Heard Don Mee read last night at Hedreen Gallery and realized that in lieu of a full review (sorry!) of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), I should post this old introduction to a reading in mid-2009. My response to the earlier reading was a strong sense of how her translation work was interwined with her own poems, how they feed off each other. It felt like a demonstration of how all writing is translation.
Perhaps I am more excited by her poems (than by her translations of poems of others) since they are less constrained by the external fact of the prior poem? To the extent that one has specific duties to a "prior" poem, one is constrained to be true to its intentions. Translations are in that sense constraint based writing. Without the duty to the specific (yet ultimately unknowable) other, one can more directly engage the arrival [sic?] of what for Don Mee is never merely subjective expression.
Here's the old introduction:
I first heard Don Mee Choi read translations at Gallery 1412 and was very impressed, especially by a theater piece by Yi Kang-baek that she read that had no spoken parts, just stage direction. It had great literary and political power.
The poems I've seen from The Morning News Is Exciting seem to be formal experiments loaded with pointed content. To me that's very refreshing.
The peculiar constructions and repetitions across sections of her title poem remind me of Oulipo (ala Queneaux exercises in style—tho I’m not sure how constrained they really are), but with a more foreboding content. No one talks much about the poverty of politics in Oulipo. For Choi, the politics of gender and of exile seem just below the surface, and to me they’re keenly felt.
“She was a visitor” as Robert Ashley famously said, and here (with enough repetitions) she becomes an “errorist.”
Choi presents billboard-sized ironies that narrate objects. This is playing with fire, and this work demonstrates that potential narrative is power. Subjectivity is at risk here.
The excited news is of dear narration – of dear nation. This text shoulds on itself. The gravity of the past and of “duty” traps the subject which can’t quite shake itself loose. The morning news is near narration and that is exciting. Especially when turned back on itself. The image is a twin with many titles.
To demonstrate a collaged animus.
As my elocution lessons,
Breed easy dear ones
The monograph wants to emerge as an icon an ism
Really on the occasion of the sequence
One’s ass hangs out – can’t get to the front of the class in our travels across the boundaries.
These goods stick to us – the rice and beaning bags under the eyelid – the swallow arising directly into the wind. The sun will meet us in 15 minutes. I am not here then. These mean red conclusions wrap us in real conjecture.
Working my way into Jacques Ranciere's Nights of Labor, and came across this text written maybe six months ago on the parallels between 2666 and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which may be of interest, even though it is probably guilty of being an explication.
Ranciere's Ignorant Schoolmaster first appeared in French in 1987. Ranciere reviews the career and thinking of Joseph Jacotot, a french literature professor who was forced into exile in 1815 (upon return of Bourbons to power -- after he'd served in the military). Jacotot landed in Louvain in Belgium, where he did an experimental thing. Not able to speak Flemish to his students who did not speak French, he used a translation of Fenelon's novel Telemacque with the Flemish on facing pages.
Jacotot had some success and there was a faddish following for his novel theory of education. Which could fit into a headline -- something along the lines of: "Illiterate parents teach their children to read!"
The students were told thru a translator that they were to learn the French text with the aide of the Flemish translation, and to write in french their thoughts about what they read. The students learned to write French on their own without any explication from Jacotot on conjugation, grammar etc.
The results astonished Jacotot who like any good professor was fully indoctrinated into what Ranciere calls the Explicative Order, where "the master's secret is to know how to recognize the distance between the taught material and the person being instructed,... between learning and understanding." (5) That is, the master explicates and brings the student up to his or her level of understanding. "The explicator sets up and abolishes the distance... deploys and reabsorbs it..."
Jacotot concluded that the logic of the educational system needed to be overturned. Explication was unnecessary. For example, in the acquisition of the mother tongue, learning does not require an infinite regress of explanations and reasons. To quote Ranciere: "What is learned best cannot be explained..." Language acquisition involves an "autonomous relation between apprenticeship and verification."
Ranciere goes far beyond the slogan of the enlightened: "Understand!" He argues that understanding is nothing more than translating (9). "Observing and retaining; repeating and verifying..." It is possible to move blindly -- the way children move, learning by oneself without a master explicator. "Words learned best... are those learned without a master explicator."
What is needed is a thing in common. In our case, it is a book. Something needs to be added to the configuration of the Parent (master) - Child (student). A geometry is created by inserting the thing in common, aka the Book.
In the first section of Bolano's 2666, the academics have Archembolo's books in common. That is the basis for their connection. Their profession is to master the book and to explain it, and as a result they are hungry for any information about the reclusive author.
2666 is full of the unexplicable and tangential. And we're left largely to make of it what we will. In Whitehead's terms, it's full of lures for feeling.
Archembolo himself is completely self taught and had early intense experience with a particular book. Like walking dreamily underwater, swamped in text. And this leads him to very material relations to typewriters and with the world.
2666 is an open text, which is much like the Duchamp's unhappy readymade -- recreated by Almafitano in hanging out a geometry book on a laundry line to interact with nature. One can find endless connections to the Book, which has a life of its own.
It is interesting that Almafitano's interactions with the book in the 2nd section are a mystery even to him. He doesn't know how it has come to him, even tho it has various tell tale markings, but he can't reason out how it arrived in his box of books shipped from Barcelona.
Like Jack Spicer, Almafitano hears voices but rather than dictating the poem to him, they're making him think about the difference between madness and calm.
"There is an order in madness as in everything."
Jacotot's concept is to become an Emancipatory Master, leaving his own intelligence outside the classroom. The emancipatory master gives "the command that enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book..... The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely intelligence and will, had therefore also been separated, liberated from each other. A pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the masters domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book -- the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student." (13)
"There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. A person - and a child in particular - may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there. But that subjection is purely one of will over will. It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence." The coincidence of the two wills and two intelligences is called stultification. Jacotot's students are linked to his will (eg, he demands that they demonstrate and verify what they've learned) but to the book's (rather than Jacotot's) intelligence. This is emancipatory rather than stultifying.
For me this resonates with 2666 as a Book. The intelligence is in the book, not necessarily in Bolano. And there are things to be experienced and thereby learned there.
Going back to section/book 2 of 2666, Almafitano's wife, who seems a bit mad but very calm about it, fetishizes an author, rather than the author's books. And this displacement is interesting, since it is unhealthy and futile. The author, a gay poet, is never going to give Lola what she might need or want. But maybe its a nomadic hitchhiking thru time and space that she needs or wants. Lola leaves Almafitano with a lesbian companion and thereafter deals with direct relations as they arrive.
Towards the end of the section, there's a reflexive moment where Bolano is saying, don't look at the "perfect" short pieces of these masters (e.g., don't look at Bartleby -- look at Moby Dick; ditto Xmas Carol vs Pickwick Papers). He revers the Book with a capital B, and 2666 is in fact B's book. A totality in which (in Ranciere's terms) everything is within everything.
"A book that is a totality: a center to which one can attach everything new one learns; a circle in which one can understand each of these new things, find the ways to say what one thinks about it, what one makes of it. This is the first principle of universal teaching: one must learn something and relate everything else to it. At first something must be learned." (20)
A congealed network of the undead. It wants to rip us to pieces...
This beautiful piece by Tilford is available as part of the Urbanomic's Summer Auction, which runs from 26 May - 24 June.
All proceeds of the auction go to support Urbanomic's journal Collapse. The lots – including original work and exclusive signed editions – have been generously donated by artists, musicians and writers who have contributed to Collapse or been otherwise involved in Urbanomic projects over the past few years, including:
Kristen Alvanson, Amanda Beech, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Cut Hands, Detanico and Lain, FIELDCLUB, Renée Green, Florian Hecker, Kröõt Juurak & Mårten Spångberg, Nick Land, Sam Lewitt, China Miéville, Pamela Rosenkranz, Conrad Shawcross, Keith Tilford
The PDF catalogue, which contains images and details of all works, with links to higher resolution images, and details of how to bid can be found here.
A reprise of the double book launch, with both video and audio files, is available here, via the fantastical Greg Bem.
John Olson's review of Wax World: here. And the Stranger's book editor, who (just like me) will never be Walt Whitman, reviews a trio of books, including NicoVassilakis's staring@poetics: here.
Robert Mittenthal * Wax World * Chax Press
Donato Mancini * Buffet World * New Star Books
with film from Brandon Downing Tuesday 3 May 8pm
Gallery 1412
1412 18th Ave (just north of Union) - Seattle WA
===================== WAX WORLD
Robert Mittenthal
116 pages
Chax Press
Robert Mittenthal is author of Value Unmapped (Nomados), Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami Editions), and the newly arrived Wax World (Chax). Irrational Dude, a chapbook of collaborative work with Nico Vassilakis, was published in 2009 by tir aux pigeons. Mittenthal was instrumental in creating and curating the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780925904904/wax-world.aspx http://chax.org/poets/mittenthal.htm
Note on Wax World
It’s an unfortunate iron that walks stiffly over us, pressing our clothes. I miss the comforts of a baggy garment which covers everything while revealing very little.
How do we come to come to speech when language has been stolen from us, when we’ve lost our words? What can words convey, when they belong to the interests of the cultural industry as it serves the interests of commerce, industry, government, warfare.
We’ve lost the word for what connects our public and private selves. Pre-owned words whitewashed and hung out to fade in the sun. It’s a contest where juris-diction is denied. There is no room to plead for the last poet standing. And without standing, we’re left outside.
We are left with a surface, a wax or skin which registers the vague and shifting impressions. In this wax world of malleable, soft, false imitation, distorted surface is the only reality we know. The truth of appearances is that there are only appearances.
How then to say something clear, definite, decisive. How offer any certainty of thought or opinion without bullying the reader, the audience? How make a music out of such unpromising and recalcitrant shifting materials?
The writing in Wax World comes from that condition, explores it, tries to build with that wax, with materials that shift and slide and change even as you use them.
===============
BUFFET WORLD
Donato Mancini
128 pages
New Star Books (Vancouver)
textual poems, visual poems and conceptual writings.
The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. His two New Star books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were each nominated for the ReLit Award, and Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Book design awards. Mancini's collaborative visual works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Cuba. Notable exhibitions include Surveillance Sketch(Artspeak, Vancouver 2003), Untitled: Conversation Loops (The Western Front, Vancouver 2004; with Miguel da Conceicao, Jacob Gleeson, and Elisa Rathje) and Angels in the Angles (Gallery Atsui, Vancouver 2009; with Marina Roy and Christian Bök), and an upcoming exhibition of print objects at CSA (Vancouver). He also co-directed the world's first genuine in-world avatar documentary AVATARA (Centre A, Vancouver 2003), now part of the Ubu Web international archive of experimental film and video. Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal curator of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium at VIVO in August 2008. Other recent publications include a book edition from Fillip Editions (Vancouver) entitled Fact `N' Value, as well as poetic and critical writings in publications such as The Capilano Review, Open Letter, West Coast Line, Rampike, W, The West Wind Review, Parser, ditch, Poetry is Dead and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
ABOUT BUFFET WORLD
Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's smorgasbord of verbal and visual poems about food, trade, and life under late–late–capitalism.
The various ingredients of Buffet World capture Mancini's dissatisfaction with current social conditions. Buffet World underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimisers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with surreal spectacle.
The images in Buffet World are colourful and almost garish, and the words are brilliantly manipulated. Equally concerned with the violence done to our planet, our bodies and imaginations, these startling, funny poems perform a deep cultural critique.
========================
BrandonDowning is a writer and visual artist originally from California. His books of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005), while a monograph of his literary collages from1996-2008, Lake Antiquity, was released by Fence Books in late 2009. A long poem, AT ME, will be released as a chapbook by Octopus Books this Fall, while his next collection, Mellow Actions, will be published by Fence in 2012. In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of collaged digital shorts, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, with a 2nd volume forthcoming in 2011. You can see some at www.youtube.com/user/bdown68, along with his photographic and other work at http://www.brandondowning.org/
It is not often than a momentous Badiouian event occurs. And the recent events in Tunisian & Egypt are all the more amazing for their spontaneity.
This is your mission should you choose to accept it. All that is solid melts into air.
Badiou's (somewhat utopian) goal is to follow the "destiny of an event" to solve "unsolvable problems without the help of the state..." [All quotations here from Badiou's editorial last month in Le Monde.]
Badiou celebrates "the principle that Marat never stopped reminding us of: when it comes to freedom, equality, emancipation, we owe everything to popular uprisings."
Badiou is against all forms of constituted statehood. " ...our states ... prefer management to revolt, they prefer claims, and “orderly transition” to any kind of rupture." One can read this absolute rejection of the state as a call for a kind of Maoist continual or permanent revolution.
His politics becomes almost pure math. The event resonates out of revolutionary movement, a movement which is paradoxically without a party. More generic than general, it's far less organized and more spontaneous than any party. Badiou's "event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities."
It's a brilliant abstract mathematics, against all forms of representative democracy.
One may want to spin Badiou's theory of the event in a more practical way vis-a-vis Egypt, e.g., to argue that the fidelity to these heroic recent events generates a kind of universal obligation, very broadly felt, that will impact how things unfold. This optimism is very compelling, i.e., one wants to believe that the fidelity to this event will "haunt" -- in a very good way -- what unfolds. I think it will prove to be a very powerful point of reference both for citizens and future leaders. But this sort of statement is probably too practical for Badiou, who has given up on all representative forms of governance. And his notion of "fidelity" -- or fidelity to the idea of fidelity -- is to him useless in reconfiguring or reconstituting a political state or any economic situation. Thus for example, he could have little to say about the problem of the Egyptian military as an institution engaged in both economics and politics.
In the wake of the immediate climax (the evacuation or literal separation of heads of state), Badiou has perhaps nothing left to theorize -- it is as if these events demonstrate or prove his theorems.
It is tempting to read Badiou's editorial in Le Monde as a post-coital cigarette. He promises his fidelity to this most lovely event in more than 200 years, aka the Paris Commune. He's been dreaming of this night for a long time.
The problem that arises after the post-coital cigarette is that the heads of state won't stay evacuated. Undoubtedly when the "new" state is constituted, power will corrupt.
The events of Tunisia and Egypt provide what may be Badiou's best of all possible examples. Hard to believe that he will not scratch out more formal paeans to these events, which he may take as mathematical proofs of concept.
At bottom, the problem is that he never ever engages economics. He sneers at the very idea. The State is his problem, and it's an exclusive problem. To him perhaps the Market is always a secondary problem, ie, merely part of the situation that will be overthrown with the state.
One can understand & largely agree with the critique of the how "democracy" under neoliberalism has lost any connection to the direct expression of the people, with the complete commodification of political choices. Did you hear that Sarah Palin was trademarking her name (aka her brand)? If only this were a joke. And of course with the so called global economy, many states are just doing the best they can (eg, like a CEO of a corporation) to maintain the position of their economies in the global market. How "democratic" is that, really? Not very. The independence of the monetary policy and judiciary in the US can't really be thought of as consistent with democratic expression of the people. It strikes me that Ranciere is right to say that democracy should no longer be used as a noun. But as an adjective it can still be useful; that is, behaviors, structures, institutions can be categorized as more or less democratic (i.e., rule by and for the people; or an expression of the people).
Badiou refuses to engage the excruciatingly complex network in which any subsequent actions have to occur. Perhaps he just can't bother with practical details. He is, before anything else, a thinker of the event. (I'll have to try to engage Badiou's Handbook on Inaesthetics, and how his modernist readings fit into his model, at a later time.)
One last comment to connect to the discussion on Badiou v Schumpeter that I missed a couple weeks ago at the autonomous university general reading group. Schumpeter embraces a similar theory of the heroic (and for him, a competitive) event, though it's an economic event not a political one. Schumpeter's celebration of capitalism's creative destruction, i.e., a disruption introduced via innovation, is a frighteningly close analog to the disruptions that Badiou celebrates in his politics against the state. Both are thinkers of the event, but they are almost a yin/yang match for each other. What Badiou lacks, a theory of the event for economics, Schumpeter provides. And vice versa.
For Schumpeter, Capitalism is a “process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” [see S. Shaviro's excellent blogpost on Schumpeter]
Schumpeter completely perverts politics, turning democracy into a market-driven representative form that will serve his notion of violent economic events, aka capitalism. As Charles Mudede once said, Schumpeter is the poet of the neoliberals. Perhaps by analogy this makes Badiou the poet of the anarchists?
All apparent contradiction aside, whether one thinks of the violence of the New as a problem or an occasion for celebration, it seems true that the new is not always so violent. The anthropocentric schemas of Badiou and Schumpeter don't account for less heroic lower-case events. For B&S these are not events at all, but sometimes something very small can have very large impact.
The bright lines drawn by B&S don't allow for the more realistic shades of gray which, in Seattle at least, completely engulf us.
In a new article in New Left Review, Jules Boykoff traces the genesis of the relations between Olympic sport and Capital. Detailing the political economic contexts of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where disproportionate long and short term public expenditures are made and short term profits privatized, Boykoff notes how this leads to government deficits and severe cuts to social programmes. The masquerade (in the form of an economic boomlet) lasts only until the games end, and Vancouver is left with a nasty hangover that won't go away.
Similar to the recent US financial crisis, the Olympic Games create a finance bubble for the sporting facilities, housing, and over-the-top pomp that the IOC demands. The developers and local powers-that-be would have residents of the city believe that this massive overspending is really a stimulus package, betting among other things on the future value of the "world class city" brand allegedly attained via hosting the games.
But more importantly here, Boykoff reports on the resistance to the games in Vancouver, cataloguing the actions taken by an impressively diverse list of groups, and describing the remarkable rapport created in this context. Boykoff describes the anti-Olympics resistance as an "event coalition" quoting Tom Mertes' organizing concept from the global justice movement: "an ongoing series of alliances and coalitions, whose convergences remain contingent."
I need to think this through but it is interesting that the "convergences" achieved and the "fun" felt by those in resistance might very well echo what spectators in a sporting audience feel. There is an affective joy in the action of joining a multiple and/or in the feelings of belonging or identification. If you own it, it will own you. Political sport as dialogic, or sport as a dialogical politics?
There also may be something to say here about Isabelle Stengers' notion of an ecology of practices, particularly where she resists general terms which "look for illustrations, for cases that are not causes but refer instead to their potential unity. Unity always means mobilisation, what was asked from armies having to follow orders in a faithful and immediate way." I think Boykoff is more attuned to Stengers, in that he is detailing situated concerns of diverse groups, and more interested in generic than general terms [via Stengers, "generic terms such as cause, obligation or risk... aim at conferring to a situation the power to matter in its particular way..."].
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