Jasper* calls for more response to the Hoy essay on Flarf; here at sh!, we have only the briefest:
One must respect his impulse, which is to look for the regulatory forces on supposedly autonomous art in the material sphere. Hoy is, more or less, asking the right kind of question. That said, I'm not clear on the source of the villain that Hoy sets out to slay, which isn't Google but the phantasmic promise of flarf as free and unregulated, autonomously critical art. Did a flarfist ever make such a claim, or has Hoy propped up this straw man merely to run him through?
If, for example, one took as evident that flarf proceeded from the assumption that any cultural production, flarf included, bore the imprint of the daily and dominated world from which it was brought into being, Hoy's essay wouldn't be suddenly false, but immediately irrelevant in the most basic ways. His essay depends, for its very existence, not on the nature of flarf, but partial, imprecise and excessive phrases about flarf themselves wrought of the most conventional poetic meta-language.
That is to say: 11,000+ words to, in effect, review blurbs.
This is a rather old story: a rissentiment about the social whirl of poetry presented as a theoretico-aesthetic analysis. The "news" Hoy presents — material conditions reappear in the cultural product — surely can't be news to any flarfist, even the ones who forgot to go to college and ignored any political analysis of art written after about 1857.
If there's anything new-ish to the action, it's the presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such (thanks to Tom Orange for the conversations regarding this topic). For this, Hoy can't be held entirely responsible; the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example, the collection edited by Spahr and Rankine (and the follow-up, Sewell and Rankine), or the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.
This issue — of how responsible poets are, especially those who make some claim on unfamiliarity, for theorizing their own practices — seems worth pondering further. This is true in part for exactly how historicizable an issue it might indeed be; it does seem inseparable from the endless parallel debates about the increasing academicization of poetry and the increasing centrality of the writing workshop.
Last things we'd like to know: what does Craig Dworkin think? What does (sigh) Jackson Mac Low think?
* ps to Jasper: sure, Cixous, but for those of us who can't make it, it's Balibar you want at least as much!
Posted by jane at February 10, 2006 08:16 AM | TrackBack