no computer

“The antique ponderousness of exact quotation will be compensated for, I hope, by the quality of the selections. They will appear when appropriate in this text: no computer could have provided me with this pertinent variety.”

–Debord, Panegyric Vol. 1

paperbacks

The Paperback Revolution, from what I can gather, refers to at least two projects. I came across one of them in the April 2010 issue of Artforum. Ten pictures of paperbacks are spread over four glossy pages. The display is edited (or curated) by novelist and critic Mark von Schlegell, and this website suggests that the photos correspond to an actual display of books, probably somewhere in Germany. The books span the years 1935 to the present, though in his introductory remarks von Schlegell dates the paperback revolution back to 1932. This small-R revolution “isn’t threatened by new technologies,” fits “all other modes of content distribution” and reflects “the real-world minimum value of a book.” New technologies represent no threat to it’s future, though something else does: the counterrevolution of the publishing conglomerates and their long-armed distribution mechanisms. This counterrevolution not only threatens the book trade but democracy itself. Von Schlegell asks, in this regard, a pertinent question—“Has venture capitalism killed off the open society?”

Perhaps it has (though, we should note, not only because of the economics of the book industry). Reading has long been linked to democracy, and the paperback represents the apogee of this sort of reading. Its cheap packaging of all sorts of texts promises (promised) open access to all kinds of knowledge and creativity. The photos in The Paperback Revolution make this clear, as pulp fiction intermingles with literary criticism and classic satire. To name a few names, books by Erich Auerbach, Rachel Carson, Chester Himes and Henry Fielding are among the ten paperbacks displayed. A website—the first one that comes up if you google “Paperback Revolution—says it well: “Between 1935 and 1960, the paperback revolution created a new industry overnight, permanently changed our understanding of ‘the book,’ helped to democratize reading by increasing readership and eroding the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, and created its own, unique genres and forms of expression.”

This webpage is where we find the other Paperback Revolution. It has an elegantly animated timeline of paperback history from 1935 to 1960. Thus we learn that Penguin was founded, in the UK, in 1935 and came to the US four years later. That same year Pocket Books was founded. During the forties and fifties sales of genre fiction and high literature burgeoned. Paperback presses were founded, they consolidated, splintered and folded. In 1960, dollar sales of paperbacks surpassed those of hardbacks. This is where the revolution ends, as the paperback had become an institution itself.

I’m clicking around the site right now. Its links section is well edited. It has a virtual paperback gallery, seemingly proving von Schlegell’s point that digital technology is no threat. I don’t have much else to say about this right now. (The site did inspire me to confirm something I once read in a biography of Borges: the first Argentine paperbacks were published in 1933.)

gabriel orozco

Orozco is succinct: “Novela = Causalidad. Poema = Casualidad.”

paz

Octavio Paz’s long essay El arco y la lira works like a companion volume to Piedra de sol, one of his most important poems (it’s the first text in the bilingual Collected poems). Published respectively in 1956 and 1957, the two texts make up two sides of the same coin: prose becoming poetry and poetry becoming prose, to put it in the form of Paz’s favorite rhetorical device: the chiasmus (and that last colon too, a colon within another colon: one of Paz’s preferred punctuation marks).

Take the beginning of both texts. They each begin with a litany of names. “Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation able to change the world, poetic action is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a method of interior liberation.” The first paragraph of El arco y la lira goes on like this for some time. As we advance down the page, sentences are made up of predicates alone, or rather of those predicate nouns that follow on “is”: “Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence. Exorcism, spell, magic. Sublimation, compensation, condensation of the unconscious.” Drawn from various vocabularies—Christianity, Romanticism, Paganism, Hegelianism, Psychoanalysis—the terms amplify that initial sentence beginning “Poetry is…”

Compare this to the first stanzas of Piedra de sol. “a willow of glass, a poplar of water, / a tall spout bending in the wind, / a tree firmly planted yet dancing, / a walking of a river that winds, / advances, recedes, turns a circle / and arrives always:” Here too is a list of things. The list continues and returns at various moments throughout the poem: “writing of fire on jade, / cracking in the rock, queen of serpents, / column of steam, font on the cliff, / lunar circus, / cliff’s edge of the eagles.” The reader faces a question not unlike the one suggested by Neruda’s poem “Galope muerto” (“Like ashes, like the population of seas”): to what subject do these objects correspond? We find out at the end of the poem, when it circles around and repeats those initial six lines. The subject there is the “magic of the mirrors” of “centuries of stone,” which arouses us from our “dumb sleeping,” bringing back to life those willows and poplars and other sorts of trees.

Now, what I want to point out is not just the formal similarities between the two beginnings. Beyond this correspondence in form, the two beginnings end up pointing to similar realities. All those things that poetry “is” in El arco y la lira are ultimately revealed to be nothing but a circulation of masks, a list of “formulas” corresponding to the poets who, over the centuries, “justify them and give them flesh, give them life.” This circulation is itself seen to be the quintessence of the poem itself: “the poem is a mask that hides the void, beautiful proof of the superfluous grandiosity of all human works!” Behind the masks of poetics lies nothing—and this is a dictum common throughout Paz’s writing. We find it there, at the end of Piedra de sol, when all those trees are awoken by a hall of mirrors, by the fleeting projections of the real. This is why the being of the poem is its quality as mask, because it reveals the truth of things as mirages that reflect the “centuries of stone.”

“Centuries of stone”: this sums up the vision of history present throughout Piedra de sol: “all the names are one name, / all the faces are one face, / all centuries are one instant.” This is why a number of historical periods commingle in the poem. Ancient Greece and Rome, high Aztec culture, modern Mexico and New York, Madrid during the Civil War. And along with them signal historical figures share one agony: the deaths of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, of Montezuma, Lincoln, Trotsky, Madero and Robespierre, are all the same death, “and their cry and the cry of the executioner / and the cry of the victim… / are flames [. . .] everything burns, the universe is a flame, / smoldering the same nothing that is nothing / but a thinking in flames, smoke in the end: / there is not executioner and no victim…” Years later, reflecting on the events of 1968, Paz would say something similar about the massacre of students at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas: “that afternoon visible history unfolded, like a Pre-Columbian codex, our other history, the invisible one. The sight was overwhelming because the symbols became clear.”

What does this (conservative) view of history have to do with poetry? Let’s look at El arco y la lira. Paz proceeds, like Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” by “asking” the poem what it is. Not equivalent to poetry, the poem is also not simply a literary form but rather “the place of encounter between poetry and man.” Poetry is a force beyond its concrete instantiation, and it is its “touch” that allows a given verbal construction to become a poem. This manifestation takes on different forms according to the historical period in which it takes place, variances in style becoming simple contingencies, masks behind which lies poetry, another name for a “center, vibrating transparency,” or “God, being with no name,” who is also the “plenitude of presences and names.” Poetry, if we’re to draw out the consequences of this system of equivalences, is both what is without name and also the conjunction of all presences and names. The poem, in this tall order, would be the place where this conjunction is displayed.

The “happening” of poetry is also the stripping away of everything but language. “In the poem language recovers its first originality, mutilated by the reduction imposed by prose and quotidian speech.” In this aspect, the poem would present us with something like what Benjamin called language as such, the language of creation that lies behind the languages of exchange and utility, his names for what Paz calls prose. There is an imagined historicity to this formulation, a return to the moment of Creation. Thus the reference to origins. “Man’s first attitude toward language was one of trust: sign and the object represented were the same.” Speech would have been seen as re-creation, where even the object’s doubles were the same. The creative capacity of language extends throughout time, as “like other human creations, Empires and States are made of words: they are verbal phenomena.” Or even more clearly: “Man is a being of words.” This, of course, is a widely-held tenet of mid-century Western thought, and it ultimately spells doom for that initial regime of thing-word identity. Self-consciousness, articulated through language, would impose itself between the two, giving birth to thought or reason, seen here as the exclusive province of humanity.

The return to such a state is, for Paz, what poetry makes possible. This happens in all the arts, and he imagines it as a return to the concrete materiality of the specific medium—stone speaks through sculpture not through stairs, pigment speaks through paintings not through house-paint, etc. In them, “material reconquers its nature: color is more truly color, sound is fully sound.” (Such was also the conviction of the abstract expressionists.)

I’m winding down here, the late morning is beginning to weigh on me. I need to take a stroll and buy a coffee. Just a couple more notes worth holding onto. 1) this placing into liberty of the material corresponds to the emergence of the image (and in fact, I’m soon headed to the library to read up on Imagism). And 2) In both El arco y la lira and Piedra de sol, Paz makes reference to those most Mediterranean of foods, bread and wine. In the first case, he writes, “In prose the word tends to be identified with one of its possible meanings, at the expense of others: bread is bread, wine is wine.” And in the second, “the world / is real and tangible, wine is wine, / bread tastes again, water is water.” It’s worth asking if there is correspondence or variance between the two formulations.

huidobro

Notes on Altazor, by Vicente Huidobro. Preface and Cantos 1, 2, and 3.

There are seven Cantos in Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. Seven cantos like the seven days it took to create all that is. The coincidence is no coincidence. The Preface to Altazor describes an origin. “Nací” (“I was born”): this is the poem’s first word. It is a verb, unsurprisingly, for this poem advances quickly, its activity unceasing. “I was born at the age of 33 on the day Christ died; I was born at the Equinox, under the hydrangeas and the aeroplanes in the heat.” His birth marks a succession; it happens the day of Christ’s death. There is no three-day waiting period, no Easter Sunday. Rather, the resurrection of Christ is eclipsed by the birth of the poet.

Descriptions follow, again in the past tense. “I had the soulful gaze of a pigeon, a tunnel, a sentimental streetcar.” “My father was blind and his hands were more wonderful than the night.” And then a quick change to the present. “I love the night, the hat of every day. / The night, the night of day, from one day to the next.” And then back to the past. “My mother spoke like the dawn…” My father had hands like the night. I love the night. Night and day, night announcing the day. “My mother spoke like the dawn.” The poem progresses through associations. An approximation of night becomes Night becomes Day becomes Dawn. The chain of signifiers pushes us down the page quickly, in the same way that the poem itself presents itself as a long fall (“a Voyage in a Parachute” is the subtitle”). It is the same strategy that we’ll see enacted later on, in Canto 3. “We already know how to dart a kiss like a glance / Plant glances like trees / Cage trees like birds / Water birds like heliotropes / Play a heliotrope like music,” etc. Huidobro goes on like this for thirty-something lines, all of them predicates to that clause, “We already know how to…” The succession takes place on the ashes of an older knowledge—how to make a simile, perhaps—just as the poet’s birth would coincide with the birth of Christ. This seems, later on, to have some historical basis. The poet, now named Altazor, says in Canto 1: “My eyes opened in the century / When Christianity died / Writhing on its cross of slow death / It has yet to heave its last sigh.”

The following verses ask a question (“And tomorrow what will we put in its place?”) and offer a tentative answer (“A dawn or a sunset”), a suggestion followed by yet another question (“Must we replace it at all?”). These lines refer us back to another text by Huidobro, his famous manifesto Non serviam (from 1914). That text also begins with a birth, or an awakening at least. “[A]fter a night of precious dreams and delicate nightmares, the poet stands up and yells at mother Natura: Non serviam.” That cry is now “inscribed [grabado] in a morning of the history of the world,” the “result of a whole evolution,” and it is meant as a cry against not only nature but the demand that poetry imitate nature. As in Altazor, here there is a strict temporal division. We must not imitate nature, or if we do, it must be an imitation of the original rhythmic trembling that gave rise to the world “when Nature was young and full of creative impulses.” It is in light of this diatribe against the representation of nature that we must read those lines, “A dawn or a sunset / Must we replace it at all?” Sandwiched between two questions is the assertion, “A dawn or a sunset.” How are we to take this suggestion, the suggestion that these idyllic images are adequate substitutions for Christianity? Is the suggestion serious? Or is it a foil, a set-up for the real suggestion, framed as a question, that we replace it with nothing at all? Perhaps it is a simple contradiction, a possibility that the poem would seem to admit. The poet is “[l]onely as a paradox / A fatal paradox / A flower of contradictions dancing a foxtrot.” Or perhaps it is meant to embody a dialectical progression, just as in Non serviam it was nature itself—fated to be overcome—that gave the poet “his” voice.

Why is the poet dancing a foxtrot? Because this dance exemplifies modernity. If there is one constant in Altazor it is Huidobro’s enthusiasm for everything modern. Hence those aeroplanes, hence that sentimental streetcar, both in the Preface. Hence also that scene a few pages later, when the poet encounters the Virgin Mary. Seated on a rose (that which the poet must “make bloom within the poem”), she tells him, “Look at my hands, as transparent as light bulbs,” and then asks, “Do you see the filaments where the blood of my pure light flows?” The light of the Virgin is an electric light. She is a cyborg, but an old one. Her halo has “a few cracks in it, a proof of [her] antiquity.” So much in this poem is filtered through this sort of technological vocabulary. Thus the end of Christianity is explicitly tied to new technologies of war. “A great cannonade puts an end to the Christian era / Christ wants to die accompanied by millions of souls / [. . .] A thousand aeroplanes hail the new era / They are its oracles and its flags.” A legitimate question to ask is whether Huidobro is excited, like Marinetti, about these machines of death. The aeroplanes contain the secret of the new era, and they hail its arrival. Christ’s 33 years of life are assimilated to the almost 2,000 years of Christianity, his death coinciding with the horrors of WWI, his death coinciding with the dawn of a new era on the backs of these dead.

Technology is one supplement for the becoming of the poetic subject. (The other is woman; I’ll get to his below.) This subject begins, as does subjectivity in general, with a call to self-consciousness. A voice cries out, “you’re alive and you don’t see yourself living.” This call coincides with a fall from grace—the entire poem relates this fall. “[W]hy did you lose your young serenity?” asks the first line. Why did you wake up, it could have asked, echoing the beginning of Non serviam. Strangely, following this is the image of an angel, an evil angel, with a sword in its hand, resting on the entrance to the poet’s mouth. The implication, as I see it, is that the loss of serenity coincides with the cutting out of the tongue. This is not how the story usually goes, for it is the entrance into language, into the symbolic, that is the modern correlate of the fall from grace. How might we explain this apparent contradiction? I think it has to do with the idea of poetry that is presented in Canto 3. “Poetry still and poetry poetry / Poetical poetry poetry / Poetical poetry by poetical poets / Poetry / Too much poetry.” This comes on the heels of what is, up to this point in the text, the most conventionally written section: a series of couplets, most of them conventionally hendecasyllabic with assonant rhyme. The loss of the poet’s tongue is perhaps the loss of this sort of poetry, the kind that, to return to a formulation mentioned above, we know how to do. A certain form of language has died; the poet must resuscitate it. “All the languages are dead / Dead in the hands of the tragic neighbor / We must revive the languages / With raucous laughter / With wagons of cackles / With circuit breakers in the sentences / And cataclysm in the grammar.” Death, again, demands life, the emergence of language (not languages), “the pure word and nothing more,” on the ashes of poetry. The new poetry must become “play,” “ritual,” must become song: “my voice is only song and can only come out in song.” This song would crystallize the centuries that “come howling through my veins / Centuries that teeter on my song / That slowly die in my voice.” This is the clearest crystallization of the emergence of the poetic subject, one that is constantly affirmed throughout the poem (“It is I who speak in the year 1919”), as the bearer of the new communal truths, of the truth of centuries past.

The other supplement to this voice’s emergence is, unsurprisingly, woman. If Canto 1 relates the birth of a sort of Adam, the second one gives birth to Eve. The gender of the poetic voice becomes clear at the end of Canto 1. “I don’t want the bonds of star or wind / Moon bonds are fine for the sea and women.” This rejection of the female reappears in Canto 2, this time as the acceptance of a necessity. Like nature, like history, the female must be channeled through the voice of the male poet. She is “mute,” her voice is actually “heartbeats,” something like the original rhythm that, long ago, exercised a different sort of creation. This distance in time is echoed in the formulation that she is “the depths of every thing,” which is to say something that must be deciphered. She does not speak but rather is spoken to: “The stones knocking talk to you for (por, also “through”) me / The waves of skyless birds talk to you or me / The color of windless landscapes talks to you for me / The flock of tight-lipped sheep sleeping in your memory / Talks to you for me.” In the most perverse and revealing verse, the poet ties this muteness to his own pleasure: “My joy is watching you when you listen.”

There’s much more to say but I can’t say it now. I’m off to teach this poem.

liquidated

We all know that the market, today, reigns supreme. But what is the market? Or, to ask a simpler question, what adjectives accompany, or should accompany, the term “market”? “Financial”: this is the answer that one can distill from Liquidated, Karen Ho’s hot-off-the-press ethnography of Wall Street (Duke UP, 2009). And by “financial,” we should understand the ethos and practices concentrated in Wall Street investment banks.

Why does it matter to answer this question? Because while talk of the market is by now commonplace in the social sciences and humanities, it is often unclear what exactly is meant by it. Manuel DeLanda has taken note of this fuzziness in A New Philosophy of Society (2006). “Markets,” he tells us, “should be viewed, first of all, as concrete organizations (that is, concrete market-places or bazaars) and this fact makes them assemblages made out of people and the material and expressive goods people exchange” (17). To view markets in this way is to avoid “vaguely defined general entities” that serve to obscure the concrete acts that make up that heterogeneous entity that we often call the market. DeLanda goes on to cite Ferdinand Braudel who invites us to imagine

a complex consisting of a small market town, perhaps the site of a fair, with a cluster of dependent villages around it. Each village had to be close enough to the town for it to be possible to go to the market and back in a day. But the actual dimensions of the unit would equally depend on the available means of transport, the density of settlement and the fertility of the area in question. (17)

DeLanda continues this analysis:

Roughly prior to the emergence of steam-driven transport, the average size of these complexes varied between 160 and 170 square kilometres. In the high Middle Ages, as European urbanization intensified, these local markets multiplied, generating a large population of similar assemblages. Then, some of the market-places belonging to these populations were assembled together into regional markets, larger assemblages with an average area of 1,500 to 1,700 square kilometres. Each such region typically exhibited a dominant city as its centre and a recognizable cultural identity, both of which are parts of the larger assemblage. Next came provincial markets, with dimensions about ten times as large as the regional markets they assembled, with a lesser degree of internal homogeneity. Finally, when several such provincial markets were stitched together, as they were in England in the eighteenth century, national markets emerged. (18)

“Even this simplified picture,” DeLanda concludes, “is already infinitely better than the reified generality of ‘the market’” (18)

In Liquidated, Ho seems to advance along a similar path. Her aim is to “conceptualize and approach markets only as a set of everyday, embodied practices,” distinct from any such “reified generality” (294). One of her central premises is that the history of finance capital should be kept separate from the history of the corporation. “[S]tock prices,” she explains, “represent a particular set of values historically divergent from corporations” (185). While investment capital rests on the neoclassical assumption of individual ownership, the corporation, particularly post-WWII, avowedly represents the site of multiple interests, of which the stockholder is only one. The modern corporation is “like the state or church,” with a temporality distinct from that of the stockholder. Ho cites the example of Theodore Hauser, CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who in 1957 pointed out the “basic conflict” between “‘what is most desirable and necessary, long-term, to the corporation’ and the implicitly short-term, private interests of shareholders. A corporation goes on ‘as long as the society of which it is a part goes on,’ and as such it does not operate according to the same timeline, viewpoints, or measurements of ‘any human span of life’” (196-87).

Here, then, are the basic outlines underlying Ho’s main argument: that the history of the corporation and the recent history of finance capital exhibit divergent, conflicting values; that the values of the latter are embodied in the habitus of investment bankers; that the central innovation of late capitalism is the exporting of these values onto the corporation.

Much of the usefulness of Ho’s book lies in her cataloguing of these values. Among them, a certain construction of “smartness” is central. Wall Street firms recruit among a small cadre of elite colleges, which are themselves stratified. Harvard and Princeton, along with Wharton, are the favored recruiting grounds, followed by the rest of the Ivies, Stanford and Chicago, as well as MIT’s Sloan School of Management. This elitism is important for several reasons. One, it allows investment bankers to consider themselves as high-performing exceptions from the rest of society. One of her informants spells this out clearly:

If you go to the outside world and you start working with people, people just are not motivated in the same way [as they are on Wall Street]. It is just a pain in the ass to get anything done in the real world. People leave work at five, six p.m. People take one-hour lunch breaks, and people do this and that and whatever. [. . .] In a big corporation of in the academy, it is hard to get things done. (Ho 103).

Ho remarks on the general character of this sort of remark, telling us that investment bankers commonly noted, “occasionally with envy but usually with an edge of moral superiority, how inefficient corporate America is because people move so ‘slowly’” (104).

In contrast with corporate America, Wall Street bankers pride themselves on speed in all things, a speed that extends to the rate of turnover in investment firms. This tendency stems, in part, from the second consequence of elite recruiting practices. The continual purges of front-office personnel would seem to conflict with the prestige accorded to these bankers. The resolution to this apparent conflict rests on the permanence of the Ivy League (or Stanford, or U Chicago) brand:

while employees come and go, the elite schools where investment bankers are recruited (and the resultant cultural capital that is imparted to investment banks for continually attracting these highly pedigreed workers) have been unfailingly constant. In other words, investment banking identities cohere around their commitments to employees’ pedigrees and university affiliations, not individual employees. Not surprisingly, such a way of managing their identity not only contributes to job insecurity but also supports their values and strategy of swift and immediate change. Having a ‘Stanford’ or ‘Harvard’ as a continual ‘member’ of the group or department is the strategic commitment or identification, not relationships with particular employees.” (256)

The personal insecurity of Wall Street jobs, however, is not experienced as a downside to the job. Rather, it is worn as a badge of honor, as “job insecurity [lies] at the heart of Wall Street’s self-conception” (222). The nihilistic, arbitrary downsizing endemic to Wall Street has, in recent years, come to dominate corporate culture as well, “forcing the average worker to become more liquid” (245). This phenomenon, Ho insists, “is itself located and formed at the intersections of particular values, practices, and institutions” (238). This is to say that it is the recent, contingent exportation of these values and practices from Wall Street outwards that can best account for the financialization of everything under late capitalism.

There is much more to say about Ho’s book, but I’ll leave my comments at that. Or rather, I’ll leave them with the final words from Liquidated, which betray a cautious hope that I wish I could share.

In this era of Wall Street dominance, finance–intimately linked to, not decoupled from, the trajectories of corporations, the livelihoods of many, and the nature of work writ large–has produced a highly unequal, new world order. It remains to be seen whether or not the global financial crises of 2008 are seismic enough to radically change the power relations on Wall Street and beyond. (324)

marriage in BsAs

Gay marriage is now legal in the Argentine capital.

piratebureau

Preparing to teach a class on Baudrillard, Debord, and Vivi Tellas, I came back to this marvelous essay by the Swedish group Piratebureau. One excerpt:

One notes that the ascent of pagers, mobile phones PDAs and Blackberries parallels the ascent of cargo pants, that paratechnology of seeming labor mobility…

rhythmic mysteries

I just posted this translation of an essay by Arturo Carrera on my website.

more economics

Here’s a follow-up story about the Notre Dame economics department.