________________________________________________________________________________ SEVEN POEMS FROM PROLETARIARIA S t a l i n a l l é e _____________________ There is fiction, and there is falsification. Form as an adjustment to the ruling powers and as a vehicle for false consciousness. The implication of literature with law in the symbolic legitimation of the existing order. The unjust but powerful version aimed realignments of facts made famous. Goethe's conscious choice against the starving weavers of Apolda in favor of the iambs of Iphigenie. What is the appearance of a contemporary situation that has been built on this? It begins (if it begins) with the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, a fitting companion to the Chantry Certificates of Cornwall. The political exigencies of Henry VIII's breach with Rome motivated the monarchy to suppress the English monastic houses and confiscate their lands granted away to those whose support and favor could be won after this manner. Enter the gentleman and scholar as entrepreneur, Henry Parker (Lord Morley) whose landgrabbing (Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke) he will impose as the necessity of expenditures (Morley is one of the major links between Caxton and the Elizabethan translators) that he may drink from a silver goblet set with stones, recline on a purple couch, and load his prose (in 1539 he presented the gift of Machiavelli's Istorie Fiorentine and Il Principe, carefully marked and annotated with precedents the king might use) with strings of gems, a language used to see just how much money can do (his use of the sonnet in his translation of Maffeo Veggio's poem almost exactly coincides with Wyatt's and Surrey's use of the Petrarchan form) where chalices remain one or two chalices in the small parish churches and chapels where chalices remain one chalice and every mile or two a house is passed, untenanted. C i n e A c c í o n ____________________ I. What was that film called, Birth of a Nation? Origins are not sources or beginnings. To inflect a birth (an organic beginning) as in, "The Birth of the Workers Movement" (Dobbs, Revolutionary Continuity) inflects a geneology, ancestry and destiny. The Birth-Mark. Continuum, teleology. The prejudices against which (Nietzsche) viz. Christian ("in my end is my beginning") also carries through the Marxist conception, class struggle. Circularity. How historical time jumps forward and can fall back on itself, collapses. There's this sense to the Amherst manuscripts, their scribal character, how they remember writing before the invention of printing. Are these books an accident? The history of the page. Has the page of writing always looked as it does in anthologies of the lyric uncluttered clean and standardized homogenous, the graphic character or identity of writing subordinated to the will to produce an assimilable appearance. What's a chronology? Anfangen or Geburten. "Origination as a structural condition, prior to any histories and determinining all." To think of an origin is to be thinking for the birth-places (and burial grounds) and for further developments, growths, mutations (transformations). Or: is there simply another story? Historia abscondita: the forgotten time, events without markers, waiting (wanting) to be located, unburied. Nietzsche: a word is a nervous sensation copied into sounds. Marx: a word is an agitated gesture in the air. Ursprung: "A writing that seeks to designate an event, a process that departs from itself--a process that always exceeds or is more than its original sphere or condition--the excess, its leaping out, its rupture--the name that springs away from and out of the process it seeks to designate." A criticism for RECENT EVENTS: "Im Grund war die Kluft nicht Uberbrückt." II. What are the possible relations between sounding out and copying? Dividing a voice into original and copy--the maker of an Abbild--so that the poet is simply that willing individual who is the enemy and not the author of the lyric that appears only in leaps and ruptures--it bursts out of all origins--hurled ahead toward unguessed futures, as neither past nor future can yet be named or seen before the naming of the origins that mark their breaking out, their birth and the name for anything other than the original speaking against--the first protest--and errancy--these contradictions and errors or origins, sources, beginnings, histories. Marxist soild (Boden). "This situation of an origin as contradiction that can only know of its own reappearance or reflection as contrary or inverted appearance." The bridge between present and past and the possbility of the knowledge of the one by the other is what Lukács means by totality. The 'we' of genesis [das Wir der Genesis]: the proletariat, as discourse and dream. "What lies on the ground first comes up into view--an event--and in this (vertical) connectedness of everything, all things emerge as history, so that the past, whether a recent or distant event, and present knowledge, are this connectedness as it can be known, the step to Marx. Lukács: Everything that happens [alles was Geschichte] is fragmentary, meaningless, mournful [trauervoll] but it is always irradiated by hope or memory [immer durchstrahlt vonder Hoffnung oder vonder Erinnerung] and this steady struggle with memory transforms itself into a fascinating and incomprehensible path [unbegreiflichen Weg] that yet is bound with untenable threads [mit unzerreiss-baren Faden . . . gebunden] to the present, experienced instant." In RECENT EVENTS I have set out from the category of social class and have sought to make visible the absence of class as concept. It is called "exclusion" but that is not the right word. T o n e R o w M e c h a n i s t i c s _______________________________________ "non-participation" [nichtmitmachen] freedom from all direct action. As to the effect of the work--its public life--do you accept as inevitable and necessary the division of labor? "I do not address my works to the actual consciousness of an actual proletariat." The arrival of the 'double song' in prolet-ariaria might be read as a direct superimposing on to prolet-cult. The hand (hands) "grasp the concept." Hand work and mind work and begin to dissolve philosophy as philosophy (Karl Kraus would not mince words). The simplicity that you can find in the 1844 Manuscripts, i.e. even as I am poetically active--an activity I can hardly ever do in direct community with others--I am socially active, I am active as a human being. The material of my activity--the language I am active in--is worked on by me as a social product, so that my life, my life, my life--as long as I am writing--is social activity, and what I make from myself I make for you and you and you--"brainworkers" [dumkopfarbeiter]. "refunctioning" [umfunkionieren] vanguard and avant-garde whose meanings have been dispersed. Her leadership is more exemplary than pedagogic. Bloch: "there is nothing in creative reality that does not belong to Marxism." L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: what counted was not the petit-bourgeois social origins behind the techniques for composing [Produktivkrafte/Produktionsverhaltnisse] but the critical attitude [haltung] among which there is never mentioned anything so mundane as a musician's union. d i e L i n k s k u r v e __________________________ There is always the fact that actual, empirically existing workers do not see the world from the standpoint of a revolutionary class-consciousness. Without this concept, think of the difficulty for someone to emerge from the condition of the working class and that their condition becomes one of having to emerge, as there can't be any staying there, or it is this effort, the determination to stay there, that strikes me about THE POET KILLER. The effort to stay there and say this is writing from the working class, the effort to stay there and say this and say that I can have this without a concept of the proletariat. As long as there is no proletariat the writer who comes from the working class will always be writing in a condition, or position, a contracting set of positions, the effort of making sense of experience thickly occluded by the fact. What happened in the pre-war years was the conceptualizing of proletarian literature and culture and the pressure brought to what is art and what is propaganda. To reinstate that question now as not closed or if it was what got pushed out in the pressure to have one or the other. The demand of [the cry from the closet of Empiricism] Lyotard: No one has seen the proletariat. "Imputed" [zugerechnete] consciousness. Not new to you. L i n g u a C o m m u n i s ____________________________ Go to the polarization. The book a week's projections that we make. Consistent, principled work. It's not the exchange, more the communication. The tradition of workers' democracy, and civil debate. We are all articulate human beings. What all this adds up to is a world without borders and this is not an empty slogan at all. "If comrades would meet me in the translation area?" 1849. What the Gold Rush meant and why we are saying that it can't happen again. The 1870s' Chinese exclusions. The sense of needing each other, that there is no individual solution, and how to write this up in a way that's really useful. Sharp jolts, structural as well as conjunctural. Heightened competition opens workers to radical answers both scientific and reactionary. What this so-called 'privatization' really means, the house of cards, the question of culture, Western culture in particular, "the technobureaucratic constraints on intellectual labor, symptomatically registered as a fetish for 'rigor.'" Who reads you? Who needs you? Mike Amnasan: "The institutional conditions for creativity at present fail to foreground the question of the relations between social groups, disguising the fact that class determines how individuals gain access to the means of literary production, and as a result the system that regulates this access functions as an efficient mechanism of social exclusion." B r e c h t O p ________________ When Pete the scene with the bucket of tools when he brings the bucket of tools more than brings when he sorts through or is put in the activity of collecting his tools one way you could read that scene would be as an allegory, the tools the taboo on the instrumental function of language, the trauma of these tools reappearing--hadn't they been gotten rid of for good? We know better, now, don't we, even with the memory of Benjamin's 'communicative' and 'expressive' distinction, how the former finding its way into RAPP, TAPP, PAPP, etc. was spelling the destruction of language? Pete's tools reapear with all the spectrality of something that has been put away, forgotten, overcome or killed. This is basic. THEY COME BACK. Murder in Shakespeare. Later, the trivialization of murder. Admonitions document. Blaser's Spicer arrives in a trenchcoat. One foot in the 20th century. Etymology of the word, homicide. But who would assign to themselves the position of Executioner? A Workers Concept Theater that would appeal to the empirically existing consciousness of the proletariat for the purpose of education? Adorno: You cannot think about what a work of art is on the basis of its (perceived) effect on the audience. Cognitive function. Cathleen's critique of GOYA IN L.A. was that it had no conscious content, no appeal for a working class audience, based on what she saw, members in the audience demonstrating observable irritation or impatience. She said they weren't getting it and you could see that. Mike agreed in as much as he didn't disagree. I disagreed without saying so as to why you can't measure someone's response since can't that observable negative register then shift later on and isn't irritation and impatience (resistance) part of the learning process? What about members in the audience who were entranced. Are we enemies, do you count us out as from the other side? You can't read the killing scene without reading GOYA IN L.A. F r o m t h e D e p u t y C o m i s s i o n e r f o r E d u c a t i o n _______________________________________________ I. Compositional praxis. The empirically existing. The rule of form [Formgesetz]. Use-music [Gebrauchsmusik]. Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Lyrik. Consciousness of the Working Class. Community [Gemeinschaft]. Social conditions [Gesellshaft]. [Neue Sachlichkeit] new objectivity marks the false facades [innermusikalisch reaktionar]. The petit-bourgeois mens chorus literature. II. over exposure over exposed, like a phantom dream-killing [according to Eisler] sing-ability, simplicity collective effectiveness [audience response] attached to a level of consciousness stamped and bound by domination and sets itself up as name-work "turned by that privacy from such public perils as words are, we travel in company with the messenger the name of the bird who fell" "bird-throated" "and the word soul . . . a kind of floater" ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org