I've decided to go a little more public with this blog so I'm going to tidy it up a little. I'm still here, anyhow.

With 30 mins to go.. Yeah, it could’ve been. At another time perhaps before it snowed or rained I forget which. Or if you consider a trajectory to future events, it may reside in a nutshell. I like telling stories, not porkies, just narratives in which if we jump from side to side with an easterly tilt we can find a beginning middle and end. You aren’t following this. This is a monologue composed in complete sentences; I challenge you to find a missing subject object or verb, in that order. The subject is of course me; my own self-indulgence outdoes me. Object, if you’re reading there is one. Verb? Did I mention that verb always reminds me of gardening? My basil is dying, the rocket is dead, the goldfish is dead, but the fruitless Jalepeno thrives. Out there. On my balcony. That fascinating place between the home and the public. I wear my underwear near the window. Not to be existential, you know. I guard my pee in the best way I know how. Japanese pissers. Check google. They’re all over. Cherry blossoms line the street my balcony overlooks. They don’t blossom much and I miss them. I walk under them and squash the petals under my steel capped boots. Sometimes I slip and laugh about it. Other times I don’t. Cicadia’s sing through them through the summer. I could come up with an epiphenomenon. You know I won’t. Preferring prostitution to nature, I walk through my little hamlet in Tokyo. Go-go girls squash cigarette butts and slip through semen. They always talk to men with long hair and suntans. I don’t like them. They wear white terry-cloth socks. Someone washes their hair. In the suburbs the architecture is inclusive. I often feel the overhead cables and wires slip around my neck and pick my teeth. My gut rumbled through a mildewed tatami room opened onto the street. I notice all the laundry is white. The housewife has nipples as large as silver dollars, dark as grapes. She washes them with white soap. She observes a dark purple cock and eventually paints it; she still believes in representation. The authorities accuse her of reproduction. The laundry is still white. END 14.00

Cyborgs etc

This is tangentially related to the poverty of poetry paper

Christian Bök has some very interesting, clued in, things to say about the future of literature viz-a-viz technology. He says that with the advent of programs like RACTOR (an almost communicative program) that know nothing of literary history or poetry, can ‘write’ poetry better than humans who don’t know poetry, and perhaps better than those who do, presents a problem in terms of authorship and well as the future production of poetry itself. The authorship issue is essentially that with a computer that does not even understand what it is saying can produce poetry of such quality, then there is no reason why a person who supposedly does know what he is saying has much bearing on the reception of the work.. That’s not clear. What I mean is that RICTOR’s poems generate interest even though there is no author, why should knowledge of the author, therefore generate any more interest? This is an interesting take, although I do wonder why North American writers still feel it necessary to invoke this authorship in this way. As I discussed before in terms of Kent Johnson’s Yasusada, there are more culturally provocative approaches to deal with issues of authorship. To simply say that computers abnegate the author is relevant but a little banal. As for the future production of poetry Bök makes 2 interrelated points: that future poets will be programmers who make code that generates poems so that it is the code and not the poem that interests people and 2. we should be writing poetry for androids as they will be our future audiences. There seem to be poets out there already programming poetry, Alan Sondheim and Lewis Lacook come immediately to mind but there are many many others. However, to say this is the future of poetry seems a little steep to me in relation to the second point, that we should write poetry for computers. He’s saying that code, designed for androids, will also stimulate our artificial audience. I find this problematic for a number of quite complex reasons. First of all, it is unlikely that computers will ‘think’ in the way humans do. When critics of the technological drive to replicate the human say that a computer will need whole life experiences to match the human, these are not just experiences of your second birthday or all that crap about implanted memory from Bladerunner, it is of all the experience that we never notice.. like the fax printer droning in the background and various voices, my experience of space etc etc. That is, embodied experience. It may indeed be possible to create a semi-thinking machine that can ‘process’ highly complex information and handle many of the rules based activities that the human does and may even be able to interact on a factual level with humans, but a machine won’t think.. Now what may be possible would be to biologically engineer machine-like people (as if there weren’t enough already!) say by altering DNA so that they won’t emotion pain. HOWEVER, machines are new tools with which the poet must come to terms with. Perhaps we will come to love a poet’s code, but the question is why would we love the code? Would we live it because of its ingenuity of design, like some people love cars? Because of what it enables us to do? Programs can give you a sense of achievement, like the many poem generators. I guess I can see this possibility, although it reduces the appreciation of the poem to the level of a video game. Bök’s points are very important to discuss because underlying them I see a fundamental conception of the human. The view of this school of thought, just like the view underlying popular culture of Matrix, Bladerunner, and even AI is that the human is programmable and that interaction works on the level of information transferal. However, there is a school of thought (to which I lean favorably) that posits complexity, that information doesn’t really exist as such and that our body in the environment does not operate on the mechanistic model posited by Descartes and, more importantly, Newton. Now, my question is, where does this take poetry????????

Very little time today since I ventured further than the local corner store to get a negi-toro ikura don (onion, tuna and tuna roe on rice) and even, gasp, a nectarine! Over the weekend I went to a contemporary Turkish art show in Saitama. Sadly, the pieces on display there were quite underdeveloped. Essentially there were many good ideas that were poorly realized. I apologize for not remembering the artist’s names; I will give some examples of what I mean. There was quite a big section dedicated to sound (visual and aural) and perhaps the most interesting was a huge sequined banner with the words RUMOUR HUMOUR HOOVER The surround was silver and the words themselves were, hmm, green, red and, possibly blue conveying the image of quite tawdry looking women’s (or feminine style) discotechque clothing. There was a fan positioned to move the banner and create at least a little noise. As I read it, this was a comment on rumor and femininity, rumor being a basic concepts within noise of woman.. That is, traditionally rumor is understood as woman and is frequently depicted as having a million eyes (hence the sequins) and with horrible ears and mouth (the noise from the shaking of the sequins).. if this is even remotely close to the artists point, then well, it’s a good idea that simply doesn’t work. (notwithstanding, the sighs we all have when we come to the big center piece in an exhibition. There is always one!) .....

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I was going to start serializing a piece called the Poverty of Poetry (well, when I say serialize I mean burden blogger with my lunchtime notes towards an essay of such a title). Somehow, it isn’t in me today. Watch this space, though, it will come. Because there are many Povery’s of .. I’m sure someone has already written something with the same title. The title does have an interesting history, actually. Marx wrote a paper (which I downloaded on Kazaa Lite!) entitled “The poverty of philosophy” in response to Proudhon’s “The philosophy of poverty” . I haven’t read either piece (though I instinctively side with “Property is theft” etc) so I can’t be much help on the contents. Nevertheless, Marx’s title is crafted in direct opposition to Proudhon, thus “The Poverty of..” carries an oppositional sense. The poverty of poetry is simply an argument against typical “colonizing” measures of poetry. By this I mean that poetry tends to appropriate vocabularies or even describe other disciplines but rarely attempts to enter the practice itself. Stein did manage this to an extent with her use of grammar as a poetic response to Cubism. An example I came across recently is a piece by Christina Kubisch in which she takes lines from 18th and 19th century poetry that highlight the effect of silence and prints them onto translucent glass. The glass was then placed in the desolate enclaves in a dilapidated castle and above it is a kind of ultra-violet light that makes the words visible – kind of like those watermark readers they use to prevent counterfeiting. The light also highlights the decaying walls around them. This to me is poetry occupying a vital space. It emphasizes not just silence, which is the theme of her piece, but also the context of reading and the space in which we occupy to read. There is also the comment about decay and sound etc. In short, this is a beautiful poetry that the page cannot do. Perhaps my aspirations for poetry are too architectural, that I want poems not just boxed in books and memory but in every movement around us. I want the failing car to sputter poems. For poems to act in the shaping of buildings and streets, the hum from which is also poetry. My phone rings poems.. I don’t have to dial them up, they are in the dialing.. I leave you today on that.

I encountered quite a big glitch in my Mina Loy paper last night so I spent my trip to work making even more notes and annotations to the Love Songs. The papers main contention is that the concepts of noise and audition inform the Love Songs and that to consider them in purely literary terms is only a half-seeing approach. So I’ve gone through and demonstrated how sound works in terms of content (that is, the images and events that take place in the poem), but now I’m looking at sound/ noise itself. I’ve limited myself somewhat by trying to see her noise in terms of Russoloian language noise – that is, the noise of consonants. I think consonantal noise is present, but there is more that is harder to quantify, such as the short /i/ sound. She certainly never goes the direction of Stein with an ever present sonority, but still what are those rattlings and shaking tin walls? Why are they there??? I’ll work it out, I’m sure. Otherwise… Office poetry is a beating keyboard and the monotonous hum of hard-drives etc. He’s taken good songs, that’s all Dub dubbing Eto What are you watching Laugh phone ring Noise Jyu ichi nin

This’ll have to be brief if anything is capitalized or punctuated it’s because my hands were working well or word did it for me I am super rushed but wanted to get some things down before I don't smile So ive been traveling with doug messerlis big fat anthology all week cuz I couldn't stand going without poetry any longer this is my fear of academia all over again you no longer read works but dissect them like frog in 9th grade science class poor things I don't think things will be that way once I get out of this miserable job and actually have time to do something when im not in a rush or half asleep Well, for the bfb big fat book ohh a comma thanks hands the bfb ive been reading mr charles olsen ive read him before but anyway what struck me is how much of a modernist he still was of course the localism of this place called glouchester not England I presume thanks for the caps word removes him a bit but not much what was on my mind this morning was his use of myth I was once a great myth-man my dog rip was called bucephalus after alexanders horse and even my son is amateras after Japanese myth is myth an exclusion western myths are themselves known to have been appropriated from the Indian and Persian but his references to man I can’t remember which myth,, whatever, I felt was rather exclusive limiting his poetry somewhat from the global not that one would write to be global necessarily but is it important??? Also sometimes olsen is compared to pound and these writers LOVE to discuss his visits to st. elizabeths etc etc but really I think there is one very crucial difference.. olsen is not musical I may be wrong since ive only read several selections of his but I have barely detected an ear he tells wonderfully embellished stories and has some great lines like:

it is not bad to be pissed off

Anyhow im outta time

I couldn’t take another day of it poemless and theoretical deluged by the theory of practice so this mornging I emptied my bag of Capra’s The Web of Life , Creeley’s Windows, and even the copy of Sawako’s Hockey Love Letters (That’s where I put it!) and put in the great tome Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century. I even went to the effort to take along an aging Nono tape and earphones to prevent myself from listening in on other people’s conversations and sounds. Once I got a seat on the unusually busy post-Obon Yamanote-line, there was no question, open to John Taggart. I ‘discovered’ Taggart a few months ago when in a similar mood I pulled out Poems for the Millennium 2 before bed. I was so enthralled – the poem in PotM 2 read like the poets rendition of In C – I even read it to my wife, who, as usual was uncaptivated but flattered that I thought she might like to hear it. Taggart is an extraordinary poet. One of the few modern poets who has really attempted to reach music but hasn’t shied away from actual feeling as well. In fact, he is able to use these generalisable abstract words, like “pain”, without bathos. Ah, great, some of his poetry is available on the web! Here is an excerpt from the Slow Song for Mark Rothko (the poem anthologized in PotM2):

To breathe and stretch one's arms again to breathe through the mouth to breathe to breathe through the mouth to utter in the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe to sing the most quiet way. To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness radiantia radiantia singing light in darkness. To sing as the host sings in his house.

The repitition recalls Stein somewhat, though it is more deliberately musical. I read that Terry Riley was very much influenced by Stein, thus the connection is hardly surprising. Still, as I was saying, a poem in which the wonderfully sensitive line “to light the most quiet light in darkness” can become part of this musically minimalist framework bespeaks the strength of writing. Damn out of time..

Ok. I WILL do this today, finally, a Friday. It’s just been a very very busy week AGAIN. In the poetry world, it seems Mr Silliman has had yet another pointless spat with another poet. This time it involves some pseudo-movement called New Brutalism – is this the Bruitists? Seems like this fella got under Silliman’s wick for saying L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry favors theory over emotion. Woo! Am I alone in thinking that this debate is pointless? Since I’m not shy of crudity, who the fuck cares? It seems that the general characteristic separating poets and other artists is that the exhuming and constant revision – rather like Freudian mourning, going over a lost object – is the poor lot of these full-blooded literary types, whereas artists are generally happy to let the critics wrangle while they move on and develop new ideas, sometimes correcting the critics in their folly. I wonder if this is in any way related to a question posed several months ago asking why artists go through phases (like Picasso’s Blue Phase) while poets are generally considered more singularly. It is partly for this reason that I dread becoming involved in such a musty literary world. My other reasons being: • Dread of national poetry and stigmatization (I still get shudders hearing Charles Bernstein say “I prefer ‘Walter Benjamin’ [Anglicized pronunciation] the American way since he was so poorly treated by his own country” .. even when he says “American poet” blurrgh!). To be called an “American/Canadian/Finnish/ British etc” poet is the greatest insult. • Being in any way aligned with these so-called defenders of young poets like Jim Behrle, Jo Massey etc. Please Jim, don't defend me against Darth Silliman. I don’t know these guys, so I may be being unfair, but I’m not impressed by their public gestures. It seems to me like it may be time for another Futurism – at least the energy.

I can’t remember what it was that I wanted to add to the last blog. Perhaps why identity is an issue in the first place?? That seems highly uninteresting though.. hmm. It’s worth asking anyway. Basically, I’m not sure exactly why it became necessary to remove the artist from the production of the work. I assume some of it has to do with the popular conception of the artist somehow expressing his/ her woes through art. It is really highly offensive to suggest that a piece of art really ‘expresses’ anything. If it does then it is bound to be rather poor. One always needs some amount of distance to do any piece of art. Art is not necessarily representation (as Mr. Warhol taught us it is also reproduction), but does work with symbols. Now it would be rather absurd to say that the ‘symbols’ actually had a corollary in the ‘real world’ (absurd but not unheard of); symbols are, the world.. that is to say that they exist not in relation to things but in relation to themselves and context etc. Thus art is a manipulation of symbols, when art becomes expressive, that is when someone creates with the intention of expressing what is after all, symbolic, the result is almost always poor.. I realize this is a silly argument, I’m just entertaining ideas. In fact I understand the phenomenon differently. To create simply requires a psychological distance otherwise the piece becomes overcharges with mass generalizations. Such is the result of most teenage art and writing, as well as Harold Pinter’s poetry. (Sadly, even intelligent artists think of poetry as this odd empty vessel into which the excrement of their ‘emotions’ can be dumped.). Er. Yes, so, this may be one reason. The other may be partly psychological. Most people have come to understand that the self is a unity of convenience, that is, “I” is a multiplicity. “I” is another as Rimbaud said. Taking the “I” out a work presumably allows the other into it. I’m not sure to what extent the above psychological conditions link to sociological conditions -- i.e. these are post-modern, fragmented times, fragmented by capitalistic schizophrenic pluralism – for artists. This seems to me always a half-truth and an approach only beleaguered Marxists would take. Capitalism thrives, it is true, through the appearance of unity to cover its monstrous chaos, a chaos that could lead us to believe that the ‘I’ is even more fragmented. I think in this respect capitalism is not new. Every ‘order’ is the semblance of unity. The difference is that now the chaos is on a global scale.. Where writers especially, are falling short these days, incidentally, is the failure to recognize internationalism. Though not a writer, I was quite amused at a PhD. Student’s resume that stated something along the lines of :”Because my university is near to the Canadian border, I am also aware of Canadian poetries, such as Steve McCaffery and Christian Bok.” Whooo! I guess it’s thinking like this that earns a 4 GPA!

Hoax’s and authorship In a recent correspondence between Kent Johnson and Brian Kim Steffens (among others) about Conceptual Literature the issue of authorship viz-a-viz Yasusada came up, for me unexpectedly. I have always maintained support for Johnson, even though the implication could be that he is the author, and Yasusada (who doesn’t exist) because of the various challenges it presents to the areas of authenticity and the unified literary persona. I should unpack these ideas a bit before going on. It is assumed in literature that the art object is an expression of, or is in some way related to, the authenticity of feeling or intellection on the part of the artist. Of course, in the 20th Century people like Duchamps & MacLow attempted to remove themselves from the production of art objects, though certainly failed in removing themselves from the ‘signified’ piece. That is, Duchamp ‘made’ the Standard Stoppages without taking part in their making (though people debate this), but we still know the piece as his and not “No Man’s” (No Man is still a very powerful image and theme). With the cult of personality being all pervasive, even in these post-Pollack days, the Duchamp is A Duchamp. The authenticity of the piece is never doubted. If you see the Standard Stoppages at the Tate in London, the friendly placard will inform you of Duchamp’s intentions, so too in other exhibits will you learn about his alter-ego Rose Selavy. In the case of a hoax, if ‘hoax’ can be used even if authenticity is never uncovered, we have a different ‘take’ on the same idea. The artist has given up hope of removing him/herself from the production of the work since, as we know, it is impossible, and instead has taken his/herself out of the reception of the work. This is a very important move in my opinion. In the case of Yasusada, moreover, the whole façade goes further than former models in actually subverting culturally held beliefs in relation to authorship and also to the cultural “other”. (I might add at this point that this particular hoax has induced in me a certain amount of shadenfreude, a pleasure that for some is guilty, especially from Ron Silliman’s initial response to Yasusada. Now that Mr. Silliman has his own blog, presumably scared off the POETICS List since his early misguided Leninist war mongering after the World Trade Center fell, I can get regular doses of this less acceptable pleasure.) Well, the lunch break is over, so I’ll have to continue this Monday.. It’s back to Noise and Loy for the weekend.

I take most of it back. Creeley isn’t so bad. I’ve made my way to some of the later poems and have been more impressed. Poems like this one, Window, irked me somewhat: The window had /been half /opened and the /door also /opened, and the /world then/ invited, waited/ and we /entered One of my objections to the poem is simply that he is still harping on about that old poets malaise, the world and me, subject – object, as though they aren’t problematic. From my own point of view, these aren’t really problems at all they just don’t exist. This is a poetry that is still relying too much on the eye and as a friend mentioned just yesterday, to privilege a sense is anti-thetical to world making, it is an abstraction of the world which in no way tries to enter it.. Before I digress, I’d also like to include a poem I liked. Was it thunk suck of sound an insistent outside into the patient abstract waited was lost in such simple flesh ou sont les motherand father so tall the green hills echoed .. That’s as much as I’ll quote since I’m at work. Obviously, what I like about this is the sound. There’s also the suggestion here that sound can potentially “suck” one into “simple flesh”, though that may be a complete misreading. There is still that “insistent outside” that irked me about “Window”..The poem is actually dedicated to Jasper Johns, who I know little about. The poem probably functions on quite another level for someone who knows about Johns. In fact, I think I’ll print out a little about him before leaving the office today and see what all I can find out.

Ah! Back and with a new name; hope you like it. I’m kind of browsing through a number of books right now. My mood is so changeable, sticking to one or two just isn’t feasible. Rob Creeley’s Windows has got to be the biggest disappointment of them all though. I very much like the poem of his, Anger, anthologized in Poems for the Millennium 2, but I have read little else with a pulse. In fact, I started reading the book earlier this year and started actually ‘correcting’ whole stanzas. I’d never done this before (good exercise though) and eventually got frustrated.. So what’s the problem? His rhythms can be interesting at times, granted; it’s the content. Dedications, death, the small things in life, etc etc. He no longer has faith in other ways of seeing (as Anger most definitely did with anger compared to trucks smashing into a wall – this is from a faint memory), he just wants us to see as everybody assumes to see.. On the topic of Mr. Creeley, any idea why has received so much recognition from the experimental writers? Oppen wrote very similar, though less musical, poetry and even lived the ideal life of dropping out of poetry to exile himself in Mexico during the McCarthy years.. O.K. I’m not a big Objectivist fan, Oppen and to some extent Olsen are a little too frontiersman for me.. and WCW, who seems to be their predecessor, well, when I was at university, his step-shapes poems fascinated my eye but eluded my ear, but his verse always paled next to Pound’s, and froze next to Schwitters’ & Stein’s. Now, I was going to make the link with the above, but avoided it to prevent too much vitriol against Oppen, Creeley etc. One of the things that bugs me about many of the above is their trite Americanism; nationalism is a virus among poets even today. Hear Bernstein talk about American Poets, for example, college courses dedicated to American poetry. Goodness, you’d a thought that they’re still wearing Quaker hats! WCW wrote this stinker called “In the American Grain”, that arouses quite a lot of anger (there’s that truck crashing again) in me. It’s not that poetry isn’t local - it is always local and we can’t help composing in space (and time) – but such ideas are not just wrought in locality but in ideality (I only half intend these asinine assonances). Many of us would discount religion and God because it presupposes a force and resignation beyond the human and worldly, why make the exception for a country. Belief in a country is the same to me as belief in God… We’ll that’s the end of my vitriolic (sorry) lunch break. I promise something more positive tomorrow.

levity is a levitation leech.

I’m reading Doug Kahn’s Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts right now to get a better idea of how to approach my application paper. As I go along, it occurs to me how radically different new approaches to the body and cognition can actually change the way we think about sound in the arts. Kahn’s assumption is that the world is “out there” and we just happen to fall into it, thus sound is all pervasive. Autopoiesis (or perhaps I should call it the Santiago theory) teaches us that the world isn’t exactly out there, at least not in any ordinary sense, rather that we “bring it forth.” I understand this to mean that we create the world in response to what is actually there (the world is there) and as an organism with a nervous system and sense generally we are constantly ‘bringing forth’ – never brought forth. Sound then is always interpreted – perhaps the word “interpret” is incorrect, but anyway… So where does that get us? In theory it brings us back to selectivity, though selectivity not based on taste so much as biological structure.. In practice, we would have to consider that mimetic attempts at sound are never mimetic, so Marinetti’s “Rattatat Tat” machine guns could be a pervasively glottal “u=u=u=u=u=u,” point one. The interesting point is that, having similar structural similarities, we may all understand the different versions of machine gun fire as machine gun fire. I would say the other point is that because we can broadly assimilate onomatapoeic sounds, that there is a possibility for metaphor in sound. Suppose my, imagined, piece called “beer belly” started with a succession of flatulent sounds and continued to ASCII: “plezur plezur : ?? Well, ahem. Anyhow, sound artists actually already know this on one level. Kenny Goldsmith is doing it all the time, but as far as I know, people don’t get it.. Well, that’s all I’m doing for now. Hmm. I’m more than a little dissatisfied by this actually. If theory does nothing but explain what has already been done, then it is utterly useless. It has to always point to what has been done and what can be done. This is just explanatory. If you think otherwise, let me know

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Miscellany While I’m still finishing off the one essay/review – which, as I said before, I may post on the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics until I can find a print home for it – I’ve got to move onto the next one. So at the moment, I’m just doing my homework, so to speak… Well, this afternoon I re-read Steve McCaffery’s Introduction to Parapoetics. It’s an important step in adumbrating a trajectory of possibility within poetry/poetics. The gist of the article is of a (para-) poetics resisting specialization in any discipline, probing, I think he says, the fungibility and centrifugality of specialized discourse. Said more simply, it will investigate the ruptures within the study of a single discipline. Instead, for example, looking at poetry within the context of poetic history or even literary history, parapoetics looks to the interstices. Hmm. Still not so simple is it? Anyhow, I’ve framed it to look like a discipline in itself – perhaps for the English department – but I think the general idea is intended to impact practice as much as study. Every artist is to some extent be concerned with context, historical, temporal, special etc. The context an artist identifies often contributes to the work in varying degree. Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Calvacanti and the Troubadors is an act of contextualizing, for example. It seems a parapoetics is a kind of contextualizing that goes outside of discipline and outside of the concerns considered relevant to a particular practice. It allows questions such as, how does architectural space impact writing or vice versa? And we can construct non-reductive answers creatively as well as academically, perhaps. Well, I’m outta time…

I only have 20 mins left today, but at least I’m getting something up. This blog was supposed be regular, however after last month’s madness I haven’t has the energy.. I’m hard at work finishing off the Architectural Body review. Not having written an essay in 5 years, it has proven to be a challenge. Of course, there was an abrupt learning curve involved too. It wasn’t until midway through that I bothered looking at autopoiesis.. only to find that it is more influential than I had imagined. Well, it’s going to be at lest a 4,000 worder, not including notes. I wonder where I can actually publish this? After all this work, I may have to settle for a posting on the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics (http://www.poetics.yorku.ca/)where it will have to compete with Karen Mac Cormack’s piece on the same topic. Though I think mine is more carefully considered!, There is a lot of thinking through that needs to be done on architectural bodies, procedural poetics, etc. A fully embodied mind is totally revolutionary and needs to be brought into discourses as wide as political theory, sociology, and well, science from whence it comes. So much of human thought works on binaries and the shades therein. This theory precludes binarism in a linear sense. Once I’ve finished this review I want to go back to work thinking it through with my own practice.. yes, my real writing has suffered over the last 6 weeks..

Politics - I can’t continue this blog without discussing politics. Although any artistic act is a political act, I am not quite capable of sublimating my own anger and hostilities through art alone. Anarchists optimistically see every turn of dissent as an opportunity for ‘revolution.’ The discussions going on in the Anarchist Research Listserv of which I’m a part, tend to highlight this fact. In every, glint of anti-governmental sentiment they see chances to persuade, chances that soon the world will look toward Anarchism for guidance on what to do next. While I loosely align my own politics with anarchist thought, I find this optimism somewhat blind to a deeply dark era I’m afraid we’re entering. Anarchism does, however, offer some generally useful ideas vis-à-vis the war and politics. I’ll bullet point a few of them here: • The State Anarchists are famously anti-statist – silly to say really because anti-statism largely defines Anarchism – and would see this war on both sides as an ideological construct. If one could stand outside of the inter-state feuds and resolutions, indeed if we could see this situation outside of the law, we may gain a more acute insight into the functioning and manipulation at work. We should not see this war as illegal – illegal is not a moral or ethical standpoint and is only valuable if you want to give up thinking. We should not see George Bush as a villain, nor Saddam Hussein – to villainize either one is to be blind to the larger construct in which they are toys. This construct? The State. Don’t forget that Hegel postulated that the state is the synthesis of the Geist, and that by his own dialectical reasoning this postulation is illogical. If we were to accept dialectics, we would want to look for an antithesis to the state. As we know, in its megalomaniacical desire to maintain its synthetic status the State attempts to quash it’s antithesis: the people in it. By our physical disposition, we are diverse, contrary to the aim of the State. Patriotism is the name given to the adhesive used to gloss diversity. • Party Politics Well it goes without saying that party politics are irrelevant. I find it fairly naïve that Americans believe the root cause of the war is the stolen 2000 election. Yes, Bush and co. did not get the presidency legitimately, but would the Democrats behaved any differently? Probably not, though the rhetoric would have had palliative effect, Republican-speak is just too coarse to stomach. • Religion is a sensitive issue for Anarchists. Tolstoy was a Christian, and there have been Christian (and perhaps other sects) Anarchist movements. Most Anarchists are atheists because religion requires your supplication to one master or another (God, priest, or cleric). The War on terrorism was not drawn up to be a religious war, I don’t think that even the idiots in the Whitehouse or Parliament had that in mind. Nevertheless, the war is a religious war, Islam versus secularism (secularism doe not imply godlessness, but God outside of politics), and this means that this war is extremely complicated. Muslims can be secularists as much as Christians can favor theocracy. Therefore, what we have is a war being fought on 5 fronts, between the secular and religious in Islamic and Western counties, and the war itself. In America, where this war has been raging for longer than Americans would like to recognize, theocracy is winning. Were theocracy losing, politicians would not need to voice their belief in God and most Americans would not prefer a Female president to an atheist. Anarchists should not forget to keep one eye on ideals and the other on practicality. I agree with the above critiques, but think that we also need to engage with the politics as they are being fought now. This war is not the fault of even a group of people but an entire system. We should ask what changes could be made to the system? One change necessary for the US and GB is to institute a proportional voting system, like the sort used in Germany. This would reduce the chance of unilateral decisions being made in the name of a minority. It would also allow a greater number of political voices to enter into public debate. This is important for anarchists as well because the further the mainstream politics are from Anarchism, the fewer people will know anarchism for what it really is. Oops. I’m writing into office hours..