poetry on Mon, 23 Jul 2001 11:06:43 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> Demotic Hebrew


IN DEFENSE OF
Classical Proletarian Political Thought

"Spain? It's going to more terrible than Spain!"
Alan Sondheim, on a street in Brooklyn

SAID 10/1/[00]

contingency or continuity or contiguity
the grammar of visual confines
the binaries being, empathy and antipathy

scope or sphere
celibated or celebrated?
"uninterruptedly"

misleading immediacy
"liberal humanism"/"radical humanism"
Dewey. Foner. ("He's speaking right now
	at Western Reserve"),
without the desire, nor the capacity. My argument.
There is, is there, a debate? Is electricity a landscape?
Can what you claim be spoken for?
Philology all but forgotten.

What are you doing and how much do you want
to know what you are doing and how do you
know that others know what you are doing.

Clifford, "The Predicament of Culture"

There was supposed to be a basic human nature or essence
you are yourself an historical object made along the way,
		killed off

	Man the oars!
	Man, the author

The experience of empire, subjugating others.
In the write world. In the white world.
History is made by men and women, and the history
made by men and women can be understood;
we can know what we make, and we can know
how it got made. Poeisis as the capacity to
make an object that has knowledge in it, to it,
about it, around it, somewhere of or off or from it,
by it. Insurgence.

"a whole factory of word-spinning"

_________________________

"a modernity that will not be exhausted
and that there is no reason to consider used up"
	Misac, WB's Passagen

_________________________

"in a society in which electricity and the radio will not be the 
crafts they are today, but will come from inexhaustible sources of 
superpower at the call of a central button, in which there will be no 
'useless mouths,' in which the liberated egotism of man--a mighty 
force!--will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the 
transformation and the betterment of the universe--in such a society 
the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything 
that went on in the past." (Lev Bronstein, 1922-23).

dilute
latent
gist, dimmed correlations.

The influence of temporary conditions
dictated by the situation, correctly denoted
an analogous process the centrifugal laws
the strength of centrifugal tendencies in the collectives
that simultaneously the unmitigated proportions
patching up old shoes (privations) (starvation)
mitigate those disproportions, strengthened
the collective forms spread over too wide a field

What may prove viable in the personal interest shown
determined by actual material, physical reality
and not set schematically, equivalent to someone
having been sought for a protracted period
(considerable social distinctions were preserved)
coefficients reinforcing a mobile framework
freed by the lowering of tempo, and fully thought-out

10/18/[00]

Subjected, the reading of Empire
the unevenness expresses itself also
different stages are not just jumped over
feverish developments can't be predicted
what belongs more to the past than to the future
who hasn't been compelled to assume a function
only the coefficients are not 2, 3 or 4

There is no devoted friend, or dedicated reader
somebody experiences a personal crisis
and at the end of ten years stands around
the rebound of an aborted development
against the other rival powers (coefficients)
bound to a hope during the most difficult years

If what's the matter with living is dying
why live? and in the most distant isolated points
reinstated or reinstalled a prior time-frame
previous, the antedated configuration among others
This was a matter of physical destruction
the stage of decay, admiration's other side
disillusion and contempt

1.
the disintegration of a psyche among the influx of verbal signs 
(poetry). Form in poetry as stronghold against the alternate states 
of silence and yammering in the unconscious, and the special social 
material of a private language creates (takes place near) the 
contemporary conjuncture, women and men making their histories (Said, 
"it is always plural").  Language does not have to be the only medium 
of their communication, the time and the place occupied by the poetic 
word takes place somewhere else, since/if poetry cannot be used to 
explain anything.  Not that poetry can be said to speak only to 
itself; instead, its private language objectifies social being and 
nature, nurtured by the residues of social intercourse, and it 
comprises a context that resonates analogically with the 
interpretation of music. Both are constructs.  Within the range of 
authoritative community, consciousness takes shape and social being 
in the materiality of signs.  The reality of a smile is a matter 
determined by the conditions surrounding their communication.  "A 
word is the purest and most sensitive medium of social intercourse." 
(Filosofija Jazyka, 1929).

2.
["be it a picture, a piece of music, a ritual, or an act of human 
conduct) . . . impossible to convey a musical composition or 
pictorial image . . . nor is there any really adequate verbal 
substitute for even the simplest gesture in human behavior"]. That a 
smile cannot be said, and it can only barely be seen, and escapes the 
words that would document the event in the event that it really 
happened, if someone turned and smiled across the space of a hallway, 
the image dispelled by its formulation, and the event dissolves into 
a moment in writing recording a gesture that may or may not have 
happened, and may never recur.  To assume otherwise would be to frame 
the event in the form of an expectation, and take--possess, own--the 
right to the repetition, mere performance, in a space and before the 
type of viewer for whom only an aesthetic need exists, a wall of 
silence responses and resonances form around, its echo found in the 
disdain engraved on the face of Vassily Primakov.

3.
Does a material reality project or reflect the shadows by which it 
becomes known, in sound, volume, mass, color, a fully objective 
physical movement?  What affect does not understand, even as it 
asserts itself in a statement, like performing Chopin as a mere 
technical means of imparting inner effects (the faces of the Russians 
in the audience expressionless, their bodies motionless), evidence of 
an expecting perhaps, strange to see, stranger yet to say, that a 
classical music is not interpreted and never performed; an 
embodiment, instead, materializes, and re-presents a form that, until 
it is realized (the concert as an act of realization) has died, 
consigned somewhere else than a museum, since no one goes anywhere to 
look at pieces of music on a wall, unless it is the wall of silence 
no recording ever represents, nor the steps from doorway to 
instrument, the moment in eternity, muted by an applause that 
precedes the bringing back,

4.
of the aspirations and desires of a social class, and what it wants 
is full employment, education, art and philosophy, world peace and 
international culture, Pavel Filonov's "universal flowering."  For 
the day when the physical body moves socially beyond its being now 
either any instrument of production or any product for consumption. 
The condition of the physical body in the present conjuncture as 
instrument and commodity.  The physical body otherwise cannot signify 
anything except a particular, more or less individualized thing 
perceived as an image--visual, virtual simulacra--prevented from "the 
absolute movement of becoming" a part and participant in the active 
construction of a material reality that is never anything except 
social nature.  Another person is neither a tool nor model, and 
serves no purpose nor paradigm when a person is freed of any 
designated function, standing apart, even turning to smile, without 
reflecting or standing for anyone else.  Image and presence coalesce 
in the facial expression--its friendliness, predispositional, after 
the sense that someone might be said to be inclined in the direction 
of another.

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