Category: Personal

Kant and Speculative Realism

I need more time to work through Graham Harman’s critique of certain aspects of my Whitehead book. But I think I can give a quick answer to his PS about Kant.

Graham quotes, against my reading of Whitehead as a kind of post-Kantian, Whitehead’s own assertion that Process and Reality involves “a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought” (page xi). Throughout my book I am referring, instead, to a passage where Whitehead instead credits Kant as “the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” (page 156). This particular way of relating to Kant is crucial to my whole reading of Whitehead; it is why I position Whitehead as a kind of (radical) post-Kantian. Ultimately, which of these two sides of Whitehead’s attitude towards Kant one wishes to cite is a tactical decision. But in any case, I think that my Kant/Whitehead juxtaposition is more than what Harman dismisses as a “bats and birds both fly” argument.

I certainly do take Graham’s point when he says: “So, why do I choose to portray Kant as an enemy rather than an ally? Largely because of how Kant has been appropriated.” From an anti-correlationist position, Kant is indeed the source of the problem diagnosed by both Harman and Meillassoux, and it makes sense for them to move against him.

My own positioning of Kant as an ally has a different genealogy. It really comes out of the implicit “Kant vs Hegel” faultline in French philosophy. My very first book was on Blanchot and Bataille, and a big part of my argument (inherited from my initial advisor, Joseph Libertson) was that they were reacting against Hegel (whom they encountered via Kojeve) by disassembling the whole (Kojevian more than actually Hegelian, perhaps) “labor of the negative” — hence Bataille emphasizes “negativité sans emploi,” and Blanchot “desoeuvrement” — both of which mean that negativity cannot be put to work, cannot perform a labor. Negativity is weak, and not productive. I saw a link here between the Bataille/Blanchot critique of negativity and Kant’s emphasis on limits: even though Bataille and Blanchot never themselves say anything about Kant. But Foucault definitely positions Bataille in relation to Kant (rather than to Hegel) for this reason in his crucial early article on Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression.”

Subsequently, thisconfiguration seemed to me to be the key to Deleuze’s hatred of the dialectic, and to his presentation of Nietzsche as the thinker who “stood Kant on his feet” in a manner analogous to how Marx stood Hegel on his feet. Deleuze separates productivity entirely from negativity. Similar anti-dialectical stances in Foucault and even in Derrida are grounded in this sort of argument, as well. From there I came to a sense that one could read the second half of the First Critique (the Transcendental Dialectic) as, in effect, Kant’s rejoinder-in-advance to Hegel’s critique of him in the Encyclopedia Logic. And this, in turn, takes on considerable relevance today, since Hegel’s critique of Kant is such a centerpiece of everything that Zizek does. I never managed to work this out in a form that I was satisfied enough with to publish — but it definitely stands behind why I found Kant of such importance in talking about Whitehead and Deleuze.

To try to put this more concisely: Kant’s importance is in saying that there are limits to the pretensions of thought to determine the cosmos. Hegel and Zizek argue that any limit to thought is illusory, since it is turns out to be thought itself that is positing such a limit. I think that Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic is best read as a rejoinder in advance to this sort of argument. It is in this particular sense that I argue for reading Kant as (surprisingly, perhaps) an ally of some of the speculative realist arguments against unlimited correlationism; rather than seeing this part of Kant’s philosophy as being — as Deleuze sometimes implies — a policing action against speculation. Of course it is both, but my reading of Kant in Without Criteria is designed to bring out some of the often overlooked “minor” aspects of Kant — which is something that gets me in trouble with more orthodox Kantians,and more generally with normativists, as much as it does with speculative realists who see Kant as the enemy.

Research Statement

I am about to leave for Norway, where I will be one of the Keynote Speakers at next week’s session of the Nordic Summer University. In preparation, I answered questions in an email interview; I will reproduce part of it here, because it is the closest I have come to enunciating my own research agenda (or at least, part of it).

Question: In Without Criteria you argue for a ‘critical aestheticism’. Along with Whitehead – and Deleuze – you argue for the relevance of the beautiful rather than the sublime (and Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique). Can you say a little about this ‘critical aestheticism’ and perhaps your forthcoming book The Age of Aesthetics?

Response:

Most aesthetics of the past century has been focused on the sublime, and has disparaged the beautiful. This is because the sublime involves a moment of rupture or disproportion, whereas the beautiful seems to involve accommodation, comfort, and proportion. Thus, for instance, Roland Barthes is clearly on the side of jouissance (which is sublime) as opposed to mere plaisir (which corresponds to the beautiful).

I argue, however, that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful remains important, because it is really a nascent version of what Deleuze calls singularity. A judgment of beauty is non-cognitive and non-conceptual; beauty is that which cannot be subject to rules, or derived from rules. It is always a singularity or an exception. It cannot be reduced to norms. The problem of the beautiful is how to universalize — or even, how to communicate — something that stubbornly refuses all categorization, all universalization. The beautiful is something that, on the one hand, I feel impelled to affirm, and to communicate, but that, on the other hand, resists all the categories and norms that are presupposed by the pragmatics of communication and the norms of conceptualization.
 
I think of critical aestheticism, therefore, as a practice of affirmation that resists norms and categories. I think that critical aestheticism can be contrasted with, and perhaps even opposed to, the “ethical turn” in recent critical theory. “Postmodern” ethical thought, from Levinas to Judith Butler, produces a subjectivity that is infinitely responsible, but that cannot really do anything that would be commensurate with the weight of this responsibility. To think “ethically” in this manner is to misrecognize, for instance, the forces, processes, or structures of Capital that create human misery without this misery being anyone’s “responsibility” in particular. Aesthetics does not lead to an alleviation of this misery either; but I think that an aesthetic appreciation of potentialities and singularities is better than an ethical recognition of infinite responsibility, when it comes to responding to the powerful and impersonal forces that oppress us.

The best statement of these matters seems to me to be Mallarmé’s wonderful maxim: “Tout se résume dans l’Esthétique et l’Economie politique” (Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy). In other words, I favor aesthetics as over against ethics; and I favor political economy (or what in Marxist circles is often disparaged as “economism”) as over against the privileging of the political in such recent thinkers as Badiou and Zizek.

My book in progress, The Age of Aesthetics, reads science fiction in the light of our recent history of commodification, privatization, capital accumulation, and financialization, in order to think through the conjunction of aesthetics and political economy. On the one hand, 21st century marketing and commodity production seem increasingly to be concerned with questions of “aesthetics.” This is so, both in the manner of Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense”, and in the way that the aesthetic attributes of our existence have themselves become commodified and marketed, so that today we are incited to purchase, not just tangible commodity objects, but also such things as events, experiences, moods, memories, hopes, and desires. However, at the same time that the “aesthetic” is central to commodification and marketing, and thereby to the extraction of surplus value and the accumulation of capital, it also stands in some sense as the limit of all these processes, to the extent that the aesthetic, in its singularity, resists subsumption into the larger categories that are required for commodification and monetary exchange. Indeed, there is a formal parallelism between Kant’s account of the beautiful, with its tension between singularity and universal communicability, and Marx’s understanding of the commodity, with its singular nature in contradiction with its translation into money as “universal equivalent.”

Everything I have said here is, admittedly, controversial. These are not definitive statements of position, but initial hypotheses for my further, ongoing research.

Digital audiovision

Yet another paper proposal. I wish it were as easy to write the actual papers as it is to propose topics.

POST-CINEMATIC ARTICULATIONS OF SOUND AND VISION

In this essay, I would like to look at the differences in the articulation of sound and image in audiovisual media, that have resulted from the digital technologies of the last twenty years or so. On a basic ontological level, digital video consists in multiple inputs, all of which, regardless of source, have been translated into, and stored in the form of, binary code. This means that the most heterogeneous sources are all treated in the same way. There is no fundamental difference, on the binary level, between transcoded visual images, and transcoded sounds. This means that moving-image media can no longer be understood in terms of a (Godardian, or indeed Eisensteinian) dialectic between sound and image. Rather, digitized sound sources and digitized image sources now constitute a plurality without intrinsic hierarchy, that can be articulated in various ways. The mixing or compositing of multiple image and sound sources may arouse new sensory modalities (synesthetic, intermodal, etc.), and may exhibit different sorts of rhythmic organization than was the case with previous sound cinema.

I think that looking at digital audiovisual media in this way can shed new light on the current transition away from analog cinema. A number of prominent film critics (including David Rodowick, Vivian Sobchak, and Laura Mulvey) have mourned this transition, suggesting that something fundamental has been lost in the process of digitization. Rodowick, for instance, criticizes digital audiovisual media for lacking both the Bazinian indexicality, and the sense of temporal duration, that were crucial to the experience of analog cinema. But I consider it symptomatic that Rodowick almost entirely discusses the image, and has almost nothing to say about sound. A reflection on sound as well as image, and on the softening of the opposition between them, can lead to a very different take on the powers and potentials, as well as the defects, of new digital media.

My investigation will also have consequences for the historical typology of film offered by Gilles Deleuze in his two Cinema volumes. Deleuze distinguishes between the “movement-image” of classical film, and the “time-image” of modernist film. The former measures time indirectly, as a factor in action and in narrative. The latter fractures both linear and cyclical notions of time, in order to present us with sheer duration, or “time in its pure state.” Deleuze crucially insists that the “image” to which he refers is a “sound image,” as well as a “visual image.” Nonetheless, it is unclear to what extent his analyses of the “time-image” in the second half of the twentieth century can still be applied to the audiovisual forms now emerging in the twenty-first. I want to consider how these newer forms rework temporal relations, so as to provide us with a third sort of Deleuzian image, irreducible either to the movement-image or to the time-image.

Everything that I have discussed so far is rooted in the ontology of audiovisual media. But it should not be assumed that ontological differences automatically translate into corresponding differences in the perceptual and affective experience of the audience. Digital technologies process images and sounds in different ways from how analog technologies did; but they also provide different sorts of experiences to their audiences or “endusers.” Digital audiovisual works can be accessed in different ways; they can appear on different sorts of screens and audio devices, with varying degrees of sound and image resolution; and they allow different sorts of audience response, including a greater degree of interaction or intervention. All these factors play a role in how audiovisual works address the human sensorium, and in how they mobilize our feelings.

In order to address these issues, I will look primarily at music videos of the last decade, and secondarily at recent films that embrace something of a music-video aesthetic, opening up new articulations of vision and sound.

Red Planets

I just received in the mail today my advance copy of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville. The book will be out in the UK in August (from Pluto Press), and in the US in December (from Wesleyan University Press). As the title suggests, this is an anthology of Marxist readings of science fiction. It contains essays by the editors, whose work I esteem highly, by several other friends of mine (Carl Freedman, John Rieder, Sherryl Vint), and by other scholars whom I have never met, but whose work I esteem highly (I won’t list everybody, but especially including Rob Latham). My own essay in this collection, “The Singularity Is Here,” about imaginings of “the Singularity,” and especially Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando, is available for download (as a pdf) here.

Without Criteria

MIT Press informs me that my new book, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, has now been published and will shortly be available (I am supposed to receive my own copies in the next week or so). (Amazon.com still lists the book as not being published until May 29, but you may be able to order it well before then elsewhere).

Of course, given the way academic publishing works, this means that it has been slightly more than a year since I sent the final copy of the manuscript to the Press. The time lag between submission and publication doesn’t seem to have changed at all in the almost twenty years since my first book was published, even though the technologies of publication have been completely revolutionized in the interim. (It will probably take the rise of new publishing operations, like the wonderful, open-source publisher re.press, to extend the benefits of new technologies to the sclerotic world of academic publishing).

I don’t have a pdf of the book as published, I’m afraid, but near-final drafts of all the chapters are available here.

For the most part, I am happy with how Without Criteria came out. I managed to work through, to my own satisfaction (and hopefully other people’s as well), some of Whitehead’s weirder notions, like “eternal objects” and (especially) “God.” I developed Whitehead’s ideas about what he calls “feeling” in relation both to contemporary affect theory, and to contemporary biology. And I showed how strongly and deeply Whitehead’s metaphysics resonates with that of Deleuze. This is not a matter of saying that Deleuze was “influenced” by Whitehead, nor of reading Whitehead entirely through a Deleuzian lens. Rather, I looked at how the concerns of the two thinkers seem to intersect — the problems they look at are closely related, even when their answers to these problems differ. Whitehead’s eternal objects and Deleuze’s virtual are both given as answers to the same metaphysical problems; likewise Whitehead’s God and Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs.

The one thing that I feel is lacking in the book — and that I have been increasingly concerned with in the year since I handed in the final copy — is a (re)consideration of Whitehead in the light of the issues raised by the (so-called) Speculative Realists. In particular, I finished Without Criteria before I had a chance to read Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics, or Iain Grant’s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. (I also didn’t read Alberto Toscano’s Theatre of Production carefully enough). All these books put my claims about the relation of Kant to Whitehead and to Deleuze in a different light.

Basically, I am arguing that both Whitehead and Deleuze are “neo-Kantians” of a particular sort. Deleuze himself argues, in his early book on Nietzsche, that Nietzsche put Kant on his feet in a manner analogous to how Marx claimed to have put Hegel on his feet; and that, in so doing, Nietzsche radicalized Kant in the way that the official “neo-Kantians” had tried and failed to do. In my book, I extend this claim to both Deleuze himself and to Whitehead. I try to show how Whitehead and Deleuze take certain ambiguous moments in Kant and push them in new directions — thus opening up areas of thought that Kant pointed towards but ultimately withdrew from. Most notably, I argue that Whitehead and Deleuze work with certain problems that are broached in the Third Critique. In the first part of this volume, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant explores the possibility of judgments that are singular and noncognitive, not adjudicable by objective criteria, norms or rules. In the second part, The Critique of Teleological Judgment, Kant tackles the problem of living organisms, or of what today we would more broadly call self-organizing systems (which include, but are not restricted to, living organisms), and argues for a kind of double causality, or for a “freedom” (or perhaps undecidability) that supervenes upon traditional linear and mechanistic causality, not being reducible to it, but also not contradicting it.

In Without Criteria, I argue that these two moments in Kant’s thought have the potential to lead us away from the normative and legislative burden of Kant’s thought overall; but also without lapsing into either eliminativist reductionism, or Hegelian dialectics. I see both Whitehead and Deleuze as returning to these strange and “aberrant” moments in Kant, and using them to forge a new direction in metaphysics. One consequence of this new direction is to fulfill the demands of the Speculative Realists for a rejection of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, or the privileging of the human or rational subject, and of the relation between thought and being. My claim is that Whitehead explicitly, and Deleuze implicitly, create an object-oriented philosophy, precisely by arguing that something like Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, in which the “forms of sensibility” govern how we respond to objects that we encounter, in fact applies to all interactions whatsoever between objects, and not just to the case of “minds” encountering “external objects.” Rather than either rejecting the very notion of “things in themselves,” as most neo-Kantians have done, or making the correlationist move of dismissing these “things in themselves” as irrelevant to any philosophical discourse, Whitehead transforms the Kantian notion into a recognition (of the sort Graham Harman, in particular, calls for) of the independence of objects from the conditions of our particualar perceptions of them. (I have previously discussed this point here).

Now, my reading of the Speculative Realists has led me to consider two problems with my overall argument, which I do not address in the book, and which therefore I will need to work on further. One of them has to do with my account of Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment. Both Toscano and Grant suggest, in different ways, that I haven’t read this part of Kant carefully enough. In particular, they both argue that what I am calling “double causality” — Kant’s contrast between mechanism and organicism — is much more problematic, and internally contradictory, than I have been willing to consider. They both read double causality as an intractable aporia or deadlock; their readings suggest that I can’t get away with simply adapting Kant’s duality to Whitehead’s dualities as cheerfully and unproblematically as I have done. Instead, Toscano describes how this problematic leaves its marks on a progression of thinkers leading through Nietzsche and Simondon, and on to Deleuze; while Grant sees this deadlock as being crucial to, and being displaced and rejected by, Schelling’s Naturephilosophy (together with post-Schelling philosophies of nature, again including that of Deleuze). At the moment, I am still right at the beginning of grappling with this problem; so I cannot be clearer about it than I have been so far.

The second problem has to do, more specifically, with Graham Harman’s reading of Whitehead. Harman indeed praises Whitehead for being object-oriented; that is to say, for refusing to privilege human consciousness, and for making a philosophy that “can range freely over the whole of the world” rather than “remain[ing] restricted to self-reflexive remarks about human language and cognition” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 42). But Harman also criticizes Whitehead (as I mentioned in my previous post) for seeing reality as being entirely relational, rather than accepting the existence of substances, or of “primary qualities” that are irreducible to relational ones. Whitehead, Harman says, “fails to distinguish between objects and elements” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 194), i.e. he fails to consider the “interiors” of objects that are irreducible to the qualities revealed in their relations with other objects. I wrote in my previous post that Harman fails to consider how what Whitehead calls the “prehension” of one object by another involves, not just passive reception, but “contructive functioning.” I will add, here, that Harman also fails to take into account how, for Whitehead, every act of prehension is selective, involving a “subjective aim” on the part of the prehending entity that is not given in advance, and that is not merely the object’s inheritance from other objects. The subjective aim is responsible for the novelty introduced into the world, in greater or lesser measure, by every new entity; it constutitues the “privacy” of the entity, as opposed to the “publicity” by virtue of which it is accessible to other entities in its own turn. My claim is that Whitehead does provide a sense of how an entity is more and other than the sum of its encounters with other entities, and does so precisely without having to resort, as Harman does, to notions of substance and primary qualities. Harman complains that “no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able to give a sufficient explanation of change” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 82); but to say this is to ignore, once again, the way that an entity’s prehension of other entities always includes more than was present or apprehensible in the other entities. None of this is addressed in the book; and it all needs to be worked out more fully and coherently than I have done here. I hope to do so soon. Stay tuned.

2009 UK “Post-Cinematic Affect” Tour

I will be in the UK next week for what I may as well call my “Post-Cinematic Affect” tour, since all the talks I will be giving will be extracted from a manuscript-in-progress of that title. Basically, there are sections on Grace Jones’ “Corporate Cannibal” video, on Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate starring Asia Argento, and on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (All of these are heavily revised and expanded versions of texts originally published on this blog). For each talk I will be doing one or two of these sections; the two talks in London will together cover the entire manuscript.

The schedule of talks is as follows:

  • Monday 16 March: Goldsmiths, London (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Tuesday 17 March: Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Wednesday 18 March: Salford University, Manchester (“Post-Cinematic Affect in Boarding Gate and Southland Tales”)
  • Thursday 19 March: University of Western England, Bristol (“Post-Cinematic Affect: Grace Jones and Justin Timberlake”)
  • Saturday 21 March: Kings College, London (“Post-Cinematic Affect”: keynote address for “Emergent Encounters in Film Theory” conference).

Copyright, again

Sorry I haven’t written for so long. Things have just been too busy, and too hectic, for the last several months. I hope to return to more frequent posting after the New Year.

Anyway, about a year ago I was bitching and moaning about copyright issues. This is sort of an update of that. I mentioned then about how a publisher I coyly called “C” — the press in question was Continuum — had ridiculously harsh contract terms, and how I wouldn’t give them an essay for an anthology they were publishing unless they modified those terms. Basically, the contract stipulated that the press would get permanent, exclusive rights of publication in all media, specifically including electronic — this means, for instance, that, were I to put an article I gave them on my own website, I would be in violation of contract. The only exception to this is that they permit the author to reuse the article in a collection of his/her own writings — but this is not allowed until FIVE YEARS after publication in the Continuum volume.

Well, they backed down in that case a year ago, and I got a compromise I thought could live with — I was permitted to publish my own book, which contains the text of the article in question, without having to wait five years. The anthology in question is finally out: it is called Deleuze, Guattari, and the Production of the New, it is in hardcover only, and it can be yours for a mere $95.11 from Amazon (a considerable savings from the list price of $130).

So think about it: if I had signed the contract originally offered by Continuum, my article could not be posted on my own website, nor included even in a book exclusively written by myself until 2014. It would have only appeared in an anthology so expensive that even most libraries would refuse to buy it, let alone individual readers. In return for getting a line on my academic vita, representing an officially “peer-reviewed” publication, I would have had to agree to a situation in which nobody would actually ever get a chance to read my writing.

There is clearly something wrong here. Authors are not permitted to disseminate their own work, and that work is made available by the press that controls it at an absolutely ridiculous price. Some of the best theory books of the last decade have received far less notice than they deserved, all because they have been caught in the limbo of this sort of publishing arrangement. I would cite, for instance, all from different publishers:

There are loads of more examples. These are just a few books that I happen to have read, and that I can recall offhand. (I read them, either by getting my hands on illicit and illegal pdfs, or by getting them through interlibrary loan).

In any case, I was recently solicited to write an article for another anthology of essays, on a subject that interested me. So I said yes. However, it turned out that Continuum was again going to be the publisher, and they offered me the same egregious contract terms as they had previously. This time, rather than negotiate, I simply withdrew from the anthology. I suppose I could have tried to negotiate again, but I am sick of the situation in which the default is so horrible and you can only get something different by making a stink. In addition, at this point I am sufficiently fed up that I would no longer accept the compromise they agreed to last time.

I should also mention that, in addition to the lousy contract, Continuum this time also sent me advisory guidelines stating that “text (prose) extracts of more than 400 words, or a total of 800 words from the same volume if there are several shorter extracts, require permission from the copyright holder.” This represents a far more restrictive interpretation of “fair use” than has ever been the case before; its
effect, I believe, is to make honest scholarship impossible. I believe that fair use guidelines extend considerably further than this, and I will simply not publish with a press that restricts fair use so harshly. Not only am I not allowed by this sort of policy to disseminate my own words, I am also not allowed to remix the words of others.

I can get more readers for anything I post on this blog than for an article published under such circumstances; so what’s the point? I realize I am in a privileged position in this regard; I already have tenure and a senior position at my university, so I am not faced with the “publish or perish” situation that forces many (junior or younger) academics to agree to publication under such horrible circumstances with regard either to price and availability, or the right to be able to disseminate their own work on the web and elsewhere.

There obviously needs to be some sort of open access policy for scholarship in the humanities, as there already is to a great extent in the sciences. We don’t really get paid for our writing, except very indirectly in the sense that a scholarly reputation increases your “marketability” and hence the kind of salary you can get as a professor. In these cases, the policies of presses like Continuum (which I am singling out here only because of my own dealings with them; many other academic presses are just as bad) serve the interests neither of writers nor of readers. I don’t have a blueprint of how to get there (open access) from here (restrictive copyright arrangements), but a first step would be for those academics who, like me, can afford to forgo the lines on their vitas, to refuse to publish with presses that have such policies.

Issue #1

Ron Silliman reports on a new publication, modestly entitled Issue 1. (I was first alerted to this by The Mumpsimus). This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to one of 3785 3164 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the names of several people I know, including some who read (and sometimes comment on) this blog. My own “poem” appears on page 1893; for what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as being very good, nor is it like anything that I could ever imagine myself writing, either in style or in sentiment.

I kind of wonder how other “victims” of this hoax (if that’s what it is) respond to it. Silliman seems kind of pissed off, as do many (but not all) of the commenters on his blog entry. Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus blog) seems more or less amused:

The whole thing strikes me as a stunt pulled by someone who desperately wants attention. (And now I’m giving it to ’em. So it goes.) I’m still amazed that anyone would put the time into creating something like this, but the amazement now is the sort of amazement one has when watching the totally insane rather than watching the harmlessly obsessive.

Me, I think that the stunt raises all sorts of interesting questions (or perhaps I should say, in Palin-speak, that lots of interesting questions “rear their heads”). Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer. Today, we can only be blase about self-referentiality, conceptual art, and so on.

In such a context, Issue 1 attempts to up the ante, by asking meta-meta-questions, as it were. Most notably, there’s the difficulty of deciding whether the publication actually is some sort of interesting conceptual art, or whether it is rather just a dumb prank, or a malicious hoax. Then there is the issue of obsessiveness that Matthew Cheney raises. Certainly a lot of modernist and post-modernist art is quite obsessive (I am thinking of everything from Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots to Henry Darger’s weather chronicles). But Issue 1 might well only be pseudo-obsessive; it seems to be something that would have required an insane amount of time and energy (if only to collect all those author names and write all those poems), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was all generated by a computer program in just a few hours. Even insanity isn’t what it used to be, in our age of digital simulation.

Finally, given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgrowth of the situation in which such ideas no longer seem new, or radical, or outrageously counterintuitive, but have instead been entirely assimilated into our “common sense.”

In short, Issue 1 makes sense to me as a conceptual art project precisely to the extent that it marks the utter banalization, routinization, and digitization of any sort of conceptualism and experimentalism in art, and of all supposedly “avant-garde” gestures. There is something melancholy in coming to this conclusion; but perhaps something liberating as well, since it suggests that the whole strain of avant-gardism that starts in the 19th century, goes through dadaism and other forms of radical modernism, and moves through conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s to the supposedly oppositional political art of the last few decades, has finally outlived its relevance and its usefulness. We have finally reached the point where we can shake off the dead weight of the anti-traditionalist tradition, and perhaps move on to something else. This doesn’t mean rejecting all the art of the avant-garde tradition, much of which I still very much love. But it does mean seeing that art historically, just as we see the art of the Baroque historically, or as we see the science fiction of the “Golden Age” of the early-to-mid 20th century historically. It’s still there to be tapped (or looted) for clever ideas, formal approaches, and so on. But modernist experimentation and avant-gardism is no longer a living resource; in an age of arcane financial instruments capable at one moment of generating huge quantities of fictitious wealth, and at another moment of sending shockwaves through the entire society, wiping out retirement accounts, causing businesses to go bankrupt and jobs to disappear, etc, etc — in such a climate, modernist avant-gardism fails to be “as radical as reality itself.” (I am fully aware that financial panics with real effects upon people’s lives are as old as capitalism itself; what’s new in the present situation comes from the way that new technologies have a multiplier effect, as well as adding additional layers of meta-referentiality and meta-feedback into the system).

I am sorely tempted to add the “poem” of mine which appears in Issue 1, and which I had absolutely nothing to do with producing, to my CV.