Hi Peter, not sure if I can squeeze this in before going out but I'll have a go... Also scared of tying myself in knots and appearing self-contradictory by not explaining clearly enough.
I, personally, do not 'view everything exclusively from political and socio-political perspectives', I can't speak for others on this. I don't do that because of experience really - the discovery, especially in the workplace, that sometimes the people I got on with best and had respect for were people who voted differently to me - and it's not as if I was a tolerant liberal, I was very left-wing, a lot further to the left than anyone I knew personally.
But yes, when something impels me towards the political (usually anger and a despairing disgust at the power and lies of the rich) then I'll readily go there with no holds barred. I also tend towards a socio-political perspective when looking at the world of poetry, partly because very few other people seem to do so, or when they do they generally frame their arguments in a way that makes it difficult to understand them.
OK, let's jump to what is definitely a difference between us, and which relates so much to your perception of 'totality' and 'blame' etc...
WW1 - which we've been forced to think about again by the media and their roll-call of war apologists and rightists in the guise of historians (yes, this is something that definitely gets my angry juices flowing). You say that the war was not down to a totalising culture but to individual acts by individuals with power. It isn't the actions of individuals alone that sent all those poor devils across Europe to slaughter each other (talking about all the countries involved on both sides) - those 'poor devils' did it because they had very little choice. Their whole upbringing and the world-view that had been stamped into them came from the culture, and this applies both to those with the power and those with no power - the actions of all of them were within a context - (if any Marxists want to say that it was economic necessities that underpinned that 'culture' then OK, but I'm not going there for the purpose of this). WW1 was not inevitable, and yes, mechanically it was down to decisions, obviously, but those decisions could not have been made and the consequences of them could not have been the same if it did not comply with the cultural world view (I know philosophers have words for this but I can't remember what they are). So my blame, and the blame of millions of others who thought about it was aimed at the culture. It can be summed up as 'This is sick. There is something badly wrong.' So the blame does not fall on individuals - individuals cannot be 'blamed' as such.
However (and this is where we begin to walk through an ethical minefield, so to speak, and also where I am not sure of explaining myself well enough) blaming the culture does not then automatically mean that collective guilt takes its place. If anything it's the opposite. I for one do not believe in collective guilt. It is abhorrent. If blame comes into it - and note I say 'if' (which it does, emotionally at times) I think individuals are responsible for their own actions, and yes, still responsible even within the bubble of the culture with all its pressures. In other words for me the soldiers who were doing the killing were in their own way just as responsible as the generals and politicians. I'm not talking about right and wrong, I'm talking about 'responsible'. I've had vicious arguments with people about this ever since my teens in discussions with my mum and dad about WW2 etc and I admit that it is a very difficult topic. I am not pacifist by the way, even though I have a great respect for those who are.
So do you see why I don't share your very well put, " "Culture" just spreads the guilt out, off the shoulders of the actual perpetrators and onto everybody. It ceases to be a historical event. It becomes a factor of a misbegotten climate inhabited collectively. And we, everybody, still, 2015, we are all responsible, and must seek expiation for this and all other wrongs." Nobody since 1918 is responsible for WW. But what remains is the 'culture', the set of beliefs in Nation and obedience to authority etc. If an individual has confidence in those beliefs then fine, but I don't. I don't know if you do or not - not sure if it's relevant or not either.
I want to say more on the poetry re this totalising notion of yours and what you say regarding the 'fracas' etc is of course connected, but it will have to wait otherwise I'll miss my train and be unable to go to Manchester to have a pint with some 'eminently unpublishables.'
Cheers and sorry for the rambling length of above for those who get put off by more than a sentence.
Tim
On 17 Mar 2015, at 16:59, Peter Riley wrote:
It's not so much the Everything is wrong. Of course everything is wrong, especially if you view everything exclusively from political and socio-political perspectives. It's more the Everybody is to blame, as it is worked through the at once subjectivising and totalising agencies of modern poetry heavily influenced by central European post-war synthesizing philosophies, until it is totally inescapable except by striking the board and shouting, "enough!" and chucking it out of the window, which I think is the only way to liberate yourself, as a poet, from the imposition of cultural blame and the resulting pessimism.
It is for instance surely typical of this "advanced" solidarity to claim that such a thing as WW1 was the result of a "culture" rather than the acts of leaders, technicians, and politicians within a history. "Culture" just spreads the guilt out, off the shoulders of the actual perpetrators and onto everybody. It ceases to be a historical event. It becomes a factor of a misbegotten climate inhabited collectively. And we, everybody, still, 2015, we are all responsible, and must seek expiation for this and all other wrongs. Poets do this through their poetry, perhaps. Or for another instance that "fracas" which Tim referred to, surely this showed the pseudo-religious dynamic in operation when a continuing social injustice is treated as a sin which can be expiated only by repentance, and people's individual beliefs and good-will count for nothing against accession to the collective "cultural" crime. And really, out there, outside these neuroses, you wouldn't believe how fresh and promising things are and spring is in the air and how much people recognise the truth of the feminist claim even if they drop the wrong pronoun now and then…
