File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-30.184, message 64


From: Klefkal-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 02:35:43 -0500
Subject: Re: Transnacionala review


So fascism in various forms appears again (and again) because the hungers
that evoked  it were not addressed, only rebuked? Perhaps--  I at least have
that perception here, in this place. Who wants to think about this? I know
that all of you not too long ago kicked Beuys around the town, and don't want
to do it again (Mr. Ostrow kindly sent me, the latecomer, transcripts re B.
and the Big F) but I think that Beuy's project was primarily this--to develop
cultural forms that would provide a detoxified response to those hungers that
fascism was a toxic response to (eurasian nomads rather than master race in a
nation; rhetoric of individual creation ie every even audienceless action
meaningful, rather than rhetoric of reception ie a radio in every home;
nonheirarchical, that is, determinedly concrete rather than abstract, modes
of communication; any insight shrouded in rather ignoble types of flesh
rather than metaphorized as [abstract, beautiful] body; etc., etc.--but all
in response to the perceived evoker of fascism, the desire for the Authentic,
always dangerous but unlikely to go away, and the perception that
Tech/modern/etc was destroying any possibility for real life for most people.
The left seemed to think this way too, vide Max Weber's buddies the
free-love-and-nakedness-on-the-land folks). 
Please don't take offense at this somewhat mechanistic language and
whanged-together history. I don't approach this cavalierly, because I do see
those same hungers becoming sharper, and I think research into how to make
cultural forms that feed them and that are nonpoisonous is essential, for the
human and the nonhuman world. (Both capitalist/communist instrumentality
toward the physical world and fascist instrumental fictions concerning the
"Nature" thing kill off the nonhuman world.)

Apologetically,
Ann Klefstad, writing from
the Microcosm of Northern Europe (containing Little Finland, Little Norway,
Little Croatia, Little Slovenia, Little Germany, Little etc. plus Little
Italy and Little Greece),
Duluth, Minnesota, port town on the prairie.


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