New (academic) poems

And now, for your reading pleasure, three new poems from some of the most gifted new poetic voices active in our American academies:


"Trace(s), fragment(s), remain(s)"

Ways of knowing, ways of doing
Systems, methods, processes
Paper, palimpsests
Impressions, inscriptions, recordings
Photography, analog and digital
Secrets, enigmas, decoding
Bodies : materiality/ spectrality
Screens, digital traces
Accounts, eyewitness and otherwise
Marks, tracks, signs
Style, stylus, pen
Death, steles, tombs
Hyphens / parentheses / blanks
Past / present
Reality / virtuality
Unity / diversity
Events / accidents / crises
Nature / destiny
Continuity / discontinuity
Memory / forgetting
Transmission, passing, surpassing
Voices, subjects, presence
Sites of passage, sites of passages
Trails, wakes, furrows, lines


"(An)Aesthetic of Absence"

The ethics, politics, morality of absence
Absent signifiers, absent texts
The anti-aesthetics of absence
Authorship in death, in exile, in absentia
Absent God(s), authors, voices
Music/Silence/Mutism
Absent senses and questions of ability/disability
Trace and absence (Derrida)
Absence of consciousness; consciousness of absence
Numbness, lack of feeling (momentary or permanent)
Absence of reality: simulation and simulacra
Performing absence


"Enough is (Not) Enough"

Luxury, indulgence, waste
Hoarding, accumulating, greed
Deviant bodies, gluttony, addiction
Transgressions, sins, breaches of decorum
Obsessions and compulsions
Repetition, boredom, tedium
Exaggerations, verbosity
Fragments, ruins, garbage
Inflation, value, debt
Hate, war, violence


If you haven't already figured it out, these three poems are not actually poems, but are lists of possible topics (or "axes of analysis") for papers to be given at academic conferences at North American universities (Georgia Tech, University of Toronto, and University of Washington respectively), culled from "calls for papers" sent out to my own academic department's email list. As hard as it may be to believe, the titles are not my own satiric creation, but are the actual titles for each conference; it is mere coincidence that all three utilize the Superfluous Academic Parenthesis—a formal innovation developed in the late-twentieth century in order to avoid clear meanings, and to give a title an air of multivalent indeterminacy, handy for cloaking a lack of actual intellectual content. These lists are invariably preceded by the qualification: "possible topics may include, but are in no way limited to...," as if the limitation of a closed set of possible topics were an affront to intellectual freedom.
These lists of possible topics are part of the general organizing principle of academic conferences, the main purpose of which is to avoid clear, specific topics which may bring together scholars working in similar areas. Instead, the idea is to bring together work related by an abstract conceptual rubric—the intellectual creation of the conference's conveners—in relation to which several papers which have nothing to do with each other may be made to appear as if they related to each other. Not only this, but the thesis is then put forward that these forced conceptual interrelations are actually productive, and help everyone present to arrive at a radical new understanding of something-or-other. Papers on the Berlin wall, Lewis and Clark, the sociology of medieval bridge design, and cellular osmosis can be presented in quick succession under the analytical grouping concept of "frontiers". This kind of intellectualized montage technique is presented for an audience of willing listeners in order to enlighten the communal understanding of "frontiers," challenging and perhaps changing perceptions of this difficult and divisive concept. A brief look in the dictionary is, however, often more enlightening.
But at least we get some exciting poetry out of it. For those searching, this is where today's true avant garde is found: absurdists and surrealists disguised as eager young literary pseudo-scientists. Lux et veritas!

Standing in my own way

“This is not a competition”—Words to live by. An unwillingness to compete. Sports are the only real competition. Life is meant to be lived together, a communal effort. I isolate myself from a culture of individualism. The true communal culture will be the one that brings me out of my shell. The communal culture is built on humility. Life is not a competition, except when it is, and usually these moments are preceded by the statement “Get ready for the competition.” There is an ethical function in this.

My boss tells me “Sie stehen sich selbst im Weg,” which translates to “you are standing in your own way.” My instantaneous response: that’s a great saying, “Ich fühle mich, dass ich mein Leben lang so gelebt habe,” I feel like I have stood in my own way for my entire life, whereupon she answers, “Das kann ich wohl glauben,” I can believe it. She says this frowning, whereas my response was said through a smile, reflecting a bliss which relates to the joy of Emil Cioran when he remembers what he already knows:

‘Tout est démuni d’assise et de substance’, je ne me le redis jamais sans ressentir quelque chose qui ressemble au bonheur. L’ennui est qu’il y a quantité de moments où je ne parviens pas à me le redire. [‘Everything is without firm basis, without substance’: I never repeat it to myself without feeling something resembling happiness. The trouble is that there are many moments when I do not repeat it to myself.] (Œuvres 1314)

Later, on the bus home, I glance at my reflection (I am wearing a hat with a brim and grasping a canvas strap to maintain my balance) and think of a response (too late, as is often the case): “Aber das ist ja la condition humaine, sich selbst im Weg zu stehen,” but that is indeed the human condition, to stand in one’s own way (and it should not be any other way).
We stand in our own ways on two different levels: the physical and the spiritual (understood in the broadest sense). When our bodies stand in our ways we are reaching the limit of our agency, the limits of our own control over our various body parts. To cross this line condemns us to injury or death. It is inhuman to cross the line set before us by our own body. Spiritually the situation is similar: when our spirits stand in our ways we are reaching the limit of our aspiration, the limits of our own ambitious strivings. To cross this line condemns us to cynicism or sin. It is unethical to cross the line set before us by our own spirit.

Perloff on the intellectual first-person plural

LINK: Marjorie Perloff, From PMLA, September 1997 issue, commissioned for roundtable on "Intellectuals"
Though this little piece dates from 15 years ago, its general diagnosis of the economic and institutional position of the intellectual rings true today. Perloff is one of the few academics today who is both willing and able to offer a valid critique of the institutional and disciplinary blockades to critical thought in American universities.

The assignment from PMLA was to write a 1000-word letter on "the notion of the intellectual in the twenty-first century"-- a letter that should be "double spaced and . . . avoid using the universal ungrounded 'we'."

That says it all, doesn't it? For what function can the intellectual have in a world that prescribes double-spacing but doesn't permit the use of the first-person plural? [...]  

The loss of this "we" is the sign that there is no longer a generic intellectual class to which "you" or "I" or "one" might belong. The causes of this large-scale transformation are manifold: the end of the cold war and, with it, of an effective international Left, the dominance of money over the old class formations coupled with an often militant identity politics that creates smaller and smaller micro-units defining the individual's place, and the increasing commodification and media-ization of society, which prompts even a scholarly journal like PMLA to resort to sound-bytes like the one I am writing. But perhaps the greatest threat to the intellectual life is that of the institution, whether the university, the foundation, the professional organization, or the government arts agency, that supposedly fosters it. 

In "The Intellectual Field: A World Apart" (1985), Pierre Bourdieu characterizes intellectuals as "a dominated fraction of the dominant class. They are dominant in so far as they hold the power and privileges conferred by the possession of cultural capital . . . but . . . dominated in their relations with those who hold political and economic power." Intellectuals "remain loyal to the bourgeois order," because it is, after all, the bourgeois order that confers upon them whatever power they have. What this means in practice, is that, in late twentieth-century culture, institutional intellectuals may profess any number of "radical" ideas but are curiously passive vis-à-vis the system itself--that is, the basic university structure with its conferral of advanced degrees, grading and certification of students, and "peer review" of scholarly materials for the purpose of tenure or promotion decisions. [...]

Perloff has said that she doesn't want to write a book on method: I find this regrettable, as her work represents the revitalization of a certain critical spirit lacking from current academic discourse. Her rigorous, historical approach is undistorted by fashionable trends in theory, and she remains always ready to actually criticize—i.e. to praise certain works and denounce others, the original "task of the critic" which very few critics seem interested in today. I always find her work reinvigorating.
More Perloffian material here and here.

Different Prizes pt. 2

Replying to a previous post, Brandon (The Enthusiast) writes:

I've been thinking more and more on those prizes— those "external goods" dangling around here and New York, that seem to keep working their way further and further inward— and it makes me really stick closer to that Internal Good.

I hadn’t considered the issue precisely as Brandon has portrayed it here: for me, I was thinking of Doc in the Boston Aquarium (from Robert Kramer’s Route One USA) musing on the “different prizes” of the culture that strays from the standard ideal of bourgeois America. In Doc’s (and my) original conception, prizes are differentiated between cultural norms, and it is in some sense the burden of those who have devoted their lives to a particular culture that they may only strive towards their culturally-determined prizes. Different pathways lead to different prizes, neither are objectively worth more. Doc’s goal in this little pep-talk is to remind the non-bourgeois individual, whose heart is heavy when he catches a glimpse of the comfortable, domestic life from which he has opted out (I use the masculine, because it seems likely that Doc is directing his talk self-ward, or possibly at director Kramer), that his choice of a different path also brings with it certain opportunities, its own lonely, precarious, yet noble prizes as well.
Brandon’s conception of the “external good” versus the “inner good” considers the situation from within a single cultural milieu, separating the prizes of an endeavor itself (in the university, the love of learning, the φιλοσοφία) from those which stem from the social and economic factors which affect those who partake in said endeavor (the cushy jobs, salaries, stipends, wine and cheese receptions, esteem of peers, cultural capital, etc.).
I’m sure Brandon is thinking also of the art world in NYC, where the actual artworks on the walls are often the least important things at a gallery opening—and are duly ignored by the majority of the socializing crowd. Artworks are sold not for their aesthetic value, but for the current position of the artist/gallery on the market. This position is always determined 90% by pure marketing, 10% by the quality of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole (although there’s no accounting for taste), and 0% by the quality of the work in question. No one would deny this, I think. (And if I sound bitter, it’s because I am: Chelsea is an absolute shit-show these days).
In the academy, the situation is different, and perhaps much more naive (which is not necessarily a bad thing: cynical collaboration is sometimes much worse). It is, in fact, pounded into the heads of incoming students that they are here to learn, to enrich their minds, to become better people. The motto "non scholae sed vitae discimus" (we learn not for school, but for life) provides the cover for what is at heart a training in docility and discipline, picking up enough cultural capital along the way to clear the path towards the highest-paid positions of bourgeois society. The ones who really get fooled return to the fray, and let themselves be trained to do such training, navigating an intricate obstacle course of groveling and pedantic ostentation, ending up with tenure in middle America. The first thing thrown aboard is this ideal of learning for life—the pure encounter between living man and printed word—rather than for school. Unlike the art world insularity, which is openly accepted, the academy never acknowledges the fact that it operates as an enclosed economy, that learning occurs as a stepping stone not towards enlightenment, but towards academic success—the key which (supposedly) unlocks the reservoirs of capital.
All this what I’ve just said is pure Übertreibung (exaggeration), yet to quote Thomas Bernhard, “ohne Übertreibung kann man gar nichts sagen.”
At any rate, I think its important to point out that there are certain ‘prizes’ in the academic world which have naught to do with the “inner good” of the literary experience, and everything to do with the sociological function of the university in present-day capitalistic society. Unlike the art-world, which (for better or for worse) accepts its new role (however ironically), the academy naively presumes idealism where there is only cynicism.

Advanced Humanism

"My point is that to turn a jungle baboon into a seminar baboon is a cruel, irreversible process. I understand why you won't ever be happy around the waterhole again."

Nathan Zuckerman's agent (from Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound) is referring to the scarring that results from higher education, how four years of training in "Advanced Humanistic Decisions" can make it difficult for an individual to navigate the less advanced humanism of society outside the university. While I think this is true, I've also noticed (in myself and certain other colleagues) that the reverse is also the case: that too much time spent outside the academy leads to dissatisfaction with the functionings of the academic world. After finishing a somewhat botched undergraduate degree, I spent five years enjoying the freedom of a nu-bohemian creative lifestyle—inclusive of autodidactic efforts to approach literature and philosophy outside of a university perspective—before deciding that the time was right to reenter the academic fold. At first I treasured these five years, believing that they gave me a certain perspective that my fellow students (many of whom entered their doctoral programs directly from college) lacked. I am beginning to see now that this brief taste of freedom had its price: that, opposite to Zuckerman, whose academic experience makes it difficult for him to be content in the "real world," my five years out of the academy also represent an irreversible shift, a break from the academic winding-up process, making it very difficult for me to be happy around the university waterhole.
To go back to the clip I posted of Paul McIsaac in Robert Kramer's Route One USA, it's not always a matter of choice which "prizes" one ends up striving for. With academia, as with bourgeois America, it is a matter of being able to enjoy its system of rewards. With any enclosed cultural ecosystem, a dose of perspective can spell exile for the curious participant.

Literary Reformation

I am somewhat sympathetic to a number of the recent "conservative" critiques of the current state of literary studies in American universities, but I've yet to read one that really expresses my frustrations. There is always something present in such pieces completely foreign to my own concerns, often connected with a certain sentimental view of literature—part old guard liberal humanism, part reactionary hedonism (books are to be enjoyed not analyzed)—which doesn't necessarily need to be the central principle of any proposed reformation of literature departments.

For example, in a recent review of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Joseph Epstein states that contemporary scholars, though claiming a deeper engagement with the social conditions of the real world, are unknown outside of academic circles due to their inclination to write about abstruse theoretical concerns instead of actual literature, as read by normal people. Epstein claims that this was not the case with the old guard of "Perry Miller, Aileen Ward, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling," who were more often read by non-academics. Yet Epstein falters when he denounces the confusion that follows from the fall of the barrier between high and low culture. Epstein sets up his argument to defend the reality of literature against that of socio-theoretical analysis: "English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender." He's got a damn good point there, not a very difficult or complex one, but rather a basic one which advocates a very sensible approach to inquiry: we need to start with the text, not with the theory. The theory stems from the reading, not vice versa.

Yet we don't need Epstein to tell us that, and we certainly don't need him to tell us that Allen Ginsberg is a "secondary author" on whom The Cambridge History of the American Novel wastes space simply because he wrote about sex. Epstein's reaction against the "automatic Leftism" of the English Department should be kept separate from his critique of its faulty processes of inquiry. (Furthermore, Leftism has always been a part of the academy—it comes from historical awareness, pseudo-Christian ethics, and a palate for the sublime, I think—and it would be more interesting for Epstein to contrast the pragmatism of the Old Left with the politically-correct intellectualitas of the New Left.)

Epstein ends by quoting William Chace, the former president of Wesleyan and Emory Universities and stalwart of old-school English modernism, who in 2008 identified the problem as "the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself." Now, without being too materialist here, I would first argue that the act of cooking soup for a hungry person is a far greater human good than any course of literary study (no matter how passionately it is undertaken). Secondly, while it is naturally important to differentiate between good and bad literature, it is not sufficient to just present something to a group of young people, with passion, simply because it is good, and you think it is good. (In a recent talk by Johanna Drucker at my university, she advocated a similar approach, that she wanted to present things to her classes just because she thought they were awesome and wanted to share them, whereupon I thought: "Isn't that how one should teach literature to first-graders?") A university course on literature should not only present specimens of good literature, but should supply the students with the critical faculty to understand the literary function active in books that makes them beautiful. To do this, the book doesn't even have to be a masterpiece. (An example: this summer I was present at a seminar where Prof. Horst Thomé of the University of Stuttgart spent two hours discussing the Venice Sonnets of Graf Platen, which upon first read I found utterly ordinary. After Thomé's close-reading and analysis of the intermedial, religious, and ekphrastic functions of the poem, I was fully begeistert.) According to Chace, English departments "have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books." This may be true, but while I'm not even sure if there are any more young people today who are interested in good books, I think it would be more useful to outfit them with a rigorous critical apparatus to understand and analyze literature "per se," rather than letting someone tell them how good Willa Cather is. American literature departments certainly need an overhaul, as Epstein argues—yet what is needed is not a reactionary return. The passionate, humanistic sentimentalization of literature is not so bad in itself—it has its place, which is no longer in the university (and I'm not sure it ever should have been in the university, but rather in bourgeois living rooms)—but as academic fodder it is certainly not much more interesting than the abstruse theory and "automatic Leftism" of the current day.

A different piece by Scott Herring also bemoans the estrangement of young people from English departments that offer courses such as "Bat[woman] and Cat[man]: Queering the Canonical Comix." Yet Herring advocates for a shift in literary studies, equally as sentimental as Epstein, though less reactionary, towards a recognition of the power of literature to communicate the reality that history cannot communicate: "History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era."

Firstly, I would like to defend history very briefly: while it is clear that history sometimes misrepresents historical reality, we must remember that this is not history per se, but bad history. Good history offers us facts about what happened. Historical facts about 1848 are always more important and informative than what it smelled like in 1848. Secondly, it is clear to me from this article that Herring is a listener of This American Life. For the record, I hate This American Life, precisely because it engenders a cultural milieu that produces people like Herring, who instead of reading, re-reading, and analyzing texts, find an old motor in a desert, talk about it with an aged American, and think that from this experience they have learned something very special. This is the new American sentimentality, arising from the pseudo-intellectuals of "Generation X," a bohemian-bourgeoisie pseudo-materialism, the self-satisfied cloaking of poverty in a romantic shawl of pastoral Americana. Like Epstein's stodgy protest against the theory-heads, Herring reacts against dysfunction of this country's English departments in an unhelpful manner, offering a reactionary return to a sentimentalized literature, a literature which describes while at the same time elevates itself above the filth of the real world. What we need are newer critical methods, not a resuscitation of bourgeois literary pastoralism.

"Let the dead French theorists lie," Herring advocates. OK, but it would be helpful if you would be a bit more specific. Dead French theorists like Derrida, Saussure, or Pascal? Me, I'd toss the first, and treasure the other two. (In other words, not all French theory is unhelpful.) He continues: "Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past." For me, this is another abstraction that the discipline could do without. The illness of American literary studies is not spiritual, and doesn't require a booster shot of passionate humanism, nor of pastoralism; the problem concerns the prevalence of an array of bogus critical/theoretical methods that impede accurate textual analysis.