[Just got back from a great talk by Paul Chan, an artist who was in Iraq in December/January and has been giving talks all over the place -- colleges, artist spaces, etc. -- for the past several weeks. Besides a great series of dispatches that he managed to get out of there, he's also took a series of powerful, if very humble and unpretentious, photographs -- both texts and images are posted on his site, nationalphilistine.com.]
Mass Actions in New York City on Feb. 15 and San Francisco on Feb. 16
On February 15, hundreds of thousands of people will converge on New York City to stand with millions around the globe against the Bush Administration's plan for war on Iraq. While we are still unable to announce a location for this march and rally, one thing is certain: It is happening. We urge all those who oppose the war crusade to continue mobilizing full speed ahead for February 15. We have just filed a federal lawsuit over the denial of our march permit and have a hearing before the judge on February 7.
[Just fell into my inbox -- click "more" below and get links to the two papers in question.]
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | UK war dossier a sham, say experts
British 'intelligence' lifted from academic articles
Michael White and Brian Whitaker
Friday February 7, 2003
The Guardian
Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.
Amid charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday.
Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide television audience Mr Powell said: "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
But on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a few insertions - from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.
Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed determined to tough it out last night.
Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The important thing is that it is accurate," said one source.
What Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged borrowing of material - the crime of plagiarism - is regarded in American academic and media circles, even though successive US governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war. On a special edi tion of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction: "I may be wrong, but I do believe it."
With trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material".
But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4: "I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before."
The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.
The document, as posted on Downing Street's website at the end of January, also acci dentally named four Whitehall officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted.
"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data."
Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma.
A Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report's public sources had not been acknowledged. "We said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself."
Dr Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him before lifting the material.
But on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to No 10. "In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies," he said.
Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work by Whitehall he added: "Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language.
"For example, in one of my documents, I said that they support organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'.
"The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq - around 4m documents - as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10 years."
Iraq's decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview one of its scientists for the first time without government "minders" signalled that Baghdad may be bending under international pressure.
But diplomats will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as Iraq's "catch us if you can" approach to inspections. Hours before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq would have to make to avoid war.
Key documents
Read the government's paper
Read the academic's paper
[Click through to get a .pdf with more news on this event, yet another -- like the Wayne State event below, inspired by Laura Bush! This one's in Toronto.]
P O E T R Y
O P P O S E D
T O W A R
Or, Laura Bush's Poetry Salon
*****
You are cordially invited to the poetry reading originally scheduled for February 12 but indefinitely postponed. Due to the controversial nature of this event, it has been moved to the campus of Wayne State University. Join poets of the Wayne community in sending a message to the White House on poetry's understanding of the nature of war.
Readers to include...
Ron Allen / Abbas Bazzi / Bill Harris / Carla Harryman / M. L. Liebler / Ted Pearson / Franziska Ruprecht / Katie Scott / Craig Smith / Chris Tysh / George Tysh / Justin Vidovic / Anca Vlasopolos / Barrett Watten
*****
Wednesday, February 12
2:30 to 4:30 PM
Bernath Auditorium
Adamany Undergraduate Library
Sponsored by
Wayne English Department Against the War
*****
[Here's some good, cheap, lowbrow political humor from www.mnftiu.cc | get your war on. There's TONS more where this came from.]
[This is from artist Paul Chan's National Philistine -- Combat edition, where you can read the complete set of posts he sent while in Iraq, along with a series of photographs.]
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you--the press--with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, "if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
Thank you.
This is the fourth invitation I’ve received in a month asking me to comment on the relationship between poetry and politics: two for print publication forums dedicated to the topic and two for symposiums revolving around the issue. As someone who’s written on the connections between poetry, art, culture, and politics for more than just a month, it got me thinking about the apparent sudden urgency to address the relationship between poetry and politics. This, in turn, caused me to consider different ways in which to conceive of the idea of the present, both as a historical category and in relation to contemporary culture, specifically, poetry and art. What became clear, at least to me, is that there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future.
(The) now is a fragile history. Barely torn from the past at the same moment it erratically staggers into the future, (the) now moves so quickly, yet obliquely, that its blur appears determined. In an information-oriented society built on speed, this is particularly true; and anyone who sits in front of a computer all day as part of her or his job knows the feeling of watching fresh headlines continually pop up on the homepages of Internet news providers. This is an experience of history—or one form of it—as whizzing by before lunchtime. As a result, (the) now often only leaves room for reaction in its small space and the short time it has left.
One of my biggest concerns when thinking about differences between (the) now and the present is that the demand for action “now” has the potential to override the demands for action “then” and in the future—demands that never disappear, even when forgotten, covered-up, or silenced. For instance, I’m heartened—perverse as the use of this word may be, given the context—that because of the threat of war on Iraq and the diminishment of civil liberties in the US, people are once again thinking about the relationship between politics and poetry. But why weren’t there just as many symposiums and print forums dedicated to this topic when the Clinton administration was dismantling social welfare programs during the go-go ’90s? And what about the writers and visual artists who had trouble publishing and exhibiting their work not so long ago because it was deemed “too political”? And what happens to this work and this dialogue we’re having today once the war in Iraq has been averted or won or lost? Or when Hillary Clinton is elected president? (The) now is sometimes quick to elide these kinds of questions, instead favoring immediate reaction.
This plays out on a grassroots level, where it can be difficult to convince people of the need to protest the impending war on Iraq when they’re more worried about their unemployment benefits running out, or when the police are perceived as more of an immediate threat than so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” or when neighborhood schools are chronically underfunded and unsafe. I want a conception of politics that can respond as much to the day-to-day politics of people just getting by as it does to the out-of-touch national politics of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to make a map connecting the bombing of Iraqi children with the failure of schools in the US, something the strategists of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to do. But I’m hesitant to define politics exclusively in terms of broad-based social movements. It’s crucial that a micro-politics of the everyday isn’t forgotten by this generation’s peace movement, or else this movement may end up being as relatively homogenous as other recent versions.
A politics of the everyday negotiations with power that take place in the present—though not always in (the) now—are extrapolations of earlier, as well as yet-to-be-articulated, aspirations for a better shared world. To use a metaphor informed by poetry, (the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming. (The) now always has the capacity for beautiful interventions—the slogans written on the walls of the Sorbonne in May of ’68, the ACT UP poster art of Gran Fury in the ’80s, the puppets and costumes at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999—but these interventions move beyond the rhetorical certainties of (the) now and into the uncertain possibilities of the present when they become articulated to larger social and ideological formations. Similarly, poetry is never inseparable from the moment of both its utterance and its reception, an utterance and reception that are socially situated, and therefore politically and ideologically inflected. It’s important to listen or read for this, especially when the ability to corrode stale rhetorics from the inside and make accepted ideologies appear unnatural are two things that poetry and art have the potential to do effectively and brilliantly.
Yet to say that all poetry and art is political negates the ability to use politics as a critical concept, just as saying that all thought is ideological diminishes ideology’s capacity for critique. This isn’t to argue that all poetry can’t be read politically and ideologically, which may be more to the point. As access to information becomes a fundamental material level in society, while the digital divide remains yet another form of wealth disparity, the ability to read critically will assume a significance on par with more traditional political concepts such as voting, union membership, etc. Pedagogy then has the potential to become a revolutionary activity, because illiteracy is also a discourse, as the reigning president has illustrated so well—all humor aside.
If power is not permanent, then politics is not a privilege. Poetry and art examine language, image, and movement at the point of production, even if this production is frequently complicit with economic, social, and institutional status quos. At these moments of complicity, the farther one gets from a poetry and art of (the) now, the closer one gets to poetry and art as imagining and invoking an alternative set of present conditions, both within poetry and art, and outside of them. The poetry renaissance that occurred in North America during the ’90s is the result of the substantial role poetry plays in marginalized communities. This can be seen most obviously in the various forms of spoken word, performance poetry, and hip hop that, in many ways, instigated this renaissance a decade or so ago. The current cycle of poetry’s relevance and political vitality—as evidenced most strikingly by First Lady Laura Bush’s canceling of a poetry symposium at the White House that poet and publisher Sam Hamill planned to turn into a political protest—has decidedly not occurred because Jorie Graham sells more books than her equivalent in the ’80s, or because Billy Collins is NPR’s darling, or because Language poetry is now taught at Iowa. In fact, it’s happened in spite of them.
The reactive possibilities of (the) now—with its frequent retreat into moral pieties and political sloganeering on both the left and the right—are a horizon away from the creative emancipations of the present, however brief, however defeated by other pasts, presents, and futures. In this sense, it’s necessary to ask why are certain stories told and others not, why are certain kinds of information known and other kinds not, why are certain situations and phenomena represented and others not. “[H]ow is it,” asks Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge, “that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” This question is as much the province of artists as it is of activists and historians, of artists as activists and historians. But it’s not simply a matter of spontaneous free expression; rather, specific statements must be understood within a larger constellation of institutions, communities, and ideologies. Without this contextual awareness, artistic, critical, and political interventions dissipate within the mystifying climate of (the) now.
All the while, it’s necessary to be realistic about what cultural workers are capable of. Thus, one strategic challenge for writers and artists—and not solely during times of crisis, because time is always in crisis—is not to try to compete with a mass media network that has rarely served to represent anything other than ruling class interests. Instead, the aim might be to foster alternative cultures, modes of representation, ideologies, and communities that the mostly false “public”—i.e., corporate-controlled—channels of communication will then be obliged to address, and with which the hegemonies they help prop up will be compelled to negotiate. This is a process different from—however tenuous the distinction—the absorption of alternatives by the mainstream . . . a process forced open by a now-informed-by-history.
St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003
[As some people familiar with my Vaneigem series know, I like to take pre-existing web pages and change the contents of them for political ends. It's not an original idea; in fact, I stole it all from the Situationists, many of whose writings are online at The Situationist International Text Library.]
Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.
Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. Détournement is practical because it is so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse. Concerning the negligible effort required for détournement, we have already noted that "the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding" (A User's Guide to Détournement, May 1956). But these points would not by themselves justify recourse to this method, which the same text describes as "clashing head-on against all social and legal conventions." Détournement has a historical significance. What is it?
"Détournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation," writes Jorn in his study Detourned Painting (May 1959), and he goes on to say that all the elements of the cultural past must be "reinvested" or disappear. Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression. It arises and grows increasingly stronger in the historical period of the decomposition of artistic expression. But at the same time, the attempts to reuse the "detournable bloc" as material for other ensembles express the search for a vaster construction, a new genre of creation at a higher level.
The SI is a very special kind of movement, different in nature from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture, the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do can yet be situationist. This is not a disavowal for anyone. We are partisans of a certain future of culture and of life. Situationist activity is a particular craft that we are not yet practicing.
Thus the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality (since we cannot represent any common style whatsoever), is first of all the use of détournement. Examples of our use of detourned expression include Jorn's altered paintings; Debord and Jorn's book Mémoires, "composed entirely of prefabricated elements," in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably uncompleted; Constant's projects for detourned sculptures; and Debord's detourned documentary film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time. At the stage of what the "User's Guide to Détournement" calls "ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life" (e.g. passwords or the wearing of disguises, belonging to the sphere of play), we might mention, at different levels, Gallizio's industrial painting; Wyckaert's "orchestral" project for assembly-line painting with a division of labor based on color; and numerous détournements of buildings that were at the origin of unitary urbanism. But we should also mention in this context the SI's very forms of "organization" and propaganda.
At this point in the world's development, all forms of expression are losing their grip on reality and being reduced to self-parody. As the readers of this journal can frequently verify, present-day writing invariably has an element of parody. As the "User's Guide" notes: "It is necessary to conceive of a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity."
This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action — an era in which the most serious ventures are masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its necessary negation, and in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.
[I've just got this one dropped into my inbox. It is probably the most cogent, but also willfully controversial, statement I have read on the situation of poets right now, especially his assessment of the three options for creative intervention. It is the third, poets turning to prose, that has most inspired the creation of this site -- that and the fact that Bush's speech writer is an evangelical Christian.]
I am both pessimistic and optimistic about what's happening and briefly, or not so briefly, I'd like to say why:
First, I take the word "politics" in a very narrow sense: that is, how governments are run. And I take the word "government" to mean the organized infliction or alleviation of suffering among one's own people and among other peoples.
One of the things that happened after the Vietnam War was that, in the U.S., on the intellectual left, politics metamorphosed into something entirely different: identity politics and its nerd brother, theory, who thought he was a Marxist, but never allowed any actual governments to interrupt his train of thought. The right however, stuck to politics in the narrow sense, and grew powerful in the absence of any genuine political opposition, or even criticism, for the left had its mind elsewhere: It was preoccupied with finding examples of sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, etc. -- usually among its own members or the long-dead, while ignoring the genuine and active racists/ sexists/ homophobes of the right-- and it tended to express itself in an incomprehensible academic jargon or tangentially referential academic poetry under the delusion that such language was some form of resistance to the prevailing power structures-- power, of course, only being imagined in the abstract. (Never mind that truly politically revolutionary works-- Tom Paine or the Communist Manifesto or Brecht or Hikmet or a thousand others-- are written in simple direct speech.)
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was completely dismantling the social programs of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society-- creating the millions of homeless, the 25% of American children who live in poverty, the obscene polarization of wealth, and so on. (And the poets, typically, were only moved to speak up when he cut the NEA budget.) Clinton might have had a more compassionate public face, but essentially the political center had shifted so far right that today the Democratic party is to the right of any European conservative party, and the Republicans just slightly to the left of a European national front party. We may never live to see an American president as left-wing as Jacques Chirac.
The main result of almost thirty years of these so-called politics on the left is that there are now more women and minorities in the Norton anthologies, and we all know how to pronounce "hegemony"-- surely a great comfort to the 4 million people, predominately black men, currently in the prison system, or the teenage girls in most places in America who need an abortion and there's nowhere to get help, or the parents and babies who create the statistics of by far the highest infant mortality rate among the technological nations, or the 20% of high school seniors who can't find the U.S. on a world map.
The good news about the monstrosity of the Bush administration is that it is so extreme and so out of control that it has finally woken up the left, and once again we're talking about politics as the rest of the world knows it, about people getting slaughtered, people being hungry, and people deprived of basic human rights-- and not about language as a capitalist construct or queer musicology. The best news of all is that very young people-- the generation of the Zeroes-- after the decades of MTV and Nintendo somnambulism, are being politicized by the collapsed economy, the prospect of a reinstituted draft, and the realization that their sneakers are made by child-slaves in the Third World. Every political youth movement has its own culture-- look at the 30's, the 60's, or radical Islam today. It will be extremely interesting to see, and utterly unexpected to find, what culture this youth movement produces: What will be their ideals and practices, their music and poetry, or even their dress? I have a feeling that we won't have a clue, and that their response may well be a sort of iconoclastic asceticism, not unlike radical Islam, impervious to corporate takeover, and completely alien to their parents. [One of the hardest things for people my age to understand is that this is not 1967 all over again, that things are going to be very different, and that, if we don't learn to listen, we are going to end up being, as our old formula goes, part of the problem and not part of the solution.]
I take this gathering as a kind of union meeting-- the union of writers, mainly poets-- and it seems to me the primary question for us is: things are going to be happening with or without us, are we going to be part of it, or are we going to continue to talk about essentialism at the MLA and finding your voice at the AWP?
Poets in times of political crises basically have three models. The first is to write overtly political poems, as was done during the Vietnam War. 95% of those poems will be junk, but so what? 95% of anything is junk. It is undeniable that the countless poems and poetry readings against the Vietnam War contributed to creating and legitimizing a general climate of opposition; they were the soul of the movement. And it also resulted in some of the most enduring poems of the 20th century, news that has stayed news indeed.
The second model is epitomized by George Oppen, who as a Communist in the 30's, and a poet uncomfortable with the prevailing modes of political poetry, decided that poets should not be treated differently from others, that the work to be done was organizing, and so he stopped writing and became a union leader.
The third model is César Vallejo, another Communist in the 20's and 30's. He refused to write propaganda poems-- he wanted to write the poems he wanted to write-- so to serve the cause he wrote a great deal of propaganda prose.
The first model (political poems) is the most common, and no doubt the one we'll be seeing the most, and frankly it will come as a relief from all those anecdotes of unhappy childhoods and ironic preoccupations with "surface." Oppen, of course, was a kind of secular saint-- and most of us are too egotistical to take a vow of silence. But it is the example of Vallejo that seems to me the least explored.
People who are poets presumably know something about writing. So why does it never occur to them to write something other than poems? There are approximately 8000 poets registered in the Directory of American Poets-- are there even four or five who have written an article against the Bush Administration? Most of us can't get onto the Op-Ed page of the Times-- we'd never displace Condoleezza there-- but most of us do have access to countless other venues: hometown newspapers, college newspapers, professional newsletters, specialist magazines, websites, and so on. All writers have contacts somewhere, and all these periodicals must fill their pages. Even poetry magazines: Why must poetry magazines always be graveyards of orderly tombstones of poems? How many of them in the 1980's, for example, even mentioned the name "Reagan"? How many of them today have any political content at all?
I've been writing articles since Bush's inauguration for translation in magazines and newspapers abroad and, if nothing else, they at least help to demonstrate that the US is not a monolith of opinion. Foreign periodicals can't get enough of Americans critical of Bush-- which is why the collaboration of such supposedly antiwar poets as Robert Creeley and Robert Pinsky in the recent State Dept anthology was so grotesque. If, as they claim, they wanted to give Americans a human face, there was no end of other forums abroad-- they didn't have to do it as flunkies for Bush. More tellingly, the only public condemnations of that anthology have come from foreign newspapers-- American writers were either indifferent or afraid of alienating a future prize jury.
In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It's one of the best ways, and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country. Send it to your friends and let the friends, if they want, send it on. Let the readers vote, not with their feet, but with the forward button.
The last time I was here at St Marks, in 1994, I was practically laughed off the stage for saying that the major organizing force of political opposition in the future was going to be the internet. Now of course, it's a banality. The internet has completely changed all the rules. It's how the like-minded instantly find each other; it's the one national and international forum that has been-- so far-- impossible to control; and it's practically the only source of opposition information and opinions from everywhere in the world: not only immediate access to the foreign press, but also-- if you really want to give yourself nightmares-- to the endless reports available from the Dept of Defense and right-wing think tanks. That still-unrecognized prophet, Abbie Hoffman, said, almost 40 years ago, that if you want to start a revolution, don't bother to organize, seize a television station. With the internet, we are all our own tv stations and publishing companies and newspapers. The potential is limitless: Trent Lott was brought down by a weblog; all the doubts about the war that are seeping into the general public began online; and just this week even lovely Laura's Poetry Tea got canceled thanks to an e-mail petition.
There are 8000 poets in the Directory, and Anne Waldman and Ammiel Alcalay, a month ago had trouble coming up with a list to invite to speak here. One eye may half-open when, like Laura's party, it directly involves them, but most American writers have lost the ability to even think politically, or nationally, or internationally. In all the anthologies and magazines devoted to 9/11 and its aftermath, nearly every single writer resorted to first-person anecdote: "It reminded me of the day my father died..." "I took an herbal bath and decided to call an old boyfriend..."Barely a one could imagine the event outside of the context of the prison cell of their own expressive self. (Or, on the avant-garde, it was a little too real for ironic pastiche from their expressive non-self.)
We are where we are in part because American writers-- supposedly the most articulate members of society-- have generally had nothing to say about the world for the last 30 years. How many of those 8000 poets have ever been to a Third World country (excluding beach vacations)? How many think it worthwhile to translate something? How many can name a single contemporary poet, not living in the U.S., from Latin America or Africa or Asia? In short, how many know anything more about the world than George Bush knows?
After thirty years of self-absorption in MFA and MLA career-mongering and knee-jerk demography and the personal as political and the impersonal as poetical, American writers now have the government we deserve. We were good Germans under Reagan and Bush I; we were never able to separate Clinton's person from his policies and gave him a complacent benefit of the doubt; and the result is Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Perle and Wolfowitz and Scalia and Rice and their little president. They can't be stopped, but I do think they can be slowed down.
Eliot Weinberger
Statement for "Poetry is News" conference
St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003
[Here's a short essay by Alan Gilbert I ripped from the Pores website.]
This past summer, as I was sitting in one of Anthology Film Archives' movie theaters waiting for the documentary film Gaza Strip (Longley 2002) to begin, I overheard snippets of conversation coming from a group of six or seven women and men from different backgrounds and in their mid-twenties sitting in the row directly in front of me. One of them was providing some context for the film they were about to watch (it was produced by an American filmmaker who planned to spend a couple weeks in the Gaza Strip making a documentary about the current intifada, but ended up staying three months and filming everyday life under its harsh conditions); another person was talking about films she'd recently seen at Anthology (run by Jonas Mekas, Anthology Film Archives remains one of the few places in New York City, and the United States as a whole, that shows avant-garde and experimental films on a daily basis; even the films of old-school experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage are screened monthly); another member of the group was talking about her new job. Then suddenly, or so it seemed to me because I hadn't heard any of the particular conversation leading up to it, someone in the group said: “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again.” Intrigued as I was to hear any responses to such a claim, or further clarifications from the person who uttered it, I couldn't catch much else, and the movie started soon after.
Gaza Strip is a mostly conventional documentary that nevertheless eschews a number of conventional documentary techniques: no solemn voice-over, a certain amount of non-linear narrative and editing, and a sprinkling of digital effects that are meant to enhance moments of emergency and danger. Its organizing conceit is to follow around a Palestinian boy named Mohammed Hejazi as he throws rocks at Israeli tanks, sells newspapers, visits his young friends after they've been shot by Israeli soldiers, and joins funerals. But plenty of other aspects of life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are also represented: bulldozed houses, snipers firing on schoolyards, rockets fired into houses, and poisonous gas attacks; in other words, the film has everything except, as J. Hoberman pointed out in his Village Voice review, footage of the horrific carnage inflicted on Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers (2002). But Gaza Strip isn't blatantly biased, nor is it overly didactic. Simply filming the Israeli army terrorizing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is damning enough, especially when a soldier in one of its tanks rolls what looks like a metal toy toward a group of Palestinian children playing, only to have one of the kids discover after he picks it up that it's actually a small bomb which then blows most of his abdomen away.
The 100th issue of the journal October is a special anniversary volume somewhat ironically dedicated to the topic of “Obsolescence.” A number of artists responded to a questionnaire dealing with the concept, and two roundtables addressed it in relation to contemporary art criticism and “American avant-garde film,” respectively. Both roundtables returned again and again to the idea of institutionality—in relation to visual art and the discourses surrounding it. In the roundtable on art criticism, institutionality was seen as a potential danger to art and art criticism, while, at the same time, all of the participants generally agreed on the difficulties of working, or even conceiving themselves, outside the art world system. Andrea Fraser, whose renowned brand of institutional critique receives ongoing institutional support, was perhaps the most representative roundtable member in this regard. In contrast, the roundtable on “American avant-garde film” mostly embraced institutionality as the only way in which this film practice could continue to reach an audience beyond a very select few, the majority of whom are fellow avant-garde filmmakers.
The lone exception, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, espoused a do-it-yourself 1960s—later punk, later Internet—fuck the system outsider stance in which artmaking isn't dependent upon institutional support for its vitality. He also fell back on what might be seen as a relatively separate strand of vanguardist innovation:
[Ken] Jacobs: . . . But then you have things that uphold the idea of the avant-garde, which is to forage and get out there into new territory, to think completely freshly, come up with whole other ways of putting things together, unexpected things to go for. New things have been made all through these years. New things are being made now.[Paul] Arthur: I'm sure that's true, but I find this aspect of the cultural ideology somewhat suspect, even obsolescent. This idea of constant innovation, of stretching the envelope of what's possible in cinema . . . I find that a problematic notion at this point.
[Annette] Michelson: Why?
Arthur: Because I don't see that much stretching these days, but I do see a very strongly institutionalized movement, and for me, that's the essential definition. (2002: 117)
Here, film critic Paul Arthur is referring less to institutionality as a network of support encompassing the production, distribution, and screening of experimental film, and more to a codified, and even ossified, vanguardist aesthetics. If the notion of vanguardism is conceptually derived from the militaristic scouting forays made by the lead part of an advancing army, then maybe after a century of the worst warfare in human history and plenty of avant-garde experiments (many of them ending up in some dubious political affiliations), it's time for the avant-garde to drop back a little, not in order to march shoulder-to-shoulder with this army (as ethicist Emmanual Levinas once described Martin Heidegger's booted march toward Being [1987: 40-41, 93-94]), but to meet it face-to-face. Semantically, at least, the avant-garde would no longer be an avant-garde; but, then, maybe the army would no longer be an army.
After the feelings of shock, sadness, and anger I experienced in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, and when more information began to filter in about exactly what happened, my two initial thoughts were: 1) this will seriously damage the Palestinian cause, since sentiment in mainstream US media and society had finally begun to shift toward a less one-sided understanding of Israeli-Palestinian relations; and 2) this is partly the responsibility of the US auto industry—in collaboration with the major oil companies—for refusing to develop serious alternatives to the gas combustion engine. These may appear odd first thoughts; but one can imagine what it was like to be in New York City on the evening of September 11, 2001, watching the smoke rising from southern Manhattan's enormous scar billow against a spectacular sunset, rendered, it may sound grotesque to say (although people in Los Angeles experience this all the time), even more spectacular by the pollutants in the atmosphere. Everyone in New York City that day and in the following days was breathing in the cremated remains of thousands of people, though absolutely no one could say it—then, or even now. Instantly, what seemed like millions of flyers of missing persons with photographs and contact information for relatives and friends covered every available surface. Spontaneous public spaces were established in parks and open areas around the city; and while some writers exaggerated the level of civic discourse and debate in these temporary public spheres, they nevertheless were places where people congregated and dialogued freely and with a certain degree of self-allowed autonomy.
This made the authorities nervous, but the level of grief was so intense that even then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani—who was pleased to be able to finally run the city like the police state he always dreamed of, and who did a good job of it, if efficiently running a police state is something one can be complimented on or take pride in—couldn't tear down the flyers or break up the gatherings. But within a couple weeks he did, and suddenly the flyers were gone, as if overnight, and people no longer congregated in public spaces. The attacks also meant the Bush administration finally had an objective other than to loot everything in sight; and just as it's easy to forget how low Giuliani had sunk in the general opinion of New Yorker's before 9/11 (the second fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man by his police corps was one of the final straws), to the point of excusing himself from his Senate race against Hillary Clinton, so, too, is it difficult to remember exactly what the Bush administration was up to before its attentions were turned toward Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the Reagan administration, which at least formulated a pernicious ideology of trickle-down economics to justify its greed, Bush, Jr., and his recycled Reagan/Bush père cronies were/are only after one thing: wealth, and the most massive redistribution of it in the US since the latter half of the 19th century.
Exploiting contradictions is one strategy art, writing, and the larger cultural sphere might explore in the wake of 9/11. Focusing in on contradiction, exposing it without necessarily adding explicit commentary and/or a heavy-handed narrative structure, is a dialogic process, one that can be politicized without in turn being made demagogic. But an attention to contradiction is as much a strategy of reading as it is a mode of cultural production. In a so-called “Information Age” of media monopolies, with their consolidations and restrictions of available information, it's increasingly essential to read this information against the grain. It's also crucial to cultivate alternative sources of information, which are in wild proliferation, whether in print or on the Internet. Both attitudes toward information are summarized in Marshall McLuhan's declaration: “When information is brushed against information . . . the results are startling and effective” (1967: 76,78). There's no reason why art can't be “startling” and “effective,” even though the two categories have frequently been kept separate: the former associated with formal innovation and extravagance, the latter with dry political utility and pedagogy.
It's important that an approach to cultural production and reading which brushes information against information have a wide range of applications. For instance, I wouldn't be the first to point to the contradictions at the heart of David LaChapelle's photography, and its very voguish attempt to blur the distinctions between fashion and art (2002, 1999, 1996). On the surface, LaChapelle's work is among the most effusive celebrations of celebrity culture currently produced today. It makes gushing television shows such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, which also push celebrity culture and its products, downright dull in comparison. But perhaps LaChapelle's work is more complex than this. Perhaps Jeff Koons isn't Warhol's most immediate Pop offspring—LaChapelle is (after all, he got his start photographing for Warhol's Interview magazine). Like Warhol, the image factory and its resultant celebrity goods—and vice versa—is LaChapelle's world. Similar to Warhol's work as discussed by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real, specifically his '60s silkscreens of car crashes, criminals, and even celebrities (1996: 130-136), there's a sense of violence and death in LaChapelle's depictions of the commonplace-as-incongruous and the incongruous-as-commonplace in mass culture. Celebrities may strive to transcend mortality in both Warhol and LaChapelle (and in this their art subscribes to one of the most conventional of aesthetic notions), but death and the intrinsic, never-resolved contradiction it brings is always sniffing at the edges of the frame.
At one level, Warhol and LaChapelle's projects couldn't make much more clear—without, that is, becoming purely “effective”—the primary relationship between consumption and death. To this I would add the relationship in capitalist societies between consumption, death, and war. But this connection is also a contradiction: to consume is to try to elude death, and to consume is also supposed to negate war, as Thomas Friedman famously remarked when he said that two countries with a McDonald's in them would never go to war (rather quickly disproved when the US bombed Serbia, to which Friedman responded that this exception actually proved his rule [1999]). In their most complex work, Warhol and LaChapelle bypass irony (the easiest of critical gestures) for contradiction. The very excessiveness of LaChapelle's depiction of celebrity and riches practically begs the viewer to read back critically into the constructed image and to understand that too much is literally too much. Of course, this begging is also a sign of the work's complicity, and one should be careful not to exaggerate the critical aspect of LaChapelle's images. The contradictions I'm pointing to in LaChapelle's photography may serve as a reading of resistance, but the key is to link up this reading with larger social, political, and cultural formations and movements. And for that, a globalized view is necessary, an awareness that's becoming more widespread, if the unexpected strong-selling success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire is any indication (2000)—though Empire might do a better job of reminding its readers that without robustly functioning nation-states, transnational capitalism would collapse within months, if not weeks.
If any contemporary photographer could be considered the polar opposite of David LaChapelle it might be Allan Sekula. Sekula's epic Fish Story was shown in its entirety at this year's Documenta. In his installation of the work and book of the same title (1995), Sekula documents global shipping routes and ports of transnational trade. If, on first glance, LaChapelle's work is “startling,” Sekula's work might be considered “effective.” Yet there's a rigorous attention to formal concerns in Sekula's photographs. Sekula may work in a somewhat traditional documentary mode, but unlike documentary that tries to capture an entire span of intellectual and emotional response within a single frame or film or video, a Sekula photograph is incomprehensible without the context he creates for it with accompanying images and text, which in turn comment directly on larger socio-economic conditions. The failure of traditional documentary is that it trusts the immediate impact of its images, and remains satisfied with these direct representations. This distinction between different documentary methods is cited by critic and curator Matthew Higgs: “Writing elsewhere on documentary photography, British artist Liam Gillick has described the kind of work that seeks meaning in the apparent profundity of its subject matter in lieu of offering a 'constructed critique' as a 'stunned mirror'” (Higgs 2002: 167). Sekula's quick movement in Fish Story between the macro and the micro, his constant historicizing as well as his attention to the smallest details, are the result of a complex formal and critical process. What at first glance makes Sekula's work appear the product of a classical documentary lineage turns out to be his refusal to accept consumption as the fundamental social and economic reality. Even in a world full of simulacra, most commodities still have to be produced and transported before they can be consumed. In a manner that's the complete opposite of LaChapelle, Sekula's work seeks to strip the commodity of its fetishistic dimension. This forces a reading of resistance to be read back, in turn, into a capitalist economy and social organization that uses an ideology of consumption—of goods and images—to camouflage inherent structural contradictions.
Unfortunately, not much has changed, in art or otherwise, after 9/11. At the same time, a quote such as, “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again,” however off-hand, however unsubstantiated, however unjustified, perhaps could only have been made after 9/11. But has anything changed? A space has opened up within political discourse and artistic practice in the US, a space partially and metaphorically vacated by the Twin Towers, in which contradictions have the potential to become more evident. Yet if one of the main challenges of various forms of cultural production is to expose contradictions in dominant ideologies, then they must also learn to expose contradictions within themselves. Without serious self-critique, art slowly loses its capacity for anything more than shallow institutional critique. For the avant-garde in particular (or what's left of it), self-critique may allow it to step back—though not so far as to become a rearguard—and engage with the progressive cultural populism it needs in order to rejuvenate itself and again function as a radical project.
Alan Gilbert
Bibliography
Arthur, Paul; Frye, Brian; Iles, Chrissie; Jacobs, Ken; Michelson, Annette; Turvey, Malcolm (2002) “Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film.” In October. No. 100 (Spring 2002): 115-132.
Foster, Hal (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge and London.
Friedman, Thomas L. (1999) “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Anchor Books, New York. 248-275.
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.
Higgs, Matthew (2002) “Same Old Same Old.” In Artforum. Vol. XLI, No. 1 (September 2002): 166-167.
Hoberman, J. (2002) “Crime Scenes.” In The Village Voice. Vol. XLVII, No. 31 (July 31-August 6, 2002): 103.
LaChapelle, David (2002) Photographs. Museums Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, Wien.
------ (1999) Hotel LaChapelle. Bulfinch Press, Boston, New York, and London.
------ (1996) LaChapelle Land. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1987) Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.
Longley, James (2002) Gaza Strip. Directed by James Longley. Produced by James Longley.
McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin (1967) The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA.
Sekula, Allan (1995) Fish Story. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf.
[A little news story about an incident that partly inspired this site.]
Thursday January 30, 2003 4:50 AM
NEW YORK (AP) - The White House said Wednesday it postponed a poetry symposium because of concerns that the event would be politicized. Some poets had said they wanted to protest military action against Iraq. The symposium on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman was scheduled for Feb. 12. No future date has been announced.
"While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." Noelia Rodriguez, spokeswoman for first lady Laura Bush, said Wednesday.
Mrs. Bush, a former librarian who has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues, has held a series of White House symposiums to salute America's authors. The gatherings are usually lively affairs with discussions of literature and its societal impact. But the poetry symposium soon inspired a nationwide protest.
Sam Hamill, a poet and founder of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, declined the invitation and e-mailed friends asking for anti-war poems or statements. He encouraged those who planned to attend to bring along anti-war poems.
Hamill said he's gotten more than 1,500 contributions, including ones from poets W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
"I'm putting in 18-hour days. I'm 60 and I'm tired, but it's pretty wonderful," says Hamill, based in Port Townsend, Wash., and author of such works as "Destination Zero" and "Gratitude."
Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate, said Wednesday that she had accepted the White House invitation and had planned to wear a silk scarf with peace signs that she commissioned.
"I had decided to go because I felt my presence would promote peace," she said.