structural view that enables Baudrillard to perceive and identify the transpolitical.

Marx certainly understood that the bourgeois state, in particular, was an instrument of capital, and not the other way around, just as he understood also that the state itself was not an absolute, a given of nature, and could at some future point wither away. What Marx seems not to have foreseen, however, is the possibility that, in some utterly critical sense, the state might wither prior to the abolition of capital. At the level of the political, many (if not all) of the effects that we have come to know as postmodernity can be traced to this radical reformulation, this redistribution of power out of (and away from) the body of the state back into a civil society that has itself been technologically internationalized and radically reconfigured.

This is the subtext of a statement such as, speaking of our present world, "it is utopia realized," and this is why Baudrillard can make such a bald and bold assertion, even in the face of famine, wars, Chernobyl, Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez. The state is withering in the precise sense that its scope no longer defines the outer limit of power. That this is happening even as state budgets and the absolute number of personnel increase, and at the same moment when computerization dramatically expands the surveillance capacity of governments, is what is lost whenever we approach this problem from within. Yet Reagan and Thatcher have managed to role back the welfare state in the U.S. and Britain. Deregulation has ceded large domains of agency and initiative away from the public sphere. Socialist, or at least social democratic, governments from Australia to France have found themselves forced, often against their own will, to replicate many of these same shifts. This is especially poignant in those nations, such Spain and Greece, where the socialist party out of power once took positions that today ring with the nostalgic tones of ultraleftism. In many of these states, socialist governments have learned the hard way that nationalization of the means of production is politically unenforceable and is thus reduced as a strategy to little more than the government propping up certain failing industries. Further, the technological transformation of commodities production over the past two decades has created such a disparity in available goods between the so-called capitalist and communist blocs that the Soviet Union, China, and several of the Soviet client states, in the name of increased production through economic decentralization, have been forced to attempt to reinvent capitalism itself. The subsequent civil unrest in both those nations demonstrates not only how volatile this process is – it may get far bloodier in the future – but serves ultimately as an index, whatever reversals and convolutions may still lie ahead, of the retraction of the state even in total societies. It is in this light that the projected confederation of the European Economic Community in 1992 seems little more than a nostalgic attempt to hold the future at bay by inventing a new level of statehood that seeks only to retrieve a degree of national agency that no longer exists. Finally, basic social problems have emerged, of which acid rain and the greenhouse effect are but the first signals, against which national action, by definition, can only be partial and inadequate.

For those of us who have been a part of the traditional left, these events pose an ironic and most unpleasant question: What is socialism? In the First World, it would seem that the answer is that it is the stage between capital and capital. In the Third World, we might substitute feudalism for the first of these two bracketing periods, but the final term remains the same. The condition, as Baudrillard might put it, would appear to be fatal.

Not one of the notorious shortcomings of capitalism are in any way resolved by this historic shift. If anything, freed of many constraints, these can be anticipated to become even more dire in the future. If American tobacco farmers find a declining market at home for their lethal products, they simply increase their advertising in France, Hong Kong or Africa, just as the producers of infant formula did before them. Union Carbide has demonstrated quite well how national borders can protect a corporation unfortunate enough to have a Bhopal. The total cost of the Exxon Valdez disaster, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, will absorb only a few weeks' worth of net profit, not enough to even impact Exxon's price on the stock market. Factor in insurance coverage, tax write-offs and price increases, and Exxon actually stands to net over $100 million on this single event.

The great failing of the left, particularly in North America, our enormous crime of negligence, has been our inability to conceive politics beyond the horizon of the state. Even the Trotskyist workplace organizer, disdainful of all electoral strategies, is entirely encircled within a trade union practice whose commission ends at the border. Because we have conceived of politics as defined in a classical and historic fashion, as the public sphere of the polis, we have failed to sufficiently recognize the state as an instrument of power. Where once it served to protect capital by providing a wall of nationhood around its markets, now it serves a very different function: to limit the potential of anyone, including the state, to threaten capital.

Nations now operate very much the way suburbs once did, as a limit to individual and public will. Much of the original impulse behind these ex-urban hamlets was not in any idealization of the rural, simpler life, but as a mechanism for spatially separating classes, races, and, most especially, tax populations. Particularly when unincorporated, suburbs could not place the same infrastructural demands on their inhabitants that were the acknowledged necessities of the city. Many of the first planned communities of California and elsewhere contained explicit language in their deed restrictions as to the racial composition of future tenants. Piedmont, California, for example, is a white enclave of vast wealth, surrounded on all four sides by Oakland, yet legally distinct. The power relations at the heart of suburbanization were initially so naked that residents of Piedmont were permitted to run for political office in Oakland (although not the other way around), and for decades the white mayors of this black majority city were residents of that suburb. It is no accident that the subnational geopolitical unit that best corresponds to the internationalization of capital in the postmodern period should be the suburb. The suburb is first of all a political form.

The totalization of power implicit in nuclear capability is just one of a number of causes that have metamorphosed nations into just such suburbs. Power is elsewhere. The question of dating, of whether this transformation, Baudrillard's "real" orgy, first came forth from its cocoon in August, 1945, in the air over Hiroshima, in Vietnam and Algeria a decade later, or perhaps in the streets of Paris, Prague, Saigon, Mexico City, and Chicago in 1968, is an issue for obsessives. Stalin's worst excesses, after all, can read as attempts to impose from above that which was already no longer strong enough to sustain itself from within. Yet, as we know, this evacuation of power from the state is in no way accompanied by a lessening of the presence or effects of power. If this is what inadvertently generates the confusion we see on the part of those who, like Jameson or the Frankfurt School partisans, cannot truthfully imagine the one without the other, at least not in this configuration, it accounts also for those others who, like Jean-François Lyotard, celebrate the present simply because it is here. The rise of French theory itself may have much to do with the fact that this evacuation may well be more perceptible, more readily felt, from the vantage point of that city Walter Benjamin once called "the capital of the nineteenth century." The history of the present, however, forces us to reconceive this project of theory, even to offer it a new title: "Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century."

Long before postmodernity, the United States found itself structurally predisposed toward a regime of decentralization, situating political power in Washington, capital in New York, and information in Boston. The very name we give this nation says it all – it is not a description but a desire, a wish for the impossible. What has traditionally been interpreted as a history of the expansion of the American state, from the Federalist Papers through the Civil War to the New Deal and Great Society, can just as easily be read as a sequence of operations aimed not at coalescing and empowering a national union so much as of holding off a far stronger pull in precisely the opposite direction, toward dissolution and dispersal. In California, we have arrived at a society of suburbs whose urban centers are, at best, mere formalities.

If the problem that faces us today is how to recognize and live with the consequences of this transformation, French theory, precisely because it is so suburban, so conscious of the decline and loss of centers, has presented many valuable hints and suggestions. Baudrillard's advantage over Foucault (the first volume of whose History of Sexuality has been offered to us today not so secretly in the red dress of transvestitism) is that, where Foucault's focus was on the micropolitical, transcribing the concretion and dispersal of authority, Baudrillard's perspective, that of the hologram, has been at the level of the macro. Like Jameson, Baudrillard is – and I will use this term positively one more time – a structuralist. Unlike Jameson, however, Baudrillard is not nostalgic for structure. In this disjunction, Baudrillard replicates, at the level of methodology, what is by now a familiar dispersal of power. Here is the real scandal, the hologram from hell, and it is one from which we can extract clues toward political, cultural and aesthetic practices that extend beyond what Baudrillard himself seems prepared to suggest.

At the level of the individual, the corollary of this evacuation of power from the state, accomplished at least partially by its totalization of lethal force, has been the devolution of the subject from an ego toward an ensemble of destabilized and competing subject positions. Those leftists – still a minority – who are even willing to publicly acknowledge this transformation respond to it by trying to imagine methods for reversing this process. Thus Chantal Mouffe turns to the concept of citizenship without addressing how this might be possible, post-polis, in the epoch of the transpolitical. The dream, which Mouffe shares with such radically different leftists as Stanley Aronowitz and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Michael Harrington and Mike Davis, is to reconstruct this mourned-for coalition, even if it is only a coalition of the self. The slogan of this politics, which might be rephrased as "The Subject United / Shall Never Be Depleted," is notable mostly for the vast quantities of evidence to the contrary it so militantly ignores.

What the emergence of the transpolitical suggests, however, is that the impulse to unite may itself be a significant problem, conditioned as it must be by a principle of organization that can only reproduce a narrative of hypotaxis. All fantasies to the contrary are simply predicated upon a universal citizen whose features are arbitrary (or not so arbitrary) extrapolations of a specific subject, against which everyone else is relativized into a subaltern position. Those political programs, such as syndicalism, that appear to evade this trap through a rejection of the party as their institutional expression merely reinvent it in the guise of their opponent, which is, whether it is called capital or the state, invariably caricatured as a monolith. Yet we know that even the multinational corporation is every bit as unstable as money or as the self. Entire industries are broken apart, reformulated, shipped overseas, brought back, reconstructed, technologically transformed, and dispersed all over again. Inside individual organizations, between the critical tacit knowledge of the shopfloor worker, the turf-jealous sectors of middle management, the often strained relations between CEOs and corporate boards, and the external threats of hostile takeovers, power can never flow freely in any direction. It is always impure, clotted, ambivalent, filled with resistance. Within this reality, we are asking the wrong questions. What we need instead is a practice that reconceptualizes power itself. Our goal and motivation cannot be to "overthrow" it, because we will ultimately never locate the real it to be overthrown.

As Donna Haraway once phrased this issue, we must become cyborgs, not just transvestites. We must move beyond gender-fuck as a strategy, beyond even species-fuck, to power-fuck itself. Our struggle is not for unity, but with unity. The problem we are confronted with is how to neutralize the lethal effects of power without reconstituting it elsewhere. Confusing power with the polis will leave us incapable of even approaching either side of this equation. The very real possibility is that this project is impossible, an oxymoron, for power will not go away. Perhaps what we should be seeking instead is the perpetual destabilization of power, the war of the flea. Politics then would shift away from a teleological practice toward a process of perpetual resistance, one whose integrity is no longer defined by a goal. We need a politics without goals. That is the cyborg lesson of the transpolitical, a politics of perpetual motion, no more stable than mercury on a mirror; in the hypotaxis of this talk, that is the topic sentence.

This does not mean an end to resistance, an end to movements, an end to strategic organizing in coalition form, or even an end to identifying the state as a vital mediating concentration of authority. But it means directing every action, and each movement, not into a master narrative, however noble, but towards anti-narrative itself.

At the level of aesthetics (you knew I would end here – this talk is a narrative, a use of power in the act of perpetual resistance, power aimed against power), the aestheticization of everything via media, advertising and subcultural style destabilizes each artistic practice. This may well be the end of aesthetics as we have known it, but it is certainly not the end of artistic practice, whose political function and potentiality is now open to contestation in ways that are still unfamiliar and may even be wholly new. The question confronting poetry is not what is the best poem, nor even the best poetry, but what are the social roles of the poem and how can these be raised to the level of consciousness so that the power relations upon which poetry itself is constituted become perceptible and vulnerable to challenge. The poem as high art versus low art, the poem as an expression of a Self (that reified subject), the poem – and poet – as the antithesis of theory, the poem as beautiful language, the poem as difficult symbolism, the poem as direct speech, the poet as academic, the poet as drunk, the poet as bohemian, the poet as mystic, the poet as avant-garde, as effete or as macho, the poem as anything other than a research laboratory for verbal effects that can be deployed a generation later in advertising: the social role of each poem is the political content of any such text. And there is no single correct answer, ever.

What is manifestly a disaster in any artistic or cultural practice, for the practitioner as well as for their audience, is a process that seeks stasis. If we say that a certain kind of poetry which attempts merely to preserve the traditional status of the poem is lifeless, or if we make the same allegation about a practice of painting that has become entirely subservient to an economy of galleries, it is because these seek to freeze the relations of power in which they find themselves enveloped. Such work is death through inertia, a culture of agoraphobia. Yet even these, we must remind ourselves, are modes of impurity. How ironic and wonderful: we could not exist without them.

Against the culture of agoraphobia and stasis, however, we must pose a counter-praxis of paralogy, Lyotard's term for the perpetual differentiation of the academy, for the need of each scientific or cultural worker to articulate a position that is defensible precisely because it has not previously been occupied – for each tenure a new idea, a grid of potential information that totalizes and reduces thought to a sequence of moves along an infinite grid. Here, however, we must propose a leap, not in faith but in practice. And Baudrillard's career itself presents us with an excellent model. If we identify freedom in the transpolitical universe as residing primarily, and perhaps entirely, in the interstices between points within a destabilized field of power, perpetual resistance requires us to carry paralogy to a new level. Paralogy's potential lies not in locating new points within the grid of the game, but between games, so as to make gaming itself visible, simply a grid of a different order, with all the same pockets of power and lethal force, to call even this into question. It is in this sense that Baudrillard-the-scholar, like Cicciolina urinating upon her fans, presents us with a model for cyborg politics.

Missoula, MT, 1989

My trip to Missoula, Montana, was memorable for a number of reasons. Taking place in May of 1989, it occurred just a matter of weeks before the massacre in Tiananmen Square in the People’s Republic of China, a pivotal – if, in the Chinese instance, abortive – event in the global collapse of “actually existing” Stalinist states that would result over the next two years in the fall of the Berlin Wall & implosion of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Indeed, I was already scheduled to spend part of that summer in what was then Leningrad.

I had also just started working – less than four weeks on the job – in the computer industry and had had to negotiate permission to take this week in the Rockies, plus the later time abroad (there were stops along the way in both Finland & Germany), when I first signed my contract with ComputerLand. I had just left my tenure as the executive editor of The Socialist Review (SR) – I remained on the editorial collective for an additional three years – and was making a conscious decision to go into the computer industry, sensing that technology had the potential to change the terms of many social debates of the late ‘80s.

But what makes my trip to Missoula most memorable, well beyond the stunning mountain setting of the University of Montana, very possibly the most beautiful campus in the United States, with osprey hunting fish in the river that runs through it, were my meetings with two people. One was Jean Baudrillard, whom I’d been asked to debate by the organizers of a conference focused around the work of the French philosopher.

The second was with the painter Mel Laubach, a one-time roommate of mine in San Francisco. Mel & I had put together a collective household in a seven-bedroom Victorian – total rent for the entire building was $350 – in 1975, a group that lasted with some rolling changes until the fall of 1977 when a leaky roof & recalcitrant landlord led to a rent strike & eventual eviction. Mel had been a student at the San Francisco Art Institute when I first met him, working mostly with abstracts in oil – imagine Franz Kline with paints as thick as some of Jess’ portraits of Robert Duncan – but graduated and had moved to New York City, seeking the proverbial great gallery deal & fame & fortune. I’d lost touch with him entirely until one day, when I had gotten my first East Coast reading tour ever, Charles Bernstein picked me up at the Newark airport and we were driving back into Manhattan. As we pulled through the Holland Tunnel and came to the first red light, one of the passersby in the crosswalk was Mel. We actually blocked traffic – it wasn’t going anywhere very fast anyway – for a couple of minutes as I got his contact information & told him about the reading.

Not only was Mel living in New York, but he had become the super of his building on the Lower East Side. As I was to learn that same weekend, one of the tenants in that building was Hannah Weiner. Talk about weird coincidences. I met with Mel several more times in New York – one of our old housemates actually succeeded him as that building’s super – the last time when he was working at an outdoor & camping equipment chain, thinking about going back to grad school. But when I got back to the city again, he was gone and I had no way of knowing where.

So I was floored when, as I was walking through the lobby of the Performing Arts Center in Missoula, about to deliver my talk, I ran into Mel again. He had settled in Missoula and was getting his MFA in painting there. He had not even realized that I was speaking there that night, and had never heard of Baudrillard. He’d simply heard that there was going to be a debate with a weird French philosopher and that it ought to be pretty funny. In Missoula, that was reason enough to head out of the house.

I spent a good portion of the next day with Mel. Indeed, a screw in the frame of my glasses had fallen out & disappeared the night before as I was addressing the audience of some 600 people & Mel knew which mall had a good optician who quickly repaired them – a good thing as I had a reading that night with jazz musician Eugene Chadbourne, complete with his electric rake.

I lost touch with Mel again after that & it was only a couple of months ago, after I’d googled him, looking to see if there were any jpegs of recent paintings available on the web, that I discovered that he’d been killed in 2004 in an auto accident in Missoula. And it was only after I’d emailed his widow – he’d been single when I’d seen him last – that I discovered that she was the sister of one of my co-workers from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I’d been the director of development for several years before taking over the editorship at Socialist Review. I still have a painting of Mel’s from his Art Institute days just ten feet from where I’m typing right now.

Baudrillard was another matter. I’d read the books, of course, and had originally been interested in him as a provocative protégé of Henri Lefebvre, but had never met the person. In 1989, his star in the world of celebrity academics was at its peak & responding to him on the same stage was, in some fashion, a big deal. For me, it was an opportunity to present in a different context than any I’d had previously, tho my work at SR had put me into some pretty interesting spots, and during that period I was very much involved with working out what I felt were that mostly amnesiac premises of what in those days constituted post-modernism. Amnesiac because nobody, at least other than Jurgen Habermas, was prepared to address the problems of modernity from which the post-modern presumably sprang. Baudrillard presented a terrific opportunity to address this question and the draft of his talk that I’d been given by conference co-chair William Chaloupka – “Transpolitics, Transexuality, Transaesthetics,” maybe 90 percent of the version he eventually published in Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics – made it self-evident that I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity.

Shorter than I’d expected but perfectly affable, Baudrillard had the star routine down solid. He hadn’t flown directly into Missoula, but had landed either in the LA or Las Vegas & rented a car, seeking to drive north through the desert that he loved so much about America – I always thought that he was the one person besides Nabokov who really saw that landscape as sensuous. Unfortunately, the rental car died along the route, perhaps in Utah, and some poor grad student had had to be dispatched to fetch the stranded philosopher. The rental car was just left on the side of the road, with Baudrillard saying succinctly, “Oh, I’m sure the university will take care of that.” He’d also arrived entirely without cash – a trick I’ve seen one or two other celebrity academics pull – so that grad students were perpetually having to buy everything for him. And he was not without his appetites.

I think I surprised him in our session together. If you read his talk – and especially in the back & forth session that followed our presentations – it was clear that he expected me to represent the aesthetic in some relatively pure form, lyric poetry perhaps. But that wasn’t me and certainly what I wasn’t doing. My own piece, when I published it in that same volume¹, was entitled “What Do Cyborgs Want? (Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century),” playing of course off of the title of the famous Donna Haraway essay, “Cyborg Manifesto,” that had first appeared in the pages of SR a couple of years earlier.

Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics has been out of print for some time & a search of the web suggests that there are no used copies to be had at all. I’ll post my piece from the conference tomorrow if all goes well. (See alternate accounts of this conference by Thomas Dumm and Bill Borneman.)

 

¹ The book's subtitle was a play on my “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” which Chaloupka and his co-editor William Stearns republished in that volume as well.

I’ve always found critical writing to be a useful activity. Indeed, when I first began writing relatively theoretical articles, first with “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” – a piece David Highsmith had to talk me into writing for an art journal he was working on – and not all that much later with “The New Sentence,” which began as a talk in Bob Perelman’s series of poets’ talks, I was pulling together lots of inchoate ideas that had been floating around in my thinking with only the loosest connections for some time, but which I had never set down in anything like a systematic manner. So just writing them up was as surprising to me as anything I wrote could have been to any other reader later on. Plus the fact that as you set things down, new pathways begin to suggest themselves, making the actual writing process really a journey of discovery. Which has a lot to do with why it’s so much fun.

The day I finally gave my talk on the new sentence, I was in the kitchen in my top-floor flat on San Jose Avenue in San Francisco typing like a crazed weasel on three pounds of meth until my downstairs neighbor, Alan Bernheimer, knocked on the back door to let me know that “we really really need to go right now if we don’t want the crowd to give up & leave.” It wasn’t the first time he’d come to check on me that afternoon. Once we got to the San Francisco Art Institute, I found myself improvising off a text – it must be in the archives at UC San Diego somewhere – that was more outline than anything else. Later when I typed it up for the anthology Bob did in his journal, Hills, I mostly just put the main points down in the manner of speech. Later, as I was editing the talk into a format for the Roof Press Book, James Sherry and my editor, David Sternbach, forced me to be clear in some thing that had slid along without being questioned. All of which is to say that what you read in the essay by that name really has no more to do with the actual talk I gave (let alone my much more cryptic notes) than the notes of Saussure’s students could be said to really be his thinking about linguistics. It’s in the vicinity, but only an approximation.

It was toward the end of that talk when I was attempting to list the qualities of the new sentence, as such, that I first mentioned torque:

1)     The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2)     The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;

3)     Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4)     Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy / ambiguity;

5)     Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;

6)     Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;

7)     Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8)     The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of the paragraph, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

The number on torque is, in fact, the only one that talks about what occurs within the sentence, as such. Torque, the word, was something I’d never used critically before. Indeed, I’d probably never invoked in my writing at all before that moment. It was a concept I had gotten in, of all places, my ninth or tenth grade electricity shop, a requirement for boys at Albany High, in which we hand-built little motors while attempting to learn the underlying principles of the engine. I understood it – I could have been quite wrong about this – as the force inherent in a twisting motion, and thus specifically as an expression of force. I was, at that moment, thinking specifically of the prose of Peter Seaton, Carla Harryman & Leslie Scalapino, all of whom struck me as masters syntax that started to go in one direction, only to veer off at unpredictable angles, creating as they went something of far greater power than referential or abstract meaning would lead one to suspect. Here are two paragraphs – the first of Seaton’s contribution to In the American Tree – from The Son Master:

The pro stampede which grows out of our associations of the west completely explodes it.

And here it comes again, father stuff and substitution leaving it to read persons and physiological passages for the sake of you under my own roof. I need my burg tomorrow, wishing us onto a field of appreciation like getting happiness from God or Kings or Congress. It’s clear close to the letters leaving everything as a demonstration of alarm, dangers of the test for George for a notion I would like to fix it so. Reading ambition, what the father in English charges streaks as a single line under the thundering thumb.

What is the status of that first sentence? It’s not, strictly speaking, referential, tho a clever reading shouldn’t have that much trouble gleaning meaning from it. But the word choices – the diction of the abbreviated pro or the insertion of the intensifier – seem determined to keep our focus as close to the word or phrase as might be possible. And consistently, throughout these few sentences and elsewhere in Seaton’s work, we come across sentences that can’t possibly be boiled down because at every juncture the actual focus of what is being said can change, not unintelligibly so, but with such localism of attention that the reader is forever refocusing on what “here” means, what “now” is.

This of course is something that occurs in a lot of poetry that is not in prose, particularly since the end of the Second World War and the advent of an interest in Asian literary heritage on the part of many of the New American poets. Phil Whalen seems a very clear instance of this, but so are Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner. What Seaton is showing – not unlike some of what we can learn by close reading Leslie Scalapino – is how this might occur as well in prose. It’s something one finds a great deal of, say, in the early short fiction of Robert Creeley, not to mention Jack Kerouac, in whose works sentences often stretch out so far that keeping it all in mind isn’t even a possibility, so that you are forced to readjust your focus, something that radically reconstitutes what reading means.

The Son Master is prose torqued up high, close to what you will find it at times in the work of Clark Coolidge, neither of whom prove as angular as, say, Scalapino. Whereas the normative view of the sentence is as a “complete thought” – subject (often a noun phrase) + predicate – these are sentences that prove reluctant to conclude, preferring, at moments, to turn & turn & turn again:

A person walking in the freezing countryside in a parka, gloves wool clothes, and no one else being around. Angry voices wrestling in the person as she’s concentrating and walking, beside the road in the snow were the marks of a struggle of a bird picking up an animal. The dark glasses of the person freezing over but the glare from the light snow blinding, feet numbing, having to get back to home – then listening to the radio, people to be in from the freezing, children not to be going out to schools.

A woman reading on the radio, and then in the great heat she and a man bicycling by the corn fields a dark sky that seems to be a tornado near where they’d come from, where they’re living. Bicycling back because of that, sweating in the heat. A dog chasing them up the road. The siren of the tornado warning whined. At night a strand of lightning singes the building, there in bed in the dark. Turn on the radio to hear which has just been blasted back on, after going off.*

There is a footnote attached to that asterisk which reads “See Jerry Ratch, Plein-Air, for fields with crows in them.”

It is not that Scalapino is being obfuscatory or in any way “difficult” in this passage from The Return of Painting, even as her unnamed but gendered characters go from hypothermia to extreme heat within the course of two paragraphs, only one sentence of which follows the normative subject → predicate model: The siren of the tornado warning whined. But normative grammar would suggest that there in bed in the dark refers back either to building or a strand of lightning, and yet no reader I can imagine will be confused by that. Because it’s not about building transparent (or even elegant) grammatical architecture, the transparent prose of a Twain or Bellow, but of representing the shape of time & of experience. Elsewhere, in a piece entitled “’Thinking Serially,’ in For Love, Words and Pieces,” Scalapino writes

Creeley’s use of autobiographical reference, is following the movement of itself in time (watching the mind) – rather than the expression of ‘creation’ of a personality. Its mirroring of its own mind formation and its race to out-run that as ‘serial thinking’ is not static personality creation because it is only that movement.

This internally produced ‘argument’ (the mind watching itself and trying to outrace its own closure, as a ‘particular’ form in this time) rather than being a trap that ultimately enshrines the self, are pieces in the collection of writing which by the very fact of occurring as ‘merely’ components repeating a conflict, as it shows up, without essential change, are not ‘that’ (fixed) psychology.

Nearly 30 years after I pulled together that initial list, there’s nothing particularly new about the new sentence. Like the title of the talk itself, torque is a term that has had something of a career of its own. But given the degree to which I was appropriating a term from a radically different discourse, the idea that it has been in any way useful to anybody subsequently strikes me as fortuitous in the extreme. Mike Hauser’s initial question, which prompted Kasey Mohammad’s response, which in turn provoked this note, isn’t at all off the mark. The suggestiveness of the thing has been far more powerful than the thing itself. And Kasey’s attempt at a definition is about 90 percent on target.

A couple of addenda are worth noting. One is that I never intended to suggest that any particular sentence or piece of writing needed to satisfy all eight points of that list to qualify as a “new sentence,” only that these are some of the features one can anticipate finding there. The excerpt from The Return of Painting demonstrates an instance in which torque pretty much is the only element from that list that’s active there, largely because Leslie is pursuing a different set of interests in that piece. I do know that when I wrote that list, it was very much “top down,” in that the first item – The paragraph organizes the sentences – is by far the most important. So there was (is?) a hierarchy of formal interests I was noticing in the writing being done at that moment in the late 1970s.

A second is that torque, as such, has generally become less important among younger poets. To the great detriment to their poetry. I can’t really think of anybody under the age of, say, 40, whose work is as syntactically marked as distinct as that of Scalapino, Coolidge or Seaton – their writing is unmistakable. In a sense, the disruptiveness that one senses around such work has continued – one sees it in both visual & conceptual poetics. One sees it in flarf, which loves to foreground its seams, or in a work like Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature, just out from Information as Material, a personally annotated & highlighted edition of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in which every word of Blanchot’s master text has been erased. But this is disruption not at the moment of a syntactic turn, but merely at the level of the text as idea. It is not too much to suggest that, in this sense, torque largely has been marginalized. Why, precisely, and what that means are questions we (I) need to be asking now.