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 talk here] 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 the internet 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 magazine Action, 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 this idea that the internet is a democratic space, that the technology is democratizing, antihierarchical, 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.

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

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

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 proconsumer 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 for Fold Magazine, 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

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 selfexpression 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,

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 mindnumbing 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

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 rulingclass, 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.

18 COMMENTS: 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. . . S UN D AY, 0 1 JU N E, 2 0 0 8 Jasper Bernes said...

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

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. S UN D AY, 0 1 JU N E, 2 0 0 8 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 MO ND AY, 0 2 JUN E, 2 0 0 8

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 or false 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, exactly one of capital's solutions for a crisis of overaccumulation, 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. MO ND AY, 0 2 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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.

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. MO ND AY, 0 2 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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,

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

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

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-

full". But such is the human condition. MO ND AY, 0 2 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 Jasper Bernes said... 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

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. MO ND AY, 0 2 JUN E, 2 0 0 8

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 the potentiality of 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

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." T U ESD AY, 0 3 JUN E, 2 0 08 Jasper Bernes said... 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.

Some day, perhaps, I'll write something about this with "facts." T U ESD AY, 0 3 JUN E, 2 0 08 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.

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? T U ESD AY, 0 3 JUN E, 2 0 08 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. WED N ES D AY, 0 4 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 brian salchert said... Thank you for allowing anonymous comments. Comment #11 should be seriously pondered. WED N ES D AY, 0 4 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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

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. WED N ES D AY, 0 4 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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 "neoliberal." 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

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

use of Marxism is escapist, as or more escapist as the stances Jaspar incorrectly believes me to be holding. WED N ES D AY, 0 4 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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!!!" T HU R SD AY, 0 5 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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

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 selfsatirizing 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 T HU R SD AY, 0 5 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 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...

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 oftrepeated 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? T HU R SD AY, 0 5 JUN E, 2 0 0 8 brian salchert said... 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.

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 any sort 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 avantgarde 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

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-nineteenthcentury, 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 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, 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

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

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 HUTCHISON ON 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

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) and to 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 widelyrecognized 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' postconfessional mode was a predominant influential style. No doubt about it.

POSTED BY: FRANCES SJOBERG ON 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 uppermiddle 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 speaker of the poem, one Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock, we learn from the poem. The identity of the poem's speaker and the identity of the poem's author are 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
POSTED BY: REGINALD SHEPHERD ON MAY 31, 2008 9:50 PM

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: JASPER ON 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 HUTCHISON ON JUNE 1, 2008 1:07 PM

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 another eighty 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 SJOBERG ON 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.

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

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 Conceptualists do 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 Weekly review 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 intimately bound up with his originality. And Goldsmith's originality lies not in destroying the authorfunction 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: BOBBY ON JUNE 3, 2008 12:51 AM

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, 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. ...so lovely you'd almost forget that Benjamin has a specific politics; that the Arcades Project had a specific political analysis based around what was to be found in the 19th century commodity culture of Paris; and was part of a larger project which conceived not of freeing people from the author function and originality but the domination of capital. But, well, I guess we have to forget some things to recall others. POSTED BY: PALAZZO ATHENA ON JUNE 3, 2008 9:44 AM

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. You can say that again, Bobby. And you might even say that its not only as much a myth as the Chicago School utopian fantasies but that it is also, surprisingly, the same myth. For these valueless works can achieve their true idealized value, [freedom] from market constraints, only by recreating the ideal conditions that make possible the absence of coercion in Friedmans laissez-faire fantasies.
POSTED BY: BOYD NIELSON ON JUNE 3, 2008 9:49 AM

Is it possible these critics & ideologues take the "status of the author" so seriously because they are not actually authors themselves? The poets I know (including myself) take the poetry seriously. The identity of the poet is neither here nor there; the poet is engaged in a kind of work. Marjorie Perloff is an expert at creating marketable academic ideas, which tend to fascinate multitudes of graduate students & semi-busy intellectuals; the next "new thing" etc.
POSTED BY: HENRY GOULD ON JUNE 3, 2008 10:11 AM

3 cheers for Bobby, Boyd, & Bourdieu.

POSTED BY: MICHAEL ROBBINS ON JUNE 3, 2008 11:55 AM

Bobby, Boyd-The homology between the theory behind some of the variants of conceptual-processual writing and liberal economic theory is actually the main point off the essay I point to further up in the comment stream, as the title might indicate. Anyway, there's been some comment/argument over at my blog, if you're interested: http://jasperbernes.blogspot.com/2008/05/liberalizing-ideology-of-internet.html Jasper