>...category of English (or Spanish) poetry not with the equally
essential category of American poetry but with a field of potentialities, a
virtual America that we approach but never possess...< (Charles Bernstein)
I cannot understand this negative grounding of a nominally inessential
'American' condition in the 'essentiality' of the supposedly determined,
though in fact still diversifying, European conditions which appear in a
manner quite prop-like to arrest the desirability of 'possessing' a
specifiable culture; the orders of possession distinguished by this remark
seem to me only nominally distinct, failing to take account of the bathos
incurred by such an act of distinguishing that fails wholly to recognise
actual material possession as the principal category of that relation.
There may very well be a virtual America, and this may very well be what
certain critics of our actual America should like to choose to fail to
possess, if only to arbitrate further in favour of popular theories of a
'simulacrum'; poetry, as the term might sometimes be taken, could be
confined polemically to the province of this 'virtual' condition, could be
as a term made distractious through a diffusion of its potential
specificity amongst unidentified 'potentialities', and this would make
things easier for all involved and promote still further the liberating
perks of a critical vantage that dissociates itself from actual crisis.
There are countless possible 'approaches' that can be evaluated, countless
deferrals to shore up a general deference, countless ways in which a
citizen of an imperial power can opt to imagine himself disinherited of the
culture his economic activity supports merely by subscribing to and
elaborating theories of removal from some apparently self-removing cultural
reality. People have complained about the world being 'virtual', more or
less, for centuries, in Europe not least. Steadily we have understood the
necessity of overcoming this proclivity.
Keston Sutherland
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