A Boorishly Fashionable Regression, aka Neo-Conceptualism

Review of Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse)

By Maxwell Clark

'Topographical Map', by Maxwell Clark (acrylic on canvass)

I can barely bring myself to read this mucky tome of yet such slimness. What either is being induced or deduced rigorously or affectively in this work? I cannot really tell. It’s a very weak piece of writing.

                “Words are objects.” (pg. 14)

Ok. Words are also expressions, aka the intercourse between subjective “faces” or unique individuals, i.e. non-objective, or even the ground of all posterior objectivity.

                “All conceptual writing is allegorical writing.” (pg. 15)

Ok. Is that an allegorical sentence? Is its secret, hidden meaning actually that its authors are weak and unpersuasive rhetoricians? Why bring in allegory in such a cursory and disjointed, much less strongly argued in some salient sense, kind of way?

                I will not further bore and mistreat my audience with quotations from this work (and please forgive the venom of that remark, although I refuse to erase it). Nor will I bore them with any more of my justly spilt bile. Please forgive, excuse, my apologies. Adios. Selah.

prayerful meditations for Cixous, my would-be masteress [a shameful email]

hello, i would have very likely studied under you as a graduate student (my parents are both Cornell alumni) if not for a psychotic break i had during in my undergraduate years at UVM. Richard Sugarman (UVM) had inspired me to Emmanuel Levinas already in those years, however. And so I also undertook to begin reading Derrida (Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Positions, and very few others), mostly in order to cull for critiques of Levinas, my "master" Sugarman's favored hero or master-thinker. i have since, thank the sway of Infinity, remodeled my approach to both Levinas and Derrida, significantly, and even in interminably more and more concrete and more hyper-determinate fashion. i sooooo miss the opportunity to have studied with you, you genii-haunted vessel, you. your translations into English are some of my most favorite readings ever after modernized American English translations of Don Quixote. hahaha. i am an animal that is defined by laughing at itself. [

“Sexuality is amenable to ethical considerations only to the extent that it involves someone or something else beyond the individual: other people, or a principle. Liberal ethics are typically expressed in terms of other people; conservative ethics in terms of principles. Thus a liberal will typically disapprove of sexual actions if they hurt another, a conservative if they contravene an impersonal principle. Very social organizations, such as the military, resist anything that lessens control over its members. Sex, which is tantalizingly close to the social and involves other people in individual ways, seems a provocation to highly social organizations that impose constant attention upon their members.”

—Brian Fleming, ‘Discussion Please, Not Coercion: On repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, New Haven Review (winter 2012)

 

"Coherent discourse is one. A universal thought dispenses with communication. A reason cannot be other for a reason. [...] Reason speaking in the first person is not addressed to the other, conducts a monologue. And, conversely, it would attain to veritable personality, would recover the sovereignty characteristic of the autonomous person, only by becoming universal. [...] The function of language would amount to suppressing 'the other,' who breaks this coherence and is hence essentially irrational. A curious result: language would consist in suppressing the other, in making the other agree with the same!"

 

—Levinas, *Totality and Infinity*, B., 5. (pp. 72-3, Lingis translation, Duquesne)

 

Sex and ethics, the appurtenances of their interfolding become apparent in military studies, for me, here and now (then and there). Sexuality is ethical, as Levinas also teaches (in famous passages of ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’, see also: Totality and Infinity), as opposed to the totalitarianism of “the third”, or centralized-hierarchized, formally rational and logical discursive communities – such as, again, the army (also the anti-capitalist revolutionary party, though, as well). ]

again, i so miss your company, books do not make you "present" enough for me, perhaps. i do feel as though i've somehow participated in the unrolling of your ego-formations, in an asynchronous temporicity of textuality, however. (((haha, how erotically ornamental a turning a phrase that was, though, hihihihihiiii))). [

A highly salient gesture of my Infinitism at present is apologetics. Imagine my clasped hands tremoring to merely indicate you, the aggrieved. Aggrieved, because if Infinitism is the absolute and total genre, or pure (cardinal) genus of creation, as I believe it to be so, how to explain the failure of others, like more than one among you already, to acknowledge this faith as I do? But already my avenues of justification are so wonderfully simple, and so variously eloquent, I hazard only the following “core-sample” in reply: the fact of non-belief, or otherness, to Infinitism is a fact upon which Infinitism hinges itself --- otherness, wherever it appears, being among the most potent marks for encountering Infinity more fully. So that insofar as Infinitism is a genre, or generically limited element of my world, and thus not itself Infinity, or the Infini-ting (a somewhat queer neologism, which mixes noun and verb in a singular grammatical case, or even grammatical element, namely the post-fixed patois [Jamaican] note of “-ting”, and thus “thingness”, or noun, but also “-ing”, as in the English verb-ending --- but perhaps more on this etymology later), Infinitism is otherwise than itself. There is no proper definition of Infinitism, no final destiny for its meaning, no foreclosure of its transcendental historicity --- Infinitism, whatever mass-cultural cache it may ever acquire, might also be stricken from all linguistic usage, “as such”, and its truths would remain, would inexorably be included under new generic forms. For Infinitism is a form transcended over from content, or is a form only insofar as itforms the form of this transcendence itself --- thus also, when properly observed as always-already transcendent of its content, and thuslywithin itself, it proves to be only beyond itself, or a totally generic process of reformulation, a pure mutability. That affirmed, I also must affirm the following phrases, however periconsistent (my neologism) or juxtapository (my neologism): the unique invariant, or immutable, of this mutability, or its identifying element or atomic name, is itself subject to the transcendence that is only inadequately, inconsistently--as incompletely--observed conditioning it, and so beyond any final expression. (As the term “relative permanence” [Whitehead] very neatly suggested before this, even the principle of change is itself subject to change.) There is also no possible annihilation of the invariably varying condition, or transcendental content, of Infinitism, least of all by resentful and avaricious texts of critique. Perhaps at most there will be the forgetting, by erasure, by misreading, or even by excessive popularity, etc., of its name, or nominal form. Grounded in being cut-off from its content, thus welcomed as infinitely separate, as arriving only in transcending us, the Infinitist poets, as it were, or each of those who is (forgive), as a “former” of the world, cannot be otherwise than to be otherwise than this. This is why I apologize, I am never “right” with what is infinite, my words, in any of their senses, are never the same as infinity’s sense. Only apologize. Only apology respects the paradoxes of separation, of otherness, of absolute transcendence, by which Infinity is directly faced and addressed.

 

Reconciliation, or forgiveness? is a somewhat different (but now massively interesting to me) question, more later.

] 

Thank you so much for blessing me with your blessedness, you blessedly lovely blessed-one, you. O! the blessedness! It is too blessed. Out-blessed and over-blessed and hyper-blessed, O! --max.

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Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     helene.cixous@cornell.edu

The Style of My Heart

I feel you few nearer than before, in gathering into my heart myself.

Each of you who nears is more friendly now than were so when farther away.

I like to be closer and closer to you from a safe distance. This is my way.

I am sad and silly after my furors of before, please pardon my hatefulness.

Please pardon what is said here, all of it, because it is not what I was now feeling most.

What I was feeling now most was beyond precious, making me to weep so.

It is simple being near to you, feeling your unknown as secure and safe.

Feeling your unknown as absolutely secure and safe, outside what I have now said.

I care if it is madness to feel this way, but such madness I will never relent.

I care if such madness is really not the normal way of life and each living being.

Maybe each too likes to be closer apart than before.

O, it is so lovely to me write like this, even if what I now have said is not what I feel most.

I feel most something else, maybe indeed you, but this writing still is sadly sweetness, almost tart with joy.

If it were colored otherwise than black and white, a yellow of many patterning yellows would be its heartful colorfulness.

And if you stay so nearing apart, more will come of me like this, in these colors maybe still too.

Yellow is heartful because fearful, agonized, trembling – yet also soft, comfy – as paralyzed, static.

Yellow is the heartful radiance of writing in nearness from afar.

Yellow writing is soft and static, because advanced upon with absolute otherness, with its fear.

Or whatever, I am draining the dregs.

Life Can Be so Sweet

Under the underway I above lift, outwards

Into the outway, inwardly,

Until it is so, then it is

So that it is.

Life can be so sweet, awwwwww.

It is so up into downway slurred, sloshed,

diagonaled, many ways, all not one,

until it is so, that the dragon is the sun.

Why ask when it is now so?

This is what is to be known, nothing more.

Truly, the fool is due, the fool is true.

Oh, you, silly me, I’d not forgotten backways

Of your emergencing always, through frontwards

displays of dominance, today, today, hooray!

Hooray you! You are true, you are known,

as you already knew, yes, you!

De-cisions

-after K. Goldsmith

Pull the body in, extend. Look directly to

The front.

Don’t shake the body leftward and

Rightward.

With the back keeping straight.

Block both hands levelly

In front of the body.

Punch forward with the right hand.

Hold the left fist,

And put it on the joint of the right arm.

Look directly to the front.

It is called Seven-star in T-stance.

In order to make you understand easier,

We practice in the

In a moving coherent movement,

Which is called Hold Hands and Shrink

Body in T-stance.

Next we will demonstrate and explain

The another foot technique—

The left foot takes a step to the right.

Put it on the upper front of the right

foot.

Squat down.

 With the back straight.

Now let’s demonstrate completely

Next we will begin to demonstrate and explain

We would

Provide you with brief demonstration

Hold the fists beside the waist.

Snap the leg levelly forward.

Both legs practice in turns.

The manners of a snap kick and heel kick

Are the same.

But kick and snap are also quite

Different.

There are various of forms

In the Heel Kick.

While practicing,

You should not kick over the waist.

Other wushu schools in the society

May require that

You should kick over the head

Or even higher.

Now, we will practice

According to Shaolin’s leg technique.

Front Kick

Next we will demonstrate and explain

It requires both hands to

swing it back and forth.

This movement is called Twine and Wrap

Around Head.

While kicking to the left,

That means after the Twine and Wrap

Around Head on the right,

Turn the head left.

Kick at the same time.

Complete demonstration

Complete demonstration

If you kick high enough,

You can kick up to the bottom of the ears.

Let’s practice from the first step

That is to kick to the position of the waist

The Inside Kick.

()                             Inside Kick.

If you want to kick the right leg, move

The left leg first.

Stretch the left leg outward,

Then kick the right leg in an arc

From right to outward, then to inward.

Slap the right hand with the right foot.

It does not mean to slap the instep with

The right hand,

But to slap the right hand with right

Instep

Now let’s demonstrate completely

It begins with the preparing form

Block both arms outwards

With the height equal to the shoulders.

While kicking the right leg,

The right leg kick in an arc

From the left upward, then to

Downward, and the right.

Then slap the right hand with the right

Foot.

15. Jump and Slap Foot

If you have never practiced

Jump and Slap Foot before,

You will feel daze when you watch me

Perform it,

And you don’t know where to start and

Practice.

But actually, it is very simple.

If you divide it into step-by-step

Movement,

It takes two and a half steps,

To finish the Jump and Slap Food.

Usually,

We would first kick the right leg in

Practicing.

,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f8zb_QKZEo

2013. Aug 22, 11:15pm DONE

If Influence were Health

                                                    “Influence is Influenza—an astral disease.
                                                      If influence were health, who could write a poem? Health is stasis.
                                                     Schizophrenia is bad poetry, for the schizophrenic has lost the strength of perverse,                                                              wilful, misprision.”
                                                                                –Harold Bloom


Poor Bloom. He got himself all twisted around in this quote. Let us help him!

Influence is a psychic disease, and the psychotic alone is the most perverse and wilful in her misprision. To imagine a schizophrenic who was not perverse and wilful in her misprisions is to imagine a normal person. That is, Bloom calls schizophrenia “bad poetry” only insofar as it said to lack what most defines itself: misprision. Bloomian misprision is a type of schizophrenia. The truly Bloomian reader of poetry is a schizophrenic, except for the above quoted disavowal. Bloomian criticism is schizophrenic, insofar as it misreads the text of cognition.  Misprision of life is schizophrenia. Schizophrenics lack nothing in perversity, or will, or misprision. A truly rigorous schizophrenic, or mispriser, such as myself, was only needed to expose this.

Poetry Changes Things

"The nations thronged around, and cried aloud,
As with one voice, 'Truth, liberty, and love!'
Suddenly fierce confusion fell from Heaven
Among them there was strife, deceit, and fear;
Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.
This was the shadow of the truth I saw."

--Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound


It is fashionable among certain modern poets, such as the still highly admirable Charles Bernstein, to claim that "poetry changes nothing". I might venture that it has even acquired a jingle-like status among those whom it influences. The least rememberance of the implications of even the term *influence*, of which they all still parlay in, however, already begins to show, and already show quite well, that any poem of any poet once in existence may be read (or heard) by others, changing them all through this experience forever after. One is very much tempted from here to invoke Spinoza, whose conception of the affects in his Ethics appears liable to justify even the claim that even any event of mere thinking or cognition has immediate, going on infinite, ramifications for the world. Much less a poem, which is, among many otherwise ways of expressing it, an externalized memory of an inward condition by thought. Poems are just vastly influential externalizations of thought, perhaps much moreso than thought in-itself. I wish I did not even suspect the need to assuage others of the material reality of all the ideational elements of my expressions; thoughts are as corporeally real as poems or readers of poems are is my neurobiological stance. Any supposed deficiencies of this ontological gesture aside, for myself, at present, then, I desire further to impress you only with their ethical supplements. Poets express themselves to others as they are, they denude themselves to the caress of the other who faces them. Poetry changes things even just because it is an expression *from* one *to* others; the aspect of change registering in this "to and from" already quite apparently. The hands that turn a poem change the world as much as the hands that turn a screwdriver. Or the mouth that speaks a poem changes the world as much as a mouth that kisses you. No act, or behavior, or corporeal movement of the world is without consequence, in end.