In which as…

In which as you to either

mine it throughout this by.

There behind an over

under yours on for.

*

We that it theirs as

without unto an or.

However these atop and after

because within from our.

*

My at beneath with under

both its ours inside.

I but there into the neither

atop these with off into.

*

Their me in through after

which your by before to I.

If its they on or over

without an and at from.

*

Yours our my for nor

within it or throughout.

Atop if you the mine

neither beneath we a.

*

Because however this unto

but that me through mine.

Their before off either

inside both yours at over.

Well, eight months and one change of editorship later, the piece has finally been “published” (in what has now become the “Summer/Autumn” edition of the journal). The introduction to the current issue is the very apex of bush league. It manages to spell the name of my article’s principle interlocutor, Martin Barker, incorrectly on two occasions and in two different ways. It also finishes with a statement of the journal’s refreshingly modest commitment to “a decent level of historical research quality.” (Though, admittedly, the “open mic night” feel is compounded by a generous sprinkling of SPAG and formatting errors in the main text, for which I & my editors share mutual responsibility, I guess).

So, yes, it is difficult to imagine a more inauspicious start to life as a published historian.

In any case, the article concerns elite discourse surrounding the 1985 Handsworth “riots”. It engages with theoretical work, particularly that of Barker as articulated in his 1981 The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe, regarding manifestations of racist ideology. My piece originally began as an undergraduate dissertation of 10,000 words, and was heavily revised (& truncated) for publication here.

Here’s a direct link (will open / start the download of a .pdf file).

Ways of knowing.

Begin at any lugubrious point saddled between two intersecting vectors.

Jump the arc of a ploughed curve, all the time to skilling. A pungent

figuring of doubt. The concept of mens rea simply cannot be applied

to language crimes. (Looka these dummkopfs, jonesing for externality.)

The appealing curio of situationism was its use of binocular-inversion

as a revolutionary tactic.
*

Pleasantries are the most confrontational aspect of discourse.

There is now a growing academic literature concerning your

failure to return my phone-calls. Retake me to the site of my

spluttering inflection disaster. Slideguitar my spine whilst

bracing me for the soft shellacs. I’d love to audition for Peer Gynt,

but I can’t play the lyre.
*

Yeah, right: any text is open to endless & unbounded re-interpretation

& re-inscription when chewed over by your garrulous maw. My brain-pan

is wallcovered by creeper patches. Why was the Raj so insistent on outlawing

sati? I always kindaliked his music. Historiographical re-examination

is cadence alteration. I envy the academy; I can never read the same book

twice.

*

Let’s meet by the river and recuperate the depravity spectacle.

Contemporary Kafkas vanitypublish. Pathos abstraction. For twelve

years now, I’ve been living arguendo. Sure, pedagogy is inherently

erotic; but not at nine fifteen. Research in our Cancer Studies department

has taken a cultural turn. Painfully feigned vagina interest. Timorous

dandruff percolations.

*

Crapulent wunderkinden streak up shrub-lined dirt-tracks leading to the

uppermost crags. With heavy blades, they open a goat right there between

the commuters on Cheapside. The solvency of a liberal, capitalist society

depends upon correct rainmaker synchronisation. Ethiopians must imagine

their gods black & ithyphallic. Ours, rather, are fickle and protean; but

constituted, and not compromised, by this fact.

*

Do you remember that summer we spent together? Those joyful boys trimmed

their hair in accordance with the socialistic lifestyle, and their girls

were rocked to sleep by the shudder of diaphanous gunfire. I dipped my

not-by-bread-alone into the binary & snuck a bite out of the pleasuredome.

‘Imperialism’ becomes ‘acquisitive holiday programme’. Now serving: CHIPS.

(End verse).

*

I like a joke as much as the next guy; providing it’s not too ludic.

Fill up my plastic pipe with Super Bubble Mixture & tell me about “wit”,

the gentleman’s τέχνη. In this economy, we all have to tighten our

cummerbunds. If you wish to be accepted, open with a joke about alcohol

intake. (I’m not saying you’re a prude, but I’ve seen you wank with

marigolds on.)

*

Normative statements are strictly for dinner parties. Maturity is a kind

of alchemy; the best ideas from all known ideologies. I heard they’re going

to stop us observing British Summer Time in case it offends other scales.

I’m all for clarity in argumentation, but that was Parti gauche stuff.

Something like ‘germ theory of ignorance’: not very profound. At what level

& to what degree does coercion occur? Rabbit hat.

*

Don’t interrupt my freespeech valorisation explosion. Nice ancient

tradition you have here; shame if something were to happen to it. The problem

with Islam is that it never had a Willie Rushton reformation. Donkey meat.

Suck my legacy. Twee nationalcharacter simpering displaces patriotism.

“We find again here the figure of the scales.” Save my seat on the psycho-

geometrical boogie-board.

*

The question is not to answer the questions, but to change them. I’ve sat cross-

legged since birth in fearanticipation of circumscription. Join the debate;

this is democracy; bring your stultifying, spit-flecked misanthropy. Rhetoric?

Where did a nice girl like you learn a Korean word like that? Post-Powellite helter-

skelterism. What if Frank Soskice were a Hindu? Sure, I’m a moderate: slapbang

between Lenin and Luxemburg.

*

Take a sniff of the latest cut from my working-class pugnacity file.

Weight votes by bibliography-voluminosity; I’m at least as substantive as the

next guy. Take a flip through our hi-def laminated catalogue. You call this

governance? On any carousel, there must be horses that lead and horses that

follow. We need to stop glorifying kindness. Society relies upon reasonable cathexis

proportionation. Having the character of.

*

Please note the lapsing of your subscription to the Staffordshire Evening Mail

and Solipsist. There’s no such thing as The Big Society; only massive individuals

& their fucking enormous families. Don’t spit in my mouth; I’m nobody’s comrade.

Give urine-consumption a fair shake. Social democracy has no theme tunes. Ageing

population equals biofuel opportunity. No matter how Big it gets; there’s only room

for guys I can breeze with.

*

Creeping desecularization, for chrissakes. Boohiss the evangelists in New Cross

bedsits. Excoriate giving for the company it keeps. The past is an erection;

noxious sweat on a purposefully-bald head. Do I detect a hint of genocide?

A dream I had tonight. Sediment can just keep on collecting. Lacquered imaginings

of all our coeval moments. Dance though you might, you can never step in the

same riff twice. Literalist reading of your face.

*

Postmodernism has created its own metanarratives. Social history observes

its own silences. My dick hurts. Once the sentence fragment is incomplete,

it’s out of my jurisdiction. It is enough for our present purposes merely to

note. Recondite gap salacity. Just another empiricist pen-pusher. Can’t

exculpate such a clamorous craw of effulgent wordbastards. Hopefully you’re

taking this in the spirit I’m pretending it’s intended.

*

Celebrity celerity snoozefest. Anti-intellectual ‘dumbing-down’ complaint.

Who are you calling ‘voltface’? Repudiate avant-garde elitism! I love popular-

culture; it’s all so terrible. Absolute fringe moratorium. Of course we

appreciate the significance of literature: that’s why we’re burning it. I don’t

like them myself, but they’re very good at what they do. Pseudo-Voltairean

coporaphagia. Emancipatory wog gag.

*

Slash the bogeypoem’s throat with glinting bottleshard. It’s a new style

I’m calling ‘stream of unconsciousness’. A meeting without coffee; quotidian

non-intentionality. A man must always be advancing towards some telos, for

when he sits still, he places too great a pressure upon his scaffolding. Where’s

my welding iron? Oooh, performative. I pulled open the fridge, and it was full of

strictures. Got his prepositions transposed in a rummaging accident.

*

Current-carried silt greasegrasps for the myriad punctilios of our social

life. Wann ich ‘Britishness’ höre… (but not like that.) Motor away from

your regrets-locus, bulldozing bystanders all the while. Our task must be

to appropriate the disenfranchisement of women for progressive ends. It

begins with gouty selfabnegation, like pinpricks. Woke up in a pool of my

own mnemonic enjambments.

*

Two a.m. judder occurrence; lecherous crowd pulsations. Join our social-

singularity experiment & get your extraneous faces burned off. Fuzzy particle-

headed adumbrations of morningtime. Be your own wallet-inspector. I shook there

& cleated myself. Asking what stockbrokers do all day marks one out as unserious.

Bathos occurs to clip the palette. He really seems to believe that the destruction of

commodities is the apex of tragedy. Nothing is ridiculous if it happens fast enough.

*

Two visions of a mechanised future. ONE: Eradication of slack

-jawed labourcompulsion. Metallic sambos pourforth my plenty. Rick

Moranis defeats the Capitalism Spirit; swab the ectoplasm-encrusted

printer cartridges. Effortless opera understandment. “I ain’t no

bolsheviki; but I ain’t no stool-pigeon either.” In short:

shower-emergence phenomenon.

*

TWO:  cowcrates heave with joes; bourgeois glass tinkles to cover

the whirr of titanium joints clanking batons into smooth grey palms.

The dead will twist out a grin in admiration of the fine spadework

which actuates their endless power-nap. He that need not work,

neither will he need eat. Hand you a swiss-cheesed figleaf to cover

your fists.

Nick Griffin: makes lovely biscuits.

Of the many arguments advanced for allowing BNP leader Nick Griffin to air his opinions on the program Question Time this week, perhaps the most popular is that relating to “freedom of speech”. The word “argument” is in fact over-generous here, since the concept of “free-speech” is rarely unpacked by those invoking it; neither are its implications fully laid out. Rather, the elephantine weight of the signifier is allowed by itself to crush opposition — “free speech” is, after all, an inviolable principle. “No true Englishman” would object to policy which follows its dictates: the ideal is chief amongst those which protect us from tyranny and prevent us from metamorphosing into such popular bogeys as Islamic fundamentalists, Nazi Germans or even (and this is the neatest rhetorical trick) into Griffin himself.

The problem with all this, of course, is that it’s bollocks. As Stanley Fish has argued, “there’s no such thing as free speech — and it’s a good thing, too.” I personally have never encountered anybody willing to countenance the full implications of a society without restrictions on speech. Even that rapacious libertarian Johann Hari (he of “the antidote to free speech is always more free speech”) responds to cases of perceived defamation not by glibly quoting pseudo-Voltairean maxims, but by threatening lawsuits. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that those who are today denouncing those opposed to Griffin’s appearance will tomorrow turn their attentions to the Advertising Standards Agency, the Press Complaints Comission, OFCOM, or those laws which prohibit slander and libel. Too often, absolute commitments to freedom of expression are under-pinned by the naive and unsupportable assumption that language has no practical effect — that, in the semantic realm, “anything goes” because everything is divorced from material consequence. Such a formulation does language no justice at all: “words,” as Stephen Poole is fond of noting, “are weapons.”

Fixations upon “free-speech” appear particularly misplaced in the context of a debate regarding a national television program. This is after all a context in which “speech” necessarily cannot be “free” — it is a limited resource which can be offered to only a particular number of agents. If Griffin is “silenced” by a prohibition upon his appearance, then he is only suffering the same degree of censure experienced by Socialist Party chairman Peter Taafe, by myself, and by former Arsenal left-back Lee Dixon. For none of us, in the last analysis, is likely to be appearing on Question Time anytime soon.

Stanley Fish: not Larry David.

The obvious counter to the above paragraph is that neither myself, Taafe nor Dixon can claim politically to represent a large element of the British population. Evidence for Griffin’s “mandate” is marshaled in the form of British National Party vote counts in this year’s EU Parliament election. This data is certainly significant. However, it might first be noted that EU election voting data can give only an indirect and imperfect sense of national political sympathies. I doubt that many people believe that Nigel Farage will be asked to form Her Majesty’s Opposition next year, or that the Labour Party will come away from a 2010 general election with roughly 15% of the vote. British Euroscepticism seems significantly to assist the fortunes of Right-wing parties in these elections. British unbelief in the desirability or necessity of a European parliament might well also encourage protest votes or abstentions in these polls. If one reverts to a slightly more sound (but still objective) measure of BNP support — the 2005 General Election voting data — then the picture changes rather. The BNP could marshal only 0.7% of the vote at those polls, scarcely higher than the 0.5% of votes recorded by the RESPECT/SSP ticket.

My reference to RESPECT/SSP here is advised. I have not heard any agitation from any quarters this week to the effect that the “far” Left should be given the opportunity to exercise its “freedom of speech” in the way that Griffin has. I suspect that this would be explained via reference again to “representation”. It is worth mentioning at this point that a close association between party vote counts and an invitation to “join the debate” imports a significant bias against the contemporary Left, simply for the reason that it is more fractured than the contemporary Right. Indeed, if all three Left parties represented at the EU elections (NO2EU, the SLP and the SSP) had combined their resources, the resulting coalition would have come away with some 300,000 votes — a virtually identical total to that tallied by the Scottish National Party, an organisation very much “part of the debate.” (This, of course, is a gedankexperiment that probably underestimates the popularity of a broad Left ticket — a united contemporary socialist movement would also have real prospects of drawing voters away from Labour, the Green Party and perhaps also the Liberal Democrats.)

But more broadly, one might question the wisdom of relating vote counts to legitimacy. In a political context that has witnessed the convergence of major parties upon an ever-increasing array of issues, the need for alternative voices is acute. If one permits exposure only to those parties which can prove that they “represent” a “significant” (however this might be figured) proportion of the electorate, then this narrowing of British political discourse is likely only to be re-enforced in a cyclical process. The Left has real and coherent arguments, and is well-positioned to offer a radical critique upon that issue that Griffin himself owes much of his popularity to — immigration. This widening of discourse may well be something in which the BNP has a part to play.

The PCC: imbued w/ great celerity.

But that cannot be taken for granted. My earlier references to the ASA, the PCC and OFCOM were not entirely stabs in the dark. The BNP remains a party which employs lies and fabrications as part of its normative electoral strategy. Lies about the local presence of asylum seekers, about the way in which housing is allocated, even about non-existent murders committed by illegal immigrants. There is no more reason to lend credibility to the party that knowingly propagates these lies than there is to permit the dissemination of the lies themselves (a thing which, I’m confident, not even the most implacable guardian of free expression would prescribe). The BNP may be invited to “clean up its act”, but central planks of its policy programme can only be supported by distortions, since the party relies upon the magnification (and, indeed, fabrication) of marginal issues in such a way that they become urgent problems close to the heart of Britain’s very survival. It is often stated that to censor the BNP “brings us down to their level” — it does nothing of the sort. It serves as a statement that in order for a political party to be given national exposure in this country, that party must conform to certain minimum standards of honesty in its campaigning. The right to freedom of expression, in sum, does not and should not incorporate a right to the distortion of facts or the dissemination of lies.

A final argument in favour of Griffin’s appearance might reflect that this is all very well, but inviting the BNP’s leader onto Question Time is an individual act with no further consequence. This is untrue: self-evidently so. Those who are quick to tender the “freedom of speech” argument tend also to be those who scoff at counter-arguments relating to “legitimation”. Yet the proof of this latter argument is rendered by the actions of those who espouse the former: already the BNP is being defended glibly with hand-waving references to “free speech” — it is “just another party” with a right, nay an obligation, to “represent” those who support it. The peculiarity of the BNP lies not, as is so often stated, in its racism — that attribute is observable across party lines. But rather, the unique crime of the BNP is the centrality of deception to its programme and praxis. If deceptions of this magnitude and consequence were being fostered by a big business between blocks of Big Brother on C4, then there would rightly be trouble. They should be no more permissible — perhaps even less so — on the BBC.

Postscript

Billy Bragg: attracts all sorts.

Recently, I got into an internet argument with some Billy Bragg fans[1] about the rectitude of using court action as a weapon against the BNP. I was surprised to find that many of them were opposed to this tout court: that is, they were opposed to prosecution not only for the notoriously slippery fish of “inciting racial hatred”, but also for good old-fashioned speech circumscriptions such as libel, slander and defamation. This seems crazy to me. The arguments against court action as a legitimate weapon are threefold, I think.

i)  “Democracy is about altering opinions by the free exchange of information and rhetoric.” This reflects what one might call the “optimistic” presentation of democracy’s functioning (or, if one wishes to be spunkier, the “naive realist” presentation of the same): democratic societies are composed of intelligent political consumers, who expose themselves to all available ideologies, before choosing in a free, rational and deliberative fashion, their preferred option. Democracy is this envisioned as one perpetual and multi-polar debate, and the disallowance of any aspect of that debate (however small, marginal and distasteful) threatens democracy.

It is, of course, odd to hear this gloss placed on democracy by anyone on the Left; it is a consumerist and rather ahistorical explanation of the relationship between parties and voters, erasing as it does the considerable degree to which parties consciously represent class interests. The “one big debate” theory of democracy also fails to appreciate the role played by the media in achieving saturation of certain acceptable viewpoints, whilst consigning certain alternative ideological formulations to the dustbin of “extremism”.[2] That is to say, these various ideologues are not just presented “neutrally” so that any consumer can happily make a free, informed and unrestricted choice.

But, even if one were to accept that the “one big debate” theory of democratic politics has much to commend it, it seems eccentric to claim that the quality of this “debate” is determined in a proportional way by its extent; by the sheer volume of speech and speech-acts it comprises. If one wishes to “defend” democratic discourse, then I would suggest that preventing political parties from committing libel, slander and defamation might be a salient aspect of this defense, rather than contrary to it.

ii) “Court action against the BNP would increase support for the party by making martyrs out of its defendants.” This argument is heard very often – to the point, indeed, that almost any action taken against the BNP would seem to be “assisting” it in this manner to some degree. There is some merit to this contention, of course. But I think that it is best applied to “incitement” cases: i.e. in those cases where the judgement tendered relates to something other than the truth-value of the proposition in question. It is effortless to turn defeat in cases of that sort into martyrdom, for reasons too obvious for me to go into.

On the other hand, I don’t think there are many people who want to believe that a political party is just straight-out lying to them. I’m sure that there would be people content to regard a libel/slander ruling made against the BNP as just another piece of evidence for an elite conspiracy against the party. But such people are also unlikely to be moved from their present political position by the fetishised endeavour of “free debate”.

iii) “Court action against the BNP, even when resulting in victory, would not be an effective way of fighting the party.” Obviously, it cannot be the only tactic used. “Debate” (or, perhaps more realistically and specifically, relentless and well-targeted canvassing) has a part to play too. Perhaps the most effective “weapon” in the “fight” against the party is the improvement of material conditions for working class people of all ethnic backgrounds. But to say that court action would be completely ineffective seems odd to me. If the BNP is ruled against, it must be sanctioned in some way (perhaps via a fine or the disqualification of a candidate, depending upon the offence), and its activities (and strategic options) will be reduced to that minimal extent.

But I think that, for some on the Left anyway, there is a fourth and unspoken “argument” against the use of court action.

Francisco Largo Caballero: anti-ethno-nationalist.

To engage with this fourth approach, we must first consider that the discourse of anti-BNP activism is heavily imbued with historical content, drawing upon the interlocked experiences of World War Two and the Spanish Civil War. These two conflicts perform separate but related functions within this discourse. World War Two is well-established as a period of national unity; No True Englishman was opposed to or sceptical about confrontation with Nazi Germany. The Spanish Civil War is simultaneously encoded as a site of political unity. Broad sections of the Left and centre came together for a common (because uncontroversial) cause: the defeat of fascism and the restoration of liberal democracy. The factual content of each of the inscriptions is deeply questionable.[3] But, naturally, it is the puissance of these narratives which matters. And this combination of historical referents does much to shape British anti-racist activity. The strangely parochial and anachronistic moniker of the “Anti-Nazi League” is perhaps the most obvious indication of this. Moreover, the terms “fascism” or “fascist” as words of abuse to be arrogated without much analytical care to one’s right-wing and/or racist political opponents are perpetually present in this discourse (“Unite Against Fascism”, etc.).

This historicist language carries with it other overtones. Considering that these two referents are both wars, it is perhaps unsurprising that they give to the discourse a heavily violent register. Fascism is “fought”; perhaps not because this is the best tactic, but because the “thugs” who espouse the ideology cannot be dealt with in any other way. (On occasions, it is even hoped that “they will not pass” – though to and from where is usually not elucidated).[4]

In this context, then, court action seems positively pusillanimous. It is a cowardly and hopelessly indirect way of “fighting the fascists”, which is not only ineffective (even counter-productive), but indicative of Leftist weakness: “we” should not need to use the “undemocratic” tactic of seeking restitution for “mere” speech-acts.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————-

[2] And here I mean both the media both as an autonomous collection of opinions and narratives, and as a device for refracting the opinions and narratives of “primary definers” (politicians, union leaders, NGOs, industry leaders, police chiefs, etc.)

[3] The cross-class differences in British wartime experiences are well documented. At a conference in Huddersfield recently, I was exposed to a paper by this guy about the specificity of wartime experiences in Britain’s geographical extremities. Paul Gilroy has written about the tension between an establishment of World War Two (a time, after all, of relative ethnic homogeneity in Britain) as the pinnacle of British unity and the performance of anti-racist work. On the Spanish Civil War side, anyone who has read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia should be familiar with at least one aspect of the Republican forces’ internecine strife. This strife was the product, at least in part, of differing conceptions of the war’s function amongst different leftist factions. The conflict ultimately resulted in open fighting between Communist and Socialist/democratic forces.

[4] Incidentally, I don’t even really understand the sloganistic appeal of “They Shall Not Pass” (in either language). I’d much rather declare that some place or other “will be the Tomb of Fascism”.

Grace period.

Spucking the graze further to details. Flinch which leaf before foot; cobble that in bang tartly as shoe only can. Sign of movement towards cleat. Spin or twitch catch by left or west. Shake which places face gainst hum. Vectors of shine enable the through, vistas denuded gradually by calm. Sketching the wake arrives by dot: flesh availed in thud; cry is shrouded with coast. Beyond gleams fabulous notice, start the slime to tuck. Grim of fast ‘til bone opening, measured by tone in rise. Necessity rolls the plates, as check is brought to hold. Thin which slates beneath the crumes.

Dram might fain the traces; mould the rig with tune. Now can see pleas only to show, or bake the fibula kind. Monument held lonely by group; hurry a tripping the sand. Frazzle our section to seek; bend to blanket the bough. Constantly is state the plume. Uncount only by itself strong to sough ago. Mix of beam a wrap-thought, and muck the crane in wide. Flux the slap of tide between; as slick the drops ‘til slake. Move of wand is flurry; walk will tilt the scrade. Dripping collects the way in all that lode light star bearing.

Build in as strafed by summered occlusions. Rumble is from straight to throw bind a waive. Grow vaunts until pummelled by incision. To with always in commensurable bucks harsher than. Brigging the jet before marvellous point, strapping fear of homologous chide. Trammelled is dune in carton, the pluck of rub to mend. Catch alight on vitiating way. Comeuppance to lick the traces which shan’t fasten to undergo. Dully as wait comes up for reaches. Pricked as strut in marshal worry; the grave which points to trap. Few as pushes to late.

Bend is tipping the clummered shivers, which merely to move as jaunt. Bounce from upper shine thrust, pooling the glints of gaps. We, which sits as maculate sheath, parried through tremors could takes. Current planks to bridge the moonings, derange or cup the lithe. Fit as gap into lacuna, or moor like fix to vine. Cramp the sultry awning, which only berates the climb. This croon is the work of fronting.

Want which maximum airing, is only the settled coupling. Task to form the beaches, formal to ruin aslide. Hum as crate of tooling, and get the parse of lime. This is quart of fully, and knows the brace of truck. Strand if I can gate that simply; mote the clutch of fact. A turn to carriage veils the munder, and strips the clack of ride. Tumble rind always comes rightly or quakes; a knack off tuke the mime. Clasp as but if window, or truss the blue of tied. We turn intention of make.

Necks of vest define the pummelling charge flow out of mind the tread softly grating against this method which aims fearsome noise tics to us. Corner arrow partakes of simultaneous thread, simmering to point up in labile heat forms. Sutured causeways: grand is the clement hanging.

Flush a cuspid cleave tuck; yes I moment the crave. After such knowledge of jettings. Shank as much as can, tipping to the chest of reliquary. Catch a feel and tell all that this is which is not but only if puncturing proves to possibly see. Foam is the answer to a question ungoverned; all that is particular spilts beyond — this domed temerity. Riven with undercurrents, a slick-dripping tournament brazes on.

Richard Dawkins: good at biology.

Like any good Darwinian, Richards Dawkins no doubt rejects the idea that acquired properties are heritable.  This rejection, given Dawkins’ non-biological standpoints, is likely to become considerably more spit-flecked when the acquired property in question is religion. Given his Vice-Presidency of the organisation, then, the British Humanist Association’s new ‘Atheist Billboard Campaign’ seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of motivations.

But what to make of the endeavour? Certainly it is less punchable/laughable than the previous ‘Atheist Bus Campaign’ (which, to my knowledge, has not even been particularly effective in increasing the number of atheist buses on our streets).[1] There is clearly something in what the BHA are saying; the formulation “Muslim children” should give us some pause.[2] However, there are also several problems with the campaign.

Firstly, I don’t believe the expression “Muslim children” should give us any more pause than the even more common (and related) expression “Muslim community.” That is to say, the BHA’s campaign is ahistorical and acontextual in as much as it fails to appreciate the social, political, and etymological processes which have led us to this linguistic moment. Rather, the campaign takes this particular formulation, identifies it with insidious and brainwashing religious families and communities, and demands that it be expunged. This becomes particularly clear if one considers an article by Johann Hari from last year. Here, Hari presents the formulation (“[x] children”, where [x] is a religionym) as propagated by people who “want to get [children] at an age when their rational faculties are poorly formed, and implant [a religion] so deeply in their minds that they will become upset and confused when they hear rational counter-arguments.” This is not the case. As a quick example, we might mention former Labour MP for Selly Oak, Lynn Jones, an opponent of faith schools who nevertheless in a Commons debate on 6^th February 2002 spoke, she said, “as the parent of a child who attends a school with an intake of approximately 90 per cent Muslim children.”

Johann Hari: a Bertrand Russell for the David Mitchell generation.

Such terms are an outgrowth of broader debates and difficulties about the language to be used when discussing ethnic minorities. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, it was very common to hear Asian, West Indian and African migrants referred to collectively as “black” or “coloured”.[3] During the 1980s, however, this terminology began to change. Instead, the term “black and Asian” was often utilised (with “West Indian” sometimes standing-in for “black”). Since the Rushdie Affair, and especially after 9/11, the separation of a “Muslim community” away from the pre-existing duality has been effected. It is as “Muslims” that such people take their place in discussions about social problems, ethnic relations, and so on because it is their religion (and all that goes with it) that “creates problems”. But, of course, even leaving aside this political motivation which hides behind these discursive changes, none of the terms mentioned is literally accurate as a means of denoting the people they are taken to signify: all persons are “coloured” one shade or another; not all “black” people are “West Indian”; and, pertinently for our present discussion, not all members of the “Muslim community” (for example) are practising Muslims.[4] (This divorcing of a religionym from a strictly religious remit towards a more ambiguous function as a broad cultural descriptor is most clearly observable with relation to “Jewish” people, of course). Once the normative denotation of the descriptor “Muslim person” becomes something other than “a follower of the Muslim faith”, it is naturally only a small step which needs to be taken before we begin to talk about “Muslim children”. This, I believe, is how we arrive at the linguistic terminus which Dawkins, Hari, et al decry; not by the Machiavellian operation of anti-rationalist religious people.

But, even for all this, the above problems are not the most serious with this campaign. We might easily agree that “Muslim children” is to some extent an idiosyncratic formulation. However, the campaign moves from this proposition to a belief that the language concerned is intended to, or at least works to, frustrate freedom of religious choice. The children depicted on the BHA billboards balefully request, “[p]lease don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.”[5] Yet it should be obvious that, for all its flaws, the phrase “Muslim children” does not foreclose the possibility of religious change. Can it really be that the multitude of actors, each with quite different religious and political perspectives, that use this term desires, tout court, that people should not be allowed to choose their own religion? Hari’s talk about “poorly formed rational faculties” and becoming “upset and confused” at “rational counter-arguments” manifests a similar misconception. Is the implantation of ideals in children really so simplistic a process? If it is, one wonders how there came to be any atheists at all. Many socialists produce, to their horror, conservatively-minded offspring; merely being introduced to a text or teaching is not equivalent to adopting that text/teaching for oneself.[6]

The Provisional Enlightnment Army: has spotted some white Buddhists in Holloway.

Let me gloss what I take to be the position of the NuAtheists on this matter. There is at present an international battle going on for hearts and minds. We, the atheists and agnostics, are rational and tolerant; we regard the scientific method as the only/primary legitimate epistemological activity. They, the religious, are irrational and intolerant; they are suspicious of and hostile towards scientific activity wherever it is performed and whatever its precise concern. We must, therefore, Re-fight the Enlightenment. In this battle, it seems, Our weapons will primarily be textual; whether the text be atop billboards or in piss-weak pop-philosophy monographs. All We need to do is ensure equal access to Our and Their texts, since, when given a free choice between these two world-views, any truth-loving, rational person will of course come and join in on Our side. This equity of access, however, is frustrated by Their refusal to play fair, by Their insistence on furnishing certain young hearts and minds with an impermeable membrane.

There are countless objections to this; I will here raise only two. Firstly, IANAP[7], but I do not believe it is possible for any parent to raise a child without leaving his/her mark upon that child in some way. Most persons would accept – I certainly do – that one function of a parent is to provide his/her offspring with a moral compass of some sort. For all people, I would say – or almost all – morality comes from, or experiences interplay with, religious and political positions. Therefore, for the religious amongst us, the moral tutelage which a parent is required to perform is inextricably linked to that parent’s faith. Even if we presume that Dawkins et al are being good intellectual libertarians, and furnishing their children copies of the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Bible, the Kojiki, the Torah, and the writings of Bahá’u'lláh and Meister Eckhart[8], we cannot assume that a parent only leaves the sediment of his/her own religious beliefs in the precious brainpain of his/her child by introducing that child to formally and systematically expressed religious ideologies.

Meister Eckhart: the face of pure evil. Probably burnt a book once, too.

Linked to this, we might consider the way in which the BHA reveals its conception of religion via this campaign. For the BHA, a religion is a textual corpus which aims to convince readers of the truth and falsity of certain propositions. But religions are not, that is to say that are not only, texts. For ethnic minority communities, and especially those for whom religious practice is a keystone of cultural identity, places of worship can function as centres of social support and solidarity; places where people who may be marginalised and in some senses misunderstood by society as a whole can expect to be better understood, in cultural terms.[9] Besides (and this should be a familiar argument), religious teachings do not exist only to convince people that certain propositions are true or false. They equally serve to encourage hope for an imagined, yet unknowable, metaphysical constellation. To tell such people that “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD” may convince a Humanist that (s)he is a superior and rational being (or even that (s)he is “doing good”), but it is so far removed from reaching and engaging with the motivations for religious faith as to be simply inane.

At the risk of engaging in an unprompted condemn-athon (undoubtedly the worst kind): I am a secularist. This, as far as I understand it, means that I support, inasmuch as it is possible to achieve, the separation of Church and state. This is because I believe in freedom of religion, and that a government with theocratic elements would work against this. The BHA is not, at present, concerned solely with promoting secularism (e.g. with removing the Lords Spiritual from the House of Lords).[10] Rather, it seems concerned with the separation of religion from people’s mindbags. Even if the campaigning strategies of the BHA were not inane, smug, vacuous, posturing, etc., then I would see no reason why this is a social good-in-itself.

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[2] And those particular children are, I think, what this is about. Big, brown “Muslim” ones whose parents are in favour of faith schools. Besides, the formulation as applied to Christian children is just a truism; baptism, whether the BHA likes it or not, initiates into faith.

[3] The term “Black” (with this orthography) was often preferred by the Left, reasoning as it did that such terminology worked to promote unity between similarly-oppressed ethnic groups. Tariq Modood discusses this in much of his work; the essays in Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (Stoke-on-Trent : Stokeham Books, 1993) are a good, early and brief example.

[4] One might parenthetically wonder how much “practice” is required for one to become “practising.”

[5] As a side note, it is interesting to compare these BHA posters with material published by humanitarian organisations to support charitable work in the developing world. Look at this Oxfam example, which depicts three African children in need of improved health care: http://www.usu.usyd.edu.au/assets/images/oxfam_close_the_gap_poster.jpg In the First World, the “sickness” is a mental malady: creeping and covert desecularisation. “Only you can save” these children by…? Using language differently? Opposing faith schools? Being an atheist?

[6] The manner of this introduction may even invite rejection, of course.

[7] Here the “P” can stand for either “parent” or “psychologist”.

[8] This is a woefully scanty selection, of course; a bibliography far from sufficient to a ensure that a child is making his/her Own Choice.

[9] Virinder S. Kalra talks about this in relation to Muslim communities in Yorkshire and Lancashire in From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change (Aldershot : Ashgate, 2000).

[10] And, yes, I know that the BHA does campaign for this.

"Political Correctness": a very amusing pictoral lampoon.

I am very much enamoured of the blog Unspeak. For those of you unfamiliar with the site (and the book which shares its name), the basic premise of the author’s work is that: i) many words and phrases used in political contexts contain smuggled-in assumptions about the topic they relate to; ii) this has a vitiating effect upon political discourse by discrediting (or providing specious credit to) certain positions without the requisite argumentation; iii) this can indeed circumscribe certain positions by rendering them literally Unspeakable.[1] I don’t believe, however, that Stephen Poole has yet turned his attentions publicly to the concept of “political correctness”.[2]

So, like Alex D. Linz gamely limbering up to stand in for the Culkinator in Home Alone 3, I will here try to provide something of a Poolean analysis of the term “political correctness”. As they say in the “acknowledgements” of scholarly monographs: fanks to ‘im; but if this is shit, it’s my fault, right?

We might start by observing just how voluminous the concept has become for those who like to use it. I learned yesterday, via Roger Ebert’s review of the film, that Tom Six, director of The Human Centipede, has explained his movie via reference to the fact that he gets “a rash from too much political correctness.” So here we have a new (and, to say the least, surprising) definition of “political correctness ”: ‘not directing a horror movie about a grotesque, coporomanic medical experiment.’ To label something as “politically correct”, or to observe in it the Machiavellian hand of “political correctness”, is to do nothing more than to register one’s distaste; the phrase is a ‘boo’ term of very limited specificity.[3]

Dr. Heiter: prefers the vernacular.

It has long been accepted that speech, acts and speech-acts can all be “politically correct.” Indeed, the Wikipedia article for the term notes that, in America anyway, the phrase became especially salient during the Culture Wars. The discourse surrounding the Culture Wars joins speech and action almost inextricably: the merits of various educational “theories” were debated but always, of course, with the conscious recognition that any proposed theory must eventually be prosecuted in the “act” of teaching. Merriam-Webster confirms this duality, for that which is “politically correct” is “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” Yet this definition seems odd. Any society which does not practice Jim Crow-type segregation is most definitely “conforming to a belief that… practices which [bloody well will] offend political sensibilities (as in matters of… [‘]race[’]) should be eliminated.” Yet it seems unlikely to me that many would identify anti-segregationism as a prime example of lily-livered p.c. Linksfaschismus.

Rather, the cudgels of the anti-p.c. brigade make their marks best when applied primarily to linguistic matters.[4] This, reflects, I believe, the “common sense” theorisation of the relationship between society and language. This “common sense” theory is, roughly, that society and language are two hermetically sealed bubbles: the latter exists in order to describe or advance positions relating to the former, but cannot impinge directly upon its reality.[5] Therefore, to oppose the utilisation of certain linguistic formulations is liberal/lefty/loony nonsense, since “it doesn’t really matter” how we name things. Vernacular is good, because… well, because it’s vernacular, that’s why. It’s “our natural” way of speaking, and we won’t give it up for anybody, especially not under the force of base political arguments made by agenda-pushing liberals probably working in the race relations industry.

Emancipation Proclamation: freedom-hating, right-on, p.c. fascism in action.

Of course, this ignores the fact that nominative changes are constantly occurring, have been a part of English throughout its history, and can be effected for both ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ reasons (a distinction which is, in any case, almost impossible to discern in many instances). Yet I think that this “common sense” position can be assailed from two further related positions. Obviously, I do not agree with this strict separation between linguistic developments, norms, etc., and political activity. But I do not think that opponents of “political correctness” believe in this Manichean separation either. This is tacitly acknowledged in the commonly heard phrase “political correctness gone mad”. This formulation concedes that there is some basis for nominative contestation[6], providing that this is conducted in a ‘sane’ manner. What’s more, most of those who assail “political correctness” do so only because they themselves prefer the political content and implications of vernacular terms. Of course, supporters of vernacular terms would deny that there is any “political” motivation for their preferring those terms, and certainly would not agree that established terms can be just as loaded and discursively noxious as newer, unashamedly ‘agenda-driven’ formlations.

And this is precisely the issue. In the scheme of “political correctness”, “political” machinations belong solely to a certain subset of the Left; vernacular terms are presumably pre-political or apolitical. Those who use “political correctness” as an analytical term occlude any substantive discussion of which terms may be most neutral. It is “just obvious” that, for example, the exclusive use of “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun is preferable because empty of political content; this is, after all, just the way things are linguistically. It is — and not just in this sphere of discourse — only our enemies who have suspicious and decidedly political ‘agendas’: politics is a “point-scoring” game, “played” by the venal, duplicitous, or uncompromisingly ideological.[7] Self-described “opponents” of “political correctness”, then, whilst claiming to inhabit a brave or “common sense” position, as against the hang-wringing idealist unreality of the multiculturalist Left, are exceptionally cringing; their stance is underpinned by a denial of the fact that political contestation is the air we breathe.

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[2] There is no entry on the blog for the term; and an Amazon search of the book’s contents for the word “correctness” yields no results.

[3] “Very limited”, I think, rather than “no”. The term crops up largely in discussions about censorship, “free speech” and nominative practice. It has especial tendency to appear in material about attitudes towards ethnic and other minorities.

[4] “Primarily”, but by no means “entirely”. Positive discrimination, for example, is a type of policy proposal often decried (and effectively so) for its “political correctness.”

[5] My analysis here is drawing on Stanley Fish’s work; but not in any really specific way so that I can offer a citation. But, you know: go & read some Stanley Fish. G’WARN! Etc..

[6] Incidentally, this phrase is the one that I’m trying covertly to append over the top of “political correctness”. I’ve gotten it into conversation. It’s on my Ron Silliman-syndicated blog now. Sit back & wait, jellyspoons.

[7] Nick Clegg’s public persona is, or was in the lead-up to the election, positively built upon this foundation stone.

Carol Ann Duffy: Queen's consort.

Posting one’s poetry or prose (or prose-poetry) online, even if in a very unassuming format and manner, is a far more daunting (because seemingly egoistic?) endeavour than doing the same to one’s non-fiction, almost regardless of what form and register that non-fiction takes. I’m not sure why this should be. Yes; bad poetry is cringeworthy. But so are bad political analyses and, depending on who you are, a bad political analysis can lead to someone getting his/her dick clipped. Perhaps this dichotomy is instead due to the way in which poetry is valourised or made mystical and transcendental. If you see bad poetry, then to cringe is the only response; one doesn’t mount a counter-argument to verse. (And, relatedly, poor non-fiction work is as likely to make us red-faced in anger as it is in shame).

Nevertheless, I have decided to, over the coming week or so, place some of my (prose-)poetry here alongside the kind of non-fiction which I’m already “offering”.

First, though, I’d like to, by way of introduction, discuss the way that I came to poetry as a form. This will involve joining some cod literary criticism to some self-regarding biography; so feel free to skip if you so desire. But perhaps, in one sense, this might be, for literary scholars, a useful piece of Reader Response in action: do my gnarled, prolish fingers pound a sprig of Authenticity? Let’s see!

I didn’t read much poetry until eighteen months or so ago. Before that, I’d mostly confined myself to the stuff I had to read: the short, easily-consumed verse present on school syllabuses and penned by modern luminaries such as our current Laureate, Simon Armitage and Tony Harrison.[1] These poets did, I suppose, disabuse me of my previously-cherished notion that all poetry had to be about An Field or Some Love or The God. (Or all three.) But these poems were, of course, chosen for the curriculum precisely because they could be taught with ease. All had to exhibit features which sixteen year-olds could name & identify, and most also dealt with themes Within our Experience (many were about adolescence/”coming of age”, I seem to remember).[2] I abhor the notion that poetry, or any cultural product, “shouldn’t be analysed”, and abhor the idea that such products “are destroyed if you analyse them” triply so. But I think that this analytical process does need to be one of reflective wrestling, rather than of ten minutes’ breathless pummelling.

One of the Shakespeares: RUBBISH, ACTUALLY.

This is not, I should say, to endorse the smug Kubrickism that institutionalised education actually – aha! – makes us stupider by enforcing engagement with culture in a way that is reductive and unpleasant. I didn’t much enjoy Shakespeare either; but found time to read drama outside of the classroom at that age. Therein lay the problem for poetry: my lunchtimes during Sixth Form were spent on Pinter (his plays, I mean, of course), Ibsen, Brecht, Soyinka, Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett, Jack Rosenthal, John Mortimer, Dennis Potter and John Godber; that is to say, on whatever playscripts our school library had available.[3] For whatever reason, and by whatever process, poetry just wasn’t getting a look-in.

Moving on to university made things worse unsurprisingly, since my reading hours were now spent on scholarly analyses of the middle class’ formation in early modern Finland, etc.. (And that really will kick the voracity out of you.)

So my engagement with poetry came quite by accident, would you believe? I was working as a voluntary archivist at the Brynmoor Jones Library (at the University of Hull), and was given the opportunity to catalogue the files of the British poetry magazine Reality Studios (1978-1988). The material included correspondence between contributors and the editor Ken Edwards, draft typescripts and ACTUAL POETRY ITS ACTUAL SELF.[4] The first poems I came into contact with when opening up these dusty old buff folders were by Allen Fisher. My initial reaction was, essentially: “what the fuck is this???” The orthography, the semantics, the vocabulary, the meters (and their absence), the “themes” (and, etc.) were unlike everything that I have ever seen.

Now, this is of course not really to say anything about the originality of Allen Fisher (or Ken Edwards or Tony Baker or Bill Griffiths). If I had come to the work of these people after an extensive engagement with the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, etc., then of course my response would’ve been more along the lines of, “oh, I see; that sort of thing…” But to go from Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage to the thrusting phalanx of the British Poetry Revival was an Escherian mindfuck. Here were linguistic signifiers arranged in a manner which claimed to be “poetry”. My every instinct as a reader was to repel the question (the “Nietzschean question”, as David Trotter puts it in a contribution to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal) I most wanted to ask: “Who is speaking here?”

So questions went unanswered, but I pieced together the “meaning” of Language poetry by joining Google searches to discovered family resemblances amongst the poetic works I was consigning to historiography. My reaction to langpo echoed George Costanza’s reaction to feeling the fabric of a brassiere for the first time:

“I LIKE THIS.”

Over the past few months, I have begun to express my approval through the only means I really know; pale imitation. This, then, opens up the question of precisely what I liked in “language poetry”; a question which, owing to my aforementioned history as a reader of poetry, must necessarily be rather a-historical and, for want of a better and fear of a more obnoxious term, “lay”.

Externality.

Charles Bernstein: an observant Jew -- nothing escapes his notice.

“Language poetry” is a truncation of the more accurate and verbose expression “language-oriented writing.”[5] It refers both to a loose style of writing and to an institutional network of presses, journals and individuals; this blurring is aided by the prominence within the school of the American magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. This manner of writing is “oriented” towards language in the sense that its semantic concentration is upon the interrelation between pieces of language (and other forms of signification), rather than upon the use of such signifying practices to depict or “create” some external image or “world”.

This is perhaps a slightly cartoonish presentation; but it reflects the concerns of some language-oriented writing in  their most polemical mood. The paradigmatic statement of this approach is probably Ron Silliman’s 1979 essay “Disappearance of the World, Appearance of the World.”[6] In the essay, Silliman uses Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism in order to analyze the specificity of langpo: most other varieties of poetry “sell” to the reader some external image, narrative or position; language-oriented writing is concerned only with the relationship between signifying practices. Obviously, this analysis can proceed only by analogy: langpo is no less “alienating” than any other poetics; it can only be less economically exploitative by dint of the way in which its product is distributed.

But it’s clear that what Silliman says has merit strictly as literary criticism. Take the opening lines of Charles Bernstein’s “So really not visit a…”:

So really not visit a remember to strange.

A it’s always finally seems now which ago,

long that by amaze. Guess I thing obvious of kind.[7]

These lines not only “resist” a reading which would interpret them as an attempt at image-conveyance; they positively negate such a reading. Here, it’s important to note that spoken performances, and the recording of these, was essential to the distribution of language-oriented writing. So, at a reading, Bernstein seems to offer us the tantalizing prospect of a clear statement about the activities of a subject (“Yes I think…”); only to “take back” this courtesy in published form, replacing it with the “colourless green thoughts”-esque “Guess I thing obvious of kind.” The word-play, punning and garden-path formulations of langpo create multifarious textual ambiguities; the spoken performance of these ambiguities often serves to add new layers to the semantic confusion.

Bruce Andrews: he's been on the /O'Reilly Factor/.

Ventriloquism

I referred in the “introduction” (or whatever) to language-oriented writing as a type of poetics which encourages us to ask, “Who is speaking here?” Of course, langpo is by no means the only type of writing to employ multiple voices. But language-oriented writing is nevertheless unusual in refusing explicitly to define or name any of these voices, and to deploy, in some cases, as many voices as clauses.

This is nowhere more true than in the work of Bruce Andrews, and nowhere is the tactic mobilised to more entertaining effect than in his collection I Don’t Have any Paper, so Shut up (or, Social Romanticism). Consider these first-person formulations taken more-or-less-at-random (i.e. not at all at random) from that work:

I’m a sketchy ditch.

Don’t let the sleazy ambience put you off / I’m a wheelchair!

I was listless and had vomit in my hair / I think these critics are all mental cases.

I want to have national responsibilities.

I was an anal virgin until last night. [8]

Andrews does not “mean” this, in the sense that he is not seriously declaring his status as a sketchy ditch or a wheelchair. The status of his anal virginity must, at the moment of publication, remain an open (hurr) question. But neither does he wish to arrogate these statements and positions to “characters”; identifiable and discrete theatre masks which he switches between at breakneck celerity. Rather, the topic of focus is (as always, at least in some indirect sense, in langpo) these precise discursive atoms.

Of course, some qualifications must be made here. When Andrews, a stridently leftist Professor of Political Theory, informs us that “I am not, nor have I ever been, an anti-Communist”, this is, perhaps, all “him”: he really does think this.[9] That’s not a problem in itself: no author is an elutriated agenda-free subject capable of sitting above (“outside”?) the discourses with which he engages. But, if anything, the first-person plural formulations of this sort (“We like to sit around our California townhouses and criticise Black street culture from a literary point of view”) are more annoying, since they invite the audience member either to become part of the in-group chuckle (the line quoted gets Andrews by far his biggest laugh in the reading I have heard), or else out him/her-self as the kind of person who does in fact sit around, etc..[10]

Vernacular

Ron Silliman: blogger & Marx-botherer.

As is probably clear from the above extracts, langpo (and Andrews in particular) is not exactly essentialist about what can be considered “poetic language”. It would be wrong, I think, to say that those involved with language-oriented writing “love” the vernacular. When Andrews places before us the notion that “you can really become yourself with money”, it is clear that he does not “love” this idea; or, at least, he does not only love it.

Instead, I think that Andrews is recognising the Chomskean principle that ideology grows best in vernacular; i.e. it is precisely when these notions do not explicitly mark themselves out as “political”, instead being smuggled into the no-frills language of the everyday, that they are at their most puissant.

Andrews is not the only poet associated with language-oriented writing to make extensive use of the vernacular. In Charles Bernstein’s “Matters of Policy”, the “kids splintering like glass jets against shadows of tropical taxis” are joined to each other by a nexus of prosaic chidings (“he really had”; “I should be sorry”; “I know I have complained”; “quit nudging!”) and thus take their place alongside the newspaper-reading narrator, desirous of “another sip of [his] Pepsi-Cola”, and “the men chatting about those dreary affaires de la monde they seem to find so interesting”; the last being the only cluster so base as to engage in overt politicking.[11]

Bernstein employs a similar tactic in the later “Dysraphism”, a poem comprising several “seams” (or, more accurately, mis-seamings); amongst these a quaint picture of American family life observed through the kaleidoscopic lens of langpo (“A good example of this is / Dad pins puck”; “Ma always fixes it just like I like it”). The final reference to such relationships comes as Bernstein sadly concedes that “I know how you feel, Joe: nobody likes to admit his girl is that smart.” Immediately, the familiarity of this sentiment is “made strange” by a characteristic jumbling once Bernstein reconsiders: “I feel how you know, Joe, like nobody to smart that girl is his admit.”[12]

Différance

Jacques Derrida: unerasable.

In a review of Bernstein’s 1987 collection The Sophist, Paul Auster comments that Bernstein has “reintroduced the spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry.”[13] Indeed. The spirit of polemic: its contours, its register, its vocabulary, and so on. In readings of the volume’s opening poem, “The Simply”, Bernstein is at no point more spirited than in his delivery of the following lines:

“…Why not, under a sway so profoundly

gentle as this, give the act a credence that, in

other light, seemed to demand disapprobiation [sic], the

account of which, at odd measures, might even be

taken if the alarm first not sounds that, painstakingly

no more the proviso than encampment, only to force full

well the recondite consideration that what is by such

confrontation supposed to later allow is just

what by such deference, accommodation to vitiate, would

be then available?…”[14]

With the voice of Demosthenes, Bernstein piles up comma on top of comma, reducing each previously-foregrounded clause to subordination or contingency with a flick of his wrist; the “meaning” of this vast run-on sentence simultaneously produced in aggregation of, and passed like a parcel between, signifiers, until finally the music stops (Bernstein’s “deference, accommodation to vitiate” is expended) and we are reminded to our surprise that this cluster of tendentious fragments was in fact being promulgated in the interrogative mood? This is a man who, for want of a more analytical sentiment, has read his Derrida.

This kind of process is by no means unique to Bernstein. Language-oriented writing, with its focus upon the interrelation of signifiers, its punning and use of unclear referents, is constantly forcing readers into new readings, not just between poems or reading sessions, but as a normative and continuous aspect of readership. It is unsurprising that the one polemical statement which Bernstein does seem absolutely serious about and insistent upon is his assertion that “the world deals with negation and contradiction and does not assert any single scheme.”[15]

Intentionality

Jackson Mac Low: unintentional.

All of these writing strategies make Barthesian attempts to chip away at the notion that any text can convey a singular, privileged meaning; that meaning “intended” by the author during composition. But no authorial practice can negate this notion quite as easily as the proactive and explicit deferral of intentionality by the writer.

This practice, like all of those I talk about here, is by no means exclusive to language-oriented writing. Perhaps the most eccentric and challenging example of non-intentional poetics can be gleaned from the somniloquies – recorded segments of sleeptalk – produced by Dion McGregor. When approaching this material it of course makes no sense to ask “what is the intended meaning here?” Discussion of extracted meanings can only begin once this question is put aside: “Hier ist nur ‘Warum’”.[16]

Non- or semi-intentionality (“determinism” as Jackson Mac Low has called it) does not take this form in language-oriented writing; but it takes many others. In the first edition of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal, Bernadette Mayer listed the following amongst her collection of writing “Experiments”:

“Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words (only) into a piece of writing – whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the same word in every line, or in a certain place in ever paragraph, etc.. Design words.”[17]

This was a common means for language-oriented writers when producing semi-intentional or deterministic work. Perhaps the most concentrated example is Clark Coolidge’s collection The So, in which all poems consist only of prepositions, conjunctions, articles, nouns and pronouns.[18] Taking this a step further, in his “I and The”, Bernstein reproduces the one hundred words most commonly used in conversations between psychiatrists and their patients (according to a sociologist’s survey). The words are presented in order of frequency; three to a line; three lines to a stanza.[19] If McGregor’s sleeptalking is the “other” peak of non-intentionality, then how different our two summits look.

But Mac Low was (he passed away in 2004) perhaps the “language” figure most associated with non-intentionality. He added a futurist twist, employing computerised algorithms to select stretches of language from “seed”, or source, texts. In an especially successful example, collected as HSCH, Mac Low combined language from the works of Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the philosopher (and his former mentor) Charles Hartshorne. Mac Low is more “intentional” than others; adding “helping words” (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns); deleting some language that is less helpful; altering proper names; and freely combining the selected language.[20] Yet, in a sense, Mac Low is most prey to his source texts. As he said, he formed the selected language into “sentential structures”, often fixating upon certain semantic fields so as to create a sense of theme. “Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon from Every Direction” from HSCH takes this further, as Mac Low appends to it an extremely suggestive epigraph: Lloyd Biggle’s remark that “democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.” The timing of the composition (2003) and Mac Low’s anarchist politics suggest strongly that this work is, in some sense, about the Second Gulf War. Much of the material within the poem is not directly suited to this reading (we learn, for example, that “Clementi shamelessly declared compunction at the slaughter of fishes”); but much of it decidedly is. In any case, the reader or listener is searching for clues about meaning not “at the margins” but “in the seams”; that is to say, not in precise formulations, but in the way that formulations are stitched together into more substantive linguistic behaviour.[21]

In an interview with Bernstein, Mac Low declared his interest in “experimental poetry in the fullest sense of that term.” What he means, I think, is poetry that is not merely concerned to declare its own merits (its novelty and its transgressive properties); but instead acknowledges (and delights in) its speculative character, its status as procession rather than product, etc..

I have tried to take some of this on board in my own “work”. That’s what I’m saying.

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[2] This is maybe a little unfair to Harrison, who I did enjoy. He’s at least political.

[3] And also on Italo Calvino, Leo Tolstoy and the complete Flying Circus scripts, I seem to remember. Incidentally, is this the first time that Jack Rosenthal and Bertolt Brecht have been mentioned as basically much-of-a-muchness?

[4] Precisely what is contained can be established by visiting the Reality Studios entry in the University of Hull Archives catalogue WHAT I DONE. [Useless, post facto note: link fixed.]

[5] Not to say that a number of poets don’t gladly accept the term “language poetry” (or the “third way” of “language writing”), but I have heard the prominent langpo author and editor Bruce Andrews argue in favour of the longer and more expansive term and also claim that this was the “original” expression. I prefer the phrase “language-oriented writing” because it cuts off at the pass any tiresome critical suggestion that writers associated with “language poetry” believe themselves to be the first writers to compose pieces with an eye (or ear) primarily attuned to the interrelation of signifiers.

[6] Ron Silliman, “Disappearance of the World, Appearance of the World” in Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews ed., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 121-132. [Reprint].

[7] Charles Bernstein, “So really not visit a…” in Controlling Interests (New York : Roof Books, 1980), pp. 37-8.

[8] Andrews, I Don’t Have any Paper, so Shut up (or, Social Romanticism), (Los Angeles : Sun & Moon Press, 1992), pp. 16; 114;  187; 188; 210; . My familiarity with the poems comes mostly from readings of various parts located at Andrews’ PennSound page.

[9] Ibid, p. 280.

[10] Ibid, p. 96. You’ll need to hear the reading of the relevant section (entitled “Gestalt Me Out”) in order to verify my laughter claim, obviously.

[11] Bernstein, “Matters of Policy” in Controlling Interests, p. 1.

[12] Charles Bernstein, “Dysraphism” in The Sophist, (Cambridge : Salt Publishing, 2004), p. 40.

[13] The snippet is quoted on the jacket of ibid., and is reproduced on the relevant page at Salt Publishing’s website.

[14] Bernstein, “The Simply” in ibid., p. 5.

[15] Ibid., p. 6.

[16] Questions about the authenticity of McGregor’s “work” abound. I do not think they are very important for the consideration of McGregor’s work as poetics. It is enough that the somniloquies denude the possibility of such material existing.

[17] Bernadette Mayer, “Experiments” in Bernstein and Andrews ed., L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, p. 80.

[18] Clark Coolidge, The So: Poems 1966, (New York : Adventures in Poetry, 1971).

[19] Bernstein, “I and The” in The Sophist, pp. 53-78.

[20] Incidentally, the stanza lengths of the ten poems are determined by famous number sequences (primes, the Fibonacci, etc.) My précis of Mac Low’s method0logy draws on his own descriptions of it as given in an interview with Bernstein for “Linebreak”, and in his introduction to a group of readings from HSCH archived at PennSound.

[21] Unfortunately, I do not know where a text for “Feeling down…” can be obtained. My familiarity comes via this reading at PennSound. [Note: clicking the link will begin the download of an MP3 file.] Incidentally, I’m pretty sure that the title given at PennSound (“… Impost… “) is incorrect, judging by Mac Low’s own delivery.

Elena Kagan: overloaded signifier.

A friend of mine noted on Facebook last week that present SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan bears more than a passing resemblance to spacky Britcom ubiquity David Mitchell (in girthier times, anyway). I noted that her delectable visage actually seems to have cast in wobbly marble a combination of  Mitchell, Richard Herring and Eddie Izzard. To note this is effortless; but, as another commented asked, “what does it mean?” My contention is that our analysis must take several strands.

We see in her the figure of the Mitchell; the court jester of the pro-war Left; this meeting of Aristophanes and Aaronovitch. And of course this recalls for us Kagan’s stance on the extension of battlefield law and so on.

But when we are then confronted with these Mitchellian facial expressions as a Marxian superstructure atop the base of this Herringean bone structure, we are forced to graft in a new significance to these expressions. (That is to say, we become conscious that Kagan will not merely, in the Kierkegaardian sense, “repeat” Mitchell). Rather, we are forced to articulate an historicist position: Kagan repudiates the anti-pragmatism of Stevens as Herring and his cohorts abandoned the self-conscious leftism of Elton, etc..

Yet this gives us the hope that Kagan will defend those (specifically civil) liberties which are at present most under threat, just as post-alternative comedy has adopted “liberal” positions even as it abandons Eltonite references to a declining brand of labour politics.

Finally, the Izzardian frame in which this interplay occurs reminds us of Kagan’s status as an ‘Other’; an outsider to the juridical community. The absence of any ultimately Real countenance (in the Lacanian sense) forces us to acknowledge that our amateur physiognomy has always as its target the uncompleted Symbolic, and is thus as much an act of Freudian projection as of empircal analysis. Gripping hope & fear in equal measure; we gird ourselves.

Wispa Duo: a question for which there is no easy answer.

So a few days ago I saw my first “Wispa Duo” billboard. This, I think, is an ingenious piece of marketing; perhaps the most playful example of smirking self-parody I have witnessed from a multinational corporation.

The reference point (albeit unspoken) is surely the Cadbury’s campaign for Creme Eggs (“How do You Eat Yours?”) This has, for some years now, been perhaps the most unequivocal celebration of gastronomic creativity on our television screens (and, increasingly, atop our internets); a boundlessly ludic feting of diversity amongst eating styles.

The new Wispa campaign possesses much the same register as the Creme Egg campaign, and has appropriated some of the same techniques (sponsored polls on Facebook, for instance). But, of course, the “choice” present here (between Left bar and Right bar) is no choice at all; these qualities (leftness and rightness) are entirely relational and subjective, and naturally have no bearing upon the experience of consumption (in either sense). But! Cadbury surely intends here to place under the microscope that springtime, fondant-flecked celebration of choice — not only by negating its conferment of autonomy, but by exposing the limits of that conferment. “This choice is no choice at all!” we are expected to squeal. But, of course, the “How do You Eat Yours?” campaign is, on one plane, just as communitarian. In order to be a part of this goo-guzzling orgy of individualism, one must first (under the at least partial coercion of advertisements, etc.) purchase a Creme Egg. In order to experience the apex of free-play in consumption, one must first take one’s part in this highly regulated and specific act of consumption. (Being one of the few seasonal confections, the consumption of the Creme Egg is in this sense especially regulated).

Frederick Taylor: hates caramel fillings.

We might also wonder whether Cadbury’s recent American take-over is salient here. British manufacturing was for a long time regarded by American industrialists as inferior due to its slow pace in adopting Fordist and Taylorist techniques. Here, the encroachment of America onto previously British terrain actuates the most obnoxious act of standardisation imaginable: standardisation which denies that it is standardisation. This is also a national self-parody, and this fact becomes particularly clear if we consider another application of this difficult opposition between “Left” and “Right”.[1] Brits often despair at the narrowness and pusillanimous consensuality of American political discourse (as do, naturally, many Americans). Who better to confirm for us what we had always expected — that the categories “Left” and “Right” are pathetic psychogeometrical swipes at political understanding which act to perpetuate a spurious sense of adversarialism — than America’s largest producer of foodstuffs?

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