September 28, 2005
Busman's Holiday (slight returns)
On the shuttle from Los Angeles, a man in business casual made effective use of tarmac time via mobile phone, spread some enthusiastic positive cheer among a couple contacts. He was perhaps thirtyfive, good-looking in a blandish way, and when it was time to shut off electronic devices he turned to flirting genially with the flight attendants. He was pretty good at all of this.
Once we hit altitude, he cracked open his computer and watched an episode of The Apprentice on dvd; that much I could see from my seat, though not which season or etc. Given what I knew about him: his faith in charm and people skills, his carefully-smoothed drive, his refusal to waste a minute, his — to get to the heart of the matter — total elision of leisure and biz...given all this, it was hard to understand his viewing choice as anything but dual-purpose. Sure, he was in it for the "entertainment," the diversion for the length of the flight (LAX-OAK, as it happpens, is almost exactly the length of an hour program with the commercials dumped: 48-52 min, depending on show). But he was also studying. He was pursuing his education in junior-executage.
This is perhaps obvious, but hadn't really struck me before with such force: that watching The Appprentice, even if one is certain one is just mordantly amused by the cravenness and the "drama" in the abstract, is just watching work, viewing a loosely-idealized allegory of one's own labor life, with scheduled lessons in how-to-get-ahead. Many viewers probably don't think they're engaging in continuing education; some, I am now pretty sure, do. And I think they're the ones who get it: that the winning appeal of the show is that it counts double. It's entertainment that counts as prep, or vice versa; the return of Dale Carnegie books packaged as amusement.
And in this way it's a substantial increment of progress, of a sort. About the victory of leisure over play (in which television takes a historic role), about the putting of "free time" in the service of being a better, more refreshed laborer, much has been written. Nor is the idea particularly new that cultural entertainments often serve to educate and prepare people for a certain kind of work life. Still, The Apprentice seems like a next chapter in this history, in which leisure abandons even its pretence and agreeably takes the aspect of homework.
Is this true of "reality programming" in general?
September 26, 2005
But Wait A Minute!
Isn't George W. Bush somehow not allowed to suggest folks "conserve gasoline" in the face of rising prices? Isn't the kernel of his economic belief structure based around the idea that what regulates consumption is the price? Supply and demand, that kind of thing? Hypothetically, if there were an actual need to conserve, because, say, there wasn't enough of something, this limited supply would produce an increased demand which would drive the prices up until they were so prohibitive that demand decreased, and prices with it. But for some reason this isn't happening; something has forced the American president to take a stand directly opposed to the basic tenets of his own beliefs (also, by the way, the beliefs of the Republican and Democratic parties).
So what gives? Could it be that, even with a certain portion of the population priced out of the gasoline market (let's call them, by definition, "the poor"; you'll note that this priced-out-ness generally takes the form of not having a car; you might recall these good folks, and the implications of priced-out-ness, from recent photos of New Orleans) there is still so much wealth-of-nation focused among the remainder (heck, let's call'em "the rich") that the whole prohibitive thing just can't work; the rich are now so rich that they simply cannot be priced out of any market? Is it possible that the human-caused great imbalance of nature that all those backpack-bearing, ecopoetics-loving, wildlife-preservation-funding people talk about is in fact inseparable from the imbalance of wealth?
Intermediate Episode
...(or, "My Simul-Trip to Australia"). Three poems from the forthcoming book are to be found in a Jacket, the twenty-eighth of many.
September 25, 2005
Notes on Music
The Title of My Next Album: Sunday, Buddy, Sunday.
The Title of Jay-Z's Triple-Disc Hits Collection: The Quality of Marcy Is Not Strained.
Better Than You Think: "Bring Me Down" Miranda Lambert. This is the third great single from her debut album (after "Kerosene" and "Me and Charlie Talking").
On the Lambert Case Way Before Me: Caramanica.
Only Other Person with as Great a Third Single Against Equally Unlikely Odds: Ciara, "Ohhh."
Possibly the Song of the Year, Certainly the Drinking Song of the Year, and a Total Essay on Exactly What's So Detestable About the Particular Nature of Kenny Chesney's "Laidbackness": "Alcohol," Brad Paisley.
Exactly What's So Detestable About the Particular Nature of Kenny Chesney's "Laidbackness": Well, it's not that it's contrived, exactly; I mean, everything's contrived, right? But it's the way it was contrived in advance of anything else, so that the only thing a song can possibly be is an expression of that pre-existent laidbackness. The songs themselves aren't laid back; they're just oportunistic.
Could You Offer a Brand Name for That Laidbackness, Please: It is, that is to say, and the Artist Formerly Known As Mr. Zellweger will in fact be very happy that I believe this, Jimmy Buffet laidbackness. This is not laidbackness as an experience but a worldview; mandated and absolutist, Jimmy Buffet laidbackness is totalitarian laidbackness.
On the Other Hand: Brad Paisley seems to discover the loopy good times of the song line by line, lick by lick...as if he starts out worrying that his song which is in fact narrated by alcohol itself might still be a temperance tale, but the good times, instead of coming back to bite him on the ass, just get good-timier. Yes, there will be a hangover. No, there is no Margaritaville. Yes, the song does revolve around the capacity of a) beer, b) Jack, and c) wine to make white people dance.
Even Better Than: "I Love This Bar."
September 22, 2005
I Like Nike (but wait a minute!)
Having never lost my capacity for surprise, which probably marks me as naive, I can only wonder at the latest television spot for General Electric.
There are commercials that misdirect the clear rhetoric of the songs they use very much on purpose, as in the case of Nike's "Revolution," for example, and that's one kind of irony. Then there are the advertisements that seem cheerily indifferent to the songs they use, buoyed by the musical energy: Carnival Cruise Lines' deployment of "Lust for Life," wherein joyous shuffleboarders cavort whilst Iggy reminds us that he's had it in the ear before, of course; that's another kind of irony.
I'm not quite sure how to name the irony of GE's new spot for the wonders of coal (which is abundant...and organic!), which features the song "Sixteen Tons." I'm not sure which version they've used; not my favorite, I don't think (Tennessee Ernie Ford). But no matter; they haven't bothered to change the lyrics at all. And so we are treated to the spectacle of a pitch for coal, scored to a melliflous voice noting explicitly and directly the murderous misery of the life of the coal miner, with the exhausted rage directed right at the boss, including the whole chorus: not just "another day older and deeper in debt," but "I owe my soul to the company store."
How does this happen? How does that conversation work? When will Nike start using "Shut 'Em Down"?
Music Criticism As It Should Be
...even if I don't agree with the taste. By Robbie Fulks, concerning Fountains of Wayne, from Steve via Orrin:
September 16, 2005
Poetics
0.0 Prologue.
0.1 First, this is a long note. I didn’t write it in one sitting, and hope you’ll take your time reading it, if you are moved to do so at all.
0.2 I’m not going to drive myself mad hyperlinking every possible reference, though I think good faith requires that, if I have in mind at some moment a specific passage, I should try to cite it as best I am able.
0.3 But I am going to use this analytical-style organization, mostly as a sort of guide to keep me from getting unclear, over-dense, and muddling my antecedents. Or so Franklin can make fun of me. This is not an attempt to prove anything via some rigorous logic, but rather to draw together some interesting poetics discussions among some bloggers from this summer. It moves from some particular discussions form this summer toward a more general set of claims. I will hope that what I gain clarity I won’t lose in seeming schematic. You can read the whole note (it extends through 10.3) by clicking below.
0.0 Prologue.
0.1 First, this is a long note. I didn’t write it in one sitting, and hope you’ll take your time reading it, if you are moved to do so at all.
0.2 I’m not going to drive myself mad hyperlinking every possible reference, though I think good faith requires that, if I have in mind at some moment a specific passage, I should try to cite it as best I am able.
0.3 But I am going to use this analytical-style organization, mostly as a sort of guide to keep me from getting unclear, over-dense, and muddling my antecedents. Or so Franklin can make fun of me. This is not an attempt to prove anything via some rigorous logic, but rather to draw together some interesting poetics discussions among some bloggers from this summer. It moves from some particular discussions form this summer toward a more general set of claims. I will hope that what I gain clarity I won’t lose in seeming schematic.
0.4 I’m going to need to use some swift method for indicating a constellation of tendencies in contemporary poetry and poetics — a constellation of which a perfectly fine example would be the poems in The Hat, which is where this started anyway. Since I’m writing in words, this indicating method will probably have to be a word or two; really, it will be a label for a complex category of poetics concepts and behaviors. Categories are preparation for thinking, sez Deleuze. Listen, I know labels are bad. I know there will be abreactions to any use of “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “post-language,” “post-avant,” and so on (in fact, there’s a critique of the current use of the concept “avant-garde” below). I know that any label limits unfairly the complex it is trying to index, and that said complex is neither reducible nor univocal. I know also that labels risk becoming brand names. So I hope, given that we all know these things, that we can move forward without haggling over these specifics, agreeing we are doing the best we can given the constraints of this whole word/category/concept problem. I will admit any term I use is insufficient; you will not pretend not to know, more or less, what array of poets and poems I’m talking about. Okay?
0.5 Now I have to choose a label that will succeed in indicating something important about the constellation, but which at the same time doesn’t beg the questions I am trying to ask here. The poetries to which I mean to refer share, in some (non-totalizing, anti-hegemonic blah blah blah) way, an interest in not replicating the poetics currently most successfully and broadly canonized and commoditized (insofar as such things are possible in the field of contemporary poetry). I’m going with “emergent poetics,” per Raymond Williams via Steve Evans. In fact, this set of notes can’t help but be, in the end, a defense of that particular terminology at the very same time that it tries to get at what is indicated by such a term.
1.0 Levinas.
1.1 I agree with Jordan and Josh and Jean-Luc that Levinas is a good first call when considering the intersection of Judeo-Christian terms and transcendental ethics (hey, I’m from Berkeley, and thus mandated to find quasi-infinite explicatory power in — nope, not Marx — Levinas and Heidegger). However...
1.2 ...I’m not sure anything is Levinasian simply by virtue of finding itself at this crossroads of ethics and belief.
1.3 For example, here’s the end of the Tanya Larkin poem “Heaven and Hell Are Real Places” (p.93) that I really like, as I like all her poems:
...I thank God for giving me autumn
and unwrapping it so violently shaking
the knife in the air nicking the light then
hacking it in two and mincing it to bits
and my happiness in this infinitely dying
light what would I do if I couldn’t release
a little liquid now and then I would die
of happiness for sure I would burst.
This is fantastically energetic; it catches me up and carries me along, wildly vivid, and it breaks lines perfectly.
1.4 Still, as with the proliferation of Hat poems that invoke Judeo-Christian (and let’s be direct, in these poems there’s an emphasis on the Christian portion of that convenient yoking) language, I don’t see all that much poetic engagement with the Levinasian conception of the asymmetric relation with the Other on which his ethics is founded, in a way that I clearly do in, for example, Jean-Luc Godard.
2.0 Godard.
2.1 It’s not the fact that he has his lead character in Notre Musique recite phrases from Entre Nous.
2.2 It’s the way he frames things, and the montage, mostly.
2.3 Godard is Levinasian not as a matter of content, of image-text, but as a formal expression of relations between things within a frame; relations between frames; and relations between the camera and things.
3.0 Brand-name Scholarship.
3.1 All that being said, I agree strongly with Jordan (again!) that what’s at stake here isn’t the particular famous scholar whose remarks most resemble some poem or another (though Jordan seems to think that’s what I was up to; not so). I mentioned the names I did, not to suggest this dude is like Agamben, that dude is like Virilio,...
3.2 ...but as highly-visible flags, one might say, revealing a general cultural-historical wind. I was suggesting that the apparitions of Christianity in The Hat might have been raised and swirled about by this same wind that raised and swirled the apparitions of Christianity in recent critical philosophy (a category which does not, as it happens, include Levinas, though he may well be both the most relevant fore-runner and individual cause).
3.3 That is, I wonder if, by considering both all this God etc in The Hat, and a certain turn in recent critical philosophy, as related phenomena, I might be able to think better about what might be going on in history in relation to all this.
4.0 History & Poetry.
4.1 Poetry — and this is equally true for emergent poetics and for its counterparts, dominant and residual poetics (to stick with Williams’ terms from "Structures of Feeling") — happens in history, and articulates the basic social relations present in history, up to and including the present.
4.2 It does this without necessarily intending to, sheerly because poetry (et al) is formed by consciousnesses which in turn are formed by the social relations in which they develop.
5.0 Marxist Criticism.
5.1 To draw together a seemingly different discussion which has occupied some of the same poet/bloggers and some others (see references for example by Ange, Josh, Jasper, Henry, and Jeffrey; some specific links are found below, 5.4-7), the preceding section above is the basis of what gets called Marxist criticism.
5.2 The claim (4.1) is Marx’s own, a corollary to his basic tenet “We know only one science, the science of history.” Relevant to the discussion of religion and poetry, it’s worth recalling that this statement is the kernel of Marx’s departure from Hegel, and from Hegel’s philosophy of “spirit.” As someone or other said, perhaps Jameson, it’s the idea that “set the dialectic on its feet.”
5.3 The second claim (4.2) can be found all over the place but is perhaps best located in Lukacs’ idea of “imputed consciousness” (the title chapter of History and Class Consciousness), an idea which bridged Marx’s interests in politics and economics with later/Frankfurt School investigations of aesthetic production.
5.4 Marxist analysis of poetics, thus, is not primarily interested in the political views expressed in a poem,...
5.5 ...and certainly doesn’t demand that poems articulate a certain politics or ideology, either in content or form,...
5.8 Marxist criticism doesn’t even require you to “believe” in whatever the hell “Marxism” is, in class conflict, workers’ internationals, communism, universal health care, redistribution of wealth, etc.
5.9 (same as 4.1 above!) It just asks how any given poem, while doing the many many things a poem might do, articulates the historical conditions in which it appears — admittedly with the suspicion that economic relations between people constitute a fundamental force shaping those conditions.
6.0 Emergent Poetics & History.
6.1 Though all poetries express historical conditions, emergent poetics has far more at stake in considering recent history and “current events,” and its relation to them, than do its counterparts.
6.2 For residual poetics, the relationship to history must always be one of nostalgia, insofar as it must hearken back to the period when it was still a vital fact. This nostalgia is able to take on the guise of fury, as residual poetry looks back in anger at the bygone era of its eminence which has betrayed it by not enduring.
6.3 Though dominant poetics may first appear as the poetics of the present, insofar as “the present” is the time of its domination, it is in fact not committed to the present but an interminable non-time. It prefers the belief that things have always been as they are — that is, a belief that the conditions in which it dominates are not historical but universal and timeless. Thus, its dominance is both indefinitely assured and, more relevantly, is not to be questioned, as it is an inevitable result of unchanging and unchangeable conditions. See also: transcendental claims, “common sense.”
6.4 Emergent poetics is, by definition, emerging along with emerging historical conditions. It’s the category of poetics that stakes its existence on both the presence and changeability of history. It is uncertain.
6.5 Hence, while emergent poetics is not in any way duty-bound to have the conscious intent to discuss, describe, theorize or thematize (or etc) historical conditions or “current events,” it must accept itself as an expression of these things.
7.0 Emergent Poetics & Politics.
7.1 Insofar as acting on the present to change it is the name of politics, emergent poetics is inevitably understood to believe in politics.
7.2 This is not to say that emergent poetics believes in any certain politics (one could imagine an emergent poetics that took as its politics a belief in fascism. Indeed, there is no need to imagine this).
7.3 Much of the reluctance about politics in emergent poetics (and this reluctance too is part of history) comes from the knowledge that, unlike the cases of dominant and residual poetics, the relation to politics must be negotiated, and cannot be refused.
7.4 Poems are, among many other things, expressions of that negotiation. However, they are not the negotiation itself...
7.5 ... and thus politics resides with the poet in social space, not with the poem. “Political action” or “activism” are proper to the poet, not the poem.
7.6 What emergent poetics might be said to share with political action is not identity (this is both liberating and disheartening). They are joined in the sharing of an understanding and a willingness: that history’s present is changeable, and that one proceeds without any certainty about results.
8.0 Emergent Poetics & the Term “Avant-Garde.”
8.1 The familiar critique from within, as it were, of “avant-gardism” rightly worries about the role of the vanguard, and the potentially or inevitably elitist politics of such conceptions.
8.2 Regarding the present discussion, however, the problem with the term “avant-garde” (and similar, including “post-avant”) is that it proposes the possibility of being ahead of history, while the poetics it means to index is defined by its participation in ongoing history.
8.3 Or, as Raoul Vaneigem put it 40 years ago, "Are we avant-garde? If so, to be avant-garde means to move in step with reality."
9.0 Emergent Poetics & the Term “Experimental.”
9.1 Everything that happens in the present belongs to the present.
9.2 A given poem — which is by definition of the present, not for the present — can’t rightly be called “experimental.”
9.3 However, because emergent poetics doesn’t accept the set of facts currently on offer (about poetry or about social relations) as the complete or stable set of facts, it shares something with the concept of “experiment.”
9.4 This congruence must perforce be found not in the poem but in emergent poetics’ “attitude,” in the sense of the passage “We wish to transform these times (to which everything we love, beginning with our experimental attitude, also belongs), and not to ‘write for it.’”
10.0 A Kind of Summary.
10.1 The ideas of religion, politics, activism, avant-gardes, experimentalism — all these things belong to the history of the present, and to emergent poetics’ stance toward the present. They do not belong to a given poem; they can’t; to say that they must risks not merely injunction but nonsense.
10.2 Given poems might take up any of these matters and an infinity more. While these might be contingent (e.g. politics, “the news”) or transcendental themes (e.g. God, love), these remain expressions of an emerging history.
10.3 Poems are indeed free to do anything but leave the present.
Update Your Lexical Atlases
According to a joint press release from Ern Malley, Kent Johnson, and the Piltdown Man, hoaxes will still be delivered into the home via hoaxial cable. However, they will now be understood to come, one and all, from the state of Hoaxaca. Please note: this is pronounced "Oaxaca."
MyJarnot Line
I was raised not by parents but by my many groovy friends, who smoked pot and were nice to me and coerced me into pretending for many years that I liked reggae (and the blues, and Sparks, and some band called Wishbone Ash that I still think I've never heard). As a result, when I made my move (my move consisted of this: dragging a half-dozen people from a Grateful Dead concert, MSG '87, uptown to this bar with a video jukebox, and forcing them all to sit through Debbie Gibson's "Only In My Dreams," which none of them liked, but sheesh did I feel free), and was suddenly free to revile reggae, I did so with a passion which I feel it deserves and which mostly continues to this day (except when one travels to other countries and discovers that to dislike reggae in, say, Italy, would be like disliking hip-hop in the United States: it's so much a basic building block of pop that rejecting everything with a reggae component would mean effectively reneging on any deal to be part of the present).
All that said, Welcome to Jamrock (or you can download here). I have only two things to say about this song. One, it rules, with an intense and extreme rulingness. Two, Damian Marley, among all the current humans currently likely to float across my video screen here at the Western World, by far more than does anyone else, resembles a young Osama bin Laden. Once that occurs to you, this shot from the video is weird.
September 13, 2005
(Make It) Run For Its Money
The registering within poetic communities of how everything, even the critique of commodification, gets commodified, comes in [at least — ed.] two flavors. The first can be summarized as Well, it's become a fact of life, and we should all just get both over it and with it, which is to say, stop complaining and ride the current as best you can, p.s. you're already compromised, p.p.s., they've done so well they must be onto something. No links needed for various exemplars of this tradition, I trust. The other flavor looks more like a despairing measure-taking of how much effort it would require to exceed the current horizons of recuperation technology.
Neither of these has much appeal. But it seems worth mentioning that only one of thm is dialectical. The Moderns, for example, understood this very same problem and if it didn't finally solve it (couldn't, by its very nature, according to the elegant, sorrowing argument of T. J. Clark), well, they conspired with history to produce Modernism by trying.
Or to pose the difference between the two stances differently: the former takes the position of the knife-bearer in Frank O'Hara's parable and indeed gives up, simply because, you know, capitalism was a track star at Mineola Prep.
September 12, 2005
Notes From the Fields
The following passages are taken from an article reprinted far and wide; this version is from MSNBC.
“Obviously stealing things like TV sets or beer or any items that aren’t crucial for survival, that’s a nonstarter,” said Mark Bernstein, a professor of applied ethics at Purdue University. “There would be no ethicist in the country that would think that’s proper behavior.”
But he quickly made an analogy: If the only pharmacy nearby were closed, and it had a drug your mother needed to stay alive, breaking into the pharmacy would be the right thing to do."
“If it’s truly for survival — and I emphasize that, really for your children or wife — I think you have an obligation to your family that is at least as strong as the respect you have to pay other property owners,” he said.
Study Question: obviously we all agree that the two pillars of culture are blood kinship and private property. Am I right in understanding that this means that if my friend, say Sasha, needed medication, it would be ethical to let him die rather than to bump and run for insulin?
By Thursday, National Guard, state and local police were deployed from search-and-rescue operations specifically to restore order to the city.
Jan Boxill, associate director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, draws a clear line: Looting on its face is wrong because it’s stealing.
Study Question: ignoring for the moment that the sentence "Looting on its face is wrong because it’s stealing" has no logical basis, despite its appeal to logic (or is that just common sense?), am i right to understand this sentence as asserting that the right to private property is actually without peer as the single highest value of ethics, and can never be contravened within an ethical structure?
But she said New Orleans appears to have regressed into what ethicists call the state of nature — an atmosphere without rules or infrastructure, where the needs are so great that anything goes.
“It isn’t that it justifies it,” she said, “but where there’s no laws that can help anybody, one way or the other, obviously people need what they need to survive.”
Study Question: does this indicate that there are no ethics or justifications in a "state of nature"? And by what definition is a circumstance where the stuff "people need" is still behind locks a "state of nature"? Wouldn't "looting" in fact be impossible in a state of nature (even in the Hobbesian sense) since private property is not in fact a natural state?
Meta-Question: are these solecisms proper to ethicists or to language?
September 09, 2005
Stating the Obvious About Common Sense II
Proposition: When what's interesting, useful and challenging about a given claim lies in its engagement with complex, nuanced social relations without betraying that complexity, those interested in attacking the claim will often do so not by refuting it, but by restating it as if it were a simple claim, which in that format turns out to be insufficient, dogmatic, and/or absurd on the face of it — to fail the test of "common sense."
Pragmatic Example: conventional critiques of Barthes' idea of "the Death of the Author."
Sub-Proposition: "Common sense," which purports to general applicability, actually requires the simplification of its object before it can be applied.
Corollary: "Common sense" is not logic, which can deal with problems of any degree of complexity, as long as they are logical problems.
Sub-sub-proposition: "Common sense" does not deal with complex problems. At best, it is an expression of a desire for a world without complex problems.
September 06, 2005
Where's David Perry's Blog?
Brooks Landon wants to make t-shirts that say "New Orleans: From the People Who Brought You Baghdad." As phrases go, I think often as well of the subhead to David Perry's lost blog, something very much like "Slo-Mo Mega-Mogadishu," which I take to be a description of the current unfolding state of affairs in Iraq, as apt as it is sonically tense.
It has seemed as well like a useful caption for New Orleans, for the particular revelatory unconcealing of the way that, within the First World which is the United States, Third World spaces are folded in; what is the Convention Center but a "weak state" in a bell jar, its "chaos" simply the name for having been abandoned as irrelevant by the administrative superpower?
The Third World imagery is powerful; aside from style of dress depicted, the photos of refugees trudging along a train track with their possessions slung over shoulders might as well come from Ethiopia under famine, Cambodia under carpet-bombing, Izmit under the earthquake. But it may be a mistake to leap to such comparisons, as if this were a new reality for "us," the unheraled arrival of an image-fact from a foreign world indicating a domestic state of exception.
New Orleans (and it is these images I am thinking of, by which I don't mean to ignore the devastation of Biloxi and Gulfport, and the rest) may look like nothing we've seen in the U.S. before. But this would simply be to think that a film on fast-foward is unrelated to the real-time version. The reality of New Orleans is neither new nor exceptional; it is an ongoing American reality, merely amplified by the speed at which the horror has unfolded.
It is neither a singular, implacable natural disaster nor a failure of the Bush administration (the false binary currently on offer). Or, rather, it's both those things — and both those things are relatively predictable, even familiar elements of a present history. Cynical political regimes and "natural disasters" happen, regularly.
They are morphemes of an American narrative already in the middle of being told all over the place; the images of the last week are, to say it another way, the tip of an image-iceberg which perhaps we might now recognize as a way-things-are. The city-moment that the New Orleans flood most resembles is not some far-flung disaster zone, not some it-can't-happen-here happpening, against all odds, here. What we are watching is not slo-mo mega-Mogadishu, but time-lapse Detroit.
The precondition is radical stratification of wealth in the urban area, in part caused by deregulation and union failure. Then the "disaster" starts: first comes the destruction and abandonment of the urban center's infrastructure; the relocation of massive portions of the remaining population to single, enclosed structures for more efficient state management; then comes departure for those who can afford it (at speed, this is called evacuation; over years it's known as white flight); the abandonment of the urban center to the inevitable results of food shortages, absolute social alienation, and despair; the not-quite-speakable consideration of making official the unofficial policy of letting the city rot and vanish from the face of the world; the contravening plan to recapitalize the city on massive scale, featuring tax abatements and other subsidies for corporate developers, which will reintegrate the races and classes downtown in a humanitarian fashion by promising economic benefits in the traditional format (jobs for the poor, profits for the wealthy), all the while ignoring the fact that even in the best case, the economics of reconstruction are only possible because of the initial, sanctioned obliteration.
It's an economy based on the planned obsolescence of cities, with each cycle benefitting those who operate the turning wheel's mechanism, while immiserating those who are born and broken on it. Why interfere with anything that speeds the cycle? But again, that logic leads to a demonology of the current President, and that would be a convenient, emotionally understandable mistake. It involves misunderestimating the whole by fixing on a part. Perhaps it is also a kind of wishful thinking, an attempt at patience and optimism: like a given natural disaster, a given presidency ends. Either way, it is a consciousness defined by a blindness to the systemic conditions which have determined Detroit and New Orleans equally.
This current cycle will not end with this president, any more than Detroit's cycle ended with Reagan's departure. Administrations are indeed expressions of cycles, not causes. Aid now; change at a structural level; one more try if you want to be citizens.
Reading Notes
Paragraph by paragraph summary of the editor's note explaining the cover of the new issue of Fence magazine.
1) I am a feminist; I am using tits to sell stuff.
2) Fence Volume 6, number 2, Fall/Winter 2003 was a good issue.
3) It didn't sell...
4) ...because the cover art was too artsy.
5) Tits are a very successful strategy for selling stuff. They succeed in signifying abstract satisfactions. Our naked model may breastfeed some day.
6) Tits are in fact only about breastfeeding (which I am doing). My baby has an unconflicted relation to this. Why not give people what they want?
7) Yeay for the tits on the cover!
One notes that the crucial logical pivot (and I invoke logic as the note is entirely in the rhetoric of reasoned argument) happens within graf 5, wherein the empirical fact that tits are used, successfully it would seem, to sell commodities somehow leads both to the idea that tits stand in for good desires which deserve to be satisfied and that, somehow (this is the perplexing part) tits thus should be used to sell things. That these desires are not in fact satisfied by buying the things sold with tits goes elided.
The deeper presumption is that marketing — a purely pragmatic category, no matter how much it appeals rhetorically to psychoanalytic or anthropological concepts — can be measured regarding abstract categories such as aesthetics or ethics. This is absurd on the face of it. However, it is perhaps the nature of the measure that's more troubling than its futile application. The formula for measurement is: if it's economically successful, it's good. While I certainly recognize that claim, it is not a defense of the wonders of the female breast; it's the market formulation of the idea "might makes right."
