February 12, 2015

Journey on the fishMax Beckmann 1934

Introduction: Maps? Dee Morris & Stephen Voycejacket2

Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4-5

The aesthetic, pedagogical, and political focus of this series of commentaries is a set of documents we call counter-maps. The term comes from critical cartographer Denis Wood, who provides a lineage that includes early twentieth-century map art, the mental maps movement of the 1960s, Indigenous and bioregional mapping, and the traditions of Parish Mapping. For Wood, “(I)t is counter-mapping that shows us where mapping is heading”. Our contention here is that counter-maps also suggest a direction poetry may take in the digitally driven, multimedia information economy that pervades all aspects of 21st-century collective creative life. In this series of commentaries, our examples, both pre- and post-1995, come from a handful of subgenres—tactical, forensic, locative, cognitive, and ecological counter-mapping—that mix the graphic syntax of cartography, the rhythmic patterns of language, and an urgent interrogation of the processes and institutions of global capitalism. If not always immediately identifiable as “poems,” the constructions we’ll examine are enough like poems to point to one among many futures for imaginative life. Like mainstream poems, each of these constructions brings together a specific site, a moment in time, and a motivated subjectivity; like innovative poems, they trouble the conventions of their medium to trigger new modes of thinking; and like avant-garde provocations of every kind, they are unabashedly pedagogical and political. In contrast to conventional poetic forms, however, the syntax of counter-maps—their logic, order, and arrangement—is predominantly spatial. As visual forms of knowledge production, they belong to the generative, diagrammatic, and dynamic practice Johanna Drucker calls graphesis.

Max Beckmann

Jerome Rothenberg interview (pdf)

My breakthrough came in part—strangely, I think—from a poem by Gertrude Stein, who certainly played down her jewishness (as much as any poet I knew), but on rare occasions let it seep out. (David Antin had suggested reading The Making of Americans as a shtetl or Jewish immigrant novel, but with the ethnic identity suppressed.) I was also immersed at the time in the dark fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom I had met on a couple of occasions, and the even darker poetry of Paul Celan, whom I met once and had been the first to translate into English. And it was also a time when I was finishing Technicians of the Sacred & immersing myself in a range of deep cultures / deep poetries from throughout the world, to which I would add the Jewish as another such culture for which I felt privileged to speak.

So I found myself thinking, among other things, of what a Jewish entry into the world of experimental modernism might look like and finding it— strangely, as I said before—in Stein. It was just a few short lines in a longer serial poem, ‘Dates’ in Bee Time Vine, but when I read it, I thought of it immediately as Getrude’s ‘jewish poem’:

Pass over Pass over Pass Pass Pass Pass

to which I added a final line—‘pass water’—and then went back into the full Stein poem and substituted a darker Jewish vocabulary from Singer’s Satan in Goray by a kind of rhyming, word for word substitution, to make in the process a ‘jewish poem’ of my own—the kind of multiphasic, irreverent and knotty ‘jewish poem’ that I wanted and that really got me on the road to Poland/1931 and, still more expansively, A Big Jewish Book, or more narrowly, Khurbn and Gematria. It also led me to ally with others, both Jews and non-Jews, who were also sharing in that exploration.

Leaving the Theatre1910Carlo Carràb February 11, 1881

Paradoxes of Materialism larval subjects

... There is, for example, a radical difference between the lived body (the body of phenomenological experience) and the physiological (material) body. The physiological body can, of course, affect the lived body, yet the lived body is no reliable guide to the material or physiological body. A man suffers from severe anxiety. His thought spins, exploring, in a Heideggerian fashion, the meaning of his existence, his relation to death, the being of being. He thinks these are the sources of his anxiety and goes to a psychoanalyst or an existential therapist. Yet perhaps his anxiety is merely a chemical imbalance. From within experience there’s no way to know, for his material being is exterior to all thought and experience. The relation of meaning to anxiety seems absolutely self-evident. He spends years in therapy. Yet the ground of his anxiety was, in this instance, never in the domain of matter. There’s a strange way in which the material body, that which is closest to us, is more exterior than the greatest exteriority– even the exteriority of the so-called Levinasian Other –such that while we are it it is nonetheless completely opaque.

Stil LIfe with Two Large Candles1947Max Beckmann b. February 12, 1884

What the Sharing Economy Takes Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population. Doug Henwood

Uber’s Business Model Could Change Your WorkFarhad Manjoo

You may not be contemplating becoming an Uber driver any time soon, but the Uberization of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession.