Pedagogical Error: Autonomous U

This is a talk on pedagogy given on March 13th in Olympia, WA to David Wolach’s students at Evergreen State College.

Epigraph for the talk is a software error that occurred this week. Not easily debugged -- and the user couldn’t tell me what action led to the poetry:

Error: The object invoked has disconnected from its clients.

To begin I’ll read from a draft statement from about seven years ago, a project I was working on with Diana George and Nic Veroli of the Seattle Research Institute (“SRI”). SRI published a couple of interesting anthologies of writing, including Politics without the State; and Experimental Theology.

It’s a project called Autonomous University – or alternatively University in Exile. Unfortunately it failed to launch – the energy or timing wasn’t quite right. And shortly after this, SRI stopped doing things after Nic and then Diana left Seattle.

For me, it is still a good idea. It still needs to happen, though maybe with a different name. Last week in Mexico City at Colegio de San Ildefonso, I stumbled upon a plaque that said in effect that this beautiful building with many art galleries and Orozco murals was part of the National Autonomous University – founded in 1910 -- probably an attempt to be autonomous from the Roman Catholic church. It’s now about 7 or 8 times as big as University of Washington with more than 200K students.

AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY DRAFT STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The Autonomous University is a university without professors. It's an alternative institution for intellectual, political, and aesthetic reflection. Research inquiries at the Autonomous University usually begin as moderated discussion groups or reading groups focused on a particular problematic. These groups may aim for a public presentation of their results in public roundtables, dialogues, lectures, books, pamphlets, and/or
artistic works.

The Autonomous University ("AU") does not grant degrees or certificates, and never will. The Autonomous University has deserted the degree-granting institution, with its careerism, its bureaucratically defined disciplines, its publish-or-perish mode of production. Nor is the Autonomous University a place for the usual practical instruction or hobby instruction or edutainment of the hobbyist. The AU wants to give you a hammer with which to think, not a pillow.

The Autonomous University promotes:

Experimentation: the point is not to master a body of knowledge, but to pose new questions. Connections rather than maps, concepts rather than doctrines.

Collective production: not solitary genius but collective intelligence. What is produced is not always a book, an essay, or a lecture. The groups primarily produce reflection, a kind of fluid yet focused discourse that is hopefully as unpredictable as it is exciting. A moderator or moderators keep the group focused, but all members are fully active in determining the direction of thought.

New assemblages, both social and textual: what can a text do, what machines are operating in it? What kind of things can a group become, what can it invent when set in motion in this context? Ideas, too, are material things.

Immanence rather than transcendence: the European/American university course is founded on a master or a father. Without this transcendent founding figure, we're free to form a band or bands, a series of groupuscules, a fluid and changing crowd.

Affirmation rather than endless negativity: enough of the impossible, the unpresentable, the lack, the end, the nothing, death. Enough sad scholars. We want a knowledge that speaks to the power of life.

Constituent power/communism: Above all, Autonomous University is committed to collective self-activity in the broadest possible sense. AU is collective activity in motion.

Autonomous University opposes all the foundational institutions, including its own institutionalization. of capitalism: private property, racial hierarchy, patriarchy, prisons, states, armies, and Autonomous markets can all go to hell.

Someone wisely said that you shouldn’t allow school to interfere with education – in finding our own way. To paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead, what’s of interest is creation not rectification. Becoming – rather than some refinement of being.

Perhaps the statement reads a bit too much like a manifesto, but it still largely agrees with me. To a certain extent there’s an idealism behind it that might have had something to do with its failure to launch. My perception – perhaps wrong – was that there were political preconceptions about the form which the research groups would take, or perhaps the issue was merely differences of opinion regarding which communities to reach out to – for seeding the initial groups.

To me, the idea is to foster collective thought – to demonstrate how collective thinking can make a difference – how we can become other than we are. Encouraging the risk - the unique risk that each participant has to bring into the collective “meeting & mutation.”

Today, I’d say that the functional purpose of AU would be to empower a situation that forces participants to think and invent -- that is, it’s not about empowering the participants, rather to empower the situation. Simply put, AU’s function would be to provide an external structure, a venue for presentations, deadline, introductions etc that would induce collective thought and action.

As the last line of the statement says “Autonomous markets can all go to hell.” So it was clear that the A-word cuts both ways and has some problematic implications.

While in fact autonomy is the goal of creation, i.e., to create something that has a life of its own (in Greek it means “having its own laws”), once autonomy occurs, this initial event of constituting is difficult to keep from stultifying into hardened rules and norms.

And this “new living thing” can’t really be completely autonomous. It is always part of an ecology, upon which it depends.

The University or universal is all one, and in that sense impractical -- how can a problem matter for everyone? Universal notions usually do everything to destroy anything that challenges their authority. It sets up a world view or model, in the faith that the Truth will set us free -- while it denies the validity of other theories and practices outside its own practice or discipline. Constituting rules is ok -- but these harden into stolid rules and norms.

I lot of my remarks are influenced by Isabelle Stengers, who I’ve been reading lately, and how her ideas about an ecology of practices relate to these pedagogical questions.

Stengers is against the capital-T Truth I just mentioned. She says: “what is true is what succeeds in producing a communication between diverging parties -- without anything in common being discovered or advanced.”

Stengers has a reputation of a philosopher of science (having worked with Ilya Prigogine - a Nobel prize winning physicist/chemical engineer). She lives in Belgium, and was influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, and more recently Whitehead, on whom she’s written a massive book that has not yet been translated into English.

One key to ecological thinking is that coherence is not logical -- it is eco-logical, always in relation to its environs. “We are not alone in the world,” says Stengers. Thus we can never be fully autonomous. The new creation is a sort of hinge picture -- it has its own life and is in and of the world. I should note that “coherence” was really Whitehead’s problem. He was trying to find coherence in the incoherent so-called “modern” world.

Here’s an overview of a symposium on Stengers from something that happened in Australia in 2003. Probably written by Brian Massumi, another wonderful philosopher, whose book Parables of the Virtual is well worth reading.

Bruno Latour has argued that the world is populated by “hybrid objects” [-- objects] at the hinge between nature and culture. Rather than policing that old humanist divide [ie, between human culture and nature], re-purifying those tired generalities, [Latour] suggests fashioning concepts and pragmatic procedures respectful of the singularity of each such intersection [that is, respectful of these hybrid individuals -- not negatively criticizing or tearing down] -- understood as a collective form of life…

Isabelle Stengers takes this perspective a step further, suggesting that there is a politics of respect for collective forms of life: a political ecology based on an ethics of intersection. Its concern would not be to judge or to discipline but to foster and to challenge. To foster the maximum expression of each form’s singularity; and to challenge that expression to expose itself to others, accepting the risk of being fundamentally changed by the encounter. Meeting and mutation.

Mutual, asymmetrical capture, guaranteeing nothing, authorizing nothing, incapable of being stabilized by any manner of constraint, and by which both sides are subjected to the “frightening” test of the third term: “We are not alone in the world.” -Stengers

The third term, between one and each other: cohabitation; relation. A political ecology would be a social technology of belonging, assuming coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat of practices…

OK so I’m going to eventually get to how this connects or doesn’t connect to my own writing practice. I want to find things that make me think, or that intensify my capacity to affect or be affected. To figure out how I’m attached and obligated to the practice of writing and whatever else it is that I do.

A couple more things from Stengers directly on pedagogy. She says that wars are pedagogical operations – enforcing peace. Teaching how to behave. Teaching an ethos.

She talks about thought as a collective stammering. Thinking is never divorced from feeling. Thinking and feeling require each other – there has to be a lure, a bit of romance. If one knows what one thinks, there might be a problem. If you know your opinions, do you own them or do they own you.

I figure it’s much better to be forming opinions rather than to simply have them.

We have to remember to acknowledge that feeling is the basis of experience. Aesthetics precedes ethics. What is it to not know what you think? Maybe that’s a process that can’t be too fast. We need to learn to hesitate.

If after Stengers, the goal is to “wake us from our torpor” -- to begin to experience and take small steps, then to adopt Whiteheadian terms, one needs an appetite towards a difference. This would be the germ of free imagination.

Question: what’s the difference between continuity and creation?

The political implication that pulls me to this question is trying to imagine how capitalism could end. For this to occur, it would need to become other than it is, that is it’s clearly mastered continuity, and seems to thrive on antagonism, almost obsessively in need of opposition to feed itself.

It seems impossible to imagine anything "crushing" or "smashing" capitalism -- short of an apocalypse. In a poem that I’ll read, Diseconomy of Scale, I was thinking about how it can fall under it’s own massive weight. But as we’ve recently seen, the notion of “too big to fail” was invented to prevent this.

For real change to occur -- becoming other -- there needs to be an exposure, a risk. And one hopes for an event -- a meeting where mutation may occur.

There are different theories of how change happens. Some have more of an appetite for self-preservation or continuity than others. [This follows a discussion in Steve Shaviro’s brilliant Without Criteria.]

1. Autopoiesis. Like automatic writing or a kind of a self-replicating mindless virus.

2. Conatus. This is Spinoza’s idea of striving to persist in being– equilibrium is what must be maintained. “Each thing in so far that it is itself, endeavors to persist…” This striving is the essence, the basic principle of conatus.

In the realm of continuity, innovation can only occur when one is absolutely compelled. It’s like the US Congress. One affects and is affected, a dual or doubled movement. For both Nietzsche and Spinoza, power is the capacity to be affected and to affect.

Perhaps the problem is how to imagine a self-organization that is not self-preservative, self-reproductive, that is not merely emerging?

‘Becoming other’ more closely resembles:

3. Individuation. Gilbert Simonden’s notion of a continual reconstitution via actualization of potentials.

4. Concrescence. Whiteheads notion where an entity constitutes itself as something new -- re-combining elements from pre-existing entities.

Yet another tangential perspective on these differences relates to a basic problem of philosophy. How to explain the existence of mind or mentality or inwardness, without which we would have no inner experience? Why this is important is that it is close to the notion of the autonomous life, at least human life. Must life that is self-constituting, that makes its own laws, have an element of mentality?

If you reject the Cartesian mind/body split as I do (I think they’re co-extensive), and if you don’t accept a divine explanation, then you’re looking for a realist one.

Shaviro outlines three possible realist (and secular) ways to address the issue

a) Eliminativist position. There is no free will -- it's all in the neuropaths. It’s a pure autopoiesis. We’re just automatons living under the illusion that we’re making decisions. The free will that we think we have is an illusion.

b) Emergent explanation – where we look for asymmetrical surprises. Shit does happen, doesn't it? This is clearly the normative position. And it is interesting and provocative that this self-organizing ideal is so important to both neo-liberal capitalism and left wing political activists, including anarchists.

c) Pan-Psychism. This involves the idea that all living things are mental (in part). It’s not anthropocentric. All living things have a mental pole and a physical pole. Against the eliminativists, it insists that mental objects are real. Against the emergent position, “mentality doesn’t just come into being out of nothing; it is always already there, no matter where you look.”

This mentality is a feature – not a bug that inadvertently emerged. Mentality is transhistoric. And it is co-extensive with physicality -- not separate. Mentality is decisional in the way that bacteria make decisions -- that is, way below the threshold of cognition or consciousness. There is a vast realm of feeling that we do not and cannot understand.

Sorry if that’s gone far a field. Without tying this into any neat conclusions, I’ll abruptly return to how poetry might be discussed vis-à-vis Stenger’s notion of ecology of practices.

Poetry seems like the obverse of science.

Science demands answers that can be detached from human interests -- that are not artifacts of the experimental apparatus. But poetry demands answers that are attached to human interests. That is, poetry is attached to human interests and its practitioners attempt to create alluring artifacts.

I recently wront a bit about an essay of Robert Kelly’s where he talks about listening out loud to his own incomprehensibility -- as a definition of poetry. “The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening to you as you read.” This is sort of the poetic muse. Kelly says provocatively: “Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.”

This is very seductive to me.

But about a week ago I found a short statement of Stengers that suggests that maybe it’s not going nearly far enough.

"It is much more comfortable to produce deep, beautiful meditations about an author not being an author of what he or she writes than reaching this point of nonstyle when you simply affirm that writing is not a spontaneous activity of human goodwill but puts the writer in debt to what makes him or her write." (Stengers, Last Enigmatic Message, 64)

One can easily imagine someone repurposing this for a manifesto for conceptual poetry and/or flarf. I’m afraid most poetry may not be up to this point of non-style.

Elsewhere Stengers says that what makes us human is NOT ours. What makes us human is the relation we are able to entertain with something that is not our creation. That’s a speculative definition of the human v non-human distinction. Stengers asks what the role of the non-human is in politics. This is also an interesting question for poetry.

R Kelly’s Heimlich Maneuver

Robert Kelly’s home page proposes that poetry is equal to “listening out loud.”  Recording the language in our head by pronouncing it or inscribing it.  This does not equal thinking.

“Most poets are too smart to believe in their own intelligence.” 

The resulting “lucid incomprehensibility” is the poet’s muse.  “The incomprehensible is the only thing that makes sense. That is, it creates sense -- the sense of something happening to you as you read.”

I might amend the optimism about most poets not believing in their own intelligence by inserting the word: “good.”

But what I find provocative here relates to what I’ve been trying to work out in poetics.  What is it that gives a poet a sense of belonging to her practice of poetry? And more basically, what is it that obligates a poet to think? 

A confrontation with the incomprehensible can indeed make one think, or create sense.  If we can acknowledge that thinking is never separate from feeling, which per Whitehead is the basis for all experience, than the use of the word “sense” or the process of making sense is inherent to thinking.

Here are two short bits from “Beauty Lies in the Eye” by Steve Shaviro that relate to the difference between the beautiful and the sublime:

29. As McMahon puts it, "the beautiful obliges us to think (its singularity poses a problem), without there being any concept for thought to settle on."

23. Kant also expresses this paradox as follows. The Beautiful leads to aesthetic Ideas, intuitions for which there are no adequate concepts. Whereas the Sublime leads to rational Ideas, concepts for which there are no adequate intuitions.

So it is the singularity recorded through the poet that can make us think.  Kelly’s homepage suggests that this singularity is essential to a poetic practice.  That is, poetry must include intuitions for which there is no adequate concept. 

One could easily write a book about how (so-called, often for good reasons) innovative poetry has had healthy doses of this beautiful singularity disorder.  And how, obversely mainstream or popular [double sic] poetics have been dominated by poets who are more likely to believe in their own intelligence.

I should leave this alone, but I’ll throw in one more proposition that I need to work through that is consonant with Kelly’s text, for which I am very grateful.

The proposition is that a poem is a record of the decisions that happen to a poet.  This only makes sense if you understand “decision” in the way that Whitehead uses it, where decisions are what happen to us and various other biological organisms.  Decisions make cognition possible, not the other way around.  “We don’t make decisions because we are free and responsible; rather we are free and responsible because – and precisely to the extent that – we make decisions.”  [Shaviro, Without Criteria, page 94]

^^^^^^

p.s. Apologies for the image and the headline, which may be in bad taste: a pathetic leap from the idea of “home page” to the German word.  It did occur to me that the rap artist R Kelly uses the word “spit” more frequently than the Bard professor, who quite possibly was an early influence on the Beasty Boys.  In fact, it’s me that needs some sort of Heimlich maneuver to get myself to post more frequently on this blog.

Charles Bernstein, Sophist

Cross posted from Matt Brigg's Seattle Local Reading Blog.  The Bernstein reading at the Henry Art Gallery is Thursday at 7p.  Free admission.
________
Nothing can contain the empty stare that ricochets
haphazardly against any purpose.

Both comedic and political, Charles Bernstein’s work embraces a slapstick economy of words that questions the very things writers hold most dear. I’ve always thought that the title of his book The Sophist effectively names the provocative place in which he finds himself. Like the sophists, he is an educator who hopes to address all citizens, not just those citizens of the so-called poetry world. Like the sophists, it’s speaking and thinking well that matters. There is no universal (or consistent) truth in his poetics. Of course this sort of position opens him to endless attacks.

Charlie Altieri, who lived in Seattle for a long time teaching at UW, once referred to Bernstein’s work as an “errant singularity.” While that might sound like a beautiful compliment, Altieri meant that Bernstein’s poetry would prove to be unteachable, and thus was limited.

A true performer, Bernstein wants to implode stodgy ideals by providing an experience to the listener/reader that will cause her to think. He quite often succeeds. Even those whom (quaintly) want to expel him from the city will find themselves provoked.

Bernstein is really an ambassador for poetry, as well as a prolific poet and scholar. He’s been instrumental in the creation of the electronic poetry archive and pennsound. He tirelessly works to generate enthusiasm for what poetry can become.

Don’t miss him. This is the first time he's been here since an appearance at Bumbershoot something like 15 years ago.

Notes toward an ecology of the practice of poetry

This is a talk given in Seattle on December 6 at Pilot books.

What I want to talk about is Isabelle Stengers' notion of an Ecology of Practices as a tool for thinking -- and what the implications of this might be for poetics and poetry – ie, for those who write and read and listen to it.

First as a preliminary example, I want to say that Irrational Dude viewed immanently, that is, from within its own practice, is not exactly irrational. While it’s not a fully logical machine, and it is admittedly full of fits and starts, it was an attempt to cohere or to foster its own force.

The title is a nomination from outside (my nephew’s nickname for me) – which Nico Vassilakis and I freely adopted -- which might anticipate the responses of some readers.

But it is precisely this kind of external (dismissive or critical) naming or labeling that is rejected by an ecology of practices.

Coherence is not necessarily logical, but rather it is eco-logical. Something coheres in relation to its environment.

B. STENGERS

Briefly, Isabelle Stengers is a philosopher who lives and teaches in Belgium. She wrote a number of collaborative essays on philosophy of science with Ilya Prigogine. Her influences include Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour and Alfred North Whitehead.

Unfortunately, her recent books Cosmopolitics (Cosmopolitiques) and Thinking with Whitehead (Penser avec Whitehead) – have not yet been translated into English. In these later works she’s still distinguishing between good versus poorly constructed science – but she moves more towards philosophy proper – using metaphysical tools to explore questions of knowledge.

For Stengers, science is inherently problematic since it typically attempts to stabilize the world.

I should say that I find Stengers very rewarding to read, but also difficult -- maybe in part because of the translation, but more likely because science was never my strong suit.

I’ll try to outline some of her underlying ideas.

1. She believes after Whitehead in the primacy of feelings and experience. The number of feelings or prehensions we experience greatly exceed our cognitive activity. There’s a lot going on below the level of cognition. Our bodies process lots of activity without alerting our minds.

This numerical superiority of feelings helps to explain the next concept which is that: we don’t own our own causes. For me this is a deeply held belief. I’ve been saying for twenty years that the words write me as much as I might write them.

Decisions are made but we’re not exactly their author.

Thus, free will is a problem. As Brian Massumi says: The skin is faster than the word. Feelings are translated and we too easily accept what arrives as our own thought. Perhaps the only free will humans have is in exercising a suspension – that is, in deciding not to act on the thought that arrives.

2. She’s interested in the Constructive (or process oriented – focused on becoming or how things change), rather than the destructive or the deconstructive (more focused on critiquing “being” or presence).

“You never construct in general, [but] always in relation with … a matter of concern.”

She’s a constructivist. She looks at how propositions (or entities or things or objects) are produced, and how these productions can (sometimes) become autonomous...

3. Constructivism is non-foundationist. That is, truth is a construction – so there is no primacy of truth. She’s against either-or propositions. It’s not the chicken or the egg, that’s a false choice. She won’t accept claims that separate themselves from the actual practice, the actual becoming.

It is along these lines, that she argues for the minor stage (or minor literature) and against the major – because the “major” always appeals to Truth (-with a capital T -- which by history’s lights must lead directly to freedom, as in: “the truth will set you free”) The minor resists this traditional form of “enlightenment” – ie, this appeal to truth.

Working from examples in the sciences, Stengers is against universalization (ie, against any world view or model) that would deny the validity of other theories and practices outside its own practice/discipline. Universalization usually denies the validity of all other theories.

She sees innovative scientific propositions as (in part) making fiction – & if the fiction is accepted, it modifies the scientific reality – in a sense it makes history.  The “what if” that drives the innovative proposition is accepted as truth -- not necessarily a good thing.

4. Stengers is very much with Latour & Whitehead & the Speculative Realists against the bifurcation of the world into two realms: the human (or culture) versus nature. This has vast implications. One way to think about this is as a denial of the distinction between how we conventionally think about subject and object. They are, in fact, hopelessly intertwined.

For Latour, it is modernism that tries to purify the world by splitting it in two. Of course this distinction gives special transcendental powers to the human: the unique ability to cross the bridge between these two worlds.

The implications for poetry here are interesting. What does poetry look like if there’s no split between human word and world? What does a non-anthropocentric poetics look like? Is it a celebration of the democracy of all objects? Along the lines of: “Hello! tree” And what would a non-modern poetry look like? A poetry that would not privilege (the human realm nor) its own language.

I’m trying to write an essay suggesting that one example of what the non-modern might look like is visual poetry, which might be enhanced by crawling out of its own pigeonhole.

C. Ecology of Practices – as a tool for thinking.

It is performative, an attempt to address itself to practitioners of a field. “To dream along with” – “in a mode that is not critical, which [does] not remind [practitioners]… of limits inherent to their activity.”

An ecology of practices addresses how practices relate to each other. (but they can only partially relate). There are no practices that can be independent of environment.

"An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe practices 'as they are’…. It aims at the construction of new… possibilities for them to be present or, in other words, to connect. It thus does not approach practices as they are… but as they may become."

“If there is to be an ecology of practices, practices must not be defended as if they are weak. The problem for each practice is how to foster its own force, make present what causes practitioners to think and feel and act.” …

The challenge is to think: "par le milieu" (with the milieu) which implies becoming THRU the middle (without grounding definitions or an ideal horizon—in other words, unmapped) and WITH the surroundings. No theory gives you the power to disentangle something from its particular surroundings.

Blaser’s definition of the poetic resonates here: “The poetic is the language of the mapless.”

The ecology of practices as a tool for thinking must be immanent – so to the extent that it’s a critique, it’s an immanent critique. It wants to contrast rather than oppose. In fact it wants to find the stubborn facts and (ala Whitehead) to convert oppositions into contrasts.

Finally, it wants to affirm the positive value of attachment – which is what obligates practitioners. So it asks how it is that one belongs, and how that belonging obligates you.

D. POETICS

So, how to translate all this to the practice of poetry or poetics? Can there be an immanent critique – from within the practice of poetry?

The first step would be to situate the relevance and limits of poetic practice without engaging in critique. In other words, where are the borders with other practices and what questions matter – what questions make us think rather than re-cognize?

For poets and artists, one of the biggest questions that matter may be: how does one produce objects or poems that have lives of their own?

The next step might be to ask: what are the obligations or “attachment(s)” of a poet practitioner. How am I obligated? Frankly, I don’t know the answer – and maybe it’s not knowable.

Maybe obligation is in part about affiliations or involvements – the more of these you have, the more autonomous you become? Or are these attachments related to tradition, community or methodology?

Stengers says: Attachments are what cause us to think. So it’s probably not really pencil and paper, or keyboard and screen that makes us think. I’d suggest that what makes us think is more of an aesthetic question. There is some mysterious allure or charm in my relations and interactions with other objects/entities that causes me to think. Like an aesthetic judgment it is singular and uncategorizable.

Looking at disputes within contemporary poetics – this does cause me to think and hopefully not just to recognize what I already like or dislike. For example, why so many hated and still hate L-poetry & why the same thing seems to be happening regarding so-called conceptual/flarf poetry. I think there are clues here about how what attaches poets to poetic practice.

Looking around, it seems to me that the notion of a poet’s obligation implies a real tension between ethics and aesthetics.

According to Latour and Stengers, moderns (and post-moderns) confuse attachments with universal obligations – therefore they destroy attachments. They “feel free to define themselves as ‘nomads’, free to go everywhere to enter any practical territory, to judge, deconstruct or disqualify what appears to them as illusions or folkloric beliefs and claims.”

If one takes (and this is where I think I’m going) aesthetics as “a primordial form of relation and interaction,” in effect a first philosophy, then the obligation may be to struggle – to relate and interact. To connect. And not just to words – but to all objects /entities that one meets in the world.

Modernist (and post-modern) poets -- the ones I have most cherished -- often answer the obligation question by moving away from aesthetics toward an ethical answer.

I’ll end by walking through some quotations about poetic obligation, but first I should say that the manifesto-like answer to this rift may be to try to convert oppositions into contrasts, a phrase which I seem to be repeating. In this case, it would be to try to find an aesthetic place for ethics; an immanent place for transcendence.

E. OBLIGATION On Poets and Vice Versa

First some examples that are not foregrounding ethics:

T. S. Eliot on the ineffable: "The poet has the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, i.e., to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them. The task of the poet, is making people comprehend the incomprehensible…"

Brodsky: to write well…

Neruda: to listen – to become a conduit… to society/others.

Afraid I might prefer Shakespeare: “The truest poetry is the most feigning...”

To aim at unachievable totality, perfect sleep, rested totality, burnt toast… Sincerely, Louie Zukofsky.

And some that are foregrounding ethics:

For Pound (Gertrude Stein’s village explainer) the obligation is to act correctly – to make new. Right poetics lead to right action.

Oppen’s obligation to the other is ethical – to take responsibility. It’s a linguistically self conscious ethics – [“ethics as a structure of relationship between self and other”]

For Reznikoff, the obligation is bearing witness to things not seen.

Horace: uses Aristotelian principles to give specific obligatory advice (like the Koran): “there should not be more than 3 speaking characters on the stage at the same time” and… “we forbid the comic poet to ridicule our citizens, under a penalty of expulsion from the country and a fine of three minae.”

Plato: It is the poet's obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. But if you bear false witness three times, that’s punishable by death. That is, Plato requires a personal guarantee – he distrusts writing or rather, other writers.

Allegiance of the Drones: WTO Libretto

ALLEGIANCE OF THE DRONES

[Characters: He, She, Canetti, chorus of union and police
and protesters.  11/30/2009 and flashback
of 11/30/1999. 

Opening Scene: Spotlight on a long table with three oversize
microphone/props and water glasses.  It’s
like a roomy war court tribunal. Three chairs – one for Canetti who sits
mid-table facing the audience.  He &
She will sit at opposite ends of the table.
He and She may be marked by some sort of distinctive apparel – very
similar to each other, eg., blue-jackets (windbreakers) that define them or
some funny hat.  Canetti perhaps in black
jacket to suggest a soft allegiance to anarchists.]

Chorus: (singing in wings)

Ten livelong years have rolled away,
Since the twin towers bayed away,
By Market endowed with pride of place
The doughty chiefs of the Capitalist race
Went forth of yore,
To plead with the police, face to face,
Before the judgment-seat of War!

[He and she enter stage right/left and embrace – showing
tenderness.  Towards the end of following
chorus, before Canetti starts – they sit on opposite chairs at long table.]

Chorus: (singing in wings):

Truce to this bootless waiting here without! 
To see the beacon fires arise
And then beneath some thwarting word
Sicken anon with hope deferred

Canetti:

 (a crowd slowly
gathers)

The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge.  Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge, which creates it.  This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.  … Only together can people free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd... In density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each person is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues.  It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.

Chorus /Union song:

(the crowd gathered, singing, still growing; She is present
in this group, and rises to sing the first stanza alone – somewhat softly, as
if to herself—the 2^nd and 3^rd stanzas sung by 2 or more,
growing in number; final stanza a crowd sings – maybe pointing at audience –
freezing when they finish)

I'm going down to join the union
I'm going to join it for myself
Aint nobody here can join it for me
I'm going down to join the union for myself

[Brother's going down to join the union
He's gotta join it for himself
Aint nobody here can join it for him
He's gotta go down and join the union for himself]
[possible deletion?]

Sister's going down to join the union
She's gotta join it for herself
Aint nobody here can join it for her
She's gotta go down and join the union for herself

You gotta go down and join the union
You gotta join it for yourself
Aint nobody here can join it for you
You gotta go down and join the union for yourself

[Short music interlude and then silence before C speaks;
crowd frozen until he starts]

Canetti:

(singing/talking?) (the frozen crowd slowly disperses
leaving 3 to 5 people; She returns to table)

But the moment of discharge, so desired and so happy, contains its own danger.  It is based on an illusion;

[music can restart here]

the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal for
ever.  They return to their separate houses, they lie down on their own beds, they keep their possessions and their names.  They do not cast out their relations nor run away from their families. Only true conversion leads men to give up old associations and form new ones.  These new associations by their very nature can only accept a limited number of members.  Such groups I call crowd crystals. 

Chorus/Union Song:

 (3 to 5 singers-
union organizers – singing in quieter/lower tone) [Sound of police off stage,
perhaps an announcement to disperse – towards the end of the song, when the 3-5
singers quickly exit stage in different directions]

We're going down to join the union

We're going to join it for ourselves
Aint nobody here can join it for us
We're going down to join the union for ourselves

Though the roads be rough and rocky
And the hills be steep and high
We will sing as we go marching
And we'll join the One Big Union by and by

Canetti:  

(singing)

Crowd crystals are the small, rigid groups of men ..  which serve to precipitate crowds.  Their structure can
be comprehended and taken in at a glance.  Their unity is more important than their size.  Their role must be familiar.. [talking] They should preferably appear the same; a uniform or a definite sphere of operation...
The crowd crystal is constant; it never changes its size.  Its members are trained in both action and faith.  They
may be allotted different parts, as in an orchestra, but they must appear as a unit, and the first feeling of anyone seeing … them should be that this is a unit which will never fall apart. 

 (Police enter in
[possibly a pyramid] formation)

 [Over next several sections, the protesters
loll along – pacing like a river- moving like a cloud.  Slowing building and meandering until the
police eventually start to try to corral them. Density of the crowd grows]

Chorus- Police Song:

(He gets up from table and joins to sing corporal or private
part.  Sung by 8 different singers
assigned a rank;)

privates three
corporals three
sergeants three
lieuies three (pronounced loo-ee)
captains three
majors three
colonels three
generals three

 

privates three - "when do I get my check?"
corporals three - "war, war, war"
sergeants three - "file from the left, column right said Sgts"
lieuies three (pronounced loo-ee) - "I'll lead the way said the lieuies"
captains three - "take that hill said the captains"
majors three - "who's gonna shine my boots said the majors"
colonels three - "where's my star said the colonels"
generals three - "war, war, war"

 (Police standing in formation, while the crowd
rushes up to them and/or around them.
The police line moves but slowly, bending to hold their position – a
riverbank to the flows they contain.)

Your left, your left, your left, right, get on down    

Your left, your left, your left, right, get on down    
Now drop, and beat your face                           
[our neo-liberal] platoon's gonna rock this place                  
Boom, check it out, check it out                       
Boom, check it out, check it out                       

[possible repeat; as C starts, He sits down. Police stay on stage in formation
and moving]

Canetti:

(singing/talking?—possible overlay of first list with this
speech)

The crowd likes destroying houses and objects: breakable objects like window panes and crockery; …it is the
fragility of these objects which stimulates … the crowd.  …The banging of windows and crashing of glass are robust sounds of fresh life, the cries of something new-born. Everything shouts; the din is the applause of objects.  There is a special need for this kind of noise at the beginning of events, when the crowd is small and little or nothing has happened.  The noise is a promise of the reinforcements the crowd hopes for, and a happy omen for deeds to come. 

Union Chorus:

(She rises from
table to join chorus)

We’re taking security fencing and closing the streets

We’re setting fires in the streets
We’re chaining ourselves to each other
We’re blocking the streets with dumpsters – throwing concrete onto the street
We’re building platforms and stages
We’re flooding all intersections simultaneously - flooding them with people



Police Chorus:

( Canetti
silent.  She sits back at table in front of
their prop mics. He reads left column alternating with She, who reads the right
column. Police line and protesters continue to test limits and the crowd
builds/loses densit

Seattle Police Department: 1800 officers and personnel; Washington State Patrol: 27 motorcycles and 40 patrol cars for escort duty, 55 troopers for demonstration management duty, 13 SWAT officers, 4 bomb squad technicians and 2 explosives detection K-9 teams	31 hand held Oleoresin Caps; 111 hand held dispensers of OC; 340 hand thrown continuous discharge tear gas grenades; 100 multi-shot pyrotechnic tear gas rounds. 5 rounds instantaneous CS powder designed for crowd management at close ranges.
King County Sheriff: 13 motorcycles, 90 officers for demonstration management, 35 officers for Key Arena, 8 SWAT officers and 1 bomb squad	459 rubber ball bodies containing additional small rubber balls; 25 rubber ball bodies containing additional small rubber balls and OC powder dispensed when the ball is deployed;
Port of Seattle: security personnel, a bomb squad, and an explosives detection K-9 team	172 rubber ball bodies containing additional small rubber balls dispersing in a circular pattern and containing tear gas.
Bellevue Police: 8 motorcycles. Kent Police: 5 motorcycles.  Auburn, Renton, Tukwila Police: 10 officers	230 37mm less than lethal rounds each with 5 wood batons; 64 less than lethal rounds of single hard plastic batons designed to be direct fired in a crowd for control; 361 less than lethal bean bag rounds designed to be direct fired.

[He and She rise and mill with their respective
groups/crowds.]

Canetti:

(singing/talking?)

The crowd "wants to experience for itself the strongest possible feeling of its own animal force..." It remains hungry for human beings it has not reached.
But everyone carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat drink make love and be left alone… The crowd here is like a besieged city… it has enemies before its walls and enemies within them.  During the fighting it attracts more and more partisans.  These slip through the enemy lines and collect in front of the gates,
begging to be let in.  

Union & Police -- Allied CHORUS:

[[He and She with
their respective groups.  Tension
continuing to wax and wane-- the union shout the locations while the police
shout the action—aka text in italic.  The
back and forth builds in volume here.) (NOTE—alt idea was to have the blue and
the black – not a union chorus but a protester chorus – have different tones or
positive/neg body language – union in disapproval – the black-jackets stoked]

We’re on 5th & Pine -- looters in the Starbuck’s.

We’re on 5th & Union – 7 patrol cars were disabled with all tires flattened.
We’re on Seneca & Hubbell Place – report of delegates being pushed around by protestors.
We’re on 3rd & Pike – people throwing barricades through windows.
We’re on 4th Ave. and Lenora, south on 4th Ave. to Seneca St.
East on Seneca St. to I-5
We’re North on Boren Ave. to Pine St.
We’re West on Pine St. to 6th Ave.
We’re North on 6th Ave. to Lenora St.
We’re West on Lenora to 4th Ave. and 8th & Seneca – large disturbance with people chaining
themselves to manholes and setting items on fire.
We’re at the Convention Center – people observed carrying bottles filled with flammable liquids.
We’re Eastbound on Olive – people pushing a dumpster
We’re on 6th & Pike – 65-100 protestors lying in the street
We’re on Boren & Pike – people attacking moving cars and fighting with possible property damage
We’re on 8th & Seneca – 100 protestors jumping on cars
We’re on 9th & Olive – protestors putting chains across the intersection – light post to light post

Canetti:

(Motions of crowd
and police escalating to panic and pushing/shoving.)
(singing/talking)

Animals flee from the burning forest; …. but the crowd which used to run from fire now feels strongly attracted by it.  As is well known, conflagrations of all kinds have a magical effect on men… If … large enough, a curious reversal of their old mass fear commands them to hurry to its site, [to] feel there something of the glowing warmth which formerly united them...  one of the strongest instincts of the crowd, as soon as it has formed at all, is to create such a fire … to use its attraction to further its own growth.

(SHE falls in the struggle of the crowd w/police, which
suddenly disperses leaving her behind.
The police line moves on and alone, HE arrests her and puts handcuffs on
her)

SHE:

My hands met three times behind me, and returned, as often, empty, to my breast. I paled, with wonder, I

believe, and begged him to stop a while, and speak to me.

HE:

‘Just as I loved you in the

mortal body, so I love you, freed: so I stay: but you, where are you going?’

(HE walks SHE off stage)

Draft 6/20/09
Nico Vassilakis & Robert Mittenthal

Proprioceptive Thought & Free Will

David Bohm suggests that concrete thinking is "in motion."  It is a tacit thinking aware of its own motion.  There's something that drives us to thought, but we're rarely able to suspend ourselves from the conviction of the thought, and its impact on us.  That is, because the feeling or affect that arrives from outside is powerful, we end up letting it direct us rather than suspending or questioning it.  We mistake the feeling for a thought and accept it as ours.  Proprioceptive thought may be less prone to this error; it is aware of its own motion, of its own body.

Brian Massumi says something similar in his Parables for the Virtual, i.e., that "the skin is faster than the word." (POV 25).  This fact has long been exploited in popular culture – from horror films to reality TV to politics.  As Ronald Reagan said: “facts are stupid things.”  Indeed, today feeling is the lure that empowers.  Stubborn facts may be limits, but they also provide opportunities. 

When someone talks about accessibility as a virtue, aren’t they really talking up instant gratification?  Impatience leads to the waning of the power of the word.  (“Heh – I can’t read your mind either!”)  Justice is flawed and at best slow and deliberative, but culture and life seem to move much faster.  In a world of object inflation and of oppressive choice, comfort is indeed, as Koolhaas says somewhere, “the new justice.”

The point is to resist those who would pin down thought, mapping it in a trajectory to guarantee its failure.  Zeno understood that his arrow on a Z-sited path could never arrive.  It’s the eros of thought that is missed, that needs to be embraced.  We need the sweep or whole motion of thought, not severable into discrete (mapped out) moments.  We need to let ourselves become, to be jolted out of the grooves of daily habit.  If a map is necessary, let’s make it uncomfortable, or at least full of surprises.

The Skin Is Faster

Recent science has uncovered some curious data regarding the split second between “the beginning of a bodily event and its completion in an outwardly directed, active expression.”  (POV, 29)  The active gesture in this instance is the flexing of a finger.  The test subject visually notes the clock-time of a decision to give the finger.  It turns out that there is about a 0.2 second lapse between the visual noting of the decision and the arrival of the gesture.  This isn't that surprising.  Reflexes aren't instantaneous and it takes a bit of time for the impulse to travel from the brain through the nervous system.  The real surprise is that a signature of brain activity occurs 0.3 seconds before the visual registration of the decision.  That is, the brain is independently doing something before we can register a thought as ours.  Stop.  Look around.  Before we can register a thought as belonging to us, something else, something outside has occurred.  This implies that there's something recursive about the nature of thought, something that isn't totally controllable. 

Stelarc in his recent Seattle talk said that new experiments have been able to predict what you’re going to do seven (7!) seconds before you do it.  [If that’s right, in our cynical neo-liberal times, it seems likely that some arbitrager will figure out how to trade on this gap soon.]  Why the case for Stelarc is so difficult to make will have to be a subject of a future post, but it relates to the fact that he is crossing boundaries that humans are uncomfortable with.  He’s a body artist who wants his obsolete body to literally become other.  To quote Massumi, “Stelarc is not a conceptual artist.  He is not interesting in communicating concepts about the body.  What he is interested in is experiencing the body as a concept.”  You can read more of this, the most convincing thing I’ve found on Stelarc, here.

It seems obvious that the brain registers all sorts of data that never make it into conscious  thought.  Unconsciousness versus consciousness is clearly a dynamic range.  In the grooves of daily habit, we travel familiar paths without consciously thinking about what we’re doing.   I go thru the motions and suddenly find myself at a destination.

One could go off here about the evils of habit.  Being aware of the present as it unfolds is an awakening.  But, e.g., sleep is a habit I’d prefer to keep.

Benjamin Libet, who did these experiments, interprets the results as a crisis of free will.  If we fail to suspend the arriving thought, to reject this as “our” thought, then aren't we becoming mere automatons, or ventriloquists of the received thought?

Perhaps the only free will humans have is in exercising a suspension – that is, in deciding not to act on the thought that arrives. 

from t.a.p./SERIES: IRRATIONAL DUDE

Announcing IRRATIONAL DUDE, a new chapbook of collaborative writing by Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal from tir aux pigeons. 

Until the crayons ran out of color. A gargantuan snag of me uphill. Supine on their backs an instrument with heads attached. The stars are out above the bivouac.
       -from Testosterone Poisoning

On collaboration, to quote the others on the plateaux: "the two of us wrote this together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd...  We have kept our names... out of habit, purely out of habit... to reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I."

PURCHASE COPY for $6 (plus s/h) at lulu:
or read downloadable PDF here.

To request a review copy, please reply to me &/or the publisher at tirauxpigeons-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

======UPDATED 12/20======
 
Birds until the night swallows their song.
Lost in the borough, no bridge to brook the flow, no sea to settle
The stoop birds approach. The marvelous perch dispersed.

These are the most sonorous lines in the poem, and signal that it isn’t only the natural world that has been damaged—in fact, everything human, including our innermost core, becomes collateral damage. Stu Dempster, the trombonist to whom the first part of Irrational Dude is dedicated, has talked about “tuning yourself to the room you play in.” Our room is the world—on the whole, the language, the aphasic diction of Irrational Dude, is tuned to the irreparable damage of worlds. It “barks back into the night.”
   -Petra Backonja

After the fact, I've discovered that Irrational Dude is synonymous with Whitehead's secular notion of god, the ultimate limitation whose existence is the ultimate irrationality.  It is the irrational dude who works alone, perhaps in a clerical role, at Whitehead's novelty store.   
   -rm