The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence. Leslie Scalapino
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happening explains the whole away.
it invalidates it by being experience
Bob Perelman argued (in his talk at the Assembling Alternatives symposium—attended by poets and professors from United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, China, and elsewhere—at the University of New Hampshire, 1996) that contemporary poets working in ‘experimentalist’ modes have failed because their writing, by being its formal medium—(that is, cognition being changed by its articulation)—does not have “social power” (in that poetry does not communicate with large numbers of the public).
His argument and his own writing practice imply a writing based on the use of social stereotype as a polemical device—which thus eschews one’s ‘interior’ thought/shape/motions articulated as motions/shape in syntax.
“Life opens into conceptless perspectives. Language surrounds chaos.”4 In an exchange in the Los Angeles Times between John Ashbery and reviewer Alexander Theroux, Theroux declares:
I am unaware of shooting at any bêtes noires in my review of his [Ashbery’s] books other than those [Pound, Stein, Olson, Zukofsky] who practice the crapulous and farcically self-defeating act of offering bad or half-made work under the guise of serious poetry to be pondered, when it remains in fact impossible to be understood…. Obscurantism is morally wrong precisely for the lie it tells in the pretense of coming forward with the truth it simultaneously—and always posturingly—refuses to divulge…. How can a poet of such byzantine contrivances miss my homely truth? Who should know better than he the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of calling gibberish “poetry” or nonsense “modernist”? We have evidence he is able to write a simple line. What kind of modernist mind do we need to understand “Once I let a guy blow me …”
The notion of “communication,” articulated as synonymous with power and as if a product with a normative format, is a slogan now at the same time that the schools and education are being contracted/denuded, to offer—to those who are not wealthy—curricula limited in informative, let alone exploratory, investigative content (such as history), that which is subject to conjecture.
Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy—it is writing that is conjecture.
‘Obscurantism’ is related to the market notion of ‘current history’ (the effect—the ‘social’—has already occurred supposedly) as cost-effective; the effect (of social power, or lack thereof) being assessed in present-time unrelated to the substance of occurrence.
Thought or apprehension—in this conception of utility—is not (to be) in relation to action which occurs (or as it occurs) outside.
All demonstrations (as writing or speaking) are sidetracked by being defined as a category. There’s no answer to one as that would admit of something other into the conversation.
At a time when bookstores are closing, the market argument is that books are not needed because they won’t sell. Barnes & Noble is receiving manuscripts from publishers to guide editors as to which manuscripts should be published based on projected sales. Big chains crush other bookstores, as well as publishing companies (Barnes & Noble’s market advantages, and its selection against non-format books). “And the diluted formalism of the academy (the formal culture of the U.S.) is anemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality.”5
The notion of defining ‘the life’ narrative as inferior is also defining what ‘the life’ is.
Defining is conceptualizing that separation of the public and ‘interior’ as power.
Writing may be discursive connections or stream-series of distillation of apprehension, the acknowledgment of its narrative being its scrutiny. The contemporary poetic-polemics association of “narrative” as being only convention—‘experience’ thus denigrated, not regarded as exploratory—in fact does not allow scrutiny of one’s own polemic.
There is a conflation in leftist thought with conservative thought in devaluing writing/experience as demonstration/process (rather than doctrine-based). “Procedure” or formalism as modes of writing are embraced by both.
A characteristic of conservative thought is iteration of tradition for its own sake, valuable in that it is that. Social conditioning is transcended—there is no “other”—rather than perspective itself being seen being created. Without the conception of the social as phenomenological, actions that are rebellious in response to whatever conditions, are seen as ‘personal’ merely. Articulating outside’s warp imitated as being one—is interpreted as one’s being unable to comprehend, couldn’t put things together.6 A syntax that is this dismemberment will be incomprehensible in the framework of conservative thought (one characteristic of which: conception of the past as entity to be preserved as being the present). In terms of a conservative framework, ‘dis-location’ is seen as merely personal aberration or failure to comprehend the whole, rather than strategic and phenomenological.
Phenomenological ‘dis-location’ in writing is strategic and specific, detail arising from or noting social conditions or background; which conservative ideology regards as without transcendence, transient. Yet such transience is change as writing’s subject (in avant garde or radical practices).
The view of aberration as failure is an exclusion that is an action, rendering what it defines as minor to the condition of nonexistent or irrelevant ‘over-time.’ (As if there were an ‘objective’ cultural basis that becomes or is ‘history.’)
Polemics was to be demonstration (that was the intention)—yet now poetry is society’s secret interior—thought’s demonstration is scrutiny (there is no ‘history,’ because that is merely a description of an overview)—in that polemics-based writing merely imposes point of view and suppresses demonstration.
Right-wing Republicans castigate labor on the radio by asking “how can ‘our’ society’s labor compete while wearing combat boots?” That is, they should not have labor demands in order to compete in the world market.
One should dismantle protection of oneself in laboring for others in order to compete with outsiders—who can underbid one if employed by those others.
The attitude that the writing is invalidated by it being experience has its corollary—in the objection to there being in writing ‘thought’ which is at one in the same time as ‘occurrence.’ Is that occurrence.
This is what makes the present-time troubling, as Gertrude Stein said.
That ‘one’ is separate in occurrence (as if occurrence were collective) is particularly heinous to Americans.
Perelman (in that articulation of ‘social power’) is taking both of these positions (critique of and authority) at once, deftly enshrining authority—seemingly in the ‘outside’ as if that were causal. The illusion of ‘occurrence’ and that it is ‘collective.’
‘Social power’ is the formation (‘I’) am trying to (‘must’) dispel.
(The delineated cultural dichotomy itself ‘makes’ the reverberation in this last above sentence only ‘extreme’ defined as such [categorical terms such as “lyrical” “personal”—negatives from a radical perspective].
One can reverberate that ridicule itself [as echo of social] on oneself effectively as the writing-syntax—to ‘bounce’ it to be a separated occurrence also.
This can reveal something about ‘one’ in relation to social occurrence. And also the intention is to see what occurrence is.)
Polemical device as a writing process isn’t to investigate shape and motion to find out what the event is—it is to instruct what one is to think about the event.
But the event (any) isn’t even there (as that formation).
One/events can only exist outside of formation there.
People