Hegel for Christmas

Christmas can be tough for philosophical types
with its message of traditionalist consumerism
as if it's all been just 2010 years of shiny paper.

So if you're feeling sort of miserably superior to it all,
feeling that temptation to "Wail for the world's wrong,"
I've got a present for you: The Preface to the Philosophy of Right.

Seriously, try it, you'll like it. Hegel's assertion
is that existing social facts should be both the ground AND limit
of philosophical speculation. And keeping your imaginative horizon
securely underfoot is surely the key to a good holiday season.

Hegel's rejection of utopian thought will strike some
as sad, but really utopian thought is much more sad.
Because, as Hegel reminds us: "Philosophy, as the thought of the world,
does not appear until reality has completed its formative process. . .
History thus corroborates the teaching
that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear."

Hegel reminds us that "The real world is in earnest
with the principles of right and duty,
and in the full light of a consciousness of these principles it lives."
And "Philosophy is an inquisition into the rational,
and therefore the apprehension of the real and present."

He encourages us to avoid "the terror of a one-sided
and empty formalism of thought" because
"Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be,
but only how it, the ethical universe, is to be known."

Etc. Now, I'm not sure one should follow Hegel's modesty
all the time, but it seems good for the holiday season.
And it may be true that an accurate description
is what we should really look for in philosophy.
Underlying Hegel's modesty is the deeper concept,
exactly the inverse of Marx's ideals,
that a true, complete and valid description of the status quo
will do more to change the status quo
than a thousand and one stormy rejections of it.

This idea is that by realizing present conditions
philosophy can speed up social developments
by demonstrating what has been achieved,
whereas false, inadequate or unsupported descriptions
only delay social development, by diffusing momentum
and encouraging all sorts of unconstructive efforts.

That theory, of course, is at the heart of the 19th century cargo cult
of progress, with its emphatic utilitarianism
because Hegel is one of the main perpetrators of that.
But Hegel's sense of progress is not about predicting
the future, but rather about appreciating
the rationality of the present, considered as an achievement
of other people, who are now dead, who tended
in a certain direction, and you are their achievement:
the subject of your dissatisfactions
is the object of their gradual approach.

We could say in a general way that many people
wanted more privacy, more security, more distance
for a long time, taking sociality for granted
because they had enough or too much of it.
This leads to a situation where private, secure, distant people
want more community and socialization,
having forgotten basic forms of vulnerability.
That's Hegelian dialectic--to see the present as an achievement.

Alternatively, you could read this Introduction
to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right,
which, as far as one-liners, has some real zingers
especially "To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.
But, for man, the root is man himself."
An interesting assertion, probably not true.
I think the root is Earth, the ecosystem, the state of affairs
that enables life itself. Anyway, Marx surely fails
to grasp the root of human nature, offering in its place
some questionable assertions about a group of people
whose human birthrate, he claims, is completely lost
"and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man":
the proletariat. The idea of a class of people
whose nature is a negation of their own nature
is blatantly reductive, using easy negations and reversals
in place of the kind of "reconciliation with reality"
that Hegel demands from philosophy. In fact, K.M.
is exactly the sort of person Hegel warned you about,
the kind who sees nothing but bad faith in existing institutions,
whose system "regards the present as vanity,
and thinks itself to be beyond it and wiser,
[but] finds itself in emptiness, and,
as it has actuality only in the present,
it is vanity throughout." I do appreciate Hegel's insistence
that we are unable to tell the future
and that an awareness of reason's limitations
is the first requirement for good philosophy.

Civin's Sticky

Very interested in Marcus Civin's Sticky Script.

On Pound's Usura Canto

Linh Dihn's recent blogging reminded me of Pound's notorious Usura canto. It is very beautiful (at least the first half--the second half is a bit more pedestrian), and I do think it's the best thing Pound wrote, though of course I have reservations about it. I thought it might be worthwhile to write a short analysis of the poem's assumptions, philosophy, and faults.

Here is the first half:

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luz
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone-cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no grain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning.

I love the punctuation, how all this leads up to the first hard punctuation (the first period) in the piece. Mastery of rhythm enables powerful nonstandard punctuation here. The heart of the argument is found in my favorite two lines, lines that stick in my thoughts whenever I read the piece: "with usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear demarcation". These lines are as well-written as anything in American poetry, and in fact they represent the most powerful conflation of social and aesthetic philosophy in our literature.

Aesthetically, the "line" referenced here is the clean thin line that represents highest-quality craftmanship; it is the stone-cutter's line by which "each block [is] cut smooth and well fitting". It represents the line in well-written poetry, but not only that; indeed, it represents a principle of craftmanship in which every unit of an artistic creation (be it home or poem) is perfectly demarcated from every other unit, with this perfect demarcation enabling all the units to fit perfectly together. It is a principle that operates down to the syllable in the first half of this poem, a principle in which syllables are understood to be objects hewn by the tongue. "the line grows thick" when the individual units of the composition, be they syllables or stones, are not cut precisely enough. The principle that opposes craftmanship, therefore, is approximation, and the damage done by Usura is that it enforces a regime of inadequate specialization, where no person is sufficiently perfect at his or her craft, where everything is done approximately (which is to say, shoddily) and adulteration of the materials is the norm.

The social principle which Pound (implicitly) opposes to Usura is the principle of "clear demarcation," a perfected hierarchy in which each person knows and is secure in their social place and therefore has the time (and access to the materials) to perfect their performance of their particular social role. In other words, precisely what is threatening about Usura is the principle of social mobility that it enacts, the way it makes society flexible. Under Usura, every worker performs their job on an insecure and temporary basis, as a means to an end (money, for either subsistence or profit) rather than as an end in itself. Thus, social mobility destroys craftmanship.

The loss of traditional skill in exchange for possibilities of social mobility is a bargain we are all used to, and I think it is in essence a good bargain. Furthermore, there is a major problem with the poem's ringing opening. Pound repeatedly expresses propositions that are generally true in debt-based society as though they were universally true. For example, the claim that "with usura, sin against nature, / is thy bread ever more of stale rags / is thy bread dry as paper, / with no mountain wheat, no strong flour". In general, as we've all noticed, inexpensive bread in late capitalist society is highly adulterated and of noticeably low quality (though not necessarily dry). On the other hand, I regularly buy pretty good bread--it just costs me a lot. Probably the expensive bread I buy is not quite as good as the low-price bread that was widely available in Renaissance-era Europe, simply because the use of adulterants was not customary in that period. Still, the fact that our society has market niches for higher quality bread indicates that the principle of adulteration is not as absolute as Pound represents it.

Similarly, in our society some people do have houses of good stone--they just cost a remarkable amount. More importantly, stone is not really the be-all and end-all of good housing, in the way that Pound presents it here. Buckminster Fuller pointed out that the best way to house the Earth's population in comfort would be with the use of inexpensive, synthetic materials, and that high-quality design could deploy those materials in ways that made large populations of people much more self-sufficient in terms of housing. Of course, Pound would argue (correctly) that Usura prevents such things from being done. Nonetheless, the evocation of the traditional figure of the stonecarver is not that convincing to me; it reminds me of the nostalgia of the Pre-Raphaelites for the Feudal Guilds. Pound does not seem to recognize that the confluence of new materials and vaster populations might call for an approach to craft driven by approximation and mass-production.

What this poem says about poetic craft is mostly said through the remarkable sonic precision of its language, which is almost too good to describe. I do find that each syllable has perfect place here, in a way that is never the case in a more approximate poet like Williams. And yet, Williams is the more valuable poet to me, in that his language is adapted to the conceptual changes brought about by technological change, whereas the very perfection of Pound's language is based on a misreading of the history of the Renaissance. The Renaissance begins when Pico della Mirandola argues that the nature of man is flexible and indeterminate, rather than merely fixed and sinful. This Humanist view argues against the perpetuation of fixed social roles; because human nature is indeterminate, individuals are not fated to one status (one toil, one task). The only justification for such a fatedness would be a sinful nature, for which humans are punished with a specific work. Indeed, such notions of human nature (as fixed by certain fundamental qualities) were the basis of feudal logics worldwide, not only in Europe. If human nature is not fixed, then social mobility must be expected, since it is the social manifestation of an indeterminate human nature.

Pound fails to understand that the Humanist project is one of advancing secularization through which an indeterminate concept of human nature becomes the basis for societies in which social mobility is earned through displays of merit. Such societies are highly exploitative, in that definitions of merit are easily manipulated and obfuscated by those in power; furthermore, social mobility can be so effectively rationed (as in our current moment) as to be virtually impossible and demographically insignificant. Nonetheless, Pound simply does not fault our society on the correct basis; instead of faulting it for too much rationing of social mobility, he instead faults it for allowing social mobility at all, which is both wrong and deeply patronizing to the craftspeople he idealizes in the poem.

Furthermore, the poet is not essentially a craftperson. And if the poet's line grows thick, or has no clear demarcation, no doubt it is a fault and one that might be judged harshly by history (if there turns out to be a history), and yet this fault can enable new modes of demarcation based on that very thickness, such as the fascinating stepped lines of Williams' variable foot. And we must remember that it was Williams who (in a poem) called Pound "inept." I am quite certain that Williams accepted Pound's superior craftmanship, so I interpret the charge of ineptitude levied by Williams to be a charge of perceptual failure.

Williams wrote:

If I were a dog
I'd sit down on a cold pavement
in the rain
if it so pleased me
to wait for a friend (and so would you)
even if it were January or Zukofsky

Your English
is not specific enough
As a writer of poems
you show yourself to be inept not to say
usurous.

Here, the failure of specificity is in the failure to represent the word specifically enough, a failing intimately tied to Pound's craftmanship, political views, and faulty understanding of history. Unlike Williams, Pound's language is unable to come to terms with the present, such that Pound's poetry fails in three ways. First, it presents reality nostalgically, through approximate figurations like the idealized stonecutter. Second, it articulates a strategy of language use based on these nostalgic figurations rather than perception. Third, (and this we all know well) it puts ideology before perception in its reliance on anti-semitic truisms. To which I would add, fourth, the vaunted historical sense of Pound's poetry is flawed by a misunderstanding of the trajectory of the philosophical developments of the Renaissance. Of course, this misunderstanding is compounded by the paranoid view of history promulgated by anti-semitism, in which history is thought to have been misdirected or redirected by the behavior of secret cabals.

I certainly would never argue that secret groups don't influence history, or that debt-based society doesn't cause unnecessary suffering and anxiety for huge groups of people. However, even without Usura the move away from social-hierarchy-as-guarantor-of-specialization is implicit in humanist thought. Thus, Pound's poem is faulty because it fails to perceive or convincingly speculate about what society would look like without Usura. It would not look like contented, superbly-talented stonecutters, needleworkers and poets. Pound tries to substitute for social mobility with the idea that all good craft is analogous, so that individuals of different social stations, in Pound's utopia, would be unified by equal attentiveness to craft. That is just not good enough. People prefer freedom of choice, even if it comes at the price of great anxiety, to perfection of craft in a context of great security. I know that. Pound should know that, and his failure to perceive such an obvious thing results from a viewpoint that patronizes as it idealizes.

Timeout for Art

Sometimes I tell my son
when he’s upset
and is not allowed
to leave his room

that he can make
some music
during his timeout
to relax

and distract himself
from his frustrations
by enacting
them.

After all
it works for me
with poetry
and he makes a great

cacophony
that I appreciate
with his
keyboard,

guitar,
ukalele,
harmonica,
and pink, blue and green panda-faced bells.

Art
is better than just
yelling
because it gets less done

and is less
bothersome.
Whereas yelling,
if it is persistent,

accomplishes
estrangement,
art accomplishes the inclusion
of excluded attitudes in a neutralized way.

Reenactment as Zeigeist

I think I was being too testy in the previous post. Something about the holidays always makes me testy.

I'm still hoping the end of the decade will mean a move past or away from strategies of reenactment as a central feature of the experimental poetry scene. But, on the other hand, I also feel there was something inevitable about the decade's emphasis on reenactment. I suspect reenactment, understood as a way of gesturing to social forces that seem to be defunct or inoperative, was the zeitgeist of the 00s. Think of for instance Slavoj Kizek's work in the decade (and especially the "nostalgia for the Terror" stuff)--how it's impossible to take seriously except as a gesture to the fact that it's no longer possible to take it seriously--so that it has the feel of a reenacted discourse, a discourse that has been deactivated and that therefore cannot any longer mean what it ostensibly means and yet can be uttered. And in Zizek's case, the utterance is amazingly comic--thrilling and hilarious. Whereas to advocate the terror in the 80s could not have been part of public/acadmic discourse in this way. And the great thing is all sorts of people get it, how hilarious it is (though some people probably just get that it's hip and don't see that it's hip because it's a form of humor, but that's okay).

So, with Maoist justifications for experimental poetry rather preposterous in the 00s, I think poetry was left in a funny space. One option was to replace the weird Maoist group think of lang-po with a kind of school-marm politesse, where the poet has all the right opinions according to the most PC people in the academy (which would probably turn out to be Judith Butler, ugh, who's a perfectly nice person after all, of course, but wrong about everything and a terrible reader of philosophy--and of course the assertion that your body essentially isn't there is kinda fun, liberating and etcetera, but by conflating all sorts of perceptual modes with ideology, she creates this idea that unless you're politically correct it is immoral to see people, because perception is a wicked act of ideological control--and whichever way you elaborate the position it just gets worse.) Anyway, the PC option is appealing for a large group, but it is unavoidably about a certain kind of elite wagon-circling. Whereas Lang-Po wasn't, but was rather about this more Maoist model of people pressuring each other and having long talks about what they shouldn't think, lots of exciting charismatic stuff behind the scenes--on the other hand, PC has little room for charisma, except of the type expressed through solemnity about our collective guilt and wrong-headedness.

So, enter the reenactment mode. Which for poetry is all about Dada and its successors (especially Fluxus). And the problem is how to bring back something that is or seems permanently closed off and done. And the work that seems least repeatable is precisely that which emphasized its own evanescence and total commitment to the present. The gesture of Duchamp's signature, for example, although repeatable, became less authentic with each repetition. And a "happening" can never really happen again--a "rehappening" would be a whole different genre. Such work (happenings and cabaret events and social interactions as art) when its present tense concludes, continues not as opus but as data for an archive. And so reenactment: fusing "you had to be there" with the certainty that "there is no there there" and that you're not really there even when you are. It represents a kind of temporal triangulation. The evocation of the 60s or Weimar atmosphere, while unserious (and even acting to undercut the political potentiality of the present) is a nice way to get one foot out of the present and raise the temperature in the room to the level of art.

This raises broader questions such as: is "social interaction as art," broadly speaking, dated? Can it occur credibly without a basis in reenactment? Does it become too boring without a mode of reenactment to ground it? Once you get to the point where people are sitting around looking at each other wishing something would happen--and that's the art--well, that might not be enough. In other words, social interaction as art tends to a shortage of structure, and the various forms of script that can be employed are all belated, so thus belatedness itself became the script and subject: the reenactment.

I hope I'm being intelligible. I'm eager to hear complaints or requests for clarification or I feel I should just yell at myself "Exemplify!"

I'll have a bit more to say later, about the various social modes available to poetry, and how reenactment has expanded the possibilities for those modes.

Reenactment in the 00s

I think Thom Donovan puts his finger on it when he writes, "the predominant art form of this decade was the reenactment." In poetry, this has been particularly true.

Here's a quick run-down of some of the approaches to reenactment that have characterized the decade's poetry:

Conceptual Writing continued the seemingly endless process of solemnizing and sacralizing Duchamp's parodic gestures. I suppose Conceptual Writing will be fully realized (and dead) when the act of appropriation no longer carries with it the slightest hint of parody.

The Flarf Festivals reenacted the carnivalesque spirit of Dada.

Various strains of Performance Writing or Writing in Performance reenacted the foregrounding of the body as sensual fact (what we all wish we remembered from sixties art).

In LA, WAMPA reenacted New Deal rhetoric (with a pinch of seventies radical chic for spice). And then the Obama administration also reenacted New Deal rhetoric (with a cynical pro-bank twist).

After all this, I think there's one thing that can responsibly be said:

Let's hope that's over. The essential quality of reenactment, which is an emphasis on cleverness and light stylistic touches, tends to make the artist too much of a curator--in other words, it's too much about taste, about the artist's sophistication as a consumer of prior art.

cris cheek on Performance Writing

a very good article by cris cheek on Performance Writing and Caroline Bergvall's work. . . I found it provided very useful background on these strategies. . . In the U.S. context, David Buuck and Laura Elrick seem to be exploring related methods and theories, efforts to embody writing in order to engage with social space and audience more physically. (I worry a little about belatedness in this, as with Conceptual Writing, how avant-garde writing so often seems to aspire to the condition of being the rearmost tip on the dog's wagging tail; and yet, cheek's essay does make it clear how Performance Writing is distinct from Performance Art--that distinction is somewhat clearer in this case than it is with Conceptual Writing, and indeed Performance Writing seems to represent a more cohesive set of theories and strategies.)

from cheek's essay:

"Writing is no longer experienced as a prosthetic presence overheard as mediatized from a controlled recording but is reversioned as an endophonic performance from spatial notations installed upon the page. Pages, closures in themselves built from the openness of pulp, are treated as material onto which further closures are written. "

Neoclassical Vibes

Feeling very neoclassical today.

I wrote a poem with vomit and toilets and even the barf and the potty were neoclassical.

It was like John Donne's barf and Richard Crashaw's potty.

Even the political stances in the poem seemed sadly neoclassical, like gilded echoes of a bygone political age.

Neoclassicism is when ideas are slightly muffled by the ornateness of a style. Of course, some ideas are improved by a little muffling.

Neoclassical style is good for advocating courses of action that don't quite seem plausible, like in Hart Crane's poetry. I mean, it's plausible, to the extent that Hart was talking about sex, but implausible in that sex just was never like that.

Similarly, my poems are plausible in that they're talking about political consciousness, but implausible in that political consciousness was never like that. But being an American these days, it's a bit hard to reconstruct what political consciousness ever really was, or what it may have been like.

Nowadays, collective groups have plenty of momentum, but no agency. You can see where the collective activity is going, and predict what will probably happen, but there's no sense that the participants in collective activity have any say about its goals or form.

Is that neoclassical politics? On the bright side, strictly ornamental aspects of our politics are highly articulated and fabulous (in both senses).

Accidental Mimesis or Associative Fallacy?

I was impressed by Kasey's eloquent defense of traditional ideas of onomatopoeia (though I disagree with much of what he says). But I thought I should bring up his argument from the obscurity of the comment box below.

Kasey writes:

I just don't see how onomatopoeia as commonly understood creates any "problem" by giving us a "false understanding of language." Only the most stiffly literal-minded person would protest that "moo" doesn't sound just like the sound a real cow makes, and only the most perverse contrarian would insist that there is no mimesis involved in it or "meow" or "quack," etc.

I don't think it's too unreasonable to spread the concept of onomatopoeia across two categories: intentional and accidental. Words like "zap" are clearly intentional (and obviously the word "zap" doesn't sound exactly like an electrical shock; no onomatopoetic word is exact, and for that matter, if mimesis itself were exact, we would not be able to identify it as mimesis, but would mistake it for its object). Of course onomatopoeia--even the most calculated type--is a conventional fiction. We are still able to recognize it as an attempt at mimesis, in the same way we recognize the crude lines of a child's drawing as mimetic of a house or a person or a cat.

Some other words bear an accidental mimetic likeness to their referent, and I maintain that "phlegm" and "sputum" are two such words. If "sputum" were called "grandstand" or "dynamite" or "bobsled," no such association between signifier and signified would be evident. The same is true of "mucus" itself: the initial soft labial "m," which evokes sticky lips parting sluggishly; the nearly-emotive "ew" vowel sound, with its connotations of disgust; the hard "c" in the middle of the word, resembling the percussive rupture of a liquid film at the opening of the throat.

It shouldn't matter whether the word were designed with this resemblance in mind, or whether it just worked out that way (and to be clear, I believe the latter is the case), unless one demands that intention be in play in order for mimesis to count as such. If that bugs anyone, I suppose we could just call it pseudomimesis.

To which I reply:

Hi Kasey,

This is an eloquent explanation, but I just don't see how one can separate accidental mimesis, as you call it, from what I would call an associative fallacy. By associative fallacy I mean: the tendency to hear the sounds in a word as mimetic of what the word signifies just because the association of the word with its sound is so familiar. This is a naturalizing effect of the signifier-signified relationship, that the signifier seems to reflect the signified in an organic, mimetic way, just because the person speaking is so habituated to that relationship.

In other words, I think habituation is overcoming logic in your reading of words like "phlegm"--essentially, I think you're letting yourself become the sucker of the signified.

PRB Reading Report

I was lucky enough to catch a very good reading at LA's Poetic Research Bureau last night. First off, it was a great chance to socialize with almost the full complement of LA poets. Ara Shirinyan, Joseph Mosconi, Brian Kim Stefans, Aaron Kunin, Franklin Bruno (on loan from NY), Harold Abramowitz and Andrew Maxwell were all there, plus Mark Wallace and Lorraine Graham up from San Diego--I was thrilled to see all of them, and to chat about Leonid Brezhnev (whose picture was up on the wall--part of the set for the play currently being produced at the space) and Paul de Man and Caucasian Conceptualism (as in Conceptual Art being produced in the Caucasus Mountains--Georgia and Armenia and environs).

The reading was by John Sakkis and Lindsey Boldt from San Francisco. The highlight of John's reading were remarkably sensuous poems about his early life as a "party kid" (his term) in SF; these poems represented the gritty, loopy feel of immersion in a high-energy subculture--they channeled that late night charisma of people who have danced their assets off and are too tired to even sleep. This work is forthcoming in a chapbook from Lew Gallery. John also read fun poems from his Gary Gygax book, poems intercut with the peculiar statistic-laden description of monsters characteristic of Dungeons & Dragons. I was especially pleased by the reference to Grey Mold (a monster like a corrosive jello-mold that surrounds people and melts them with its caustic goo). John also performed a few poems from his full-length debut Rude Girl, sly and evanescent lyrics reminiscent of some of the contemporary Greek poetry he translates.

Lindsey Boldt read a long piece about her childhood relationship with the film La Bamba, in which the characters of the film became a sort of surrogate family. It was quite beautiful, and I think pulled everyone there into that fluid imaginative space of the small child, framed in this poem by references to the tub and toilet--the bathroom seemed to be a privileged location for quasi-religious interactions with these imaginary friends from pop-culture. It reminded me of how I was with He-Man action figures and Transformers and Star Wars. At one point, Lindsey reproduced the zaum-like imaginary language with which she had spoken to the La Bamba characters as a child--a wild language of made-up words not unlike the inspired language of speaking in tongues or of being "ridden by the Loa" in the Haitian religion. I'm not sure I've ever heard a poet go so far in evoking a relationship with pop culture as a form of religious experience, and I was moved by the honest idiosyncrasy of the work.

Lindsey also read two poems from her chapbook Oh My Hell Yes. She should have read more. I flew through the book last night and was amazed by it--it's always amazing when I both like and am surprised by poetry--I'll try to write a review of it later this week. It has an incredible description of the sky, several attempts to describe the special uselessness of poetry (the way in which poetry is somehow both useless and essential, or more accurately useless in a way that is somehow essential to how poets live life--a sort of salvific uselessness), a great description of dancing, and several scathingly tender accounts of gender politics in the poetry community. It's essential reading in that way that some first chapbooks are, without the over-polish so typical of the first full-length collection.

I was also glad to see John and Lindsey's friend Steve Orth who they'd brought along from SF. The three of them seemed very scrappy with their huge beer-cans and fashionably scruffy "urban" clothes. John in particular gave the impression of being born in his hoodie and bringing it along with him like a caul.

Oh, and I was quite happy when Lindsey and Steve turned my name into a James Brown-style soul-funk number: never has "Stan Apps Stan Apps Stan Apps Stan Apps" been syncopated so convincingly.

Onomatopoeia without Mimesis?

Tova calls attention to the words "sputum" and "phlegm." Both of these words produce an unusually intense sound effect by deploying a variety of contrasting consonant sounds. I want to see these words as onomatopoeic because of the sound effect they produce and the way this sound effect emphasizes the concept expressed by the word.

This raises broader questions. Has anyone theorized onomatopoeia in a post-structuralist sense, without relying on a naive idea of the mimetic relation between the signifier and the signified? It would seem that the post-structuralist idea of an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified presents an insurmountable challenge to traditional ways of understanding onomatopoeia.

So I ask my fellow bloggers: Can we understand onomatopoeia non-mimetically, in terms of a linguistic intensity produced through sound effects, a mode of emphasis rather than a mode of mimesis?

Logic

Stereotypes are more true than things you learn from hearing and seeing, because everyone knows about stereotypes, but not everyone knows what you hear and see.

--

To the best of my knowledge, no society has ever operated in accordance with those ideas, and therefore we can plainly see that no society has ever operated in concordance with those ideas.

2 Funny Essays

Eric Gelsinger's been on a bit of a role.

First,

the competition will only intensify among writers engineering language to achieve market impact; and, out of a fiercer arms race will come fiercer arms. The spectacular achievements borne of this competition will attract yet more attention from scholars, will further solidify ‘book sales’ as the primary characteristic by which literature should be valued, which in turn will sway yet more writers to enter the main race, and so on

&,

Those who use blogs as pulpits always come away looking pathetic. Fancying themselves “voices in the wilderness” who know better than the rest of us, they make a small, sad spectacle of their own inadequacy like a live-streaming, impotent porn star.

I Managed To Think About It

One of my poems is now up at poeaticanet, courtesy of Joseph Mosconi. It's for Greeks! (That is, poeticanet is for Greeks; my poem is for all persons of middling character)

This + that

Brian's terrible poetry jokes really work for me, they don't quite make me laugh but they make me snicker a little and feel like I know things.

Nada's reading of Alli's book is interesting; I'd probably be annoyed if someone collaged the sexy bits of my poems (are there any?), but the chat about code-switching in the penultimate paragraph was very perceptive I thought. And the idea of code-switching as mask (does code-switching as mask take the place of persona as mask, perhaps?)

Book Report: Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals

To fully understand Foucault's Discipline and Punish, you have to read Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Not only does Nietzsche's book pioneer the genealogical study of concepts (the method taken up and formalized by Foucault's works), it also includes extensive discussion of the idea of punishment. Furthermore, like all of Nietzsche's books, On the Genealogy of Morals reads politics in terms of the idea of power, a reading that psychologizes politics and denies the idea that political structures and practices are intended to achieve specific purposes. Instead, according to Nietzsche, political practices are the manifestation of the will to power of political actors, and any use which political structures might seem to have is secondary, overdetermined, and temporary.

Foucault's books model an ambiguous relationship to power: on the one hand, it's clear that Foucault fears power and sympathizes with stigmatized persons who have been marked or transformed by the operation of power. On the other hand, Foucault writes like power: his prose seems to reenact power's past operations as well as producing power in the form of knowledge. Foucault as a person tends to disappear beneath the surface of his prose; Foucault's prose identifies with the operation of power rather than with his own personal subjectivity. (I assume that Foucault does not dramatize his personal subjectivity because he declines to dramatize himself as a product of the operation of the power of others.) This begins to change only after Foucault becomes fascinated with gay liberation movements in the early 80s.

Nietzsche on the other hand loves power; he views the unashamed, natural, pleasurable manifestation of personal power as the basis of human vitality. To Nietzsche, the powerful who use their power without self-consciousness to achieve their own pleasure are the only healthy humans; humans without power are impotent and full of resentment and their resentment and reactionary idealism represents the greatest threat to human vitality and to human values. For Nietzsche, the impotent forces of resentment want to universalize their condition of powerlessness through ever more restrictive and tyrannical modes of democratic governance; the side-effect of this is that they teach an ideology of contempt for human drives and human nature. Nietzsche particularly hates (and fears) Christians, anarchists, communists, anti-Semites, and the bourgeoisie; he loves aristocrats and Greek heroes. Nietzsche does admire the state, and governance in general, because they represent an expression of power to organize life on behalf of the powerful; however, to the extent that the state is influenced by the democratic forces of resentment, Nietzsche views the state as sick. This is because the democratic state aims toward the elimination of power and the production and glorification of impotence and helplessness.

In a very profound way, Nietzsche and Foucault are both pro-crime, and it is Nietzsche's sympathy for the punished criminal, I think, that first attracted Foucault to him. Foucault's sympathy for the punished is different, because it is based on sympathy for those whom society has stigmatized as deviants (a standard aspect of the punishment process--every felon has a more or less indelible label). Nietzsche, on the other hand, sympathizes with the punished person's loss of vitality; he despises punishment to the extent that it estranges the punished person from his-or-her power and removes the sense of agency (for Nietzsche, agency is confidence in one's own will to power). Nietzsche writes "Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance." Here we see Nietzsche's optimism: the hope that punishment will increase the will to power, and therefore the vitality of the punished person. Yet he continues, more somberly, "If it happens that punishment destroys the vital energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less pleasant than the usual effects of punishment--characterized by dry and gloomy seriousness" (On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, Second Essay, Section 14, pgs. 81-82).

This "dry and gloomy seriousness" of subjugation is precisely what Nietzsche and Foucault are joined in hating--they meet on this ground. Nietzsche even imagines, paradoxically, a government so powerful that it would have no need to punish--he sees this as an ideal situation. However, it's an absurd, self-contradictory idea, since Nietzsche at the same time believes that government exists fundamentally as an expression of power--how else could power be expressed than through some form of punishment? (Foucault clarifies this idea by describing the function of government as disciplinary, employing punishment to subjugate the populace. It's fascinating to imagine how Nietzsche would have responded to this idea of "discipline": I assume he would have viewed it as a horribly destructive collective dehumanization perpetrated by the democratizing forces of resentment. Nietzsche could only have been appalled by the spectacle of a state that disciplined all its members [even the President!--that would terrify him], thereby inducing resentment in everyone, and eliciting the expression of that resentment as the bedrock of political process [Think of how, in the U.S., almost every effective political stance is against someone, whereas proposals that are for a particular group tend to fail--it's in resentment and the use of power to suppress prerogatives that the public finds some unity]).

So, Nietzsche loves the state because he loves power; Foucault hates the state because he hates its production of subjugated individuals. Nietzsche also hated the production of subjugation, so one suspects that were Nietzsche to have become aware of Foucault's ideas about state discipline, he would have had to give up, or at least qualify, his love for the state. This is one small way in which Foucault undermines Nietzsche's positions.

It is in On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche defines the genealogical method for studying concepts, and, not coincidentally, it is in the sections on punishment that he defines this method. He writes "the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin" (Second Essay, section 12, p. 77). Thus, the genealogical method attempts to discover both the origin and the various transformations of a concept, without assuming that any narrative of progress governs the deployment of that concept in different locations or eras.

Nietzsche continues, "the entire history of a 'thing,' an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another" (77). And in the next section he applies this genealogical theory of concepts to punishment, writing "the concept 'punishment' possesses in fact not one meaning but a whole synthesis of 'meanings': the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its employment for the most various purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is hard to disentangle, hard to analyze and, as must be emphasized especially, totally indefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)" (80). Foucault's Discipline and Punish builds on the kernel that Nietzsche presents here, doing precisely that which this passage says cannot be done, and using Nietzsche's genealogical method to do it. And as I said above, by defining the contemporary purpose of punishment as the production of discipline, Foucault even succeeds in undermining Nietzsche's positive view of governance. At the same time, Foucault proves the value of Nietzsche's genealogical approach for producing a non-teleological history of significant concepts, viewing the shifting meanings of concepts as the results not of conceptual evolution but rather of the adaptation of the concepts to the purposes of new users (new powers).

The biggest problem of Nietzsche's philosophy is the idea that the expression of power, the achievement of the will to power, is pleasurable. What is this pleasure? Is he right? This is the place at which it is possible to doubt Nietzsche. And yet, it does seem that those who have power enjoy expressing it very much. But isn't it ashes in the mouth? For Nietzsche, my doubts about the joy and vitality to be found in the expression of personal power mark me as an impotent person, a miserable person steeped in resentment, the sort of person who cannot see the beauty in human beings and human actions and who cannot see the value of human life except as something to be superceded by idealist manifestations. He may be right. Yet still I doubt. Is cruelty really as fun and self-affirming as Nietzsche claims? (Obviously, his assumption is that the religious consciousness, founded on resentment, must be rejected before a person can realize this.) I have to say that I do believe there are pleasures much greater than those to be found in the expression of power, and Foucault came to believe this too, as is clear in some of his late discussions of gay liberation and San Francisco, where he glorifies the idea of people living as friends. Of course, the will to power has some expression in friendship, especially sexualized friendship, but camaraderie exceeds power relations. Nietzsche discusses this too, arguing that true friendship is made possible by the acquisition of power and the recognition of approximately equal power in another. But this is vague--is he arguing that only aristocrats can have true friendship? Can't the poor have equally satisfying lateral bonds? Or is friendship only made possible by some level of mutual affluence, and therefore dependent on some degree of power acquisition? I'll leave these as discussion questions for whoever's read this far.

Nietzsche makes his own effort to interpret the "semiotically concentrated" concept of punishment, with a remarkably poetic use of parataxis. He describes 11 possible meanings of punishment, of which I'll list a few:

"Punishment as a means of rendering harmless, of preventing further harm. Punishment as recompense to the injured party for the harm done, rendered in any form (even that of a compensating affect). Punishment as the isolation of a disturbance of equilibrium, so as to guard against any possible further spread of the disturbance. Punishment as a means of inspiring fear of those who determine and execute the punishment. Punishment as a kind of repayment for the advantages the criminal has enjoyed hereto (for example, when he is employed as a slave in the mines). Punishment as the expulsion of a degenerate element (in some cases, of an entire branch, as in Chinese law: thus as a means of preserving the purity of a race or maintaining a social type). Punishment as a festival, namely as the rape and mockery of a finally defeated enemy. Punishment as the making of a memory, whether for him who suffers the punishment--so-called "improvement"--or for those who witness its execution" (Second Essay, Section 13, pgs. 80-81).

I'll stop there. Obviously, the most disquieting is the "festival" of punishment, involving rape and mockery (think Abu Ghraib or, closer to home, the tolerated systematic rape of American felons). And yet, I feel this is the sense of punishment which Nietzsche views as most fundamental, the enjoyment of punishing which he views as a healthy prerogative of those who express power. One could say that Nietzsche is a sadist, but that doesn't even cover the case--in fact, he views sadism as a universal quality of healthy human beings, whereas those who resent such abuses are sick and despise humanity and human nature. In Nietzsche's view, we resent those who rape and torture others precisely because of our own feelings of impotence and frustration about our inability to do the same; furthermore, he is optimistic about the pleasure of hurting others, since the acceptance of such enjoyments is the basis of beautiful aesthetic possibilities.

It's hard to know quite what to say about all this, except that it makes one rethink the meaning of those works that do aestheticize torture--for example, are various works ostensibly critical of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo actually better understood as creating beauty out of these tortures (and thereby glorifying their aesthetic significance)? Certainly, many Americans, especially poor white people and especially (from my experience) poor white women, seem to very much enjoy the idea that male criminals are raped in jail, which they see as an aspect of justice. There's a racial subtext to this, since it's mostly people from minority groups who suffer this treatment, and then again sometimes there's this wistful hope that high-status white collar criminals will be raped this way, since that would "really show them." In other words, in a society with an institutionalized penal rape culture, who are we to reject Nietzsche's idea that sadism is healthy and universal? And yet a major problem of Nietzsche's thought is that he seems not to realize that such an idea must be rejected in order to achieve civil society. Perhaps the answer is that Nietzsche (like so many 19th century philosophers) did not really value civil society. In which case, an interesting study would be to critique Nietzsche through Habermas.

But that's enough for today--now it's time to "work"!