June 01, 2015

RoadsideYannik Willing-Holtz

R. Scott Bakker: Global Elminativism and the Post-Intentional WorldS.C. Hickman

For Scott what we neglect is more important than what we remember. We are selective creatures who forget more than we will ever be able to retain, and we base our knowledge on this minimalistic world of intentional folk-psychology rather than on the sciences which are continually blowing holes in our smoke screen semantic worlds. One might say we are tribal semanticists, we carefully protect and defend the bubbles of meaning that we are embedded in without knowing that they are all based on mechanisms of social control.

The Self Forgives Little of Itself Adam Clayguernica

The days swell with our remaining. Yes, the leaves allow the wind to contain the branch of a tree and the skyline to become its own type of lineation, the idea of beauty lost and then found along the swirling liquid in the trashcans left in the alley. Watching the train cut across the prairie, geese flying the wrong way for the season, it’s as if the knuckle of tomorrow has arrived today with the weight of snow and wind, gardens cut open to sky and the sky alive with the orange hue of the sun replaced by a false sense of itself, a waste of time left clear and open in this wash of sightline.

Adam Clay at the Academy of American Poets

The Nightingale is SingingMikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov b. May 31, 1862

Three Poems Adam Clay la petite zine

(I do not deny repetition as the singular goal of emptiness) I do not deny repetition as the singular goal of emptiness, but repeating emptiness is something worth dismantling. I love the tangible aspect of my world, but the concrete bores me. Watching an ice cube melt from the inside bores me. What doesn't bore me can be found in The Museum of Domestication. I realize my words are only a footnote to the sea. I realize the sea is only a song to myself.

Schizoanalysis as Anthro-Ecology Edmund Berger—synthetic zero

How does one begin to broach the question of linkage, passage, and reflexivity to be found in the theories and practices of anarchism, the radical post-psychoanalysis of Felix Guattari, and the ontological framework that has been ushered in the necessity of acknowledging the forces that we label “the Anthropocene”? The overlaps between each are undeniable: in was ecological concerns that late in his life Guattari turned his mind to; the field that his work is commonly situated – the school of post-structuralism – is often affiliated with anarchism of the so-called “post-left” variety. That Guattari was closely aligned with the Italian Autonomia, which the post-left anarchists owe much of their discourse to, is no passing coincidence. We can also note the presence of “green anarchism” under the post-left label, alongside the controversial, anti-civilizational stance espoused by anarcho-primitivism. Yet we can see clearly that this triad of eco-ontology, Guattari, and anarchism have yet to really have the dialogue that they deserve. On even a surface level reading the commonalities between each point is immediately clear: none points to a resolving synthesis in thought or being. The Anthropocene has brought us full circle and pried open what was also present but shunted aside by the progress of the West – that civilization and nature are not separate, and that civilization and culture exist entangled in the complex web of the ecology itself, defined as it is by various states of emergence. Anarchism, regardless of which of the many monikers it adapts, is at its core a program that is constantly evading and contesting the centralizing and homogenizing forms of the state itself. Guattari, meanwhile, shifts these focuses to the levels of individuals and group’s subjecthood, looking to move from fixed and stable states to ones far from equilibrium. Keeping in tune with the manner in which each point in this triad presents itself as an ongoing unfolding, this essay will attempt no resolute synthesis. I am more concerned in this moment with simply tracing out a constellation of convergences and patterns, looking for possibilities of a minor politics for the Anthropocene.

Distancias 2010Juan Genovésb. May 31, 1930

Retrospectives 1: Thomas, Moore, and Craig Peter Rileyfortnightly review

In most critical accounts of English poetry, the period called “the 1940s” has for a long time been considered a disaster. The conventional history is that all was going well enough with Auden, Spender, Day Lewis et al., and suddenly under the cover of war a race of demented poets were let loose who produced incomprehensible ravings which cannot be taken seriously for a moment. In fact the 1940s was not a disaster zone for poetry, it was a disaster zone for criticism, which was caused initially by moves in academia, especially Cambridge, to apply the established forensic expertise in locating literary frauds through the centuries to current production, thus assuming the right to intervene, with praise and blame as appropriate, in the production and reception of new poetry. This was the disaster it was bound to be, in which a bunch of Cambridge lecturers, led by F.R. Leavis, attempted to extend their coverage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into the present tense, having already savaged Swinburne, Tennyson, Shelley, Hardy and others. The whole stress was and always had been on evaluation, discrimination, quality control, from a platform of moral responsibility through formal coherence (already Dylan Thomas must have sensed a tank regiment advancing towards him across the fens). The intervention into contemporary poetry initially did a lot of good in fostering acceptance of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (by Leavis himself in New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932) but it was hardly to be expected that critics who had already proved themselves incapable of reading Milton or Hardy would take kindly to what happened in the 1940s. ...