June 22, 2005
Almost Geniuses
One ought note, without hesitation or spite, the flaws in the discourse of phauxetrydotcom. They do not require lingering over, as they aren’t reparable. In no particular order: a) the calculations supposing profits by poetry contest operators are not even close; b) “outing” the shocking behavior of corrupt poets (of whom I’m apparently one) will no more bring down those poets than will a gotcha photo of Britney Spears fisting a transvestite dwarf ruin her career; it’s just more of the porn which gives people salacious and spiteful stuff to talk about at parties, which is all they really wanted anyway; c) some of the cathexes are pretty obviously problematic and more obviously misogynistic -- one needn’t spend too much time with the language on the bulletin boards to watch impotent male rage find its traditional phrases ("I do not like Jorie Graham,/" begins one contribution, "I do not like her, she is a ham/I do not like her small rack/I do not like her verbal flack..."); and the real howler, d) the legalistic solecism: over and over, the librarian and his visitors explain that if a lottery (or McDonald’s giveaway or etc) were won by a friend of the proprietor, it would be a crime, as if that had some bearing. It’s a doubly empty analogy...
For one thing, such games are premised on chance, and the promise that everyone who enters has an exactly equal one, while poetry contests are not; they are not in logical or legal fact the same kind of game. More damningly, the phauxetry argument in fact depends on the contest’s subjective nature; one could scarcely denounce the winner of a contest to, say, demonstrate cold fusion because the scientist knew the judge. Fusion happens, or it doesn’t. So the argument in question requires on the one hand that poetry’s value be entirely subjective, but on the other hand that the contest be an objective game of chance. There is, one might say, not much legal traction here.
And, having said that, I’d also like to point out that there’s something not just poignant but prickly about this curious quest. The basic sense is this:
• that the game is rigged;
• that it’s rigged in favor of those who already have power, access to power, or something to trade for power other than pure merit;
• that the game is controlled from above by a relatively few oligarchs who rig the game not simply to benefit personal friends but to maintain the game’s hierarchy;
• that the oligarchs have so much influence that they are largely exempt from considerations of fairness;
• that the game depends on infusions of cash from entry-level participants, who comprise the base of the hierarchy;
• that the promise made to those entering the game is that they can ascend the hierarchy based on pure merit;
• that, as we have noted, this is in fact not the case;
• that neither does the money return to those stuck at the bottom, but is used instead to administer the game;
• that the administering of the game is merely a term for maintaining the power of the powerful, and the powerlesness of the weak;
• and that any excess money is simply taken as profit by parties higher up the hierarchy.
This is an imperfect description of American poetry, at best -- but this may be only to say that, the smaller a sector it occupies, the less that a specific subsystem follows the general systemic rules. Whatever their innacuracies regarding the business of American poetry, they have described rather perfectly the business of America. Dude, there is a hierarchy. It is economic. It does require that value be put in by a vast number of rubes at the bottom, a value which by everyone’s account is returned in fraction only. The part that doesn’t come back does go to richer people, who use a substantial portion of their wealth to make sure that the order of the game undergoes no fundamental changes. The suckers are convinced to play via a vast and aggressively promulgated promise of class mobility, but the data say that class mobility is a myth.
In short, the shocking revelations that phauxetry achieved via a close inspection of the territory are exactly what anyone who isn’t severely mentally deficient could determine by taking the measure of free market capitalism. So my questions: How can these folks a) not settle for the sad but less-than-shocking knowledge that po-biz succeeds reasonably well in expressing the basics of social relations, what with being part of them and all, and b) not identify the source of their misery as those social relations themselves? With half of what they figured out, a person of conscience would become an actual political activist, a socialist, an anarchist, something other than a captive of his own facile rissentiment.
Posted by jane at June 22, 2005 10:31 AM | TrackBack