Peter's posting is very timely. His argument for an understanding of
innovation that detours through renovation in order to restore mass,
where acceleration would leave - has left - a waste of light and
information, associates a number of poets who'd hitherto seemed like
lone operators, in an unprecedented way. The reference to Virilio is one
I must pursue - my recent poem Sarn Helen walked through a similar
accelerated zone as a response to T Brennan's History After Lacan
(originally - although I got lost and confused and had to make up a
different way).
However, although I admire those who go beyond description and diagnosis
and plough a straight, local furrow, I would caution against seeing the
postmodern/informational universe as uniquely pathologizing. It has
often struck me that the Deleuze and Guattari account of the
contemporary culture of schiz-flow, and privileging of schizophrenia as
an exemplary modern condition conflicts with the simple sociological
fact that levels of schizophrenia are tightly aligned to the Jarman
Index of social deprivation. If you're poor, black, male and unemployed
(and extremely local - you can't afford the wheels or public transport)
you're more likely to develop schizophrenia than if riding through the
City's bars on the green monitor wave of floating signifiers. The
characteristic postmodern pathology is of course and by contrast, a
cluster of stress-related conditions which are about a LACK OF FRICTION.
Especially characteristic amongst people working in my office is anxiety
related to impulse control (straw poll yesterday). Endless and incessant
substitution has succeeded use value. As soon as you reach for something
you fall over. Your body's changes of state, your emotions, are distinct
from the observer and might displace him/her anywhere. What will the
tongue say?
Perhaps this links back to the previous discussion I entered, keying to
the word 'innovation'. Writing whose chief impetus is innovative drifts
past as just another bizarre object in the vertiginous envelope.
(Vertigo without coordinates.) Its fate is to be a figment of a symptom
of what it would challenge.
O yes, and Ken - I think I was being affirmative about Charles Bernstein
at that moment! One of the good things about Assembling Alternatives was
to hear and tune in to what's funny and deft in his verse.
Anyway, Peter starting this ecological line leads me to wonder whether
Richard Kerridge - who collaborated on the Prynne book with Neil Reeve -
might have anything to contribute, since I gather he's big in Green
Critical Theory. Is he out there/in here - at Bath?
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