thanks Deb for your thoughts about molecular and molar politics; they're really provocative. to follow your flight-line, just a few bits about a 'microcosmic' poetic, and the idea that this
might be a politically suspect, or apolitical, mode.

What might be offered by a politics/poetics of detail? this, to me, is fascinating & rich terrain. One objection to seemingly endless splintering & detailing (i imagine) might be that it
can effect a kind of stasis of dispersal. Discrete particles might be seen to float without context, and seemingly adrift from more macro-political 'anchors'. But there are complex
political currents at work in detail, too - even though these might not fit with solidity-principles, or grand narratives.

Strategies of detailing can encode some pretty intense resistances - to homogenisation, to totalising languages, to prescribed/prevalent commodification logics. I'm being reductive here.
This might be due partly to defamiliarisation, and the capacity for 'microcosmic' (poetical) attention to generate strangely different ways of perceiving 'existing' orders. At its most
optimistic: a detail jumps out, preventing complacency in reading, or suggesting a kind of epistemological swerve, or reminding us of the dozens of ways in which 'languages' can mean, or
helping us to be alert to the subtle (& not-so-subtle) ways in which power works, or just delighting us... all political engagements.

Microcosmic detailing might help to ensure against kinds of forgetting, too - it is a way of keeping trace, keeping histories - a possibly anarchically-ordered kind of archivalism, humming
with potential energy. I think this is valuable political work. Detailing can provide context; which to me is one of the most politically-crucial 'things' to take into account, when reading
poetry, or reading/responding to anything. (How can a thing be without context?) If poetical 'microcosms' preserve contexts that can then enable political resistance to certain kinds of
injustice, or erasure, then I think that's a good thing.

It might be telling that excessive detailing, and wandering texts, have often been feminised - and not positively.

This all assumes that poetry matters; that it has effect, and 'real' political significance as a labour practice; which of course it does. Its strategies/politics might be subtle as Ron
says, or gossamer as Deb says, or help to quietly loosen knots, as Alison says... but there are important politics at work there.

Navel-gazing is often seen as a political dead-end, of course; and microcosms that don't reach equilibrium with 'bigger pictures' are probably pretty suspect. My big fear about 'detail' is
to do with technologies of commodification. If everything can be molecularised and sold, in isolation, or used purely in the service of capital flow & capital generation, then the whole
thing breaks down a bit. A limitless carousel of dis-embodied detail (eg a supermarket) can suggest a fairly disenfranchising politic, even while claiming to provide a certain freedom to
choose.

I've been thinking recently about this in terms of interiorisation (or turning in) and exteriorisation (or turning out). Needing the internal to exemplify an 'external', and vice versa.
It's another version of 'think global act local', perhaps - one spatialising of political strategies.

I wonder what people on the list think about 'superfluity' and political engagement?

This is just a localised rave, tired on friday night with a sore arm, & of course there are many s p a c e s in it. I'd be interested to hear other responses to Deb's idea of
molecular/molar politics. What kinds of poethics are at work in 'miscrocosmic' poetries? A mote of Louis Zukofsky to end; a poet, maybe, of the macrocosmic microcosm.

'A poem. This object in process... Impossible to communicate anything but particulars... Poems are only acts upon particulars.'     - An Objective

cheers
kate fagan

(ps can i have my subscription e-mail address changed on the list please to
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