Paterson Pageant!

I've been meaning to do something about this historical curiosity from Paterson for a long while, but then was tempted to just post it as an unsung piece of data (a la Williams), because what else can you do but reflect on the oddness of the event, and the abyss of history that separates us from the idea of a radical political "pageant" that the proletariat would take seriously as a means of action. Indeed, while we usually think of 1968 as one of those rare moments where art was taken seriously as part of political change, here we had a much earlier moment when the New York avant-garde and the strikers of Paterson came together to mount an entirely new form of political "representation." In fact, this experiment in the summer of 1913 would turn the distinction between representation/propaganda and presentation on its head by having the very strikers as actors. As the New York Tribune wrote at the time:

"There was a startling touch of ultra modernity—or rather of futurism—in the Paterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden. Certainly nothing like it had been known before in the history of labor agitation. The I.W.W. has not been highly regarded hereabouts as an organization endowed with brains or imagination. Yet the very effective appeal to public interest made by the spectacle at the Garden stamps the I.W.W. leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent. Lesser geniuses might have hired a hall and exhibited moving pictures of the Paterson strike. Saturday night’s pageant transported the strike itself bodily to New York. . . ."

Indeed, the spectacle of 1200 workers walking from Paterson to Madison Square Garden to perform challenges the very notion of "spectacle;" we perhaps instead enter the realm of the simulacrum (without the cold video eye, or the potentiality for the anesthetizing rewind).
The one reference to this event happens in Book III of Paterson, an excerpt from a letter to Williams from a friend who had participated in the event: "Rose and I didn't know each other when we both went to the Paterson strike around the first war and worked in the Pagent. She went regularly to feed Jack Reed in jail and I listened to Big Bill Haywood, Gurley Flynn and the rest of the big hearts and helping hands in Union Hall. And look at the damned thing now."
While the last sentence seems to comment upon the loss of energy and "pagentry" [sic] of the I.W.W. or American labor politics in general, there is a comment in the MacGowan footnotes that makes me think that this statement is Williams ventriloquizing. And yes, he is perhaps reflecting ruefully on the failure of labor politics, but maybe also making a meta-comment about his own labor of "page-entry." "And look at the damned thing now" seems to have been a comment this friend made--not ruefully but enthusiastically--when he finally saw how Williams had progressed with Book III.
Some of the many documents on the web about the Paterson Pageant include archival documents collected in an issue of TDR (summer 1971, pp.61-71), a book on the impact of this show on emergent modernism, and a lot more to explore.

Democracy

"Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness"

Acousmatic Ghosts

I’ve been wondering lately whether Williams’ Paterson might help me think through issues on another topic I’ve been writing on—Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic music and contemporary uses of the term acousmatic. Both Williams’ and Schaeffer’s work draw from the fragment, snapped out of the flow of life, and transformed in the work. The notion of the acousmatic implies that, with recorded sound you listen blindly—the lawn mower weaned of its backyard and whirled into multitimbral projections (something that the word cannot do as easily, unless all semantic and word-based elements are erased –cf. the poesie sonore of Henri Chopin, et al). Yet, with tape music, before these sounds become otherworldly, they are in the world, and the choice one makes to sample or process a sound is not an arbitrary or unmeaningful one (I once had a student who told me his abstract sound piece was composed of the recordings of holocaust survivors he found on the web; he didn’t seem to have any investment in either why he chose the samples or distorted them beyond recognition, other than that they were there and he could do it.) Contemporary, conservative acousmatic artists will claim that the referent does not matter in the pursuit of some purist idea of art. Francisco Lopez, perhaps the most anxious of these latter-day acousmatisticians, seems so put upon by the idea of significance that he goes as far as to say: “There can only be a documentary or communicative reason to keep the cause-object relationship in the work with soundscapes, never an artistic/musical one.” But it’s precisely the communicative and documentary urges that motivate both Williams and Schaeffer to create texts uniquely drawn from the world—not to reflect it, but to imagine new relations. In his essay “Hypermetrics” Sean Cubitt says, “Williams is prepared to open the foot to relativity, not only in the abstract, but in the weight of the relations between people that are concretised in words” (Writing Aloud 122). Compare Schaeffer, who old-school acousmatician Francois Bayle describes as wanting to “relate a musical object to its most general context, to the spiritual destiny of the period” by arraying “marks, blank spaces, questioning forms which, . . . designate what neither shows nor conceals, but beckons.” There is a sense that, far from lugging the reel to reels up high Parnassus, the acousmatic musician threaded his capstans to navigate the high seas of "unmusical" sound, as well as the oceanic substance of future time itself. As such, he needed to create a network of relays between the documentary source of the recordings, the present tense of composition, and the future relations such experimentations heralded. Perhaps what haunts both Schaeffer’s and Williams’ experiments is the intractability of the real, but what makes them still valid is their hypostatizing of democratic ideals in form and their openness to the potential of the future. Sean Cubitt goes on to say, “Capital’s social relations could not afford a resolution: the power of this poetry arises from its failure.” (123) Strange sentence, that. Does “its” refer to the social relations or to poetry? I guess, maybe to inaccurately quote a line I heard Charles Bernstein once deliver, red wheelbarrowing-it for the audience, “so much depends upon what you mean by failure.”