Recuperation of the Indexical

This is a (probably un)startling return of the real:

From The New York Times:

NEWS ANALYSIS: Unraveling Boston Suspects’ Online Lives, Link by Link

Once the search for the marathon bombing suspects focused on Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers’ social media postings provided a rich vein of material to mine.

http://nyti.ms/10y1YeE

Spirit wounds

'The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind. '
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.

In this passage Hegel is talking about the beautiful soul, which, always ready to forgive, to forget faults, perpetually returns to itself, rediscovers itself, reconstitutes itself, recuperates. It is possible to see in this phrase the very definition of the work of the Spirit. It's expresses precisely this process of recovery, healing, return, the re-knitting of the skin after the wound, in other words, the plasticity that appears as the very movement of the absolute.

- Catherine Malabou

toward a mainstream poetics

[K. Silem Mohammad] on the origins of Flarf:

Towards a Mainstream Poetics

Want to take seriously [Pixar-esque weasel/clown-faces behind me fleer and moue] for a bit here Mike Magee's reconfiguration of the poetic Mainstream.

Others have pointed this out before, of course, but "mainstream poetry" as usually construed by its opponents is anything but. What on earth, as Mike asks, is mainstream about Robert Pinsky? A mainstream is a forceful, central current that carries in its path all the debris and livestock and entire vacationing families that get vortexed into it. It is not a carefully constructed iron walkway that escorts the effete peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon. In the mainstream, you have to shout to be heard above the roar of the already-tired water metaphor I'm spinning out here. In the mainstream, the weasels with clown faces have uzis. The mainstream is the scary global video game we live in, everyday, and it has nothing to do with some absurd publishing scam within which a few bloodless surrealists and failed classicists and Tools of the Homespun False Consciousness get to define what is normative.

If you want to break it down by sales figures and numbers of readers, the margins between the Big Names and the small press world are negligible in light of the overall money-losingness of poetry. Most of the poetry read on a daily basis in this country, I'll wager, is amateur poetry circulated between individuals and posted on the internet.

So what would it mean for poetry to be truly mainstream? It would have to be aggressively public, perhaps--distributed via mass mailing or spam messages, say. It would have to be as shameless as television in its bid to engage new readers, and even, potentially, make money. Imagine that: poetry that made money. Do you feel a bristling in your blood at the hint of sacrilege? What shall I do with all the money my new, Mainstream poetry is going to make...? After I pay off my student loans and credit card debts, maybe I'll finance a series of poetry billboards that respond electronically to the radio signals from passing cars and compose digital aleatory compositions designed to influence the way people shop for fabric. Maybe I'll fund a political party whose platform involves the legalization of plagiarism. Maybe I'll pay some high school kids to translate the Iliad homophonically and have homeless people read the results on cable access TV. Although it would make more sense to pay the homeless people, wouldn't it? You see how anarchically irrational and unfair poetry in the real world would be!

Let's start a lo-fi, low residency MFA program dedicated to the advancement of guerilla Mainstream poetics. As Juliana Spahr recently mentioned, there are certainly enough unemployed poets with Ph.D.'s out there to band together and get such a thing accredited. I don't know how that stuff works, but basically don't you just take out an ad in Poets & Writersor whatever and then people pay you money to entertain them in the countryside for a weekend or two? Give the thing some hip jazzy name like the Institute of Post-Avant Poetics, and you're all set. And stop at nothing--T-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, mouse pads.... Invite big-name poet-celebrities to our conventions: Suzanne Somers, Leonard Nimoy, and Jewel alongside Lytle Shaw, Anselm Berrigan, and Lisa Jarnot. Special musical guests. Softball games. Cotton candy. And in the background, the weasels with clown faces, always softly stalking and slavering.

via: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html

from "The Coming Insurrection" by the Invisible Committee

First Circle

“I AM WHAT I AM”

“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?

“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”

The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter.  Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.

“I AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state.


http://tarnac9.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/thecominsur_booklet.pdf

spirit panic

Only those who know the meaning that they will give to the catastrophe retain calmness and precision in their movements. By the type and the proportions of panic to which a spirit allows itself to go, one can tell one’s rank.

He no longer saw the future before him, and the past, 
in spite of all his efforts to find it explicable, resembled something of the incomprehensible. Justifications left in pieces, and the feeling of pleasure seemed 
to exhaust itself more each day. Journeys and long 
walks, which had formerly given him a mysterious 
joy, had become strangely horrible for him. […] He 
was neither truly without homeland, nor honestly 
and naturally at home in any place, wherever in the 
world it might be. He would have liked very much 
to be an organ player, or a beggar, or a cripple, for to 
have some reason to invoke the pity and the charity 
of men, but still more ardently he wished to die. He 
was not dead, and yet…

TIQQUN: THEORY OF BLOOM

http://translationcollective.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/bloom-en.pdf

from wherever (10)

March 8, 1993

The Contemporary Museum

Mr. Karl Ambonvoid IV, curator

1610 St. Paul Street

Baltimore, MD 21229

Mr. Ambonvoid,

Thank you for mounting and promoting my work so marvelously. My thanks to all of the patrons and staff of the Contemporary Museum for supporting my work in so many tangible and moving ways.

Sincerely,

Mona Nyous