The Circular Epithet

When Roland Barthes said that "Language is fascist," he was not discrediting language: he was recrediting fascism.

Derrida's Only Worthwhile Insight

From Phenomenology as a Mystical Discipline by Colin Wilson in Philosophy Now magazine:

As Derrida has pointed out, the act of masturbation is a textbook illustration of intentionality in action.

Show me this textbook.

Authenticity With A Bullet

Four people were recently shot in an altercation outside a plaza in my hometown of Hamilton. According to one unnamed young man, "A lot of wannabe gangster kids hang out there. It probably started over something stupid." By "wannabe gangster kids" I'm positive the man meant kids with baggy jeans and clownishly oversized shirts, not men in crisp Italian suits with Tommy guns. The word gangster has now become synonymous with "gangsta," which is sad for sartorial reasons if nothing else.

The "wannabe" part of the sentence also struck me in this context. When does a "wannabe gangster kid" become a real gangster kid? Possibly when he shoots four people, which is likely the reason the shooter did it. Being called a gangster used to be an insult; the Nazi propaganda machine even referred to Churchill as a "gangster" and distributed pictures of him holding a tommy gun. Nowadays calling a political figure a gangster would probably win him the youth vote, if the youth who aspire to be gangsters voted.

Although I can't relate to most gangster values, the ideal of being "authentic" is universal. Some may desire to be called a gangster, but nobody wants to be called a wannabe. If being a gentleman was still an ideal in society, accusations of inauthentic gentlemanliness might lead to a duel. Now that being a gangster is an ideal, accusations of inauthentic gangsterism might lead to a drive-by shooting. Human nature hasn't changed; it's just that the societal ideal for authenticity has declined.

Of course postmodernists, authentic in their self-congratulatory inauthenticity, would say that I view the notion of "decline" from my own socially constructed value system. This is true. And when all the socially constructed value systems of old are deconstructed, the postmodern paradise--which is a void--will indeed triumph for one second before being filled by new, some would say grossly inferior value systems like gangsterism. When wannabe gangster kids shoot each other, they are saying in the boldest of terms that they want to be real; and postmodern irony has no real to offer them.

Whoever the anonymous shooter is, he has proven he's not a wannabe. He has lived up to his ideals, which demand tit-for-tat violence over any perceived disrespect. But for all the wannabes out there: is this really what you want to be? We all have the urge to kill sometimes, but isn't that what the army is for? At least by joining the army you would kill for a reason above petty personal disputes. Even killing for oil is surely a grander cause than killing because someone stared at your girlfriend too long. We all need values--nature abhors a vacuum and man even moreso--but aren't there better ways to be real?

The Gateless Ether

What I like about bloks is that they eliminate the role of the gatekeeper. The traditional writing infrastructure is one of a thousand small literary magazines or journals that are only read by those who submit to them. Guarding the integrity of the literary enterprise is the "editor," a creature who is unknown to the wilds of the Internet. With the editor comes the sadomasochistic process of "submission," humiliating for all involved. The submitted piece is categorized as "fiction," "essay" or "poem" and judged either on merits of form or of postmodern anti-forms that are just as formulaic. If it makes the cut then it goes into print and your life is complete, until you realize you have been caught in a vanity feedback loop that finishes exactly where it started.

I'd rather my words go directly from heart/mind/gut to word processor to online to meta-online to meta-meta-online. There they will either disappear into the ether or survive as an eternal intangible monument upon my death. There is no binding, no vetting process, no submission guideline to mediate. The world clicks on it and/or immediately clicks past it. A part of me would like to write a book but: I come in spurts, in every sense possible. My saint is the Argentine master of saying much in little, of not so much defying rules of form as simulatenously pre and post-dating them. Edwin Williamson notes that:

Not only did Borges throw off the constraints of realism, he called into question the preeminence of the novel in the hierarchy of modern literature. He was drawn to modes of storytelling that had long preceded the novel-fable, epic, parable, and folktale.

The novel is a wonderful medium. But why is creative writing only "official" when it is in that format? There are millions of novels in existence, most of them unread and forgotten. Rather than contribute to the scrapheap, forcing creative designs to fit the narrow straitjacket of publishable material, why not go above and beyond "the hierarchy of modern literature"? Just as there were modes of storytelling that preceded the novel, there will be modes of storytelling that come after. Postmodernist and post-colonialist novels seek novelty through unfamiliar form and content. Eventually however, the halo around the "marginalized" will fade due to overexposure, and Dead Black Females will join Dead White Males in the ranks of the officially passé. As for postmodernists, one can only subvert convention so much before what was formerly subversion becomes just another convention.

My object in writing is not to subvert anything. Nor is it to write the "Great American Novel" and achieve widespread adulation and fame. The days of the writer-as-rock star are dead anyway. You can't have adoring masses as a literary figure when the masses are functionally illiterate. I'm not marginalized and I do not have a voiceless people to be the voice of; nor do I think the voiceless would really appreciate my voice. I write so I don't go crazy. That's more or less it. It may not pass muster with a gatekeeper; it may not be neatly categorizable; it may not be publishable: but the ether calls and I must answer.

Deconstructionist Ethical Rebuttal

Deconstructionist scholar John Caputo questions the injustice built into every act of intended justice by asking, "If I feed my cat, do I not sacrifice all the other cats in the world who die in hunger?"

I reply by stating, "Lucky for cats most humans don't listen to the paralyzing anti-ethics of deconstructionists like John Caputo, or they'd all be dead of starvation."

Anti-Anti-Anti-Communist Manifesto

After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Marxistentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre decided to hedge his political bets by claiming to be neither communist nor anti-communist, but "anti-anti-communist." In a similar spirit of Gallic prevarication, I declare that I am neither communist, anti-communist nor anti-anti-communist, but rather anti-anti-anti-communist. I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of McCarthyism (or Birchism or Hooverism or Bunkerism) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of Sartreism (or Fanonism or Frankfurtism or Meatheadism). As applied to modern politics, I consider myself an anti-anti-anti-Islamist, anti-anti-anti-Bolivarian and anti-anti-anti-socialist (as well as being anti-anti-anti-social). I prefer to primarily use the all-encompassing title anti-anti-anti-communist, however, as it rolls off the tongue more easily. And so in these days of post-communism (and post-post-communism) I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of post-McCarthyist Cheneyism (or Limbaughism or Foxnewsism or Elephantism [though I like elephants]) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of post-Sartrean Chomskyism (or Saidism or Berkleyism or Nologoism™ [though I dislike logos]). Sartre wanted the freedom to bash the vulgar defenders of freedom without being called a Stalinist, and I want the freedom to bash the bashers without being called a reactionary. As an anti-anti-anti-communist I am so progressive I give progressives vertigo; their tunnel-vision prevents them from seeing the tunnels I've dug beneath them to get ahead. From this dizzying position I declare: anti-anti-anti-communists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your opponents' ability to know exactly what you're uniting against without pausing for several minutes to think!

Metametadata

Subversion's Dead End Poetics

A published experimental poet came in to speak for a Comparative Literature class I was taking. She bemoaned the fact that poets were no longer at the forefront of culture, no longer the "antenna of the race" as Ezra Pound put it. (The Pound reference is mine, not hers, race of course being a social construct.) She was obviously an intelligent woman, but intelligence tends to inexorably drift from honesty of intentions. If she had bluntly stated that her experimentalist poetry was designed to earn her a living, indulge her artistic aspirations and gain dates in the lesbian community, in whatever order of truth, I would have applauded. Instead she had to use the deconstructing language as political statement trope - which, as a firm proponent of reconstructing language from the ruins of both consumerist and supposedly anti-consumerist postmodern newspeak, I took issue with.

One of this woman's poems consisted entirely of a string of numbers, yet she detected no correlation between the willful obscurantism her art represented and the decline of poetry's status in the broader culture. I don't deny poets the right to be as willfully obscurantist as they want, but they cannot in good faith remain so while bemoaning the fact of their own obscurity. This woman came from the school of transgressive poetry, and the fact that it is a "school" - and we were being taught it in a school, that most bourgeois of institutions - speaks to its tragicomic confusion of purpose. If she really wanted to be transgressive, she should have taken her aspiring vanguard of the masses poetry to an institution actually representative of the masses - perhaps the military. I'm sure her strings of numbers would have gone over smashingly there.

If a poet transgresses in the woods and nobody hears it, who the fuck cares? This woman spoke of her poetry as a political act, but in typical postmodern style, the summation of this grand political statement was roughly: capitalism sucks, racism sucks, sexism sucks, the fact that the masses don't appreciate how hard I work to transgress their norms sucks. The masses don't care and why should they? Poetry has always been a bourgeois art, and the attempts of nearly every modern poet to deny this fact has done nothing to change it. Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky became the poet of the Russian revolution specifically to employ his poetic skills for the masses, and ended up writing state-sponsored advertising messages telling the proles to brush their teeth. He later committed suicide, perhaps the only transgressive statement he had left.

This contradiction extends to modern art as well. Every modern artist who attempts to transgress bourgeois norms by shitting on a bed and inserting an American flag into it (has that been done yet?) is only appealing to a substratum of that very same bourgeois elite they supposedly seek to bring down. The fact that the tax dollars of the much-ballyhooed masses often goes to support this form of modern art is a glimmer of its totalitarian heritage, exemplified by the sad career of poor idealistic Mayakovsky. Irrelevancy can be a noble position to be in, but not if the only value the irrelevant subject aspires to is relevancy. By trying to be "relevant" to the chaos of the postmodern age by adapting their form to it, poets and modern artists are not transgressing the status quo - they are reinforcing it. It is my position that clear language is the most subversive poetics of them all.

Postmodernism: Some Working Definitions

post·mod·ern·ism

1. The secular mysticism of superfluous (wo)man.
2. A paradigm shift away from the oppressive dichotomies of Orientalism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism and heteronormativity in favour of the liberating dichotomies of Occidentalism, matriarchy, Afrocentrism and homonormativity.
3. Transcending the false meta-narratives of race and gender by seeing them everywhere in everything.
4. The critique of hyper-reality and consumer fetishism through the critical perspective of hyper-reality and "ironic" consumer fetishism.
5. The (en)gendering of crypto-linguistic auto-fellatio.
6. Opening the gates of Rome to the barbarians and expecting them to greet you as liberators.
7. The ultranationalism of deterritorialized borderlands.
8. Beating the horse that drove Nietzsche mad.
9. Escape from the hidden oppression of language through the dialectical process of making it more obscure.
10. The cultural (il)logic of late Marxism.
11. Applied Spenglerianism.
12. The close reading of signifiers within a text for the purpose of diassembling their significance thus rendering the entire process a self-consuming hermeneutical circle-jerk.
13. The radical problematizing of the false possibility of practical solutions.
14. White mythology for whites who think they're above mythology.
15. Queering the birth process and expecting the womb to bear.
16. Revolt against the threat of the scientific social engineering of society through the unscientific social engineering of students.
17. The decolonization of the mind from Western thought-patterns and internal power structures through entirely non-Western mediums like the novel and the secular university.
18. Academia's critical shield against the hegemony of relevancy.
19. The deconstruction of the human spirit.
20. The self-lobotomization of the Western mind.

Best Nickname For My Balls Taken From Lecture Notes

"Male spheres of power"

Today's Forecast: Repetition! Repetition! Repetition!

This is the three r's
The three r's:
Repetition, repetition, repetition
- The Fall, "Repetition"

The Weather Network and McDonald's: working together to fuck my computer up. Behold the true face of the postmodern information age! Colourful and cold and beating you even at Solitaire. Why do I feel like a Big Mac all of a sudden?