Archive for the ‘“statements, terms, and jargon”’ Category
“statements, terms, and jargon”: Tuesday 17 October 2023
Time constraints and temperament restrict many of my thoughts to remarks. Thus, what follows are emphatically fragments, metonymies (parts) of potentially more-extended discourses and drafts (essays) holding the promise of future elaboration….
The debate over the origins of the coronovirus continues four years after the pathogen’s emergence. Whether the virus “leaked” from a lab or originated in a wet market is false dilemma, however. Gain-of-function research is carried out to help predict how virusses that originate “in the wild” might mutate and effect human beings; wet markets are precisely a vector for such virusses. At base, both sites are situated in a dysfunctional food production system “linked [as Hadas Thier puts it] to the rise of factory farming, city encroachment on wildlife, and an industrial model of livestock production.” Thus “the debate” is a distraction from the real, material conditions that gave rise to Covid-19 and that culture future pandemics…
Presently, Quebec’s civil service unions are negotiating a new contract with their “employer.” What is as remarkable as it is unremarked (such silence an index of ideology) is the adversarial stance adopted by the provincial government. It seems not to understand that a robust and efficient civil service is not an “expense” or “cost” to the province. An effective civil service would, first, deliver needed services to the population, which would culture a happier population, one would think, rather than one for whom life is made increasingly difficult if not downright precarious. And wouldn’t a governing party want a happier populace? But, moreso, an investment in the civil service is a cash-injection in the province’s economy, not a drain on the government’s monetary resources. In the first place, a non-trivial portion of wages and salaries are immediately recouped as income tax. What remains of the wages and salaries is, for the most part, spent on local goods and services (and the resulting profits are themselves subject to taxation). If the civil servants are fortunate enough to have any surplus monies (a majority of Canadian households run a debt), those funds are deposited in local financial institutions, banks or, ideally, credit unions, which, then, in turn, are leant out as a further cash injection into the province’s economy. And what is most egregiously overlooked is that the province’s civil servants are themselves tax payers—that group always appealed to to keep governments’ “operating costs” low—and most importantly citizens.
“Populism is always ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!’ Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess—which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required.”—Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 61.
If the shock of the Great War and attendant traumas drove many to choose between fascism and communism, liberal democracy and capitalism having been revealed in their essential bankruptcy, then how much moreso now with the Pandemic and the Climate Emergency? And what of the insight that liberal democracy is and has been merely the vehicle of the political power of the bourgeoisie? That the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and the demise of Feudalism and monarchy all accompany the advent of Capitalism, that that development is “modernity”? Then, how fateful the name of “the Occident”!
A fateful analogy: “The commodity, a singular concept, has two aspects. But you can’t cut the commodity in half and say, that’s the exchange-value, and that’s the use-value. No, the commodity is a unity. But within that unity, there is a dual aspect.”—David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2010), 23.—The sign, a singular concept, has two aspects. But you can’t cut the sign in half and say, that’s the signifier, and that’s the signified. No, the sign is a unity. But within that unity, there is a dual aspect….
“statements, terms, and jargon”: Saturday 2 September 2023
Time constraints and temperament restrict many of my thoughts to remarks. Thus, what follows are emphatically fragments, metonymies (parts) of potentially more-extended discourses and drafts (essays) holding the promise of future elaboration….
“If you want to change your life / burn down your house…” These words, which open Peter Dale Scott’s Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000, strike an uncannily, untimely note in light of this season’s fires in Maui and in Canada’s north and west coast. The first canto of Scott’s long poem describes experiencing one of the no-less devastating wildfires Californians suffered in the closing years of last century. Both the fires in California and Maui left “rivulets of metal // from… melted cars.” From a broader, historical perspective, my German father-in-law, who came of age in the closing years of the Second World War in Germany’s industrial zone, the Ruhrgebeit, when he saw pictures of the devastation in Maui, was reminded of similar pictures he’d seen of a bombed-out Dresden. Such devastation, that stretches back, too, to that of the Great War, prompts Scott to cite Heidegger’s 1929 study, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, concerning “Dasein face to face // with its original nakedness.” Have we here, perhaps, a new literary topos?…
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not write but, more exactly, perhaps, merely generate not even intertext but a permutation of its elements (words). Where intertext, rigorously, is “scraps of text that have existed or exist…the texts of the previous or surrounding culture… a new tissue of past citations…”, the “wake of the already-written”, what LLMs produce is only the most probable order of words. Do such prototexts not, imaginably (if not imaginatively) call forth, then, from poetry a countermeasure, the demand to compose in the least likely syntax? This demand transcends The New Sentence, wherein parataxis occurs only between sentences, urging a rereading of not only those most syntactically centripetal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems, for example, but those explorations in this direction in, among others, the novels and poems of William Burroughs and John Cage, let alone those even older, deeper efforts to evade, avoid, or otherwise complicate the declarative sentence as “a complete(d) thought” in the poetry of Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, among so many others.
Or, from a related angle, chatbot “poems” need be considered in light of earlier modes of aleatoric composition, whether Burroughs’ Third Mind techniques or Cage’s or MacLow’s employment of the I Ching, or, farther back, Surrealism and Dada, or, even more radically, the various forms of divination throughout space and time, such as those collected in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred and remembered even in the classical heritage of antiquity (the Sybil’s leaves…). Given that the unconscious if not the “mindless” has been overtly and consciously employed in the composition of poetry to a variety of ends, chatbot “poems” or their precursors (which go back decades) are hardly “new.” Indeed, their very place in so-called “Late” Capitalism urges their scrutiny in light of the tradition, especially when they are employed “to write” “poems.” Is it inconsequential that Breton was a communist, that MacLow and, in his own way, Cage were anarchists?…
Perry Anderson, in his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, sketches the grounds for “The General Crisis” of the Fourteenth Century. On the one hand, agricultural production reached a limit: existing, arable land was becoming degraded, and land that could be reclaimed had been and was of a poor quality. At the same time, silver mining could neither dig deeper nor exploit the relatively poor-quality ore that could be accessed, affecting the amount of coin in circulation. This crisis in the forces of production was aggravated by the Black Death, which killed an estimated net 40% of the population of Europe.
Parallels to our present day are suggestive. The carrying capacity of the earth’s ecology has been breached (however much we do in fact produce enough food to feed the world’s population; the problem is one of distribution), and we cannot in principle exploit existing fossil fuel reserves without burning down our own house. Covid is hardly the Black Plague, but it is only one of the pathogens that have been and will be released by the progressing economic colonialization of what wilderness remains.
Nevertheless, on the other side of the Fourteenth Century and its crises was not total collapse, but the Renaissance….
At a time of deep social fragmentation (Identity politics, ethnonationalisms…) and irrationality (a loss of consensus, determined by so many factors…) and no less in the face of the climate and more general environmental crisis is it not necessary, then, to revive the Universal and the Human?…