8653912 the liberalizing ideology of the internet

8/3/2019 8653912 the Liberalizing Ideology of the Internet

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THE LIBERALIZING IDEOLOGY OF THE INTERNET

for a recent example of the liberalizing ideology in action, see Kenneth Goldsmith's

summary of Marjorie Perloff's talkhere]

It is spring 2007. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, perhaps as many as a

million, have died in the US wars. My government tortures peopleit always has, but

now it tortures lots of themand holds them in an extra-judicial space that, like the

internet, does and does not exist. The Democrats are hateful because, like the internet,

they are doing nothing to stop this. Americans are hateful, mostly, because they like theinternet and are doing nothing to stop this. Poets are hateful too. They are like the internet

and they like it.

Johannes Gransson asks me to write something for his magazineAction, Yes. At first, I

think to write something about poetry in public space and my researches into the theory

and practice of the Situationist International, but Im feeling the hate, Im liking the hate,

I have all of this aggression thats bottlenecked because its supposed to fit through these

tiny pixel-sized perforations, and increasingly, what I find impossible to stomach is thisidea that the internet is a democratic space, that the technology is democratizing, anti-

hierarchical, equalizing, when it seems clear to me that alongside the surge of troops into

Iraq, also under the pretenses of democracy, there is a surge of voltages into the space of

the internet, and that, instead of one surge stopping the other surge, they are mutually

enabling surges, they are pals, these surges, and contrary to predictions about new media

enabling new forms of resistance, the internet has, mostly, become, like, a giant

deterrence machine, virtualizing and disembodying resistance, it is something like the

Free Speech zones set up at protests and on campuses, a merely formal space of freedom

surrounded by massive unfreedom, and because I read a good number of books about

capitalism, this seems like an old story, this one about freedom and unfreedom, and I

want to tell it.
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/05/marjorie_perloffs_unoriginal_g.htmlhttp://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/05/marjorie_perloffs_unoriginal_g.htmlhttp://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/05/marjorie_perloffs_unoriginal_g.html


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I begin to think about the internet and what it does and what its for and I have, at the end

of the day, two or maybe three main arguments about it. They are not very original, these

arguments, and anybody who reads the same books about capitalism, particularly the

ones written by Karl Marx, who was a pretty sharp guy, could probably come up with the

same arguments.

I. Information Wants to Be Free

The internet is a screen, a series of screens. Its true: everyone can have their own blog,

can publish their poems online so that the whole world can not read them, can peruse and

produce the contents of the internet freely (in all senses of this word). But below this

level of freedom, this level of leveling and equalization, the old exclusions and

inequalities still obtaindifferences in literacy and knowledge, differences in access to

free time, differences in positionality with regard to social networks and cultural capital.

This is a public that requires, paradoxically, an immobilizing and privatizing of

individuated bodies: in rooms, in front of screens. And it is offered, I think, as

compensation for the destruction of our cities, the privatization of social entitlement

programs, the decay of our schools, infrastructure, etc. The freedom of the internet is, in

this sense, the freedom of the marketplace. Its democracy the democracy of, well, the

U.S. Its equality the equality of money, the general equivalent, through which

equivalency buyers and sellers confront each other as equals. Every dollar is equal to

every other dollar, stupid. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar.

In his notebooks from the 1850s, referred to as the Grundrisse, Marx, who encountered

similarly vexing arguments about the democracy of the marketplace, decided that the best

way to deal with such claims would be to create a mock-up of the market, of the simple

sphere of circulation, taking at face value the claim that all participants were equals in

order to demonstrate the contradictions and impossibilities of such a stance, and therefore

force us to plunge into the noisy and highly unequal sphere of productionwhere capital

and labor meet as antagonistsupon which the market rests. I find his analogy for this

type of equality cheering. For the bourgeois economists, he says, it is as if it were

asserted that there is no difference, to say nothing of antithesis and contradiction, between


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natural bodies, because all of them, when looked at from e.g. the point of view of their

weight, have weight, and are therefore equal; or are equal because all of them occupy

three dimensions. . . And he goes on: In present bourgeois society as a whole this

positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath

which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which the apparent

individual equality and liberty disappear (Grundrisse, 247). Replace prices with

information and you get the picture.

If you believe, then, that the equality and democracy of the internet floats in an emulsion

of unfree and unequal social relationslets call it the difference between those who do

and those do not own the means of production (whether knowledge, hardware, software,

or data)then the supposed freedom of the users resembles, in my view, two types of

political subject. First, the nineteenth-century liberal subject endowed gradually with

rights (able to vote, to own things, to appeal to the courts) and, secondly, the free and

rightless proletarians of the transition to capitalism. This is by no means to suggest that

the majority of the people who use the internet today are as brutalized as the lower

classes during the transition to capitalism or during the nineteenth century, but merely

that, and I owe this insight in part to Standard Schaefer, a similar dialectic is operating,

that we should consider the spaces of the internet as ones of enfranchisement and access

which sit next to, and cause/are caused by, some of the most extreme disenfranchisement,

dispossession, atrocity and destruction in recent memory. That is, we should think of this

in terms of Marxs account of so-called primitive accumulation, the process whereby

the European peasantry was dispossessed of the access to commonly-held land in order

that they were forced to rely on the sale of their labor-power. The argument here, and the

actual history, is rather complex, but you get the picture.

It is with some impatience, then, that I encounter positions like that of Kenneth

Goldsmith who, for all his salutary antihumanism, must surely be accounted one of the

internets liberalizing ideologues. In a post on the Poetry Foundations

Harriet blog, he writes: Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one

at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long


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been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at oncepulling RSS feeds from one

server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from

hundreds of other shifting identitiessuch nave sentiments are even further from what it

means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the

definition of a coherent self, rather it [sic] has to do with the reconstructed, distributed,

fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely

adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once

again to include these as well? I think Marx already dealt with this quite well, dont

you? What Goldsmith cant countenance is the thought that whether you get an identity

of an infinitely malleable sort or a regulation issue identity has to do with, basically,

class, race, gender. Indeed, despite his protestations, this is quintessential identity politics

its whiteys identity politics.

Lest I seem like I dont get the joke, I should say, at this point, that Im not immune to

Goldsmiths charms. He has cool hats, and I find his works fascinating and even, if only

for short periods of time, pleasurable. I admire his intelligence, however perverse it is,

and I realize that he positions himself rather self-consciously as a gadfly. But irony is a

great way to disavow things you actually believe. The value of Goldsmith, no doubt, is

that he has a sense of humor and under no conditions, blessedly, does he claim that his

version of conceptual poetry is in the slightest politically radical, or in the least

threatening to the functioning of the political status quo. On the contrary, his is a pro-

consumer poetry, and as well see in the next section of my talk, his virtue is that he

reminds poets how little the experiments of today are a threat to capitalism and

imperialismindeed, in his version, conceptual poetry, as well see, works as

advertising, product design, and job training for office managers.

Things are a bit trickier when claims are made for the liberalizing ideology of the internet

being politically progressive. Stan Apps and Matthew Timmons, for instance, in their

stimulating Editors Statement forFoldMagazine, have the virtue of being so clear about

their own intentions, and often so accurate in their analysis but so disastrously wrong in

the conclusions they draw from this analysis, that they make critique all the easier. I dont


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even need Marx. One of their claims is that the new aesthetics of information enabled by

the internet are anti-capitalist. Capitalism, they write, has no understanding of what to

do in a %100 saturated marketplace in which no significant profit is possible. The

poetries of cut-and-paste are virtuous because the the romantic paradigm of replication

remains gloriously immune to the marketplacewhich is to say, these forms of self-

expression are produced for selfless reasons. But this demonstrates a particularly weak

grasp of the nature of capitalismassembly-line work, for instance, depends upon

replication and automation. While they themselves note that distribution is the new

production, this apparently does not lead them to conclude that distributionthe

production of new information through consumption of that informationis capitalist.

They write: The primacy of distribution is the greatest lesson of capitalism; ultimately it

will be understood that capitalism has nothing to do with money or profit at all:

capitalism is simply the recognition that the connections between people are more

important than the information or objects they exchange. By now, such ideas should

sound familiar. Ditto the response.

II. The Internet as Work

In what ways is the distribution of information on the internet capitalist? For me,

answering this question involves demonstrating that the internet is, largely, workunpaid

work and unpaid job training, and that, similarly, in Goldsmith and in the Apps-Timmons

tendencys accounting, the work of art has become the art of work. I cant cover much of

this argument here, but Ill do what I can.

The work of the internet is the dialectic counterpart to the primitive accumulation

discussed above. Essentially, with the internet, capitalism gifts the masses with a false

commons where people can work, off the clock, creating information and relationships

that the ruling class can enclose, appropriate, commodify, and sell back to us at a later

date. Its a way of letting the process of primitive accumulation work as a perpetual, and

because of the stagnation of the economies in the advanced capitalist countries, vital,

supplement to the mechanism of exploitation, and one that should be seen alongside the

other forms of primitive accumulation that are occurring right now and are, for sure,


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much more important: the direct seizure of Iraqi resources, the copyrighting and

commodifying of the material of our bodies, and most obviously, the accumulation by

dispossession that is occurring in Africa, in China, in Latin America, as capitalism pushes

to its limits and attempts to expunge from the earth any trace of commonly-held land.

Thus, back to Kenneth Goldsmith, who writes: How I navigaterather than how I

createis what distinguishes me from another writer. I am an intelligent agent carving a

unique path through this thicket of language; what distinguishes my practice from yours

is the particular swath I carve. The conceptual-processual poem that he champions, then,

is a series of transportable techniques for the management of flows of information; it is a

kind of aestheticized Google, one that promises the information consumer an endlessly

protean and fungible identity. Despite his somewhat Kantian claim that his writing is

purposeless, its consonance with information-management products does not escape me.

It is poetry not only for information consumers but for the administrators and managers

who work in the distribution of information. Tools for managing and mastering flow of

data are also, in this sense, tools for managing and mastering populationsor, whats

better, as with viral marketing, letting populations manage and master themselves. It is a

technocrats art. The nice thing, though, about Goldsmiths attempt to aestheticize current

working conditions is that he refuses to sex it up, to make it interesting. The mind-

numbing boredom of the office job, of phonebank work, data entry, and proofreading,

comes through crystal clear. Youll never clock out, again. Goldsmiths poetics of

boredom is the revenge of work in postmodernity. If, as Adorno and Horkheimer claim,

Amusement under late capitalism is the extension of work, in his poems the profound

alienation of work can longer be covered over, eroticized, or made interesting. Were

dying of boredom and we know it. In this sense, given that the dominance of

financialization over the last thirty years has been all about making distribution (of

capital, of information) profitable, it seems, in response to Apps and Timmons remarks,that capital does, in fact, know what to do. Indeed, Apps, Timmons, Goldsmith and the

ideas they present are what capital doescreating and prohibiting the conditions and

types of access to information that will allow for the profitability that they claim,

somewhat exaggeratedly, is lost by the free exchange of information. Its true that, as they


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say, capitalism is all about the relations between people, that its fundamental truth is what

Marx calls the relations of production, that political relations are, in a sense, capitals

ontology. But what Apps and Timmons dont see is that the poetics of distribution is a

way of altering, managing and directing those relations.

This is not a blanket critique of all processual writingsome flarf, for instance, does not

seem to partake of this technocratic rationality and, instead, by a process akin to what

Benjamin calls profane illumination, manages to manifest those material conditions

and inequalities which subtend the supposedly symmetrical plane of the internet.

Id like to see more writing like this, obviously, and Id like to understand more about the

effects that internet life does and does not have on the lives we live offscreen. Because

you are all smart people, Im sure youve noticed a contradiction in my account. On the

one hand, Im saying that the internet has no effects except indirectly: its a smokescreen.

On the other hand, Im saying its a tool for mastering and dominating people, for

generating saleable information, for directly producing social relations. I think both of

these things are true. Sometimes its a screen, and sometimes its domination, and these

two effects are mutually enabling. I do think that theres an uncanny timing to the arrival

of the internet as a full-on social force directly after 9/11. In my view, in the last decade,

people were essentially given this domain for experiment with alternate forms of

communication and confederation and, in ways that served the interests of the ruling-

class, an ideology developed which encouraged people to conflate manipulation of

political symbols with the manipulation of political bodies. Its an old ideology but it has

come in handy over the last decade.

Sometimes symbolic freedom is just that, symbolic, and sometimes its something more.

Symbols can be powerful, and the manipulation of them can have real effects that need

not be technocratic and dominating. My piece in Action, Yes, finished with a call for a

translation of poetic strategies into strategies for activism in the world at large. I still

think thats whats needed. And I still think the question for us is how connections

between symbols and bodies, languages and bodies can be consciously and effectively

put in the service of, for lack of a less ambiguous term, equality.


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1 8 C O M M E N T S :

Stan Apps said...

Hi Jasper.

Interesting. Your reading of my collaboration with Mat Timmons is, from

my point of view, an unfortunate one, in that it eliminates the humor

and indirections of that work, in order to turn it into a kind of simplistic

piece of pro-internet propaganda. Whereas, in fact, its collage structure

is meant to discourage such reductive interpretations. for example, you

quote a reference to a "100% saturated marketplace" and read that as

the internet, but the internet is actually an emerging marketplace as we

all know; a classic example of a saturated marketplace is agriculture,

and indeed capital doesn't know what to do to achieve significant profits

in agriculture (other than destructive strategies such as hoarding and

dumping of subsidizied product.) In other words, capital is good at

making saturated marketplaces less effecient, to achive profit, but

doesn't know how to interact with them at full efficiency.

As for the "primacy of distribution," who can doubt that now? If you want

a political or economic alternative to work out, it has to be as adept as

capital at moving things around to the people who want them. Ideally, it

should be better at moving products around than capital is--to me,

indeed, the internet is moving in the direction of finding better ways

than capital to move value around.

More on this later, when I have more time. . .

SUNDAY, 01 JUNE, 2008

Jasper Bernes said...
http://www.blogger.com/profile/04844082750285483221http://jasperbernes.blogspot.com/2008/05/liberalizing-ideology-of-internet.html?showComment=1212361680000#c8375402291256074222http://www.blogger.com/profile/15593713553275884570http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=9674688&postID=8375402291256074222http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=9674688&postID=7206475394768228405http://www.blogger.com/profile/04844082750285483221http://jasperbernes.blogspot.com/2008/05/liberalizing-ideology-of-internet.html?showComment=1212361680000#c8375402291256074222http://www.blogger.com/profile/15593713553275884570


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Well, Im a bit perplexed, Stan. Elsewhere in the piece you seem to

indicate that overabundance of cultural products makes them immune to

commodificationsomething you identify with the internetso I assumed

that the Capitalism has no understanding of what to do. . . quote

referred to that kind of saturation. If you meant something like the

commodities markets, then I apologize for misreading. But why follow

the sentence with Writers do [know what what to do in conditions of

overcapacity]. Writers know what to do with the overproduction of

foodstuffs? Really? Id like to know what this means. . .

A profit is a profit for capitalthose strategies (subsidies, futures

speculation, etc.) are the way that its done now, and youre right to

note that it has more to do with gaming the market than in investment

in production, Perhaps this wasnt clear from the paper, but I agree that

distribution is primary now. My point is that these strategies are plenty

adequate for capital. The internet is one of these strategies, and the

poetics of distribution, far from being anti-capitalist or operating with

systems at full efficiency (whatever that might mean), bears an

uncanny resemblance to these strategies of distribution. Not to mention

that the internet is also the worlds best advertising vehicle, which helps

keep up effective demand. For instance, the scam known as biofuel that

is currently helping to starve the worlds poor to death? Where did that

catch on?

The main thing, though, thats wrong with your argument is that you

seem to imply that economic justice can be had if we find a better way

to distribute goods. But this is what liberals say and think, and it was

(and still is) the ideology behind neo-liberalism (the spectral twin of the

information wants to be free people). Its true that capitalism is

massively inefficient and wasteful. Its contradictions are legendary and

almost any other system could distribute goods in a better manner. But

the problem is with the hierarchical and uneven relations of production

that happen outside of the realm of circulation (even for the people who


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work in circulation). Any alternatives need to aim there, and not just at

the marketplace. In this sense, I probably disagree about what the

primacy of distribution means. Most people on this planet still work

producing food and goods. Capital may need fancy ways to export

capital/goods, to gamble on future surplus-extraction, but ultimately

those forms of distribution are still counting on some exploitation

happening in the real economy of production somewherein the future,

in other countries. The fake gift economy of the internet rests upon the

people who lay the cables and build the chips and service the machines

and program the codes. And that shit aint free.

And you still oppose the internet to capitalism! Its unbelievable.

SUNDAY, 01 JUNE, 2008

Joseph said...

Jasper, I think you're seriously misreading Stan and Matt's text. You write

that they have "the virtue of being so clear about their own intentions."

Really? There are at least a dozen contradictions deliberately written

into the text. You're reading it as an attempt by Stan and Matt to argue a

specific point; there are many points, some of them in opposition to one

another, hence your exasperation with the text when it doesn't seem to

add up. It's a collage poem, not an expository essay, and to that extent it

contains various voices and points of view (some of which Stan and Matt

may be in agreement with, others they may be in disagreement with).

I'm sure a large part of it is appropriated. Obviously you've picked up on

a point about distribution that you and Stan do disagree on; it's an

interesting conversation to have, but appealing to their essay is not

going to clarify the arguments. And since the essay under discussion is

online, shouldn't we link to it so people unfamiliar with it can read it?

http://insertpress.net/index.php?s=fold

MONDAY, 02 J UNE, 2 008
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jane said...

I too am puzzled by the phrase operating with systems at full

efficiency, not least because I can't tell what "full efficiency" might

mean in a non-capitalist situation, and so the term seems to presume

the very condition it claims to challenge.

But mostly I am puzzled by the idea that distribution is primary now.

This can no more be true orfalse than the claim that "consumption is

the new production" i.e., these are simply thought experiments for

examining from different perspectives the complete process of

production>>distribution>>consumption.

Distribution, as Jasper notes, has been developed as a way of converting

labor into capital when that labor is distant in space or, largely, time. It

isn't isolable from the production chain in any way whatsoever. It is,

among other things, exactlyone of capital's solutions for a crisis of over-

accumulation, when capital can't take the necessary profit via

reinvestment in production materials. But it always stands in relation to

production and consumption; it has no independent meaning, and thus

no independent possibility, whether involving the internet or not.


Stan Apps said...

The distribution of good and resources is not only a capitalist activity; it

is a problem for human society in general. Capitalism, as we all know, is

good at distribution, and particularly good at inequitable distribution.

My "thought experiment," as Jane called it, was to emphasize

capitalism's distributive efficacy as its worthwhile element, the element

worth imitating, albeit differently. Ie. getting everyone what they want,

rather than only getting specific subjects what they want. Experiments

in micro-finance are trying to do this at a starter level.
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Distribution is primary because there is already enough stuff in the world

to supply everyone; production was primary in an earlier era of scarcity.

Another issue I have with Jasper's thesis is: the internet is a technology,

something that works. It is more than merely a manifestation of an

economic ideology, and more than an outreach of any particular effort at

hegemony. While capitalist practices are articulated through the

internet, the technology is not limited by that, and can be used in ways

that are anti-capitalist, acapitalist or post-capitalist. I mean, are you

seriously arguing that there's something intrinsically bad about

instantaneous communication? Is there something intrinsically bad about

fire too?

Last, I resent being characterized as a naive idealist by someone who

reads an appropriated collage text as an expository essay. The Editors

Statement for Fold is at least 95% copied, and many of the idealisms

expressed are no more than the idealisms that are "in the air" at this

moment. Many of the sentences are not things I agree with; the piece is

intended to provoke thought. I am sad that in this case, rather than

enabling speculation, the piece has been foreclosed upon and made to

seem so simplistic. Thanks to Joseph for helping to clarify this.


brian salchert said...

Mr. Bernes,

This topic is highly complex, and I

am not sure anyone knows what future

awaits us, but for me thoughts about

it go back to at least 1976 and these

lines from my "July: Year-day 202":

Soon Machina sapiens, crying loud,
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may demand more praise than we now expect.

-

Bill Knott has had similar thoughts

and Kenneth Goldsmith, unless he is

fibbing, thinks humans will be superseded by (or morphed into)

machines.

I did what Joseph suggested, and read

The Editors Statement for Fold. I

also read Stan's last comment as it

wasn't here when I was last here.

With that in mind, these quotes:

"Distribution is the new production."

" . . . capitalism is simply the

recognition that the connections

between people are more important

than the information or objects

they exchange."

"The model of the writer as 'transmitter'

will invalidate the concerns of a

culture of commodity fetishists."

And about K G: " . . . that play is

the most economically efficient

mode of creative work."

I know you and Jane here addressed

the distribution issue, but Apps

and Timmons also say more about it.

Back to me, and then again to K G:

Capitalism is a worrisome thing in

that it cannot exist without consumers

and yet it strives to co-opt whatever


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would seek to destroy it and in so

doing tends to destroy all that it

needs for its survival. However, I

am not confident it can be replaced.

In Silliman's May 31, 2008 links is

one to "The Young Hate Us {3}" by

Donato Mancini in which among

many thought-provoking statements

is that publication is a power stance. Another link (also in

Joseph Hutchison's blog) is to an

interview by Radhika Jones of Mr.

Kenneth Goldsmith. Of interest

to me there is: 1) Goldsmith is a

collector of certain literary,

musical, and other works.

2) He is a family man.

3) He favors "texts that court their

readers least".

Is the Internet liberating or

imprisoning? Both. Will the

Internet survive? Only if those

entities which rule and support it

have the tools required. What

about nanotechnology? Read today

that research on long-chain carbon

nanotubes has revealed they pose a

danger similar to asbestos. You

are right about the biofuel scam.

Also read today there is a 1 in 10

chance of Earth being hit by an

asteroid in the comparatively near


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future. Good inventions occur

daily, but one mishap could wipe

out humanity.

About the author: Until that point

at which humans as biological entities

no longer exist, the author will

continue to exist, and so will the

ego, and so will the drive to be read

and remembered. Yes we are all

complicit in the evils of capitalism, but unless we find ways

to modifiy ourselves away from it,

it will ever be part of our DNA.

Again the quotes from The Editors

Statement for Fold.

-

" . . . the connections between people"

are essential, and this is (if it

is allowed to be) the greatest good

of the Internet

-

" . . . the writer as 'transmitter'" is problematical

but may be inevitable

-

" . . . play . . ." is not a new

thought since all art is a kind of

play, but it is a vital thought if

it undermines self-importance - I

don't think it has - further, I

think those who make the most of

being at a distance from the "I"

are often those who are most "I-


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full". But such is the human

condition.



Hi Stan, Hi Joseph

In a longer essay, I would have had more time to devote to the

statements (or non-statements) complexity, and if I do something with

the piece, I plan on that. I apologize for not having had the space to

account for its many-facetedness. In an earlier draft, I looked at some of

the remarks youve made at your blog, Stan, particularly those re:

hegemony and eclecticism, which I think will bear out my sense of the

position of the statement. Because, in the end, I do think that in the

aggregate there is something like a position there (and lots of positions

are excluded from it). This is substantiated by the fact that youre

taking this exact same position here. If you and Joseph agree that we

disagree about the meaningfulness of the internet and distribution, then

thats all that needs to be said, really, since it was the main point of my

piece. Have we reached the point at which noting that something was

written via collage is like saying it was written in words?

In any case:

>My "thought experiment," as Jane >called it, was to emphasize

>capitalism's distributive efficacy >as its worthwhile element, the

>element worth imitating, albeit >differently. Ie. >getting everyone

>what they want, rather than only >getting specific subjects what >they

want. Experiments in micro- >finance are trying to do this at a >starter

level.

See, Stan, this is why youre much closer to someone like Thomas


17/38

Friedman, and the bourgeois economists with whom Marx is arguing in

the Grundrisse, than you are to me or to any anticapitalist who hasnt,

basically, thrown in the towel. Capitalism doesnt have any distributive

efficacy; distribution is actually where its weakest, its virtues being its

unleashing of powerful productive forces; capitalism, by its very nature

(the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, broadly)

requires that there will be massive waste, overproduction, needless

competition, and lots of iPhones but much less medicine for things like

malaria that can be wiped out for pennies on the Iraq war.

I dont have any position toward technology as a whole. Im friendly

toward fire, wheels, vibrators and the electric guitar. My problem is with

the social relations that the internet supports and is supported by. In a

different world, the internet would be a different thing. However, I think

I address the claim you make for the a-capitalist activities that occur on

the internetthat is, they are a-capitalist activities that are, mostly, in

the last instance, in the service of capitalism. Will this always be true?

Perhaps not. Is it necessarily true? Certainly not. But it is today, and to

the extent that people offer aesthetic and philosophical positions that

deny this, they are contributing to a profoundly destructive lie. Im not

saying to stop using the internet. Im telling people to stop harboring

illusions about it. Paolo Virno is actually good on this point when he talks

about the communism of capitalism, as is Zizek in his book on

Deleuze.

Because heres the thing, Stan, and this gets back to point about the

internet being better than capitalism at moving values around, the big

secret is that the internet doesnt really move things around. We do.

What the internet moves around is representations. And then people

move around the things that are represented. These representations

dont become values until they can compel certain forms of behavior.

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Joseph said...

I'm sure Stan and I disagree about many things besides, say, the merits of

Flarf and importance of Fassbinder; so I'm not sure why you assume we

agree about the meaningfulness of the internet and distribution. I was

simply making a point about the nature of the text he and Matt Timmons

wrote.

I don't think anyone harbors any illusions about the democratic nature of

the internet; I've read my Zizek, thank you very much. I am aware that

the internet, as currently configured, is a marketplace, that it was

"supposed to bring us all together into a Global Village" and what we

have instead is "particular identifications at our choice" -- those choices

primarily being an ever-expanding array of consumer products. What I

object to is the broad generalization that "the spaces of the internet

[should be considered as] ones of enfranchisement and access which sit

next to, and cause/are caused by, some of the most extreme

disenfranchisement, dispossession, atrocity and destruction in recent

memory." As the engineers at work say, "Show me the data."

I actually agree with your point about the internet as work; sure, these

very words I'm typing may be read by an Adwords bot resulting in an ad

for "wholesale distributors" being placed at the top of the page; three

years from now, when this blog is defunct, these words might be

chopped up and boiled down into spam text that will be sent to the

inbox of a Clinton intern. That likelihood doesn't negate the value of the

conversation we're having right now. Nor does it render useless the

community organizing that is possible through blogs and email. The

point, as even you concede (and Zizek too, in his book on Totalitarianism

where he asks us not to retreat but rather to fight for the "socialization

of cyberspace") is thepotentialityof the internet. The operational

structure here is similar to the potentiality of Marxism, isn't it? Even

during the worst atrocities committed in its name there was still
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19/38

something of value in its critique.

Further, it's a bit disingenuous and condescending of you to lecture Stan

about waste, overconsumption and "lots of iPhones [and] much less

medicine for things like malaria" when you quote him at length but fail

to include the phrase Stan uses immediately preceding your selection:

"inequitable distribution." I can't speak for Stan, but I suspect that the

key words in relation to his notion of distributive efficacy here are

"imitation" and "differently," as in not the same as the current conditions

of neo-liberalism.

Incidentally, it's strange that you lump Stan in with conceptual writers

like Kenny Goldsmith when Stan is closer in temperament to the

Flarfists; in fact he's read at at least one of their festivals and is a

member of their listserv, and has written at least one chapbook that

might be described as Flarf. If anyone can be said to partake in profane

illumination it is the man who wrote the poem "The Christmas Party."

TUESD AY, 03 JUNE, 2008


Hey Joseph,

Sorry, that was messy pronoun use in my comment. By "we disagree" in

that sentence I meant Stan and me, not all three of us. I didn't mean to

imply that you held the same views as Stan (nor, by the way, that you

hadn't read Zizek; just pointing to something similar for corroboration).

As for the logic of causation you flag, well, it's probably not articulated

correctly there. These kinds of determination are difficult to prove. In

any case, it has to do with the argument about political immobilization,

if you buy that, and then also the fact that the internet is a big

advertisement, and the destructiveness of that, etc.


20/38

Some day, perhaps, I'll write something about this with "facts."


jane said...

Quoting Joe, responding to Jasper: What I object to is the broad

generalization that "the spaces of the internet [should be considered as]

ones of enfranchisement and access which sit next to, and cause/are

caused by, some of the most extreme disenfranchisement,

dispossession, atrocity and destruction in recent memory." As the

engineers at work say, "Show me the data."

Well, I suppose one might start with the inextricable twinings of Chinese

"modernization," the "capitalist road" wherein the rise of internet access

is part of a singular process which has at its absolute core the separation

of people from their means of production, various forms of enclosure,

real subsumption of labor, and so forth. The insistence on seeing these as

separate facts is exactly the mistake of seeing "distribution" as

something that can be discussed (and modified) independent of the

relations of production with which it shares a mutual determination.

But why not just mention the glaring fact that "the internet" (and the

larger complex of information technologies ascendant in the last

decades) isn't really a distribution network, anyway? It is a literal space

of work, and not just in the representational or incidental ways that

Jasper mentions. It's a set of technologies for allowing the extension of

the workday in space and time telecommuting, editing, designing,

conferencing, and on and on (for Thomas Friedman, this is the tech's

greatest achievement: the equal access to market competition it brings

to all peoples. Yeay!) And the forces that drive us into these new work

spaces are not forces of distribution at all; they're forces of labor

markets.


21/38

Sure, in our decreasing off hours we might hope to do some cool

parasitic stuff on this new spine that work has grown, but imagining it as

resolving capitalism's contradictions without imagining first the

destruction of the spine...that's just already old-fashioned cyberpunk

stuff, yeah?


Anonymous said...

The internet is in the service of capitalism not least because you need a

computer and various kinds of networks to access and use it. Computers

and networking require, create, and fuel a consumer economy.

Computer equipment is made by the hands of people very far removed

from the end products, and when obsolete, returns to them on very

unequal terms (that is: it poisons poor people in particular and the

environment in general). It also presumes literacy, which is expensive

and unequal. There is no such thing as equal access.

WEDNESDAY, 04 JUNE, 2008


Thank you for allowing anonymous

comments. Comment #11 should be

seriously pondered.


mark wallace said...

I'm trying to see if I can boil this down.

Stan and Joseph believe Jasper missed the ironies, ambiguities and

contradictions of the piece in question, and perhaps he did. But perhaps

that's because he doesn't think of those kinds of literary twists as
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22/38

important enough to the issues he's raising. I'm not sure about his stance

on that.

Then the question comes up of whether the internet is developed in the

context of, and supports, the hegemonic functions of capitalism. And

yes, everyone seems to agree that it does, although there are a few

differences and questions of information regarding in what way

specifically it does.

Then the question is raised of whether despite that fact, some activities

on the internet can work against its capitalist uses, and if so, how that

might work. That is, can capitalist technologies be used in ways that

resist capitalism or not? I would think yes, as can radio and television

also, but not necessarily obviously, and to what degree and in what ways

of course remains speculation until it happens.

I would add that resistance and especially large scale resistance seldom

operates on a singular theory about what it's up to, and by no means

requires being right in any pure sense, in which case there may be room

for all you guys on the boat.


Stan Apps said...

Mark's right that there's a lot of unacknowledged common ground here;

in fact, a lot of my frustration stems from the fact that Jasper is

ignoring elements of the "Editor's Statement" that reflect positions

similar to his own. This makes me feel that Mat and I are being made

straw men, because Jasper is so eager to set himself up as the wise man

chastising us for worshiping the internet and (by extension) being "neo-

liberal." But the truth is I've written an extended critique of Thomas

Friedman and am alarmed and angered by the hypocrisies of the

neoliberal stance. And the truth is that I use the internet as a mimetic


23/38

tool, a device to hold up a mirror to our culture, but I don't idolize the

mirror. Also, the text in question isn't about the internet at all; it's about

appropriative writing strategies--plagiarism and copying. These are

excellent mimetic strategies for use in exploring and satirizing the

culture. And if the internet is a workspace that alienates my labor, then

I'm using it because I want to bring that alienation into my writing. . .

we live in an alienating society, so literary work can express that

alienation as part of a critical stance.

Having gotten the common ground out of the way, I don't necessarily

agree with the kind of Marxism Jasper and Jane are espousing. . .

Marxism is historical and its argument that violence is the only authentic

tool for social change is alarming. . . Plenty of socialists before Marx

understood the limits of violence as a liberatory tool, and when we look

at, say, the outcome of (failed) Marxist revolutions in the 80s in Central

America, we see an immense waste of human potential and effort.

Violence radicalizes and produces sectarian extremity; sectarian

extremity is a paranoid mindset not conducive to empathetic

communication. Of course, I think violence is justified in lots of

situations, but the implication in Jane's most recent comment that only

violence is an authentic approach ("imagining [the internet] as resolving

capitalism's contradictions without imagining first the destruction of the

spine...that's just already old-fashioned cyberpunk stuff, yeah?")--that is

just ridiculous. No one can destroy the spine of capitalism; we're all

going to be, as Jane puts it, "parasitic" on that infrastructure. Whatever

future is coming down the pipe is going to be developing upon that

infrastructure. And, since imagining the resolution of present

contradictions is the goal of dialectic reasoning, the effort to do that is

exactly the kind of mental work we should be trying out, the kind that

never goes out of style. I guess for you, Jane, people's mental work isn't

valid unless it has some sort of fantasy appeal to violence as a, what, a

genre marker? Since I think your allusions to violence are strictly

rhetorical, I find you to be an unconvincing writer in this genre, i.e. your


24/38

use of Marxism is escapist, as or more escapist as the stances Jaspar

incorrectly believes me to be holding.


superbunker said...

"The Internet" is not a unitary entity. It is, in all senses, a collection of

substrates and forces. To refer to The Internet as a singular object is a

naive but sadly common fallacy. "The Internet" is in fact a metonymy for

"some techno thingy about I really have no idea but feel something, i

guess, whatever, lol."

To clarify your discussion, I suggest replacing every reference to "The

Internet" with "Language." Or if your prefer to express your solidarity

with the Worker, you might try replacing it with "people talkin' bout

stuff." This replacement of your ill-chosen referent should help untangle

your ideology from the mirror trap of commercialized lingo.

Regarding Marx on the nature of electronic reproduction, I refer to his

famous quote upon first experiencing the cinemaograph:

"OH DEAR GOD THE TRAIN IS COMING RIGHT AT US!!!"

THURSDAY, 05 JUNE, 2008

TT said...

To jump in late on this thread, I have a lot of doubts about holding up

the Internet as a mirroring of culture; this strikes me as being about the

same as holding up one's hand as a mirroring of embodiment.

It's not a question of one's particular opinion about the 'mirror,' but

rather one's decision to see these things as separate (even if reflective)

images. My position is closer to the idea that contemporary culture
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25/38

and/or the Internet do similar work in terms of orienting folks towards

certain positions in terms of social relations, divisions of being,

economic habits, etc.

Different strokes, of course, but my thought is that satirizing and

exploring a culture that, in our moment, perpetuates itself through self-

satirizing and self-exploratory (culture as 'limitless' database and

constant feedback and commentary on itself) norms doesn't do much in

the way of critique. I think the language and gestures of critique can be

the material for interesting poetry, but I also have my doubts as to the

extent that poetry can be, in and of itself, an effective tool of critique

(though it can occasion powerful critique in response).

Word,

TT


Joseph said...

Responding to Jane & Anonymous before this thread peters out....

In answer to my question, Jane wrote: Well, I suppose one might start

with the inextricable twinings of Chinese "modernization," the

"capitalist road" wherein the rise of internet access is part of a singular

process which has at its absolute core the separation of people from

their means of production, various forms of enclosure, real

subsumption of labor, and so forth.

And Anonymous wrote: Computers and networking require, create, and

fuel a consumer economy. Computer equipment is made by the hands of

people very far removed from the end products, and when obsolete,

returns to them on very unequal terms...


26/38

Isn't this a rather banal point about the "capitalist road" as such? One

could very well say the same thing about any aspect of our societies, any

of our consumer products...cars, shoes, etc. How, specifically, does the

internet differ? (I'm sure it does, but I'm still asking.) And yet, we're all

still using the internet. To return to Zizek, I'm reminded of his oft-

repeated formula of the Kantian fetishistic disavowal: I know very well

that the [internet, cars we drive, shoes we wear] sustain and support a

system of exploitation and atrocity; nevertheless I continue to [use the

internet, drive my car to work, buy Nikes].

What I want to know, specifically, is how this "space of the internet," the

one we are using right now, "causes some of the most extreme

disenfranchisement, dispossession, atrocity and destruction in recent

memory." And if it does, why are we still using it?



In spite of the Internet's negatives, I'm still using it because of its

positives. Linh Dinh over at his Detainees has for some while been linking

to articles and speeches by writers more powerful and perhaps more

committed than any of us. As it does for us, the Internet provides a stage

as it were for them to share their thoughts about present crises. If you

don't wish to go to Linh's blog, but haven't yet read the May 28th speech

given at Furman by Pulitzer-prize journalist Chris Hedges, here's a link to

his entire "America's Democratic Collapse". Hedges, Tom Engelhardt,

Mike Whitney, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and others are

also on the boat Mark Wallace has imagined.
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27/38

Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius

Marjorie Perloff's keynote for the Conceptual Poetry Conference in Tucson set forth a clear agenda:

making a distinction between the poetics of thirty years ago and now: Language Poetry vs.

Conceptual Poetry. She claimed that the poetics of, for example, Ron Silliman's anthology In the

American Tree -- with its play on William Carlos Williams's Modernist classic In the American Grain

-- is being superceded by the new transnational and global culture of the internet.

Perloff went on to ask how has the digital dissemination of new poetry and poetics -- whether in

journals, or on sites such as Ubuweb, Pennsound, Ron Silliman's blog or here on Harriet -- affected

the writing of poetry itself?

She also questioned the values of a poetics based on identity in a time when neither phone numbers

nor email addresses tell us where caller and recipient are actually located, nor does an email

address provide vital statistics about its possessor; when an AOL or Yahoo address, for example,

reveals neither nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, age -- and often not even gender. We are

moving away, she claimed, from a geographical, from identity politics to shifting identities and

communities, all this being reflected in the new poetry.

She gave numerous examples of Language Poetry, which she termed the "period style of the

1980s": a poetry of programmatic non-referentiality, words and phrases refusing to "add up" to anysort of coherent, much less transparent statement. The defeat of reader expectation -- a kind of

cognitive dissonance-- is central to these poems.

Perloff then went on to say that conceptual or "uncreative" writing is by no means without

precedent, looking back to a number of movements and paradigms that antedate Language poetics

by decades. One such was the Concretism of the 1950s and 60s (itself a bridge to the great avant-

garde projects of the early twentieth-century). A second precursor of twenty-first century poetics

was the Oulipo. This history includes the use of appropriated text, including archival material,

documentary, informational manual, and, most recently, the discourse of the internet from

hypertext to blog to database, the citational text, reframed in one form or another for particular

effect, is central to twenty-first century poetics.

Next was a deeper exploration into the identity: the fabled Death of the Author has finally become a

fait accompli. She then asked, "But what would Barthes or the Foucault who declared that 'the

writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of 'expression' . . . . the confines of interiority'

have made of the conceptual poems and fictions of our own time?" Perloff responded with the idea

that in the age of the simulacrum, genius theory is simply pass and made a case for "unoriginal
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28/38

genius," claiming that once we grant that current art practices have their own particular momentum

we can dissociate the word original from its partner genius. A long discourse on genius and

originality followed: whether in the arts or the sciences, is synonymous with novelty, invention,

creativity, and independence of mind. And if masterpieces were produced in the mid-nineteenth-

century, is it really plausible to believe that it is no longer possible to produce a "fascinating and

mysterious work" today? Or is just that our own "masterpieces" no longer make the claim to be"original"?

A key point was made regarding appropriation, citation, copying, reproduction, which have been

central to the visual arts for decades. In the poetry world, however, the demand for original

expression dies hard: we expect our poets to produce words, phrases, images and ironic locutions

that we have never heard before. Not words, but My Word.

Her denouement was putting forth Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Projectas the precursor to

Conceptual Poetics; a book, made up in large part of the words of others with its juxtaposition of

poetic citation, anecdote, aphorism, parable, documentary prose, personal essay, photograph,

diagramindeed every genre-- makes Benjamin's assemblage a paradigm for the poetry of

"unoriginal genius" to come. Its formal structure -- with it small black squares around certain words

-- functions as a sort of ur-hypertext. The book is full of instances of sampling -- mimimg the

flneur's own movement through the world of the Arcades themselves: one moves at will from

toyshop to skating rink to pub to Oriental carpet merchant, from cited poem to photograph to

travel-guide documentation without bounded map or master plan; in short, Perloff sees the Arcades

as a precursor to the internet and to Conceptual Poetry.

This is fascinating, Kenneth, thank you. But I believe the era of Conceptual/Appropriation/Grab-&-

Run Poetry is also already behind us. The new movements in the arts point very pointedly toward

something I would like to call the Pay For Noise Period. Ten years from now, we will all be familiar

with new art in a variety of media which consists entirely of packaged noise; in fact, the packaging

will be part of the noise. Only the small payment by the audience (in time &/or money) will be

distinguishable from the noise/art product itself, and I can actually forsee a time when the payment

too will devolve into ablah blah noise zzz blah blah $$$$$ caching drone blah....

POSTED BY:HENRY GOULD ON MAY 30, 2008 11:01 AM

... as Paul Valery put it,

everything changes but the avantgarde . . .

...

1980s period style is Langpo? .. . not my 1980s,

in my 1980s the predominant influential style
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29/38

was Sharon Olds' postconfessional mode. . .

...

once again i protest against the Poetry Foundation

allowing its site to be used for this avantpropgit

a thousand blogsites already transmit this blatherblah

Christian Wiman, get down off your highhorse and

put a stop to this horseshit . . .

take a stand, Wiman . . .

...

POSTED BY:BILL KNOTT ON MAY 30, 2008 11:56 AM

I'm an admirer of Ms. Perloff and am a little reluctant to criticize her based on Kenneth's summary,

but if his characterization is accurate, I have to take issue with her logic.

According to Kenneth, "She also questioned the values of a poetics based on identity in a time when

neither phone numbers nor email addresses tell us where caller and recipient are actually located,

nor does an email address provide vital statistics about its possessor; when an AOL or Yahoo

address, for example, reveals neither nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, age -- and often not even

gender."

It's absurd to claim a connection between contact codes (phone numbers and email addresses) and

identity. The assumption seems to be that because the codes don't point to "vital statistics," identity

itself must be similarly free-floating. I recognize that the notion of a non-existent identity (or a

shifting miasmic identity like some blowing cloud of pixels) is the philosophical flavor of the

moment, but it's a silly idea and only serves to undermine her argument. When I first encountered

T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), I had no idea whether he was a man or a woman,

an American or a Brit or a Canadian, a Catholic or a snake-handling pentacostal, or whether he was

alive or dead. The more I learned about Eliot, to be sure, the better I understood the sources,

resources, context, and aims of his work ... oh, that's right: all the aspects of a writer's work that

spring from his or her identity!

This confusion that theorists like Kennethand Ms. Perloff, evidentlypersist in propounding is

between the procedures of technology and their impacts on our way of being in the world. Certainly

they affect the way we live, think, and feelbut they don't reshape our essential being to match

their (after all) transitory forms. When Gary Snyder writes that "as a poet, I hold the most archaic
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30/38

values on earth," he doesn't speak just for a faction: he speaks for every poet and every reader.

Our forms of expression may change in response to technology, but the core of our nature persists

through them all.

POSTED BY:JOSEPH HUTCHISONON MAY 30, 2008 2:15 PM

Its nice to read this summation of Marjorie Perloff's opening remarks. I think this conference and

the topic in general is fascinating and also important. As would be anticipated, there is of course the

pitting of "experimental" practice against "conservative" practice, which sadly but truly, is still the

now age-old conflict point that unconventional writing practices must contend with, attack, defend

against. That tension seems so unique to poetry. In contemporary art or contemporary music there

is sufficient audience and support that there does not remain this constant need to fundamentally

defend an "experimental" position. I find this base-level conflict so specific for poetry. Then there is

the issue now of how to 'go on' after the hermetic, chance and process based works labeled

"language" practice. Here it seems like poetry really has itself more in a marketing problem than in

an aesthetic problem. As art markets boom what about art-poetry? So in a way it feels very shrewd

to repackage these sorts of practices not with a confusing and insular name like "language" but with

the nearly meaningless but signifying "art" speak of "conceptual." I somehow wish there were more

signs of other possibilities here. Do musicians need to say they are doing "conceptual" music" to get

their point across? It feels like the foundations are being laid for a development project to update

poetry by rehearsing/performing the now 2 decade old practices of "appropriation" and related

visual art innovations in the name of "catching poetry up." Somehow this retro activity of annexing

not only the practices but the vague terminology of "conceptual" "appropriative" art to writing

seems a deeply conservative and un-eccentric route which at the same time, loses grasp of poetry's"own particular momentum" waging a stake that to act parallel to visual art might gain headways

into the economy of art culture and admitting without saying it that poetry has "nothing to lose" in

this exchange. The fact too that this marketing seems to begin at the level of a university

conference with the imminent but very senior scholar Ms. Perloff laying out the territory does not

really endorse this as very vanguard. It feels more like canon formation in a top-down manner. But I

don't want to be critical here. And I see any attempt like this as a sign of deep desires unfulfilled. So

what's going on? And what else can be offered?

-harriet

POSTED BY: HARRIET NILSSEN ON MAY 30, 2008 5:12 PM

I think Marjorie Perloff's question is timely--how is this new technology altering the art form? Yet

the notion that the "new transnational and global culture of the internet" is superceding either the
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poetics of thirty years ago or identity poetry simplifies the reality (or virtual-reality) of the Internet

as a complex dynamic system. It contain multitudes of communities exchanging their poems and

poetics, and those exchanges often cross the boundaries from one community to another. These

boundary crossings are often where new forms emerge. So to discount either L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E or

identity poetry seems reductive and so counter-productive.

Yet there is also a term for a complex system called "heterarchy" that organizes itself both

hierarchically--"canon formation in a top-down manner" (in Harriet N.'s words)--and also in an

overlapping, more fluid and continually branching way. I think the poetry world is a heterarchy and

within it, many critics compete to originate the ranking.

Thanks for the concise summary of Perloff's talk. I look forward to reading more dispatches, Emily

POSTED BY: EMILY WARN ON MAY 31, 2008 1:51 PM

Dear Harriet N.,

I appreciate your comment and want to respond to your assertion that the symposium is a

"university conference" exacting "canon formation in a top-down manner." The symposium is taking

place at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. We're not an academic department, we don't

produce an academic journal, and we have yet to produce an event sufficiently academic to entice

our UA lit faculty in any comprehensive way. I'm flattered that you think we might have any

influence on canon-formation, but must admit it's quite unlikely. It's also not our aim. Our aim is to

develop audiences for poetry (through community fora and k-12 outreach among other things) andto represent what's going on in contemporary poetry (in our comprehensive poetry library and

through symposia, among other things).

The works of our featured artists--vanguard or not--are just plain fun to spend a week-end with and

stimulating enough to talk about. We invited Marjorie Perloff to participate in developing this

symposium because a.) she uses the poem as a primary text, and b.) she is one of very few widely-

recognized scholars who is in active conversation with poets in general and emerging poets in

particular. And, lets face it, there aren't that many individuals for whom both scholars and artists

would make a summer trek to the desert.

Thanks,

Frances

Literary Director for the UA Poetry Center (for another couple of weeks)

p.s. Bill Knott! We love you! We have all of your books in our collection, including the wonderful

photocopied chapbooks. Please start sending them to us again. And I concur, Sharon Olds' post-

confessional mode was a predominant influential style. No doubt about it.
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POSTED BY:FRANCES SJOBERGON MAY 31, 2008 3:30 PM

Dear Joseph,

This is somewhat tangential to the substance of this piece, but is instead a direct response to your

assertions about poetic identity. When you write that "When I first encountered T. S. Eliot ("The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), I had no idea whether he was a man or a woman, an American or

a Brit or a Canadian, a Catholic or a snake-handling pentacostal, or whether he was alive or dead,"

it sounds frankly disingenuous and deliberately slippery.

By "he" do you mean the author or the speaker,? As the title indicates, the speaker is clearly "J.

Alfrred Prufrock," and by the same turn is also clearly not the author, not in any direct sense--he's

Mr. Prufrock. From the poem we know that he's male both from his physical and sartorial attributes

(his hair is growing thin, he wears trousers that he may daringly roll up one day, his necktie is rich

and modest) and from the fact that he constantly discusses women (one woman in particular, to

whom he can't express his feelings) as desired, longed-for, yet frightening others. The toast and

tea, the cups, the marmalade, the tea, tell us that he's either English or a very WASP Anglophone.

There's not only nothing to indicate that he's a pentecostal (pentecostals and snake-handlers aren't

the same, by the way) and everyhing to indicate that he's not--he leads much too genteel an upper-

middle class life for that.

So again, I feel that you are being (deliberately? humorously?) disingenuous as a means to insist on

your point about the importance of identity. What we need to know about the identity of the

speakerof the poem, one Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock, we learn from the poem. The identity of the poem'sspeakerand the identity of the poem's authorare not the same. To repeat, the author is the not the

speaker, the speaker is not the author. Even in the most ostensibly, transparently "confessional"

poem, the speaker is still a construct, a verbal creation--and "Prufrock" is far from straightforwardly

confessional.

It's late and I'm exhausted (I tire very easily these days), so I will sign off. But I wanted to toss my

two cents.

peace and poetry,

Reginald, on the way back from the dead

Reginald

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Hi Frances / Kenneth,

Is there anyway to get hold of the entire paper / recording?

Cheers

Vivek

POSTED BY: VIVEK NARAYANAN ON MAY 31, 2008 11:47 PM

Coincidentally, I gave a talk yesterday that critiques positions like Perloff's (or at least Perlofff as

recounted here). The text can be found here:

http://jasperbernes.blogspot.com/2008/05/liberalizing-ideology-of-internet.html

And there will probably be audio files of the all the panels that you can listen to here:

http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/

--JB

POSTED BY:JASPERON JUNE 1, 2008 12:01 PM

Reginald! Good to have you back not only blogging but commenting (worth more than two cents,

surelyat least two bits). May your health keep improving...

As for my post, I victimized myself with an untethered pronoun. My "he" was meant to refer to Eliot,

not the fictive speaker of his poem. I suppose I assumed that because Ms. Perloff's "vital statistics"

analysis dealt with poets and not their invented characters, my "he" would be understood as

referring to Eliot. Mea culpa!

POSTED BY:JOSEPH HUTCHISONON JUNE 1, 2008 1:07 PM
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Vivek -- Marjorie's talk is the introduction to her forthcoming book, "Unoriginal Genius" hopefully to

be published some time next year.

POSTED BY:KENNETH GOLDSMITH ON JUNE 2, 2008 4:43 PM

I realize the pun in KG's title is intentional [sic], but I'd just like to second it. My God, let us by all

means continue to have this same conversation for anothereighty years.

POSTED BY: MICHAEL ROBBINS ON JUNE 2, 2008 5:58 PM

Michael -- That is actually the title of Perloff's forthcoming book, which deals with the sort of

conceptual and procedural poetics that were presented at this conference.

POSTED BY: KENNETH GOLDSMITH ON JUNE 2, 2008 7:53 PM

Kenneth -- I know, that's why I referred to it as a pun (her book is called "Unoriginal Genius," but

her genius is also unoriginal). But if you didn't intend the pun, then I hereby intend it.

POSTED BY: MICHAEL ROBBINS ON JUNE 2, 2008 9:18 PM

Vivek - An audio file of the keynote address should be posted on the Poetry Center website by the

end of the week. www.poetrycenter.arizona.edu

POSTED BY:FRANCES SJOBERGON JUNE 2, 2008 10:53 PM

The 20th century, especially, saw the appropriation by art of the scientific method--big time by

practitioners. And so on into the current millennium.
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Whether or not one wishes to pursue such an attack no doubt devolves on many things, from one's

state in the womb to the state of one's bank account, etc.

We all start somewhere. We all imitate. We all fall in love, at least once, for the first time. And after

first love, we all find a mode/modes that allows/allow us to live, or die, in some way or other.

Therefore, the critic illuminates and categorizes the procedures and transformations employed by

love. To suggest that such an endeavor can ever enforce valuation is a contradiction in terms.

POSTED BY: HUGH SEIDMAN ON JUNE 2, 2008 11:49 PM

She then asked, "But what would Barthes or the Foucault who declared that 'the writing of our day

has freed itself from the necessity of 'expression' . . . . the confines of interiority' have made of the

conceptual poems and fictions of our own time?"

Okay, I'll bite (somewhat late to the game as usual).

The Foucault essay that Perloff cites ends with these lines (apologies for length):

The authoror what I have called the "author-function"is undoubtedly only one of the possible

specifications of the subject and...it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence

of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would

circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and

regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the

tiresome repetitions:

"Who is the real author?"

...

New questions will be heard:

"What are the modes of existence of this discourse?"

...

Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:

"What matter who's speaking?"

And it's that last question--conspicuous by its absence here as in most everything I've read by

Kenneth Goldsmith or Christian Bk--that makes me deeply suspicious of the program that's helped

itself to the name of Conceptual Poetics. The promise of the death of the author--Foucault's version

of it, anyway--was that "discourses...would unfold in a pervasive anonymity." So much for that


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pervasive anonymity, huh? After reading Goldsmith's summary of Perloff I had to go back and make

sure there wasn't a colon separating "Kenneth Goldsmith" and "Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius."

But wait! you say. There's nothing in Conceptual Poetics itself that promises anonymity. All we want

to do is to decouple genius and originality, to let a little air in and formally recognize practices that

have been kicking around for decades.

So let's take a look at what the Conceptualistsdo claim for themselves:

Freed from the market constraints of the art world or the commercial constraints of the computing &

science worlds, the non-economics of poetry create a perfectly valueless space in which these

valueless works can flourish.

And so here's my question: who gets to be an uncreative genius? And more importantly: on what

grounds? If I recreate Day--an achievement, one must admit, that would be even more uncreative

than the "original"--am I a genius? Will The Figures publish it under my name? Will Publisher's

Weeklyreview it? Will I be invited to speak at the next Conceptual Poetics conference on the basis

of it?

Of course not, and the reason is not because of any residual traditionalism infecting the publishing

industry or academia. It's because the "perfectly valueless space" is as much a myth here as it is in

the utopian fantasies of Chicago School economists. The "valueless works" are describable as such

only insofar as one willfully forgets the roles they play in building careers and organizing

conferences, and forgets as well that they're built on the backs of RISD BFAs and tenured

professorships. I don't hold any special grudge against any of these things, but I think it's

disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst to go around touting one's freedom from the world of

vulgar values--values that all the rest of the world mucks around in day after day--at the same time

that that very freedom (or at least the feeling of it) is a *direct secretion* of that value-laden muck.

And so to end where I began, I'd expect Foucault to say that Kenneth Goldsmith's real genius is

intimatelybound up with his originality. And Goldsmith's originality lies not in destroying the author-

function but in raising it to its purely formal apotheosis: he's demonstrated that the most radical

refinement of the author-function so far is the author who doesn't have to write. And allow me to

repeat: securing that apotheosis is an achievement, it is an act of genius, but it is both of these

things because it's original. (Hell, Foucault might even grant him his highest honor, that he is an

"initiator of a discursive practice.")

And now that I'm at the end of this I fear I'm just saying something that everyone already knows.Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time...

POSTED BY:BOBBYON JUNE 3, 2008 12:51 AM
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Lamentably, I'm reminded of old F.R. Leavis saying of Auden et al. in the thirties that they're all

talking like schoolboys pretending to be workers.

In the end, though, it could be that these people are true poets of the Devil's party without knowing

it!

POSTED BY: DOODLE ON JUNE 3, 2008 9:39 AM

Her denouement was putting forth Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project as the precursor to

Conceptual Poetics; a book, made up in large part of the words of others with its juxtaposition of

poetic citation,

8653912 the liberalizing ideology of the internet

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