Onions

For those of you interested in the hippity hop: check out Sweatshop Union. Found them at pandora.com

Organs

I'm pretty sure I just saw someone on A Daily Show suggesting that the roots of the organic food movement are to be found in German Organicism. He even when on to suggest that, since the Nazi's co-opted much of Organicism (and Romanticism in general), that the organic food movement in the US is fascist.

It is a world of words to the end of it, but that only means we have to be careful how we use them. Cognates and homonyms don't make an argument.

Happy Ending

One of our presenters fell ill at the conference, so I was asked to give my paper from Wales in stead.

Jason asked a question that I answered a little differently than I would now. He wanted to know if I thought the term "Minimalism" was useful or valid, given my different take on the repertory. I said that it's a mistake to use the term, but that we can always only make mistakes, and that we ought to make them strategically and scrupulously.

I'd like to expand that a little. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak launches a lengthy and convoluted critique of Jameson's Postmodernism, dealing (in)directly with many of the issues I approach in my paper. She talks about the decentered subject (which can never be dead, according to her), arriving at several contradictory conclusions which will require much more study to understand. One interesting thing she brought up that I think I finally do understand is Derrida's graphamatics (which I'm spelling wrong, I think, but I can't find my book right now). The graphamatic is apparently the necessity of assuming a coherent, unified origin for the subject (the I). As I understand it, the actual coherence or unification of the origin of the subject is both irrevocably forgotten and effectively irrelevant. However, in order to begin thinking or theorizing the subject at all, the origins need to be finessed in this graphamatic fashion. This move, which Spivak says can never be endorsed by deconstruction, is the necessary first move: it is the mistake. I think graphamatics can extend well beyond the subject, and into subjects as the term is used more colloquially. In this case, I think it's a useful invocation for the establishment of genres and stylistic schools. We cannot think Minimalism without assuming that it has come into being as a coherent body of work, but thinking it will show that assumption both to be false and necessary.

I still will need to work out exactly what it means, from this deconstructive vantage, for the subject to be decentered. I find it very alluring that at one point Spivak says the subject is always centered, but unfortunately she says later that this is not the case. More reading is in store, and this time it's going to be the same turf over again.

Headin out the door...

I gotta run, but I wanted to get this quick. Was I dreaming when the radio came on this morning, or did Huckabee really use Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" as his
entrance music? The piece named after Nietzsche's magnum opus? Well done sir.

Immortal

I don't know much about Mumia. Santa Cruz had a lot of activists trying to get him off death row, but I didn't pay much attention. This is him on Immortal Technique's "Revolutionary Volume 2":

To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture and also about homeland security is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels with some justice that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that seems to generate the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth and the climb above the pit of poverty.

In the broader society the opposite is true, for here more than any place on earth wealth is more wide spread and so bountiful. What passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. They're very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S. Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duck tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safer? From Death row this is Mumia Abu Jamal

Some of this is fairly common (though useful) rhetoric, but I like two things: the link juxtaposition of American poverty, opulence, and political rhetoric; and the brief analysis of anxiety that ties these three together. I would add to this the identity politics of the American majority. The politics of (the same) identity is what allows gay marriage and intelligent design
to be powerful political issues. This same image of identity is what rejected and then appropriated hip hop (while still retaining the rejection), and at the core of identity politics is anxiety (which is why maybe there never was a postmodern culture).

The rejection of political rap--which preoccupies Immortal Technique--has nothing to do with profanity and violence. This is a genre which exists aside from commodity culture: it's system of valuation is not one of exchange. It validates the American underclass, illuminating the underlying compulsions of behavior patterns that are thought by the privileged to be free choices.

The end of one of his songs is apt, especially given the specular/visual importance of identity: "Turn off the news and read a book."

Chris

The reason I believe in Santa Claus is that, even though my only plans for the day are to get on a plane in 3 hours, I still could scarcely sleep.

Bloomers

I'm submitting an abstract for a conference, and it's a paper I haven't touched in a while. I re-read (mostly) one of the background articles, and I want to recap it in an attempt to better prepare and organize my abstract.

The article is "The Breaking of Form," by Harold Bloom, in Deconstruction & Criticism. I'm using it as a foil to discuss form in Joel Durand's Athanor.

Bloom's article serves mainly as a polemic against his detractors. His work on poetry--most famously The Anxiety of Influence--was received poorly (and Bloom would say unfairly) by some, and here he seeks to redress the balance.

Bloom's understanding of form, or the creation of form in strong poetry, is that of breaking. The prolonged discussion is on breaking from older (or elder) poets, though this can also, it seems to me, manifest in a breaking from form. Ultimately, these end up being the same thing (for me. Argument to follow). Bloom quotes Kenneth Burke on form: "A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." Anticipation, especially in poetry, can be formed only through citationality (in music as well): if there is no preceding discourse (or syntax or semiotic system etc.) upon which to base expectations, there is no gratification. The corpus cited, of course, is precisely the o/elders. One wonders if this can be argued in such a way as to keep from dissolving into the old story of patricide.

Two things make this myth (all criticism is a myth, to over-generalize Bloom) more interesting than Oedipus. One is Bloom's capacity to think a history of poetry (or art) without invoking either organicism or any other teleology, however crude or sophisticated. The anxiety of influence is not a natural phenomenon that propels a poet to his (except Dickenson) greatness, but is a historical/cultural (documented in some cases) phenomenon with which we all struggle. The narcissistic aggression of the artist is what makes the work strong. This first labyrinth unsettles me on two accounts: I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a discourse of strength as it is deployed by Bloom, and I am skeptical of any framework with so openly places psychoanalysis (especially Freudian) at its foundation.

The other turn in this otherwise banal story is Bloom's deliberate position in the between. First, Bloom positions himself in between the over-coding and the abyss: "Language, in relation to poetry, can be conceived in two valid ways, as I have learned, slowly and reluctantly. Either one can believe in a magical theory of all language, as the Kabbalists, many poets, and Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction." (4) We have on the one hand the over-determination of meaning, and on the other the dearth of meaning. But which we chose is of no importance, Bloom says. In either case the poet/critic must wrestle for freedom from meaning(lessness): "Either the new poet fights to win freedom from dearth, or from plenitude, but if the antagonist be moderate, then the agon will not take place, and no fresh sublimity will be won. Only the agon is of the essence." (5) Again there is the problem of strength, but I would like to suggest that the positive in this analysis of analysis (or rhetoric of rhetoric, as Bloom prefers), is that there is not focus on the actual freedom, but on the struggle. It is in becoming-poet that is the poet, the canal from fetus to infant. The poetry is in the forgotten margin.

This loops us back to influence. For Bloom, a strong "misreading" of poetry (and we can only misread, it seems) involves reading the (anomalous) ratio between poems/poets (but maybe we have only poems; or to follow Bloom more closely, we have only readings of poems). His reading of Ashbery (which I've not yet finished) is closely tied to his understanding of Stevens and Whitman; it is always read as its influence (forget Foucault). Never, though, because that is where we find truth, or the meaning. Only because (I suspect) that is the only way we can ever read anything--Bloom prefigures, perhaps because of a common affection for Derrica, Spivak's scrupulous mistakes. So not only does Bloom deny authorial authority and the immanence of truth or meaning, but he refuses to search for meaning in the text itself, or even in the reader. Instead, meaning (or perhaps better, reading) comes from the space (and time) between one text and another--or perhaps there is only one text already. The reader--centered by virtue of its subject position--is also always already in the margin, perhaps experiencing its own anxiety of influence.

There is perhaps more I ought to say, particularly by way of critique, but I will forgo that for now, on account of the lateness. The use of this for my abstract is already partly manifest, but I should like to flesh it out some more.

In the original paper I make use only of Bloom's quotation of Burke, and then go on to demonstrate Durand's use of repetition, both on large and small scales, to generate repetition. My analyses (aside: firefox doesn't recognizes analyses?) focus primarily on rhythmic/motivic devises as well as structural (often mistakenly called formal) articulations. I use this in lieu of a more common pitch-class analysis, which seems to me quite out of place in Durand's music, not in the least because of his comment describing his aesthetic for Athanor as "unmodern."

From here Bloom himself becomes more useful. It is interesting to me that Durand could write music like Athanor after studying under Brian Fernyhough, a man who deliberately writes music so complex (or complicated, depending on whom you ask) that even the most virtuosic of performs are constantly, as they perform, forced to decide which mistake they shall make. Athanor stands in stark contrast to Fernyhough's music, just as does that of Reich, Glass and Carter next to the pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger. I worry here that this is too trivial. I'm reading in Durand's music the absence of Fernyhough's. I can complicate this by also reading it for Murail and Grisey, for whom Durand has some respect; the crucial difference here would be Durand's interest or skill with form. This can finally be expanded out to include the "unmodern" and read Athanor particularly as a radical break from and repetition of the modernist--or according to Burke, artistic--refusal of influence. This might suggest that Bloom is writing in circles (which wouldn't surprise, giving his reliance on Freud): if anxiety is posited as a universal for successful art, and if it is typified by absence and difference, then all that is needed to support they hypothesis--and perhaps even to prove it's unescapability--is change.

That's good for now. It's sleepy time.