Zizek Excess

I stumbled on these excess notes from a reading of Zizek a couple of summer's back. Hegel annoys me. Lenin ditto. SZ's excessive ferment is almost unbearable. But like a train wreck it's difficult for me not to look. Anyway, these notes I think were made as a reading into the text, or made as a parallel supplement---a gathering of prods and reminders of some of the potentially useful aspects in Zizek who, in many ways, reminds me of an extremely uncondensed Ed Dorn. For what it's worth:

SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Parallax View
NOTES 3.6: “THE OBSCENE KNOT OF IDEOLOGY, AND HOW TO UNTIE IT”


The Academic Rumpspringa, or, The Parallax of Power and Resistance

Conditions govern decisions

“choice is always a metachoice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself”

Meet enemy on your ground—not at G8 summits

SZ via Critchley is skeptical of the Third Way Left: “a ‘revolt’ which poses no effective threat, since it endorses in advance the logic of hysterical provocation, bombarding the Power with ‘impossible’ demands, demands which are not meant to be met”

SZ proposes Badiou’s solution against “Critchley’s call for modest local ‘practical’ action,” which is: “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

“The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on” (334).

OUGHT AND MUST

“The deadlock of ‘resistance’ brings us back to the topic of parallax: all is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of ‘resistance,’ of bombarding those in power with impossible ‘subversive’ (ecological, feminist, antiracist, antiglobalist…) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.”

“the public Law and its superego supplement are not two different parts of the legal edifice, they are one and the same ‘content’—with a slight shift in perspective, the dignified and impersonal Law looks like an obscene machine of jouissance.”

Paradox in “constitutive excess of representation over represented:” “At level of the Law, state Power merely represents the interest, and so on, of its subjects; it serves them, is answerable to them, and is itself subject to their control; at the level of the superego underside, however, the public message of responsibility, and so forth, is supplemented by the obscene message of the unconditional exercise of Power…. the law can sustain its authority only if the subjects hear in it the echo of the obscene unconditional self-assertion” (336-7)

Slow Poetry at Big Bridge

Ron Silliman, Mark Woods, Kasey Mohammad, and others have announced the Slow Poetry Feature at Big Bridge. There also is an anxious spoof of my introduction, as many know. I hesitate to announce the feature myself because Big Bridge is still under construction. As soon as the entirety of the magazine is available for public viewing I'll have more to say. In the meantime, I feel that the work in the Slow Poetry feature contributes a significant conversation to contemporary poetics.

Midsummer

On the longest day we play
into the night and the heat

inside us dissipates
into cool water the green

spring water covers
our feet the children splash

profoundly on the other side
of any stupid knowing

but the rush of sensation renews
as if having dreamed

and then waking suddenly
to find relief in the habits of place

we see other versions
of how we do what we do

in the counting of years
by features filled in by light

a young man behind me
I only dimly recognize

who we are and wander
the trails of memory

midsummer begins
a shortening of days

Dame Folly (more from Cosmograph

Our Lady of the Pirouette stands next to bankers on the edge of a great precipice of real estate and Nike sneakers and all the cocaine you’ll never get up your nose. She arranges the future, lifting her skirts and breaking wind over mundane morning espresso shots. Grotesquely real, ripped hunks mount bikes and gym weights behind square Aryan jaws and narrow sunglasses. The old croaker bore me into a world-bank account of elephantine creatures whose hunger reaches behind the mind the mound the mouth the month mud measure mourning beetles bees Brahmins and blues of puerile progress. Observe the American He-Man balling Folly while juggling seven toddlers. The little ones cry but our ripped stud tightens concrete buttocks and gushes a load on Folly’s crack. He drops the kids. They land with a loud thwack, thwack, thwack. Foolish Folly flees moonward moaning meaningfully hear her giggling ghoulish delight from moon height passing gas amassing asinine assumptions—stick dick hick crackery stone fondling stone sucking bone hump thumping knee-bent genuflection. Squirrels hurl nuts across the limbs of their pecan cosmos. Twenty-first century mind ooze spreads from limestone and clay deposits Folly stabs with stiff stiletto heels.

Birds

Sitting at Birds Barbershop, Friday afternoon, Solstice Weekend, at South Congress, Austin, Texas, while the kids get their hair cut....

I wanted to note, quickly, that there will be a Slow Poetry announcement soon, though many are finding the Big Bridge link already. Things are mostly in place. Slow Poetry is coming to your house soon.

Silliman Vomit

I was going to "blog" about this, but John Latta got there first (thanks):

(Somewhere in the brain-box, in some mouse-turd’d corner reserved for the mealiest-mouth’d scurrilities, is this: “The whole notion of the poet as a solitary practitioner—the splendid isolato—is so out of touch with reality as to be bizarre. Sure there are poets who eschew the companionship of their peers—but there is a reason for it. These are poets with issues.” La Silliman’s insinuating that individualism is something of an aberrance, even—load’d word, “issues”—a mental illness. Note, too, how he blatantly uses the death of one individual, Victoria Rathbun—“a fine young poet who hung with the Actualists in the late 1970s”—in a cynical attempt to bolster—“I don’t know why Victoria Rathbun didn’t publish more in other post-Actualist contexts,” he says, mock-innocently, though the answer (she somehow fail’d at “the phenomenon of groupness”) is at the ready—another argument for careerist groupuscular formation. The sign of how little hoot Silliman gives to poetry itself: there is no Rathbun poem provided, she’s a mere marker in a sociological argument, mere marker in a theory of “groupness.” Silliman himself’s clearly become a casualty of trademark Sillimanick rhetorical bludgeoning, too many hours logged marketing is what produces a line like: “the fate of poetry in a managerial society such as the United States.” Gone is any sense of how individual perception might battle the coveys (convoys) of mere opinion-mongers, or how poetry’s (and a poet’s) aim ought be, wholly, yea recklessly, to counter the speciousness of the Doxa, to defeat the managers by extravagance, rebuttal, daring, jest, and scorn. And exile. What Silliman proposes is precisely the opposite: managerial poetry for a managerial society.)

from "Cosmograph: A Contemplative Prosimetric with Folly & Fly"

Observe the flotilla of our Lady of Sweet Lunacy. Follow her across the watery cosmos to a democratic village of guppies. Cats prowl the hills licking their freaky feline lips. There’s one sucking on fins as guppy survivors retreat behind a little fishy churchyard crying, “O Lord, Protect us! Lead us back to our houses and give us plenty of gasoline.” Gulp, gulp. Guppies giveth protein unto kitty flesh.

But this vision won’t last. Shut my eyes, stroke my ass. Observe the frayed genius of the American Commonplace. It uncoils beneath an ancient elm, its 10,000 scales each painted with a scene of the history of national hunger. On one reality eats every peanut in sight. On another the identity of all creatures competes for a little piece of cheese in a kind of teeming Darwinian swimming pool of objective form. Look, says an amoeba in a Paul Smith lamb’s wool jacket. “I’ve got a piece too.”

The serpent recoils and tightens grip on our Lady’s slipper. Out of its mouth arrive the comedic American poets, each equipped with pithy quips. The Irony Iron Cage Band leads their procession in John Philip Sousa hats. The Cultural Identity Racket applauds with polite reserve, farting art out their arse poeticas. The neo-Ellipticists drag their knuckles over broken lyre wire. Hybridists hibernate in cocoons of strategic satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I’m sinking in a pint of pilsner while my lady turns three times on a magic circle, squats and squirts. The poets laugh. They rush to her embrace. Lap her cheap drip and squirm in gooey ooze, as if she promised jobs in a market of quick sand. Laughter fills the atmosphere. Dead moon rocks absorb the elevated discourse. It goes through space to penetrate a great nothing through which nothing escapes to overwhelm us. And sparrows hunt seed beneath Dame Mercy’s knees. We have names and active verbs and hallucinated wealth and weal. A whispering of ghost voices absorb into the mild night air.

The feeling of a dream---a Photo of Victoria Rathbun

In the photo a poet looks out from another world. The modern America of the last century races behind her. I see her as if in an Antonioni still. Where do we go? I am reminded of Roberto Bolano’s waifs, racing around Mexico City circa the seventies. Impossible to hold things still. These forms of modernity resist stable morphology. How contemporary she appears in the photo. We leave the plastic form of our bodies. I pretend I live in another era looking back to our own. Postmodern fragmentation has been footnoted as a social weakness in the history of a dead race and its environs. The problem of who we are remains. The firing of the synapses in the brain; the eyes’ perception of light; the perspective that informs how we feel about invisible phenomena. Imagine all these things. Laughing our way into momentary, postmodern cultural orgasm. The buildings in the background provide the subject with a sense of place. And that geographic surface vanishes with the subject. She wanders into the drag of time. The body, too quickly discarded, is possessed of inert patterns. Along with these thoughts tonight I recall recent sightings: purple finch; cicada shell; purple martin houses; grapevines in chinaberry branches. And notice the disappearance of these outlines.

Read It and Weep: Postconceptualism

Tom Clark's "Postconceptualism."

Contra PoMo and all that Flar-poo...

This from an article on David Foster Wallace correlates so well with Slow Poetry I couldn't resist sharing it:

In contrast to “the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship … the next real literary ‘rebels’… might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal’.”

Hoa Nguyen at Isola di Rifiuti

Finally we're settling into our new tree house on Trailside despite flood, 24-hour fans, and other disruptions physic and psychic. And on my first full day back to my desk I find this lovely and generous response to Hoa's work by John Latta, one of the most consistently intelligent and perceptive writers I know.

Up in Air or Up in Smoke?

Saw Dizzie/Pixar's Up last night with Hoa and the boys. Sat in the cool dark of the Alamo Theater in South Austin drinking a Lone Star and eating popcorn. Our youngest was lovely to observe, so obviously delighted by the animated shorts before the movie started.

We're about to move into a one-year lease near Zilker Park in South Austin. After that, who knows? Depends on the academic market. The economy. Lady Fortune. Etc. So Up was particularly apropos our situation, as it involves the main character--Carl--saying goodbye to a house and an old way of life.

Beyond our personal situation, however, and the trauma of departure toward some other habit of living, the movie's subtext is about saying goodbye to homes in a period of massive foreclosures, the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression (D1)). Maybe other reviewers have picked up on this: I haven't read anything about the film. It is instructing "us" however on ways to say goodbye, and on detaching from the projected past in order to enter some new adventure. Perhaps Carl's journey will soothe the massive range of grief and dispossession that has gripped this country, and that is so downplayed in the official media. Texas looks pretty rosy, at least in the Austin urban green zone, compared to the rest of the nation. A friend today wrote from the Northeast saying that he'd turned down a job offer because he was afraid that he couldn't carry two mortgages, the current house impossible to sell in today's dying real estate market.

Anyway, I liked Up okay. It was good to watch it with my family. The surface was fun and funny at times. Under it though lies something darker, and only hinted at, that goes beyond one's personal (mis)fortune. I mean, if the moralist E. M. Cioran had been consulted from beyond the grave, we would have seen hints of other detachments to come, the biggest of all being one that you can only delay so long. This country is in the grips of irrational forces, and Ditzy/Pixar, I doubt, will fill for long the emptiness that opposes "our way of life" like a noetic Grand Canyon. But like all things American, it was a fine distraction from the real.

Publishing the Public Word: Poetry, Networked Tribes, and Resilient Communities

I'll be teaching a 4-day workshop at Naropa next month and thought I'd share my in-progress syllabus here. Responses are welcome. I designed this course around the Slow Poetry discussion that began last summer. I've focused the class on the rhetorical aspect of poetry and its possible contribution to community formation and public engagement.

*

Goals. One basic premise informs this class: globalization has hit a wall. With this in mind, I'd like to talk with students about how poetry is produced and publicized. We will discuss ways to create community and art in a world facing resource contraction—and the social consequences this will have. Students will contribute to a blog that documents our conversation, and produce a small body of work that addresses some of the issues we discuss.

Since the focus of the class will be on how poetry and communities interact, we’ll discuss strategies for using poetry to generate conversations about how we live in the world. We’ll talk about publication strategies, editorial goals, production methods, and other practical tools for bringing poetry into particular communities. Since the goal of the course is focused on process rather than on final products, we will discuss communication strategies that help facilitate methods for communal and public engagements.

Some other things to think about this week include the intersection of private and public realms; performances of gender and sexuality; community formations; print and digital mediation methods. To this end we can talk about definitions of poetry, rhetoric, communication, and public spheres. I also want to think about these issues in an economic era of resource contraction, tracing a key question throughout the week: what can poetry do to create and extend community, and how are we to define and nurture such creative spaces?

Texts. I tried to limit the reading this week but assume students will be familiar with a few key texts each day. In addition to the class reader, familiarize yourself with these blogs:

Economy, politics, resources, communication: http://www.bloomberg.com/; http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com; http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com; http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net; http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/; http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/; http://www.joshiejuice.com/blog/

Poetry and poetics: http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/wood_s_lot.html; http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet; http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com; http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com; http://possumego.blogspot.com; http://poetsagainstthewar.org/; http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/

Workshop. This week is dedicated to thinking about the contexts in which poetry is produced and read. To that end, I would like for students to continue working on projects begun in previous weeks, but I’d like you to consider your work in relation to others, asking these key questions: Who am I writing for? What do I want from a reader? What do I want my work to accomplish? Where and how will I publish it?

Each class will open with general remarks on a topic and is open for discussion. We’ll look at some key texts and problems in order to develop strategies for approaching our own work. The second portion of each class will be dedicated to discussion of individual poems and projects provided by students in the class. We may also look at examples of poems and performances by other writers. Feel free to ask me questions and put me to work based on your needs. A lot of how the workshop develops will depend on the class’s individual requirements. My main goal is to open up discussion for the rhetorical aspect of poetry, and hopefully to complicate and challenge received notions of rhetoric, aesthetics, communication, and communities.

Workshop class 1 (July 6).
Introduction: The Levertov-Duncan Conflict
Duncan, Levertov letters and poems

Workshop class 2 (July 7).
“Poetry as a Field of Action”: Modernist Rhetoric and Poetics
Williams and Burke essays; Nguyen, Kyger poems

Workshop class 3 (July 9).
Tribes and Publics:
Borkoff / Sand, Bey essays: Toscano, Dorn poems

Workshop class 4 (July 10).
Poets Against War
Poets Against War and Kent Johnson’s “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or: ‘Get the Hood Back On’”

Blog. Blogs can provide important forums for poetry communities who wish to further discussions of poetry from diverse geographical locations. Blogs are flexible and easily adaptable to our needs. Some bloggers provide critical commentary while other prefer more non-discursive formats. Some bloggers provide news and updates about the larger poetry communities that intersect across the nation and globe. Others post on events, readings, social issues, writing strategies, and other related phenomena. In short: a blog can be about anything and presented in just about any format. But a successful blog provides a certain standard of consistency, relevance to a particular audience, and presence of mind. It’s my hope during our week together that we might create a “disposable” blog, one that may or may not continue beyond our week together. I’d like for students to design and implement it based on their interests. As a group blog, we’ll all be free to contribute to this public forum in ways that we determine. Since our week together is dedicated to better understanding community, a public forum that shares our discussions with others will hopefully further our conversation by brining it to a limited public readership. We’ll discuss the specifics during the first class, but ideally we’ll use our blog to share notes, present useful commentary, and offer brief poems and images that document our week together.

Course Reader Contents

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space, (Long Beach: Palm Press, 2008).

Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

Kenneth Burke, “Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy,” Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An Exploration ed. Don M. Burks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1978).

Hakim Bey, T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985).

Edward Dorn, "Tribe," Way More West (New York: Penguin, 2007).

Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi, eds., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008).

Joanne Kyger, selections from About Now: Collected Poems (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2007).

Hoa Nguyen, selections from Hecate Lochia (Prague: Hot Whiskey, 2009).

Rodrigo Toscano, "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," Collapsible Poetics Theater (Albany: Fence Books, 2008).

Williams Carlos Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” Selected Essays(New York: New Directions, 1969).