Christopher,

That was a great post. Because I am a presumptuous little so-and-so, and
because I am lazy as hell, I am going to answer you with another section
from my soon-to-be world famous interview. The section I have chosen
contains a sly allusion to Kristeva. Can you find it? I also, elsewhere, not
in this section, discuss Bourdieu and position-taking, but I probably
shouldn't ahve, since I'd only read one book by him and, to understand it, I
had to read a bunch of secondary sources. As well, note the reference to
Macao. What a coincidence!

Before offereing the interview section, on this question of ethics, just a
remark: Imaginative acts of transference in the context of deeply tangled
ethical issues need not-- at times cannot-- be confined to entrenched
protocols of authorial closure. For example, and to take the case of a work
I am close to, clearly the Hiroshima event haunts our collective
unconscious. If one of the reasons it does so is becasue its moral
transgressiveness "defies representation," isn't it understandable that the
event might call forth-- as one dimension of response-- answerings that in
turn transgress the sanctioned codes and contracts of written expression?
Not for the mere sake, that is, of being transgressive, but becasue working
against the grain of "natural" frames of attribution and reception may offer
new ways of empathic engagement and understanding (albeit always unfinished,
of course).

OK, here's the passage:
cheers,

Kent

-----------

Bill Freind: This sounds visionary, with a tinge of the mystical, maybe.
Some of what you're
saying reminds me of the Neoists, who fought against the capitalist
appropriation of
the figure of the artist by producing works under the name Karen Eliot.
Likewise, they sponsored what they called Festivals of Plagiarism which
included works which borrowed, reworked and, yes, plagiarized other works.
While that seemed like a good way of directing attention to the
commodification of both “art” and “the artist,” it’s interesting to note
that Stewart Home, one of the primary Neoists, has moved more recently
toward what can only be described as outright mysticism (although he
suggests this celebration of the occult is a parodic way of undermining the
ideology of capitalism). Can we question the commodified figure of the
artist without sliding into a more mystical approach which is little better
than the system it purports to replace?

KJ: Yes, what I’m talking about is a bit of a vision, admittedly, but it is
grounded in a materialist, not mystical position. As to the Neoists, in
their second incarnation via Mail-Art and Home, they foreshadow a much more
significant anarcho-cultural phenomenon: the still-unfolding collective
pseudonym Luther Blissett, which began as an Umberto Eco-inspired cell in
Italy and has rapidly spread, largely via the Web, to other nations. This is
a fascinating development, and its hoaxes, pranks, hacks, and
Situationist-like antics have garnered a good deal of media play. But Luther
Blissett and Karen Eliot bear little in common with Yasusada: the former are
anarcho-deconstructive in intent and function, the latter is
utopic-constructive; the former vacuums up creative minds in monolithic
anonymity under a single name, the latter represents the sowing of new
authorships by creative minds seeking to disseminate identity in fluid
configurations.

Now to get back to the issue of mysticism, I can’t fully agree with the
premises of your question. There will be many mystics, many odd,
spiritualistic characters in the future exfoliations of a heteronymic
general economy. Heteronymous materialists will attack them violently, to be
sure, but it would be unmaterialist to assert that materialism has won the
debate in advance. Are super-strings, or wormholes, or parallel universes
matter or spirit, for example, and what do these terms mean, truly, when we
talk about such things? Why is there something rather than nothing, as
Leibniz asked 300 years back? There’s been no answer yet. The question
heteronymy proposes is materialist in character and intent; no one can say
what the final response, if there is one, will be.

The underlying contradiction that provides the traction for setting forth,
the “regimentation” that demands new destinations, is quite clear in its
general outline: poetic production, in the US, Russia, Uruguay, Martinique,
Macao, or Japan is stuck on the page and inside the body brace of the Name.
The Name is what validates and envalues; it is the relay pole through which
the current of the culture industry moves; it is the hole through which the
invader enters and appropriates; it is the watermark that guarantees the
currency. It's comfortable and respectable to circulate there. What, after
all, could seem more natural? If your mutual fund grows big enough, you can
even buy a job. But poetry’s yearning cannot be contained indefinitely by
this system, and it is fated to burst the outmoded form that presently binds
it.

Marx said, “The task of history, once the world beyond the truth has
disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world.” For poets- or at
least for those poets who take the notion of a revolution in poetic language
seriously- the task is now. There is no need to wait for “the world beyond
the truth” to disappear. There is no need, either, for a “transitional
stage” of practice that requires some kind of “collaborationist” interregnum
with the reigning regime. The task is one of permanent poetic revolution- a
progressive espousal, as Adonis, again, puts it, of the unknown eternal
truths that can only be discovered outside of “any kind of ideology, system,
or institution.” In order to begin this espousal, in order to begin
establishing the poetic truth of this world, we must show, by deeds and not
just claims, how phantasmagoric the world of the Author beyond the truth
truly is.


Q: And how might this be shown?

KJ: The fractal proliferation of new, created authorships will show this,
dismantling and liberating in a single gesture. Their multiplication across
times and places will expose heretofore invisible conjoinings and practices.
This will constitute a qualitatively new condition of poesis, one that will
unfold beyond the penal, disciplinary rituals of the old order. The world of
the Author we are now in is a vast and flattened circle of cells around a
great tower at the center which sees from above and all around. Most of the
prisoners happily accept their state; a few souls try to wiggle their way
under the walls here or there, but they do so while singing about it at the
top of their lungs. The song is called, “Here I am, my name is inmate so and
so, I occupy cell number such and such, and I’m trying to wiggle my way
under the wall.” Obviously, they won’t get out this way.


Q: What is the radius of this flattened and ramparted “world beyond the
truth”? You seem to be suggesting that it encompasses areas beyond
“mainstream poetry”?

KJ: I'm not talking here just about the poets at the Associated Writing
Programs convention or at the New Yorker party. The so-called avant-garde in
the U.S., for example, is by and large in a poetic/panoptic Flat-Land, poets
squiggling about, trying to make squiggles distinctive from those of the
poets of the Academy of American Poets, for example. They are doing some
interesting squiggles in those two dimensions, the so-called avant-garde is,
but there are many other dimensions, and one can stand up in them and even
fly, maybe, or be in two places, or more, at once. But if you are “so and
so” poet because that’s what it says on your social security card, you are
stuck in a certain space that is constructed for you, and the reader is too,
no matter how odd the form or language of your poem in Poems for the
Millennium [an anthology of international 20th century poetry].

I think this is one of the reasons poetry of any kind is not interesting to
most people, and why so many of those who do find it interesting find it so
for surface considerations... Poetry, alas, has become too much a kind of
entomology, a collection of chrysalis-like authenticities all too happy to
be plucked and pinned in display inside the tower at the structure’s center.
Poeticus charlesenius olsonius, Poeticus robertus pinskynius, Poeticus
brucenius andrewsei, etc. ...The multiple specimens have variations in size,
marking, and color, but they all stem, ideo-phylogenetically, from the
originary genus. It’s quite easy to fit each species-even the exotic kind--
into its proper place in the Archive.

The truth is that professional wrestling, which is brazenly fake on one
level, has a much more interesting and complex relationship to cultural
reality than 99.9% of poetry does today. Poetry should and could be much
more sophisticated in its generic- conceptual-performative operations than
professional wrestling, of course. Right now it is less so.

But I don't claim any special powers of understanding these matters. I'm
quite aware I’m not as literarily-talented or quick- minded as many of those
poets trapped in the Flat-Land. It's simply that I've been associated, by
great coincidence and fortune, with a work that has proven to have a subtle
and powerful (if largely unintended) critique of the present state of poetic
affairs. And I think Yasusada has done a little bit of good work in laying
bare the fake consciousness of so much poetic authenticity. Anyway, so no,
because I guess I’m still answering your first question, I do not feel that
the words “fake” or “hoax” are applicable to Yasusada in any productive
sense.
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