The Swerve of the Thing

I felt as if Ginsberg’s assertion in the last video clip that “‘no ideas but in things’ means that there's no God, basically” was a little glib, so I decided to take yet another dive into Williams’ materialist (but perhaps crypto-theological) apothegm, this time via Slavoj Zizek, who has been, since his appearance on the scene, the philosopher of the “Thing,” and who has recently taken up the project of “thinking the subversive deadlock of monotheism through to the end.” (71) I find a lot of chance points of intersection in Chapter 3 of The Puppet and the Dwarf with various readings of Paterson, especially Zizek’s reevaluation of Freud’s notion of psychic automata and traumatic blockage. What follows may be more my riffing than a close reading, as can be only possible in this constrained space.
Firstly, those “thousand automata” of Paterson “who neither know their sources nor sills of their/ disappointments,” may in the end, be better materialists than Williams is; the language fails them, but they operate fine, and are the body of the demos. They are Paterson. Williams, in contrast, posits himself as alienated demiurge of the things he sees—the things emerge from him and the Falls rather than just sitting there like the green bottle glass. Poet is trumped by the people, and like them may also be an epiphenomenon of the Falls, which are, in turn, a better, natural geist that animates all the automatons. Can Williams get from geist to mere gist, thus overcoming the oversoul that haunts his search for the thing (although becoming Christ in the end?), or will he always miss this encounter in his deadlock with the people of Paterson?
The Falls may be what Zizek (citing Jonathan Lear) calls an “enigmatic term”: a seductive, empty concept that keeps a traumatic inconsistency from true consciousness. They are not “false” per se, but are structurally important placeholders for opacity, blockage, and the impenetrability of the Other’s desire, to use his terms. What’s important is that, in this reading, the Falls are not a stand-in for the Real as the thing-in-itself beyond the grasp of language—the flow, the noise, the movement towards death, etc. Rather, they mark the blockage and inconsistencies of the Paterson-system: “this Real . . . is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap that prevents our access to it.” (78) This gap may be the all important antagonism between the poet who individually sings the city and the multitude that does not hear the song, so Williams is hep when he sings the blockage, but not when he makes the Falls an allegory for the flow behind appearances. There is no flow, only these blockages. There is no crossing the gap of the structural antagonisms, and this realization—the materialism of Williams—is paradoxically when he is most Christian, according to Zizek: “It is the very radical separation of man from God that unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated from himself—thus the point is not to ‘overcome’ the gap that separates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God Himself” (78) We could say that Williams’ separation is incomplete—perhaps because of his Unitarian shilly-shallying with the divine—and, to end with a Zizekian doosy, it is only, then, the Jewish poet Ginsberg who can then become the Christian God.
Zizek makes a rare reference to poetry (Plath’s “The Other”) at the end of this chapter, which makes me think it is an apt one for these meditations. Here’s another good quote from this chapter for the poetics grab-bag:

It is not that we need words to designate objects, to symbolize reality, and that then, in surplus, there is some excess of reality, a traumatic core that resists symbolization—this obscurantist theme of the unnameable Core of Higher Reality that eludes the grasp of language is to be thoroughly rejected; not because of a naïve belief that everything can be nominated, grasped by our reason, but because of the fact that the Unnamable is an effect of language. We have reality before our eyes well before language, and what language does, in its most fundamental gesture, is—as Lacan put it—the very opposite of designating reality: it digs a hole in it, it opens up the visible/present reality toward the dimension of the immaterial/unseen. When I simply see you, I simply see you—but it is only by naming you that I can indicate the abyss in you beyond what I see. (70)

Or if you are completely bored by all this, here’s his dirty joke about tennis.

It is the World Which is the Dwelling Place

"The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is darkxxxxxx." (100)

It is the Word Which is the Dwelling Place

I picked up a used copy of Barthes' Writing Degree Zero while in Rochester. Its descriptions of modern poetry are apt for reflecting on the referential dynamics of Paterson. For Barthes, the word in modern poetry is like a terrible, inscrutible monolith, "without environment." "It is the Word which is 'the dwelling place.'" (47) The Word has an "existential geology" rather than a social space. Throughout New Jersey as an Impossible Object, this type of purity has been under scrutiny, especially when the poem drags along with it an entire city, seducing us into imagining that it serves--however absurdly--as a kind of map that connects us to that city, or cities in general. But what seems a little more interesting than this familiar dilemma is that, the way Barthes describes it, classical language (which he contrasts with modern poetry) acts in many ways like the modern factory. Thus, the modern factory town of Paterson, with Alexander Hamilton as its creator, is a failed attempt to create classical poetry in the modern world. Barthes' description of the classical evokes the industrial manipulation of nature:

"The economy of classical language . . . is relational, which means that in it words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships. In it, no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection."

"The classical flow is a succession of elements whose density is even; it is exposed to the same emotional pressure, and relieves those elements of any tendency towards an individual meaning appearing at all invented." [think: sluice, which may be an "invention" but doesn't mistake the invention for raw material.]

If we want to take Barthes' on his "word" here, then Paterson's relation to the city, and the connections we make to it and through it, is a kind of parody (or another favorite Barthesian word, "alibi" . . . but he uses parody here.) It's a way to trick the mind around a dark corner in the city leading one to the revelation of the word. "Connections [in modern poetry] are not properly speaking abolished, they are merely reserved areas, a parody of themselves, and this void is necessary for the density of the Word to rise out of a magic vacuum, like a sound and a sign devoid of background, like 'fury and mystery.'" (47) It's as if his approach to the city itself is like a culture-jammer picking up some crappy classical poem (like Thomas Ward's Passaic), and treating it to a variety of recontextualizations, mutations, and derangements in order to get at something more elemental.

However, beware of random tips from used books. Because even though a lot of poets have glommed onto this notion of the dwelling place of modern poetry, a few quick web searches make me think that maybe Barthes will challenge this strict division between classical and modern poetry later in the book. Or--given the self-canceling nature of web-opinion--not. Read on . . .

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.”

With Trick and Money Damned

Pound’s and Williams’ interest in the ‘money question’ has a special relevance for the ‘modernist’ style of their poetry because it involved them in similar (though not identical) theoretical efforts to reconcile poetic and economic theory at the linguistic level and not just through criticism of capitalism or society. The money question prepared them to see money as another form of representation much like a limited form of language. If the solution to the economic crisis lay in the conundrum of money, it was therefore wrapped up with the problem of speech. The power of money was, in fact, money’s power to utter the otherwise inchoate wishes of social, political, and economic power that far exceeded the traditional poet’s linguistic and literary resources. (Marsh 5)

I need to pick up Alec Marsh’s Money and Modernity where I left off a couple weeks ago. I always enjoy reading things with a detailed sense of economic theory, if only because it pains me to hear vapid phrases from artists and pundits like “it’s a capitalist society” to justify any and all forms of asshole-ness. How it tires me! But listen, there are as many brands of capitalism as capitalism gives us potato chips, even though the kind of capitalism usually invoked by such phrases is just a hair's-breadth from rape and pillage. And hey, there’s also socialism, which still exists, or else the vaunted 9-11 firemen would not have made it to the towers without those trapped inside having to swipe their credit cards or revealing their mom’s maiden name to telephone operators in Bombay. But I digress. Marsh’s book arrays the two primal forms of American capitalism against each other. On the one hand, Jeffersonian notions of wealth, stemming from the beliefs of the French physiocrats, posit a kind of natural wealth (which, although premised on an agricultural society, are alien to notions of bean countin’); on the other, the Hamiltonian system—upon which the entire raison d’etre of Paterson, NJ rests—establishes money itself as the ultimate value (deracinated from land value in the form of exchange value). Marsh claims that Williams is more interested in Jefferson, but I think that there can’t but be a fascination with the kind of non-referentiality of value that the Hamiltonian city, like modernist poetry itself, encourages—even though it is roundly agreed that Paterson, NJ is the disastrous outcome of Hamiltonian planning (like the Cantos are of modernist poetry). Marsh goes as far to say that Williams and Pound write “Jeffersonian jeremiads and partly experimental structures through which Jeffersonianism can be renovated and modernity reshaped in such a way as to allow for a truly American independence” (14). I’m still not convinced, if only because even the idea of “two capitalisms” is in the end still reductive: the true versus the false; one close to the spirit, the other pure artifice; one for the poet, the other for the plutocrat. Williams’ relation to the real and to artifice and language is too complex to merely ally him with Thoreau who dreamt of having a Realometer at his disposal “that future ages might know how deep the freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time” (qtd in Marsh 17). Maybe I give Williams too much credit. credit. credit. After all he does twice make the analogy "money : joke" in contrast to some inalienable "radiant gist." So I will have to read on in Marsh. Indeed, the relationship between the coin of language in poetry and money itself is an intersection worthy of much discussion. If you look at some early language poetry, in fact, notice how the word “capital” comes up again and again. Is it an elaborate joke on referentiality (presuming that our ken encompasses its entire system in a single utterance) or is it a more earnest attempt to foreground questions of value at the frontiers language-making?

Beyond the Symbol: Bob Perelman on Paterson

A couple weeks ago, I talked to Bob Perelman about Paterson, language poetry, and the "grade school pageant" aspect of Paterson's symbology. I thought that the author of the poem "China"--which Fredric Jameson posited as an exemplar of postmodernism, in league with the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Body Heat--would have something to say about the referential gap between Paterson and Paterson. At the end, I ask Perelman to read some of his own "no ideas but in things" poems from his early collection The First World.
Approaching Paterson: (2 min. 32 sec.)
Paterson's mass of unarticulated sound: (3 min. 44 sec.)
The pitfalls of taking on the epic: (1 min. 33 sec.)
Perelman reads from Book I, part 3 and discusses: (10 min. 12 sec)
Perelman reads from his collection The First World: (3 min. 18 sec.)

The Thing Itself!

In July, I took birdwatchers and filmmakers Michael Gitlin and Jackie Goss to Garret Mountain and Rifle Camp Park to look and listen for some fine feathered friends and talk about the references Williams makes to them. Unfortunately, it was too late in the day and too hot to see any wildlife, and Rifle Camp Park’s nature center—an unexpected find—was closed. If you go early enough the mountain teems with bounding doe and wild turkeys, in addition to birds of many stripe.
We discussed, again, the “realite!” section of Book V (p. 207), and I asked them whether bird mnemonics might help one understand what Williams was getting at, if he got at it at all—since as always, he seems to be to showing us the gap between the “getting at” and the “it.” There’s a kind of archaism to bird mnemonics, akin to the language of flowers, that responds to a worldview in which a deep appreciation of nature is more a function of the literary than the scientific. (I kind of like the illusion of objectivity that this form of bird sound analysis gives!) But there is still the dark wall behind the mirror of nature, making Williams wonder whether our apperception of it, literary or otherwise, is fundamentally flawed. Is “the art/ with which these flowers have been/put down . . . to be trusted” (213)? Need the brain “be grafted/ on a better root” (214)?

Mapping the Void

This summer, I looked into using Yellow Arrow as a possible means to map Paterson. By the time my arrows came in the mail and I figured out the confusing instructions, my stay in Paterson was almost over. Nevertheless, I used one to mark the portal for a trek I took with Anne and Alita along the freight rail that cuts through the city's notoriously turbulent 4th ward all the way to the fetid shores of the Passaic. You can check out the exact location by typing "Paterson" into the search engine at Yellow Arrow's main gallery (one of the many drawbacks to this site/service is that there are no distinct urls you can reference). I think this site may have been a pioneer in terms of Internet mapping experiments; however, other larger entities have surpassed them with their ease and accessibility (e.g. Google, Flickr). Pictures from the trip are above: I love the fake super 8 (courtesy slide.com)! There may be only 8 millimeters between heaven and earth. Such are the mysteries of photogenie.
I'm reading some essays on mapping and psychogeography for a talk I'm giving at Parsons next week via iChat. I'm interested in a point about Situationist techniques of alternative mapping made by Tom McDonough in "Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity": "Freud notes the way in which the animism of 'primitive man' (which bore striking similarities to the neurotic mind) altered the spatial arrangements of the phenomenal world into a new configuration that obeyed a logic all its own. . . . It was the task . . . of the Situationist derive . . . to induce that hallucinatory state, to adopt the obsessional neurotic's belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and desires, in order to momentarily assert the possibility of radical change in the form of a world fully accommodated to the subject." (np) Even though he is appreciative of the Situationists, his language seems to me unproductive, as if this type of remapping is an aberration of the solipsistic, rather than a healthy impulse which civilization has repressed, and which is crucial for survival in the modern city. The value of Situationist experiments is to point up how the habitual experience of the city is neurotic and obsessional, not the derive. Undoubtedly, the neurotic has a positive value in McDonough's essay, but I think this backhanded valorization (similar to his use of the word "animism") points to a deeper suspicion he may hold.
The popularization of alternative forms of mapping may bear my position out, even though most uses of Flickr, for example, are more what I would call obsessional or neurotic proper. But maybe these are the wrong words. Since McDonough is bringing up Freud, I must add that I think the crucial shift in perception may have to do with a shift (unpackable here?) from Freud to Lacan, and within Lacan from the symptom to the sinthome. The sinthome, as Zizek has described it (especially in The Fragile Absolute), announces a constant and fragile arrangement of "quilting points" as they attach to the real. Instead of imagining a "real space" to which we must submit our perception, the network of points composing the sinthome is the reality itself, not a neurosis which must be overcome.

The Reality! The Reality!

A young William Carlos Williams and his mother translated a surrealist novel about a stalker, a prostitute, a murderer, and a gangster who haunt the streets of Paris. Referenced in the beginning of Book 5 of Paterson, Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris is not as racy as it sounds. Perhaps it is only a surrealist who can take the source material for a typical thriller and evacuate it of all thrill, returning the action to everyday. It is cold in tone, evocative of the ennui of city wandering that denizens of the night experience. Were I argue its conceptual strengths, however, I would hide the fact that, for me, the book did not have much going for it except its connection to Paterson. The publishers even tacitly admit this exterior source of literary value by printing the pertinent section of Paterson not once, but twice—as the book’s only blurb and as its epigraph. It may have been an important inpirational source of Williams’ own exploration of intractable urban mystery (here the city is a woman, not a man as Williams would have it). Nevertheless, while there is much promise in a story that starts with a narrator, a dog, a sailor and a prostitute wandering randomly together at 3 in the morning, it was a chore to glimpse the “inviolable secret of Paris” that their journeys turned up.
Of greater interest to me is Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (at least the first two parts of it I have so far read), more cryptically referenced in this section of Paterson's Book 5. I was introduced to the book by Holly Tavel who was using it for a summer-term psychogeography course; as she described Paris Peasant, she started to flip through it a few times, a sort of perfunctory gesture of “showing me the book.” What jumped to my eye was the following section, from which Williams seems to have pulled his "la realite! la realite! la rea, la rea, la realite!"(207) Williams is much more tortured (and in the end, impressed) by “the real,” while Aragon is clearly more contemptuous (if only because Williams' “reality” is almost Lacanian in its paradoxical unknowability, whereas for Aragon it is more synonymous with custom, albeit still paradoxical):

The Realities

FABLE

Once upon a time there was a reality
With her own flock of sheep in real wool
And as the king’s son came passing by
The sheep bleated Baaah! How pretty she is
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was a reality
Who never could get to sleep at night
And so her fairy godmother
Really took her by the hand
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was an old king
Who got very bored as he sat on his throne
His cloak slipped off into the evening
So then they gave him for a queen
The re the re the reality

CODA: Ity ity the rea
Ity ity the reality
The rea the rea
Ty ty The rea
Li
Ty The reality
Once upon a time there was THE REALITY

Aragon’s book is a much more fanciful and detailed exploration of the mysteries of public life in the city than is Soupault’s, and is in more in line with Williams’ aesthetic (menus, news articles, playlets, and street signs are pasted directly into the prose). His subject is the passages—“human aquariums” cut into the shadowy corners of the streets—which threatened to disappear under the impending Haussmannization of Paris. Or rather, the passages frame his various subjects—which include reflections on “blondness,” an accordionist with P-E-S-S-I-M-I-S-M written on the folds of his bellows, bathhouses, shoeblacks, cocktails, and postage stamps.