File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0211, message 96


From: "Thomas Taylor" <taylorth-AT-bellsouth.net>
Subject: Re: Dynamism (Love, Where are you leading me now?)
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 21:44:51 -0500


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


Eric, the Creeley thing...

His writing has been an obsession of mine for a good while now, especially his earlier work (For Love, Words, Pieces). For me, he like no other author has opened a poetics in which the brute and seizing tenor of affect (as Lyotard puts it) can be "expressed". (and I thinking of Adorno's version of expression which has nothing to do with content issuing from a subject toward the world, but rather, the exteriorization of the non-I).

In my piece the guiding theoretical texts are those of late Lyotard, Freud's The I and the It (the english ego/id translation is simply wrong in my opinion), and to some extent Lacan's Mirror Phase text. My principal topic is constitution. Bearing psychoanalysis in mind, constitution is never finished. In fact, following the very basic theses of Freud and Lacan, the ego is a fictional entity, constituted as a defense against the centerless turbulence of sensation felt by the infant. This is when the ego is constituted in primary narcissism. Lyotard cashes out more fully the stakes of this defensive ego: infancy will haunt it, affect it, or as he puts it strike it. This will occur in an event out of time, so to speak, in which all boundaries and also all smooth unfoldings of chronology are suspended. Thus constitution is constantly repeated. It is also a wound of sorts. Birth is not happy, and determination will not erase, cannot erase that scar.

By some magic that is entirely his own Creeley is able to bear witness to these instants in which the infancy strikes. He does not give a representation of them, he makes them happen again in all their force.  Look at the violence of his line breaks in his early pieces. They poems themselves grant the instant they treat as a sort of violence. Some blow being given. But what is more, the poem itself "feels" this violence(remember, for the projectivists, language was literally material)  in its line breaks which are counter-syntax. This affect is in turn transferred to the reader. I mention the theoretical framework little as I think it does Creeley more justice if read him and use his own words. In the end, I will be reading the insistence of his eye, the repetitive occurrence of instants narrated in visual language coming up as something Lyotard would have called a return to infancy, total vulnerability.

There is no explicit politics here. But there will be in the piece which follows it. This second piece is a reading of the little-known rhetorical theorist. For him constitution, specifically political in this case,  also involves a suspension of givens. He makes the claim, in the 40's no less, that all acts of rhetoric (literature and war itself included) operate on an implicit theology. For Burke identification is crucial. Terms or interlocutors A and B are in the first instance, absolutely distinct. They are able to communicate by identifying with a shared C. The nuances of this identification will be subject to an infinite debate. That is, identification, the constitutional event is traumatic par excellence. There is no final identification. As such, identification in the end is like the relationship between God and the supplicant. Burke calls this relationship infancy. (Burke is new thing and I am far from finished with him). But perhaps by taking the Creeley piece and the Burke piece (they are distinct essays), through these meditations I can derive a more general theory of traumatic constitution as it relates to political beginnings and re-beginnings. I suppose the next step would be to go head to head with Hobbes. Nations too are defensive fictions. Who knows. The Creeley thing comes first, with the Burke piece in the margins.  The others I could very well be working on for the rest of my life in one way or another. You may want to look to Tom Keenan's reading of The Rights of Man and Citizen in his book Fables of Responsibility, and too, a soon to be published work on Emerson and mourning by Eduardo Cadava provisionally entitled "Mourning America: Emerson and the Guano of History".  I am also writing a piece on Chaim Soutine's Cerait landscapes that is in many ways parallel to the Creeley piece, though it relies much more on the late work of Merleau-Ponty (particularly in the visible and the invisible).

To the others on the list, apologies in advance for the diversion from the present discussion.  If there seems to be an interest, however, I am more than willing to post the three short Creeley poems that I am currently working with.

RT
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Eric
  To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 1:15 PM
  Subject: RE: Dynamism (Love, Where are you leading me now?)


  Rod,

  

  I agree with you completely about the many Lyotards. (The one who keeps me up at night thinking these days is the later one.)

  

  Would you talk a little more about this project with Bob Creeley?

  

  He is a writer who has always interested me. In conjunction with his sidekick Charles Olson, he was a force to be reckoned with back in the fifties with Projectivist Verse, Composition by Open Field and Black Mountain College genetically altering the make-up of American culture.

  

  Did you know Olson is credited as being the first American to use the term 'postmodern' and that the crazy letters  Bob and Charles wrote to each other (Minimum and Maximus) fill 10 volumes, edited by that great scholar George Butterick before his sad and untimely death?

  

  I thinks of these old boys as being out own homegrown Deleuze and Guattari before the letter, acting out first in verse what still needs to be acted out in society at large. They were thinking LARGE when everyone else in America was watching 'Ozzie and Harriet."

  

  Anyway, he is a hero of mine and I even got the chance to see and hear him do a poetry reading a few years back.

  

  eric

  

  -----Original Message-----
  From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas Taylor
  Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 11:16 AM
  To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Subject: Dynamism

  

  Eric, Steve, Glen, Hugh, Lydia, and the phantom readers

  

  Let's remember that this Lyotard fellow is dynamic. He constantly revises himself. One of his ideas is that dogmatic marxism, and party platforms in general have to go. But, and this is a big but, we are lost unless we cling to the sprit which founded marxism.

  

  And by the way, I'm not so sure that either theory advocating and delineating the qualities of a universal subject or an outright rejection of the latter will help to overthrow the Bush regime. Did the people in Seattle say "hey wait, are we a universal subject or not?" as a necessary precursor to the events? Well no.

  

  To return for a moment to some of the critiques of Lyotard. They seem to be coming mostly from Lyotard in his self-named "pagan" period (that which follows the Libidinal Economy and ends in the Differend where the positive and productive aspects of dissensus and paralogy are coming into question). His last period, also self-proclaimed, he calls the intractable. The writings of this period, pomo fables, lectures d'enfance, misere de la philosophie, etc. In them, he holds that there is something in us that will always resist both domination and codification, like the gaze of Soutine's bellhop. These later works bear more on maintaining faith in the face of despair. That is an important point, being that most americas feel that their politics are autonomous and beyond them. This is a faith we must have as a first step to any practical resistance. It is almost Christic, save that we don't even have the advantage of a god on our side as Christ did. If more americans and others realized that "determination will never exhaust birth" (Lyotard) america would have more voters and more vocal resistance.

  

  That said, I would like it if people specified in the future which Lyotard they mean. He thought of his corpus as a plurality and I think we should treat it as such.

  

  As far as the debates on the list are going, they seem to come in the form of quibbles within the left. My take on that is Deleuzean. There is no need to come up with a final philosophy. Philosophy is a toolbox. If this tool works, use it. If a tool with which we are much accustomed does not work for this given situation, put it in reserve for later. Neither a universal subject nor a de-centered subject can be established finally. Use them when they work. I attend to agree with Hardt. Some other form of organizing needs to commence if we are to resist capital itself. Otherwise, there we go back to the state again. Granted, capital has become post-statist (but under the rule of american rome). As such it seems a double task is in order: to resist both america as rome and global capital. But there have to be enough of us with faith (the specific type of faith I mentioned earlier-- not Christian but Christic) to get  this done.

  

  Convoluted and half-thought as ever (forgive me), but enduring the inquisition of grad school applications has taken its toll on the clarity of my thinking. Really all I can think about is Robert Creeley right now (my writing sample).

  

  Cheers all...

  

  

HTML VERSION:

Eric, the Creeley thing...
 
His writing has been an obsession of mine for a good while now, especially his earlier work (For Love, Words, Pieces). For me, he like no other author has opened a poetics in which the brute and seizing tenor of affect (as Lyotard puts it) can be "expressed". (and I thinking of Adorno's version of expression which has nothing to do with content issuing from a subject toward the world, but rather, the exteriorization of the non-I).
 
In my piece the guiding theoretical texts are those of late Lyotard, Freud's The I and the It (the english ego/id translation is simply wrong in my opinion), and to some extent Lacan's Mirror Phase text. My principal topic is constitution. Bearing psychoanalysis in mind, constitution is never finished. In fact, following the very basic theses of Freud and Lacan, the ego is a fictional entity, constituted as a defense against the centerless turbulence of sensation felt by the infant. This is when the ego is constituted in primary narcissism. Lyotard cashes out more fully the stakes of this defensive ego: infancy will haunt it, affect it, or as he puts it strike it. This will occur in an event out of time, so to speak, in which all boundaries and also all smooth unfoldings of chronology are suspended. Thus constitution is constantly repeated. It is also a wound of sorts. Birth is not happy, and determination will not erase, cannot erase that scar.
 
By some magic that is entirely his own Creeley is able to bear witness to these instants in which the infancy strikes. He does not give a representation of them, he makes them happen again in all their force.  Look at the violence of his line breaks in his early pieces. They poems themselves grant the instant they treat as a sort of violence. Some blow being given. But what is more, the poem itself "feels" this violence(remember, for the projectivists, language was literally material)  in its line breaks which are counter-syntax. This affect is in turn transferred to the reader. I mention the theoretical framework little as I think it does Creeley more justice if read him and use his own words. In the end, I will be reading the insistence of his eye, the repetitive occurrence of instants narrated in visual language coming up as something Lyotard would have called a return to infancy, total vulnerability.
 
There is no explicit politics here. But there will be in the piece which follows it. This second piece is a reading of the little-known rhetorical theorist. For him constitution, specifically political in this case,  also involves a suspension of givens. He makes the claim, in the 40's no less, that all acts of rhetoric (literature and war itself included) operate on an implicit theology. For Burke identification is crucial. Terms or interlocutors A and B are in the first instance, absolutely distinct. They are able to communicate by identifying with a shared C. The nuances of this identification will be subject to an infinite debate. That is, identification, the constitutional event is traumatic par excellence. There is no final identification. As such, identification in the end is like the relationship between God and the supplicant. Burke calls this relationship infancy. (Burke is new thing and I am far from finished with him). But perhaps by taking the Creeley piece and the Burke piece (they are distinct essays), through these meditations I can derive a more general theory of traumatic constitution as it relates to political beginnings and re-beginnings. I suppose the next step would be to go head to head with Hobbes. Nations too are defensive fictions. Who knows. The Creeley thing comes first, with the Burke piece in the margins.  The others I could very well be working on for the rest of my life in one way or another. You may want to look to Tom Keenan's reading of The Rights of Man and Citizen in his book Fables of Responsibility, and too, a soon to be published work on Emerson and mourning by Eduardo Cadava provisionally entitled "Mourning America: Emerson and the Guano of History".  I am also writing a piece on Chaim Soutine's Cerait landscapes that is in many ways parallel to the Creeley piece, though it relies much more on the late work of Merleau-Ponty (particularly in the visible and the invisible).
 
To the others on the list, apologies in advance for the diversion from the present discussion.  If there seems to be an interest, however, I am more than willing to post the three short Creeley poems that I am currently working with.
 
RT
----- Original Message -----
From: Eric
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 1:15 PM
Subject: RE: Dynamism (Love, Where are you leading me now?)

Rod,

 

I agree with you completely about the many Lyotards. (The one who keeps me up at night thinking these days is the later one.)

 

Would you talk a little more about this project with Bob Creeley?

 

He is a writer who has always interested me. In conjunction with his sidekick Charles Olson, he was a force to be reckoned with back in the fifties with Projectivist Verse, Composition by Open Field and Black Mountain College genetically altering the make-up of American culture.

 

Did you know Olson is credited as being the first American to use the term =91postmodern=92 and that the crazy letters  Bob and Charles wrote to each other (Minimum and Maximus) fill 10 volumes, edited by that great scholar George Butterick before his sad and untimely death?

 

I thinks of these old boys as being out own homegrown Deleuze and Guattari before the letter, acting out first in verse what still needs to be acted out in society at large. They were thinking LARGE when everyone else in America was watching =91Ozzie and Harriet.=94

 

Anyway, he is a hero of mine and I even got the chance to see and hear him do a poetry reading a few years back.

 

eric

 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas Taylor
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 11:16 AM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Dynamism

 

Eric, Steve, Glen, Hugh, Lydia, and the phantom readers

 

Let's remember that this Lyotard fellow is dynamic. He constantly revises himself. One of his ideas is that dogmatic marxism, and party platforms in general have to go. But, and this is a big but, we are lost unless we cling to the sprit which founded marxism.

 

And by the way, I'm not so sure that either theory advocating and delineating the qualities of a universal subject or an outright rejection of the latter will help to overthrow the Bush regime. Did the people in Seattle say "hey wait, are we a universal subject or not?" as a necessary precursor to the events? Well no.

 

To return for a moment to some of the critiques of Lyotard. They seem to be coming mostly from Lyotard in his self-named "pagan" period (that which follows the Libidinal Economy and ends in the Differend where the positive and productive aspects of dissensus and paralogy are coming into question). His last period, also self-proclaimed, he calls the intractable. The writings of this period, pomo fables, lectures d'enfance, misere de la philosophie, etc. In them, he holds that there is something in us that will always resist both domination and codification, like the gaze of Soutine's bellhop. These later works bear more on maintaining faith in the face of despair. That is an important point, being that most americas feel that their politics are autonomous and beyond them. This is a faith we must have as a first step to any practical resistance. It is almost Christic, save that we don't even have the advantage of a god on our side as Christ did. If more americans and others realized that "determination will never exhaust birth" (Lyotard) america would have more voters and more vocal resistance.

 

That said, I would like it if people specified in the future which Lyotard they mean. He thought of his corpus as a plurality and I think we should treat it as such.

 

As far as the debates on the list are going, they seem to come in the form of quibbles within the left. My take on that is Deleuzean. There is no need to come up with a final philosophy. Philosophy is a toolbox. If this tool works, use it. If a tool with which we are much accustomed does not work for this given situation, put it in reserve for later. Neither a universal subject nor a de-centered subject can be established finally. Use them when they work. I attend to agree with Hardt. Some other form of organizing needs to commence if we are to resist capital itself. Otherwise, there we go back to the state again. Granted, capital has become post-statist (but under the rule of american rome). As such it seems a double task is in order: to resist both america as rome and global capital. But there have to be enough of us with faith (the specific type of faith I mentioned earlier-- not Christian but Christic) to get  this done.

 

Convoluted and half-thought as ever (forgive me), but enduring the inquisition of grad school applications has taken its toll on the clarity of my thinking. Really all I can think about is Robert Creeley right now (my writing sample).

 

Cheers all...

 

 


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