Earlier Pieces
Twilight sentiment. Thought of after walking out front door [in San Francisco] and seeing top of building with xmas lights, a little smoke pipe and the clear sky. A Christmas tree of white lights had been made of some other larger protuberance on top of the buildings. The building is a senior citizen's home. There was something bleak and warm at once about this sight. Squalid building tops, that sort of drab scape against the lush sky. Deserted Queens, NY, streets at Thanksgiving, from the cold outside, the remote trace of other people: the smoke leaving the enclosure. (The desolation of the multitude.) It escapes, solitary, unheard, to the outside, like me. And through all this, the joy of the artifice, of even a paltry attempt at beauty or pleasure. The pathos, precisely because of the pathetic in that sense. Such is a twilight sentiment. [12/11/98]
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Place and identity. The location of identity. Magnitude, proportion, scale. The airplane view, tele-vision. (Supplement the order of reality: the persistence of the persistence of vision.)
The quote of Flaubert on being a writer (diving for pearls) taped onto a corner of a computer screen in an apartment on Central Park West. Already overwhelmed by the sense of space, multitude sense of New York, this was exponentialized, re-dimensioned by this quote. Appendages: Derrida's "law of genre," the principle of identity whether it belongs to the class it identifies. While writing this note, sitting in Healthy Bagels and Things, a woman with a striking resemblance to someone else bygone, another round or geological layer even of New York, a re-assembly of her features. A sense of reading, derived from Blanchot (and Trakl) -- that the reading does not meet the text, the meaning, etc. Deviation, version, necessary erring. And then this example of the quote by Flaubert. What is the place of the text?
Hide and seek. The invagination of the utterly hidden and the utterly revealed. (The unconcealable and the unrecoverable.) As well as the transgression (technical) of Flaubert's notion of that "place" where writers go. Also, the problem of the indexicological. The paradox of the absolutely known / absolutely other coming to the place of a mark (a quote, a coordinate, etc.) would always have to express itself as previously concealed.
Is this the quote? But apt for so much else:
Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover two worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the great, the eternally splendid. Then there are those who spit terror from their gun-ports, who pillage, who grow rich and fat. Others go off in search of gold and silk under foreign skies. Still others catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I'll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
-- Letter by Gustave Flaubert
[1990]
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From the running journal I have never kept: a link of passes -- here too a search for the word to describe, to economize, those swells of associations . . . "pass." This, for now, is the calling. Swooping, scanning and veering, scaling -- not even links. Thinking of those moments of interior-exteriority, the strange tiny pleasure of being hidden in my emotions, with them, scandalously minute. Parasite of experience. Passing by windows and the various kinds of evidence of goings on, muted, planed, shielded, suppressed. Enjoying moments of solitude in relation to those, precisely, who are not there. (Past of my orphantasm.) This is the kind of abstraction I perform. Never specific because the point is always passing, being passed. Wander/wonder. Epiphany, what it is supposed to be, is given over to these rushes, these quietings, inferences. And always under the implicit order of insufficiency. What would have been consumed, burned in a flash, and missed. Do I miss the point? Or do I burn it up? Obliterate with the silent speed of distraction. Quickly, now, the links which invest each other with the meaning, the swells of it, can give over to a mad dash to capture them in their dispersal, or they can distribute themselves as flats, screens, blinding enunciations, like an array of tautologies resolutely ignoring each other in their being placed together on the stage, in the frame. Thinking disorder. What will be pursued to describe this very thing will be right there to express, blotted out by a distrust, an infidelity, a failure to support myself. [C. 1989]
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Language-centered (encountered in readings of Steve Benson and others who have been called this) -- I heard this phrase in a funny accusatory way, as "self-centered." As well as what this hearing suggests for a reading of Benson (and others), there is a suggestion here which could go miles, running a course throughout this contemporary issue, of which these poets are not strictly proponents, exponents, nor opponents. To what extent is it the same thing to call something "self-centered" as "language-centered"? Do not some of the (slightly) derogatory tones of this suggest that inasmuch as language is the medium for the self, to pay too much attention to it itself is to be self-centered? And this works crossways with the whole language-centered view of the de-centering of the self.
To speak of the self is already in a way to be carried away, duped, by language speaking of itself, as the "I" is always that pronoun that carries my delusion of absolute singularity in the greatest generality.
"Self-indulgent" is probably the term most primed here. A self that would be given in order to negate, to efface, to manage, according to an etiquette perhaps passing itself off as ethics, but really it's an economics, in the etymological sense. Keeping house.
To call these poets language-centered is of course also, whether favorably or not, to commit a funny paradox, to commit them and oneself to such a paradox, that to which the self is of course committed. What "commits" the self, or "one" (by the way, to submit to a whole line of reading this expression "one does," this third person general).
Poetry about poetry? Perhaps (?). Writing about writing. But as soon as writing absolves itself of this concomitant task, always again in the same expression, medium, then it will be the sheer medium under the guide of the speaker/writer, who can so smugly be-speak himself (and we call attention to the traditional general gender in and of this writing).
Language-centered (as in self-centered) will be to call these writers unruly, to a certain extent, in a way to designate the extravagance of such a project, an excess beyond the hold of the house, the management of the house, according to set theory, or that set theory of economics. Self-reflexivity will be re-marked according to critiques which snap from the reflex -- and this kneejerk, these reflexes so well coiled, well oiled (seemingly without preparation), will have to be examined as far as schooling and the visceral, the economy of verisimilitude, which will always incite a reaction; the way in which they always insinuate each other, inseminate each other, underlie each other. The reference to the reference -- the re-action to these language-centered will be caught ahead of time, fall into a trap of following suit. This will not dissolve the enormous task of self-consciousness (and here I use this term as one set into its own instability, the cross-fire which springs from what is at times a redundancy in the language of the phenomenological), which must commit . . . self-consciousness to self-consciousness; but in order to drive the modernist recuperation . . . both drive it (the engine of its vehicle) and drive as in desire, and drive it into a corner that will also force it around the broken frame (the parergon) which it would have disassembled for the sake of its assembly (shout -- can I get an amen?).
I digress. Where Benson may have already joined his critics (even apart from rounds of rejoinders) is in the irony of this abnegation. To retrieve this epithet, "language-centered" from the pejorative -- to reclaim it, as they say nowadays of other terms used for derogation -- this will of course be figured in the sacrifice, the rule itself, already. And this formula and formulation opens up a whole line of interrogation for the drama (the death of Socrates, the trial, the odyssey, the whole issue of the protagonist which may be countered and counted again as such -- I'm convoluting and unravelling too much here).
Language-centered would call attention to these provocateurs, spoilers, and we open up the conference on the spoils. Why are they twisting everything? Is it possible to demagnetize the field? To purge it or imagine it without sway? Everywhere this notion of adequacy is ready to govern by default (because it would only be countered, and counted, by the something else, the projection of its own scheme of identity). In the brief segment that seems a citation or caricature of someone else's reference to him and them, that accusatory, or at least declamatory, quality is extended by the term "late capitalist," as so many recent readings of the responses to these motions of the last 20 years continue to ripple for those who would have made the splash. Coincidental concerns, here. Affinities. Careful about what you lump together.
Language-centered is tautology and redundancy, as soon as stated: the very possibility, absolute possibility, and (therefore) impossible. But the extraneous, the excess, is so often brought up as the identification of a critique, when not merely dismissal or disparagement. As if language, writing, most certainly poetry didn't always involve the subject of itself, concern or musing on its own workings, preening or not. Why grant the speciousness of that, really mostly naive, reaction? [C. 1988]
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Recording Technology -- A Brochure
Technology for recording, or recording technology itself. Or both. Special recording technology to record technology. Technology is both the doer and the receiver, the subject and the subject of. Specifically concerned with the notion of recording, that which is a record unlike that which it records, and that which is supposedly a duplicate. An exact replica. The whole notion of a replica, replication, thought from the deployment of it with specific functions of recording, such as tape recording, etc. Mechanical and mass reproduction. Automatic and natural, traces of (them/it)self. Imprint, image, reflection. Not by hand. This technology which records, generalized to include photography, film, but also video and audio reproduction, more specifically these latter.
A momentous discovery that also mocks recording, taking the voice of this spectacle, speculation, spec(tac)ularization. Also of invention and announcement. Proof once again that reproduction is logically impossible, this special reproduction provides the proof of reproduction. The infinite regress of narcissism (as if Magritte's "reproduction interdite" were necessary to show the failure of the grasp of the reflection, something the video perspective always gives). Another astonishing announcement, presentation, discovery and invention -- proof once again of science fiction.
What is broached in this brochure (stitched, pricked, jabbed, pierced, a pointed tool). Audio and video equipment. But what is not recorded with just these senses? Images of items with labels. Improper proper nouns of objects displayed. Different sets, categories, make, model, number, specifications. Brands. Proper proper nouns of propriety and impropriety. Accompanying text: Terms of description, explication, exposition, displaying the effects, capabilities functions -- indeed the technology -- of some other discourse, text, an implicit citation, what language not technical nonetheless conveys the efficay, meaning, gist of the technology. The language not too technical that makes known that the technical language, and the technology so described, is worth its salt. The technology of the text. Play and play back. [C. 1988]
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