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Kent,

and this not at all an attempt of a critique, or an 'authorative' (ha ha)
answer, but what I'm really intrigued with on this identity question is why
you seem to use a theoretical scaffold for it.

I use at times various personae, but they all end with the muddy tag of
'David Bircumshaw' underneath. I have lots of problems with that guy, btw,
but I stick with him, possibly from a sense of sympathy. I certainly do at
times want to be somebody else, for instance one richer, better looking,
younger, miore talented, etc etc, but I stick with that half-wit, maybe if
just for old times' sake, rather than let the personae run loose.

As I said, this is not a reasoned argument, just a few thoughts and
impressions.

Best

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "kent johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 12:07 AM
Subject: Levinas's door/ collaboration


> Doug,
>
> A felicitous typo, yours below: "'heteronymy' top"!
>
> You ask:
>
> >So: is there any hope whatsoever to achieve 'collaborative modes [that]
> >would no doubt explode within an active counter-economy of heteronymy'?
> > >And where is that 'heteronymy' top be found?
>
> Yes, I think moves outside normative attributional forms will expand
> potentialities of collaboration, and not just between "really existing"
> authors. If I keep quoting from my forthcoming interview, there won't be
any
> reason to publish it (!), but since the issues being raised connect
directly
> with some of the things I discuss there, I will go ahead and quote some
> more-- the opening (unabashedly utopian as its tone may be), which I think
> goes to the point of your question:
>
>
> Bill Freind: When it was revealed that Araki Yasusada was in fact an
> invention, many people were quick to call the work a hoax or a fake. Do
> those terms seem accurate to you?
>
> KJ: Who is more authentic, who is less a reproduction: the poet who
markets
> his person and career, proudly hoarding his cultural capital into the
mutual
> fund of resume and copyright, or the poet who creates another poet or more
> and refuses, to his dying day, to claim this writing under his own name?
In
> the special issue of Boundary 2, 99 Poets/1999, edited by Charles
Bernstein,
> the expatriate Syrian poet Adonis proposes the following about poetry's
> future task:
>
> "To save itself, poetry will need to progressively espouse the unknown
> eternal truths and refuse again and again to be regimented from the
outside
> by any kind of ideology, system, or institution....[P]oetry will have to
> advance by exploring regions the invader cannot reach....[T]he traditional
> view of the poem cannot survive, it will have to be transformed in its
very
> structure. Just as the traditional concept of poetry has already broadened
> to exceed the limits of traditional forms of speech, so, in order to
resist
> the utilitarian goals which nearly strangled it this century, in order to
> escape ideology, the structure of poetic language will have to open itself
> to more movement, and move always toward a concept of the total poem."
>
> This is well said, and I would say that this movement or opening toward
the
> "total poem" will also require a sloughing-off of narrow and fake notions
of
> authenticity. It will mean a guerrilla war of the heart against the
ideology
> of the Author.
>
>
> Q. What's wrong with the ideology of the Author?
>
> KJ: I don't mean that all poets would or should cease to attribute their
> poems to their persons. That would be more than a quixotic proposal. So
I'm
> not suggesting that modes and versions of heteronymity will totally
replace
> traditional conceptions of authorship. Nor, I should say, will any move to
> something truer and more authentic have anything to do with simple notions
> of anonymity. As Mikhail Epstein, the prominent Russian theorist and
critic
> wrote in a letter to Yasusada's creator, Tosa Motokiyu, in 1996:
>
> "Poststructuralism has pronounced the death sentence for the individual
> author(ship), but does this mean that we are doomed to return to the
> pre-literary stage of anonymity? One cannot enter twice the same river,
and
> anonymity in its postauthorial, not pre-authorial, implementation will
turn
> into something different from folklore anonymity. What would be, then, a
> progressive, not retrospective, way out of the crisis of individual
> authorship? Not anonymity, I believe, but hyperauthorship."
>
> As in the physical world one has Newtonian and quantum mechanics
coexisting
> in paradoxical simultaneity, so also will classical Authorship and
> heteronymic strangeness coexist. The problem is that literature is still
> very solidly in pre-Einsteinian times, and the quantum realm has not even
> yet begun to be observed...
>
>
> Q: The quantum realm?
>
> KJ: I believe there will be, in this future and broad-based "refusal to be
> regimented from the outside," a more subtle and fluid relationship with
> poetic identity as legally and culturally, even biologically,
circumscribed.
> And in this resistance to regimentation, the circulation of created,
> fully-realized hyperauthorships will become a vibrant and branching and
> authentic utopian space, with schools and collaborations, journals and
> sub-genres, critical forays and epistolary crossings. I think that readers
> will flock to this apocryphal space and jump in, grateful to abide in
> mystery and to pursue the traces, clues, and revelations its authors leave
> behind. Poets both real and not real will move in shimmering ways back and
> forth between realms and across times. Cross-disciplinary forms and genres
> unimaginable at present will flower forth. It will be a "wavy" zone
> impossible to appropriate or to discipline, because authorship in this
> topography will not have a discrete location or body; it will be
> continuum-like, a wave, to draw from Epstein again, going across times,
> places, and personalities.
>
> But this will require strong conceptual moves that leave behind the
> vanishing point of genetic ascription and push poetic- performative
> activity-- sometimes illicitly and against "known laws"-- beyond the
generic
> canvass-horizon of the page.
>
>
>
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