Poetry has kept punching-bag like possibilities in mind for a long time. But has it gone so far as to recognize them as today’s necessity?

What if that’s the most important—a readily available procreative atom [the klinaman]? To one extent or another, this character has traditionally been interpreted as an irritant and defect, something not to be kept in the background, not smoothed over, not shamefully pushed aside to the periphery. The procreative atom acts by means of a central poetical principle: one goes at him full tilt to the end.

This seems so true that it’s even banal: infirmity ennobled to limits of natural innocence. If some verse feels the inconvenient influences of barbarism, it should become entirely barbarous verses. If cinema lacks plot, it should transform into radically plotless films.

Naturally, it’s possible for such a decision to be considered as an attempt to conceptualize a scudding of the Great Wellsprings of Art or a smuggling in of the talentless. Consequently, one slays in the name of a certain stylistic cleansing. But what if there is not even a trace of cleanliness, and never was; if it was only standing guard over the present emptiness: the reputation of a naked king which under the arrangement or habit, under thoughtlessness or intention seeming to be vested in sacred clothes. The actual deal: in the moment of noticing this nakedness not just to blink, but to gouge out one’s own eyes—they had erred for so long.

The demolition of a language, for example, that of poetry really occurs because of an intrusion of alien impurities, but poetry is built of out of this same antimatter. When what has been predicted by the signs of the prophets starts to fill all of the promised land…of the genre. Yes of the genre. But that’s precisely why we should allow for it—and infinitely. There is no alternative way for us.

Most importantly, this antimatter may show up through a reversal of dates and seem to be thrown out as a new form of oppression. We have no special right to avoid it. (It is probably even necessary to recall Rimbaud’s imperative and consider any criticism of contemporaneity as reactionary). We should rush into the whirlpool of antimatter, aspiring to pass through it and come up on the other side, taking lead in hand. Anti-matter must not be allowed to become a new item in the toolkit of oppression.

Those who shunned will sooner or later be touched all the same (only already in the form of a reality); how many would they strengthen in the pastoral hothouses.

Brodsky said that poetry is what language (or culture) does by means of a subject. In my opinion, poetry is what the subject does by means of language—the collective (and especially marginalized) subject, not the airbrushed subject possessing centripetal acceleration. At the center of hell language only hollow blisters could flounder congesting the reputation of the vanguard. These blisters are more likely to be born out of a surplus of language than on a surplus of reality (and its corresponding lack of language). They overdose on language. New experience certainly is born ad marginem, at not staked out by language territory, which consequently has been traditionally registered as the “lowest”, as tongueless. For that matter, linguistic gentrification similarly increases not only the area of the whole city, but also the old parts, the ones absorbed by normativity: the petty-bourgeois big village of poetry (that leads to discomfiture—this happened quite often in twentieth century poetry when, as a result of rapid development, seemingly new structures found themselves as tumbledown).

And so only un-knowing toungelessness induces an invention. The dully diligent study of the list of phenomena inclines one to the roles of a songster of catalogue, and peevish librarian.

The realization of the permanent secularization of poetry is a unique opportunity for its further development (when the subject of this process is a figure). In actuality it always goes hand in hand with the disintegration of traditional perceptual spheres and with the increase of «teleological-existential entropies» (when the object of the process is an discouraged observer). A realization of the proximity of these two processes arouses some doubts about the respectability of the project of secularization. From time to time the artist is given “the role both of the gardener and the flower” (Mandelstam), or the artist may even entirely throw off the gardener’s mastery, hoping to be rescued by the unpretentious role of the flower—actually that is only a moment of becoming artificial.

Recently, the fear of wolves has kept us from visiting the woods. No one has any notion that wolves have already flooded the city because the woods have not been colonized, and now the call to refuse journeys into the woods is especially looked at very suspiciously. It looks like the post-colonial.

As opposed to the reactionary centripetal dynamics of texts that proclaim the authenticity of experience and as much as possible avoid stenograms and cultivate “abnormality,” the indigestible, or radical incoherence as a mortgage of authenticity, there is a presumption of the presence of sense in breaks in the text. However, the production of the texts predisposed to a wide distribution and opened for reception dooms them to understanding. Those texts full of «social allusions» also give pleasure through their unrecognizable genre-stylistic, estrangements of form.

Besides, the strategy of the poetic statement cannot any longer be restricted only to writing poems. The strategy of the poetic statement should also include (within itself) tactics of distribution. Alongside of a developmental level of a means of mass disinformation there is no room for any hope that the history (only of literature, after all) will highlight all the key points. The main goal of mass media is to outlast this paralysis of history by bringing down a lot of pseudo-information on an individual (as if it is now free and limitless). In situations of abundant media-production the dominant discourse does not so much satisfy informational needs as form them, creating “repressive,” weed forms of informational need. Certainly, some quantity of critical statements in the system could allow for a reputation of pluralism. But no liberalism could stretch its practice to one that is self-injuring.

Nevertheless the (most likely confusing) rapprochement of concepts such as that of the reception of the poetic statement and those regarding the procedures for getting information is a direct condition of the secularization of poetry. Hanging on to the indirect requirement of special “religious rites” and the hint of the unordinariness of poetry, on the other hand, also allows the hallucinogen of media-discourse to last. Today there should be nothing more everyday than poetry.

The most powerful potential of the poetic statement should not be abashedly hidden in the shelving of history (which in any case appears to be locked up with a key) for technologies’ sake (these are too easily becoming conductors of the dominating ideology); it should be released from archaic vestments, having transformed itself into a mobile diagnostic tool and influence on reality.

In fact, if one looks a little bit further into the woods, it’s possible that what is most important in poetry is to look into precisely this wood: how many poetry has not fed.

Public scholars of the humanities have become a rarer and rarer species. The last great demonstrations appeared in the late 1970s and 80s, when sociologists like Richard Sennett and Benedict Anderson took on the themes of public interaction and nationalism. Intellectuals with an explicitly public stake in discourse flourished in the recent present, when they ranged from intellectuals who favored direct intervention, like William Sloane Coffin, the Yale University chaplain who organized busloads of freedom riders headed south in 1961, like novelist John Hersey’s championing of anti-nuclear proliferation in the pages of the New Yorker. There were indirect public intellectuals, too, like Hannah Arendt’s excavation of types of public interaction and sociability from ancient Greece to the present day, delivered as lectures around the nation, or Irving Howe’s literary essays on topics like Ralph Ellison and the contemporary color line, published in The Nation, The New Republic, or the journal he founded, Dissent. Indeed, intellectuals of the 1950s sought out a public arena in which to engage questions of justice and to define notions like democracy. Their work in dissemination and public argument, as much as their intellectual work, underwrote the self-understanding of a generation of activists.

The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked differently, and that the present may have looked very different itself. Experts like Krugman and Nesse are, by definition and training, not participants in the humanities game of memory, comparison and synthesis: rather, they are experts. Experts, like the fox of Isaiah Berlin, track down the single series of facts towards knowledge. They come out of laboratories, where they have performed minute studies of a single experiment where terms like “promiscuous” and “chaste” are fixed as a supposition of the game. Experts judge the workings of the brain by the newest findings, not by comparison with Aristotle or Machiavelli. Hedgehog intellectuals, by contrast, agglomerate and compare: this definition of good behavior with those five more relative or strict versions that societies have enforced at different times; the perspective of gender studies with that of sociology. Their training in the humanities acquaints them with thinkers classical and modern; it teaches the keen eye for other cultures, the rapid absorption of information about pamphlet and canvases in everyday time. Hedgehogs generally are made not in laboratories but in libraries, where they have learned to compare dictators and democracies across time and space, dealing with the primary texts of alien societies – learning, that is, from the natives on their own terms. Hedgehogs are assimilators, and they’re friendly with the locals. Lately they do not come out of the libraries so much, and the forum is brimming with foxes.

The disappearance of the humanities from the public signals the evacuation of historical perspective from the age of expert rule. It is a sorrowful trend. Intelligent persons, who value both foxes and hedgehogs, will want to know why. They will, it is hoped, also mourn the passing of the public intellectual, inquire as to the conditions of his return, and demand related changes of themselves.

The bewildering extinction of public hedgehogs reflects the empoisoned convergence of three major forces that conspired to permanently distort American intellectual culture. First, the advent of continental philosophy and the aestheticization of obscurantism. Second, the transformation of the academic profession as a whole. Third, electronic publication and the coming of the internet. Each of these forces represented the refining of the process of knowledge-creation. At their inception, they were beacons of hope, and they inspired young thinkers to argue seriously over matters of potentially public concern. Together, they conspired to break the public inclinations of the humanities as a whole.

The first loss of the public was not a defeat but an allergic reaction. French theory came of age in America as Foucault taught at Berkeley, Derrida visited Irvine, the translations of the major theorists only a matter of the late seventies and early ages. They shook the American mind, and they enthusiastically received, but only partially digested – a handful of texts accepted as gospel, the larger debates behind them mostly unknown. All of postmodernism might be taught still in a single week in most graduate courses, or a single chapter of Of Grammatology serve to represent the whole complicated and often contradictory turns in the philosopher’s entire corpus. The result of rushed learning was the confusion of tongues by many of the movement’s chief proponents, who spoke of Oedipus and the Panopticon as the only models for power, lyricizing through run-ons that mimicked Derrida’s grammar without his passion.

At stake as well was the politics of the radical left that became free to operate in the academy after the McCarthy Era. Marxists who had seen their mentors suicide after public disgrace had little patience for tempering their politics, language, or disdain for the middlebrow: a fetishization of removal that expressed itself in thick allusions to Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, and the heavy jargon of post-colonial critiques. Expressed as a style of writing, half-absorbed philosophy and bitter political divides appeared as an unfathomable traffic jam of continentalisms. Hyphens, dashes, three-way puns, colons, and parentheses became the badge of the intellectual so liberated to have escaped the confines of vernacular thinking altogether.

In theory the avant-garde would pioneer new modes of thought that would be absorbed a few generations later by the slower, befuddled masses. The Russian modernists first who propounded this theory prophesied that the working class would soon be whistling Schoenberg in the streets. Avant-garde rhetoric was turned to a new use in America. The dashes, puns, and terms like “phallocracy” that entered academic vogue in the 1980s signaled a revolution not in politics but against the public itself. Postmodernists invented a language incomprehensible even to their colleagues. They were mocked by the Sokol prank and rightly rejected as unfathomable jargon from the pages of all forms of media that still looked to a public – with its vernacular language and limited knowledge of rarified canons – as a final readership deserving of attention. They had aimed at liberation and succeeded in elitism, and they lost the public in the process.

A second loss of the public happened in the shift of battleground from the public publication to the shadowlands of academic journals. The phrase “publish or perish” appeared in the 1970s in the wake of increased job-finding pressure on academics in the humanities and social sciences, alongside new metrics for the quantitative comparison of individual scholarship as a function of publication, citation, and institution. “Publish or perish” operated, at least in the social sciences, by setting into play a series of metrics that established quantitative citation, rather than qualitative relevance, as the primary marker of importance. The expansion of journals to accommodate the need for academics to publish, and the expansion of mechanisms for measuring and comparing the importance of various academic journals, has accompanied the streamlining of publishing by academics into a n increasing number of academic publications. The SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) appeared in 1973 and provided the basis for rankings of publications by citation counts – the number of citations that linked to a particular publication. America’s Best Colleges Rankings on US News and World Report began to be published in 1983, and it too compiled statistics on publications, broken by department and university. As quantitative citation became the measure of success, minority professional publications that did the citing were prioritized over mainstream, public journals. The academic’s relevance was defined in terms of his footnoting colleagues, not in terms of an unknown public of New Yorker readers. Through an insistence on the metrics of the superscript, “publish or perish” effectively eliminated appeal to the public as an item of academic concern.

Finally, “publish or perish” hastened the specialization of knowledge and fragmentation of audiences further through the diversification of publications. To take one example, the emergent study of disability, which attracted scholars of injustice, biology, education, and the construction of disease since the late 1970s. A handful of journals published by outfits like the Council for Exceptional Children formed the concrete expression of expanding knowledge about the behavior of autistic and otherwise disabled individuals. The field underwent a dramatic boom in publication venues with the coming of electronic media. In 1996 alone appeared three new publications: The Journal of intellectual & developmental disability, The Journal of applied research in intellectual disabilities, and Focus on autism and other developmental disabilities. As of 2007, the field of disability studies boasted at least 50 separate periodicals.

The proliferation of abstruse publications was hastened by one last new trend, electronic publication. Expensive institutional subscriptions funded by university libraries still float the expensive print journals, with little if any profit going to staff and publisher. They were labors of constant cost-cutting. Online publication drove down the cost of publishing, encouraging new journals to spread like the wildfires of Los Angeles. In 1994 the four-year-old Postmodern Culture went electronic, the first peer-reviewed publication to do so. In 1996, First Monday, the child of radical information scientist Edward Valauskas, was launched as an exclusively internet publication. More than half the existent journals on disability arose after 1996, and almost all of these were exclusively published as online journals.

Ironically, electronic publication was initially expected to reinstate the public venue for academics, rather than to abstract journals further from the public realm. The pioneers of electronic journals like First Monday saw electronic publication as an opportunity to liberate discourse from academic constraints, and so reach a broader public. This trend remained particularly true for publications on the study of technology, where an ideologues looked to the internet as a new commons. Yet freedom and publicity were not the trend. Electronic publication soon became another cash cow for the great university presses, which sold packages around the electronic subscription to traditional disciplinary landmarks like Past and Present. Charging for the electronic version of the publishers’ great mainstays established a precedent for charging for the new ranks of exclusively electronic journals as well, grounding visions of an internet commons. Electronic journals became the private demesne of university publishers who reap between $4 and $200 an article that costs them nothing to buy or to publish. Taylor & Francis, a British publisher, charges between $131 and $2973 for the electronic subscription to a year of quarterlies and monthlies (an individual print subscription is a bargain in comparison, at rates between $42 and $911). Imagine the parent of the disabled child reading across a range of years and journals. The journals and their publishers are not intended highwaymen, of course; they prohibit access knowing that the articles are written by academics, for academics; that university libraries subsidize the fees of their only readers, and that the public cares not a fig for what academic journals have to say in the first place.

The academic journal had already reduced the much publication in the humanities to grist for the citation mill, grist that existed to pad the careers of academics who formally served no purpose other than the production of more such fodder for the same mill, which churns the labor of uncounted thousands into yet more material that will be cited purely so that more articles can be cited. In undergraduate lectures, among colleagues, concerned academics everywhere speak to and believe in a public, to be sure. But where a man’s ink is, his heart lies also. With fewer and fewer exceptions, academic ink feeds private paper mills never destined for the public eye.

Together, obscurantism, publish-or-perish, and electronic publication produced an ironic situation: the proliferation of publication coupled with the narrowing of readership. A true market of ideas tends to demonstrate growth in both sectors. Unread publications suggest academic stagflation. In other words, the humanities in America have lost their public.

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Imagine two possible futures: a future of academics as academics, experts enshrined in libraries, arguing amongst themselves, directing the progress of knowledge through a series of well-honed essays and monographs, while public culture proceeds to digest the sea of information into an amateur, enthusiastic mythology of truth. Wikipedia articles in this scenario will continue to resemble their current pastiche of fact and spurious conclusion, rambling detailed explanation and spurious, old-fashioned proclamation of the great good of progress / success of the nation / triumph of the free market / triumph of communism. The opinions of the public will be fought out in a real estate war on Wikipedia, with academic debate rarely if ever offering an alternative view or playing the moderator.

In another scenario, the public intellectual returns. She seeks out new ways to enter the public discourse. She refuses to be confined by the format of academic journals, monographs, and NPR interviews. She has memories of past societies, and visions of future societies that threaten to evolve. She is an active translator in the culture wars, an active participant in the process of social change, and an active member of a public, where experts engage, without jargon, a world of common sense, diverse experience, and deep prejudice. Humanities departments across the nation would welcome such individuals as paragons of civic responsibility and transdisciplinary excellence. They would adopt new rubrics for rewarding intellectual activity in the public sphere out of preference to journal citation. Recognized, rewarded, a thriving public culture would transform world politics on a grand scale. Plentiful opportunity for intellectual engagement with widely available archives would characterize public culture, and participatory politics would flourish in an environment of engagement and criticism.

The construction of the future is in the hands of those who choose it. Individuals who admired such a public culture would therefore pursue the activities most likely to bring about an alternative to academia in its contemporary situation.

Manifesto for a Public Intellectual

1 — Engaging the world as a public intellectual requires a different location of engagement with the world than does being an academic.

Academic journals don’t go to the public. Editorials and online magazines do. The internet has made possible a re-opening of the arcane worlds of study to the general public. The internet outdates the obscure connections between the old-fashioned intellectual and antique book dealers, printers, collectors of cameras. It throws these all into the open: now Ebay and internet transactions instead of cramped notes written to bookdealers across continental Europe. The internet opens the library to the world. The internet obviates most of the traditional functions of the library, university, and seminary. It puts the tools of intellectual critique into the hands of the masses. It puts the most refined and learned of discourse into the open air. It gives every alienated suburban teenager access to enough information to stump their teacher – not only information about history, such as I had access to from the public library twenty years ago as a fidgety third-grader, but also contemporary information: the news of all countries, reviews of the most recent philosophy and science, digested, for the willing, from every point of view radical and conservative, broken down for the beginner or the expert. The virtual coffeehouse of the internet makes possible so much that was only fantasy before.

The internet also makes possible new means of sharing and publishing research that potentially can cross-fertilize both intellectuals and the public. Most examples of good research can be better documented by notes in blogs and wikis. The case of attribution remains valid; online writers can accurately point to what they’ve done, even in the minutia of research synthesized in someone else’s argument. Only a truly radical reconceptualization of nation-building or social-formation needs to be published as a monograph. The internet makes possible the lighter circulation of arguments of lighter weight. The masses of facts that fill in and illustrate dominant paradigms can be more effectually used, more digestible, in the form of wikis. Flights of finesse, demonstrations of proficiency with critical language and theory – these exercises that graduate students are called upon to make – are rarely actually interventions in the idea of “discipline” or “public” itself. As such they belong to the private world of a blog, a personal documentation of one’s intellectual journey through a set of ideas, which shines when it is worthy and looks dull when it isn’t. Becoming a public intellectual will therefore require a rethinking of the modes of gathering and sharing research.

Real hope exists in the public, intellectual culture of the internet. A minority of publications have harnessed the openness of the internet to proliferate new, open discussions, free of access, broadly interdisciplinary, in which most of the most innovative thinkers are constantly debating public issues of the day. So Borderlands, an Australian “transdisciplinary” journal, which since 2002 has ruthlessly produced a series of interpolations on biotechnology, Sharon’s wall, Rene Girard, the papacy and the War in Iraq. The monthly public “Outburst” of the Journal of Mundane Behavior has critiqued cell phone behavior, password usage online, and interaction on the public bus. The fascinating Rejecta Mathematica specialized in only articles that have been rejected from other mathematical journals, featuring sections on “controversial premises” and “misunderstood genius.”

On the margin too are those vague, non-peer reviewed citadels of interdisciplinary excellence like Cabinet, where catalogues of recent art installations sit side-by-side histories of the timeline prepared by remarkable young academics, the most eclectic, best curated, and aesthetically radical of the current heirs of ‘zine culture whose numbers also include N+1, McSweeney’s, The Baffler, and The Believer. The Dutch anthology Documente 12 specializes in aggregating online the best articles on modern life from around the world into a footlocker of curiosities in French, Spanish, English, and German. And then there are the old standbys, which never want for senior academics of great perspicacity: Harper’s, Le Monde diplomatique, and Raritan. Both the free journals and the liberated magazines exist for an underworld of hungry readers who share news of their reading over the stray coffee; they form a liminal world that cuts against the prevailing trend, the preserve of the public and the intellectual commons, exiled to the margins.

Writing for such venues as a critic and arbiter is only one possible role for the public exercise of ideas. The public intellectual may manifest as an activist, documenting an avant-garde of practitioners and providing certain tools to enhance their sense of identity and coherence. In any case, the work of the public intellectual takes place by appearing and engaging the public at coffee-shops, newspapers, websites, public meetings, think tanks, policy centers, boards of government, and public high schools where the academic is but rarely seen. The location of intellectual engagement is always more public than its academic equivalent.

2 — Engaging the world as a public intellectual demands broader kinds of research than those pursued by academics.

The public is not held in books; it is out there in the wild. In search of that public, an intellectual has to leave the library and enter the forum. She becomes a species of spy, collecting information from everyday life, the numerous traces of intersecting cultures. She learns their languages. She gains their trust. She secretly analyzes them late into the night, mapping their movements on a geopolitical scale. She is capable of interviewing people, even sports-obsessed sales agents and tartan-wearing fraternity brothers. She is a good traveler.

Her ethnology requires an immersion in the many cultures of contemporary politics before she takes a stance. The public intellectual is eager to understand and explain the situation of women, blacks, gays, lesbians, queers, geeks, fundamentalists, bubbas, mountain men, libertarians, Israelis, Palestinians, Copts, Argentinians, anarcho-syndicalists, and any other subgroup with an interesting and optimistic point of view whose interest may have been overlooked by the forward movement of world powers. The public intellectual is at least curious about UFO-sightings and takes a conciliatory attitude towards hipsters. She validates the conspiracy theory as an upwelling of mass resentment against the culture of experts that isolates the power of insight within a small cadre and invalidates local opinion and insight among individuals everywhere. She gets giddy whenever she meets obsessive collectors, garages full of found footage, office managers who collect rare nineteenth-century postcards off of Ebay in their spare time. She is hip with the cult of the dilettante. She aims to become a connoisseur of dilettantism. Big-hearted to the last, she sees in this the reflection of the most noble sentiments of democracy, where other people with advanced degrees see either the pallor of tastelessness or fear the invasion of their turf.

One way to get there is to give up on the old-fashioned models of textual research, the subdivision of knowledge, and follow the path of landscape history: the revelation of secret knowledge about the interpretation of things hidden in plain sight. J. B. Jackson at some point, anyone who turned to studying the American love of the Airstream trailer and motorcycle as a better key to collective unconscious than William Carlos Williams or Andy Warhol. The landscape was, is, will be filled with information about how we behave, and the study of landscape escapes all the classical bullshit of literary studies and nation-based history, to be ultimately concerned with what people are doing on a micro, medium, national, and global scale. It blends a rapacious interest in the vernacular with a deep respect for the lineage of folkways and products of symbolic consumption. It might tell more about what people are actually doing to find pleasure, identity, community, and life than any other single discipline.

There are real heroes who have shown the way here. Architectural historians writing field guides to the suburbs. Studies of infrastructure, drossscape, walking. Things you can tell about a black neighborhood by the fact it doesn’t have any grocery stores.

Discernment, not enlightenment, is the province of the public intellectual; enlightenment is for monks and other contemplatives who want to be isolated with their books, to be let alone with heaven and eternity. For all those who care about time, history, and interpretation, there is only the vast unfolding and becoming of a world whose mind cannot be made up.

3 — The reason for caring about the public is the issue of social change.

Social change has to operate through the structures of dissemination, therefore through the media, through celebrity culture, and through politics.

The public intellectual is aware of the flux of history and favors intellectual work within history rather than the building of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. She is constantly on the lookout for separating tectonic plates, the eruption of magma, the shift in the wind, the freezing over of continents, the implosion in the free market, the nuclear winter, and the devolution of the social fabric into fighting in the streets which may herald an entirely new age. The public intellectual would be ashamed to make naïve conservative arguments like “modern democracies have always embraced these values and therefore they will never chance,” or “the stability of the current regime presages,” having in his pocket a host of counterexamples of radical shifts in perspective, including the earthquake in Lisbon, the sack of Rome, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the striking of his own uncle by lightening, the successes of Maoist China, and diverse other anecdotes that illustrate the unpredictability of nature and the reality of historical change.

The public intellectual fights for life against death. The culture of death is all around one: in the punitive tendencies of state, law, and school; in the cult of those fixated on reciting the lessons of the past as if they were still pleasing their sixth-grade teachers; in the weak and repetitive politics of pundits. The public intellectual is on the side of life: curious about teenagers, curious about outsider artists, curious about undiscovered cultures, not fully integrated intellectual positions – anything, in short, which can promote vitality, conversation, argument, and proliferation. In politics, the culture of death stresses sacrificing culture on the altar of economic growth, bowing to the current ideas in circulation, and a preference for old forms. The public intellectual presses the suit of justice and mercy; everywhere, in many forms, the cause of life.

The modern intellectual may have the opportunity to become an academic rockstar, and in that case, she must use her power for good. She may not, and then she must persist, doing the more complicated, and also more radical work of the trenches, burrowing trap-doors, escape hatches, and mole-tunnels underground to connect all the basements, libraries, and prisons of the world.

4 — The public intellectual creates social action by perfecting the tools of academic study.

The spread of information, whether pursued by intellectuals or experts, is always in the service of humanity. It expands the bounds of public participation in the production of knowledge across class and race. It creates official bodies of information for policy decisions based in an informed and deep perspective on life.

For tools of outreach the public intellectual forcibly looks back to the oldest and most conservative of the humanities, Telling History. A History, as distinguished from stories more broadly, is a particularly persuasive arguments about events, and as such makes claims about the identity of a common experience, playing off of names and images still in public memory. It does not excavate obscure schools of fringe politics for new kinds of jargon to throw about, although it may find occasional heroes and patterns there. It is more modest, and more scientific as a set of claims, that other myths about who we are, for our collective experience can be known, identified, argued about. Artifacts from it can be shown in public, held up. People have memories that they bring to bear. The eventness of pasts is undeniable – the fact of world war two and the holocaust – even if the meaning of them is in constant dispute. History, unlike other disciplines, tries to tell persuasive stories. It situates itself in the facts that are knowable, in a mastery of what can be amassed, the stories that can be told. And it chooses not to analyze them with the tweezers of the philosopher or psychologist, but rather with to slice through a dozen contrary versions, and to remass them with all the magic of the sorcerer bringing a doll to life. The historian tells stories, persuasive stories, stories that can be rehearsed and lipsynched by news anchors and political pundits as pure fact: fact that we know that evil was done, fact that we know that our society has changed. They will proliferate as fact and myth and hearsay down to all the peoples of the world. Telling persuasive stories is an important component of social change.

The modern intellectual will be forced to search out and invent new avenues for the perfection of craft through collaboration. She may proceed by reaching out across disciplines, offering conferences, salons, coffeehouses, and looking for venues to start a larger engagement. The most fruitful avenue indeed may be the pooling of research and projects online: using social news sharing services like digg.com, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and social bookmark servers like del.icio.us to establish larger communities of active intellectuals who share information on their current work. These communities would have the advantage over academic communities of providing rich content pulled from the archives in addition to fully-produced publications ready for discussion. Private wikis and mailing lists would enable such independent intellectuals to mentor and refine each others’ work much like an academic community.

Such alternative communities of intellectual engagement are becoming radically important for the public intellectual to survive, for the crisis of the public intellectual is a crisis for the humanities in general.

5 — The success or failure of the public intellectual is important to the survival of the humanities as a whole.

The fact that the academy is an unwelcoming home for the public intellectual is a problem insofar as the humanities have to justify their existence to the world. The humanities are having a hard time explaining themselves to the public, and the result of that is a looming crisis in the funding of the humanities.

For the humanities are so distant from the public that they can scarcely articulate the reasons they exist. Our universities were built upon an understanding of all humanities inquiry as fundamentally about public intellectualism: the humanities were the study of human values, and engaging them implied ministry to one’s students and the broader public. Those ideas have faded with the secularization of elites. They have left a broad wake in what the humanities are for. Indeed, it’s a glum moment for the humanities’ self-understanding as being for anything. One of the last humanities intellectuals to write for the public, Stanley Fish, recently refused to justify the humanities to the public for a variety of reasons that might be summed up as “the importance of wonder” or “the importance of maintaining a free zone for individuals dedicated to the experience of fascination and problem-solving.” Fish continues here his life-long defense of the private intellectual who refashions his own values, and he sees these values at work in great literature and great scholarship alike. Such an idea is valuable in a world where scholars were once forced to recite the doctrines of church and state. But it dodges entirely the current imbalance between a superabundance of private scholarship beholden not to nations but to disciplines and journals, and the lack of public intellectuals free to speak to the nation. Generations of postmodern scholars have not produced a coffee-house institution that defends free scholarship in the pursuit of pleasure, but rather a paper mill of tiny journals, handcuffing graduate students and assistant professors to the mechanisms of professionalization. It’s not a prison, but it’s neither so free nor so pleasurable as one would hope of an institution that celebrates itself for its uselessness.

That collapse is ripe to press the crisis of humanities funding to the breaking point. When so great a man as Fish will do so little to justify fading humanities funding, the public starts doing the math. Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, coolly calculates that if Fish’s unwillingness to explain is typical, humanities departments of the future can expect “roughly one tenth” of their current funding. We live in a society where ideas have consequences, and if the humanities is stripped of ideas to offer the public, the humanities will simply disappear.

6 — The success of the public humanities is essential to the flourishing of political culture as a whole.

Public man has been dying alongside the public intellectual. The middle class fails to vote and forms its identity through consumption rather than by active participation in civic affairs.

Yet public space is alive and well, its avenues open: the internet offers multiple opportunities for the curious or bored to find out information from any who offer it; it reduces the expense of publication to almost nil, and so provides the possibility of a new republic of letters.

That public space may be filled up with noisy entertainment and uninformed opinion, but an alternative is possible. Critical thinkers rise to the highest level of debate when the issues are published in a vernacular language and accessible fashion. The public intellectual, who contributes a historical perspective on the strategies of many humans across many eras, represents the great hope for the return of critical civic engagement in our time.

To mention one motivation for pursuing the verbal art-linguistics dialogue: only a human language faculty can create poetry, for example; and only this faculty, in interaction with other uniquely human capacities, is endowed with the necessary competencies that allow us to mentally construct an aesthetic response to it. Interestingly, a parallel or homologous endowment seems to apply to the invention, performance, and perception of music. So the study of literary creation can help us understand these faculties and capacities better. How do aesthetic genres spring forth and develop, in children for example; and the biggest promise might be about casting a glimmer of insight on their origins in human evolution, together with some of the more specific grammatical components of the knowledge of language.

The essay begins with a critique of an important discussion in Language Poetry regarding the extent to which grammatical forms might contribute to upholding oppressive and undemocratic power structures, or least that the dominant social order is reflected in grammar in some non-trivial way. The underlying, more fundamental, question here is: what aspects of grammar are socially constructed? Posing it in these terms, Johnson implicitly opens the door to the possibility (heretical, for sure, to proponents of the strong version of social-constructivism) that only some aspects (many, a great number of relevant aspects, etc., but not all aspects) of language competence are constructed or determined by the constraints imposed by society and culture. If grammatical forms “mirror” existing social orders, at what level, he asks, might there be evidence of this reflection: in the phonological patterns of speech, in morphology, syntax? This manner of approaching the problem happens to be one way of getting off dead center in what has been so far a difficult and not very illuminating discussion. In the realm of how we use language – the culturally specific metaphors, rhetorical devices, the way we organize discourse, normative conventions, and the prescriptive rules of proper usage – no reasonable person would deny that preconceptions of culture, social outlooks of all kinds, and ideology, even of the most radical and bizarre sort, influence many aspects of expression and understanding. And here, in this realm of language use, we could take each exemplar on a case by case basis. Some claims of ideological/social construction might turn out to be plausible, some speculative but still interesting, and others without any substance whatsoever. But we now have to beg the question: how far down does this influence reach?

Johnson goes on to reference linguistic theories and some of the differences in approach that musicians, creative writers and critics and analysts of literature might find useful for their work. To be clear, most linguists who study the nature of competence (i.e., knowledge of language) pay little attention to debates about prescriptive grammar, how anyone should/should not speak or write, or what might be proper or correct, this indifference applying, almost equally, to both Cognitive/Functionalist theorists and their generativist/Universal Grammar-oriented colleagues. Rather, the very hard questions related to the underlying knowledge structures and functions of mind, the fundamental nature of the uniquely human faculties of language, music and other aesthetic capabilities are what have captured the imagination of researchers most intensely. In linguistic science, the counterpart to the study of prescriptive and customary language use is the description of the underlying structures, the design features of knowledge, and the component parts of language ability. The interest here is what characterizes the mental grammar of any and all speakers of whatever variety of language: standard dialect, vernacular, non-standard, indigenous, and creole alike. In this domain, the problem of how much mutual influence there is between grammatical competence, on the one hand, and politics, ideology and culture on the other is one that is far from being settled. And in the end the standard social determinist assumptions on this score may turn out to be far off the mark. But again, the relevant questions are very much still open. Not coincidentally, these concerns might be the same ones that bring us to a common forum together with artists and critics of art. The actual common ground here might have something to do with a shared curiosity for primitive elements and essential properties.

As the interchange proceeds, each side should welcome the observations of the other about its competing tendencies and theories. Linguists, for example, should be interested in how observers outside the field understand the opposing hypotheses on broad questions, especially the ones that cross over. Recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science more generally should in fact make these explorations more inviting. The beginnings of a new realignment, for example among generativists, has cast previous and remaining debates with functionalist and cognitive linguists in a different light, crucially, one that has incorporated a measure of self-critique of some of Universal Grammar’s more doctrinaire assumptions. This attempt at convergence, still limited and hypothetical, should allow for an opening for those of us outside the discipline (this writer is not a linguist either) to look for other, as yet unforeseen, opportunties. [1] Writers and artists might also want to take stock of how positions have shifted, and keep an open mind about the implications of applying the framework of any one theoretical approach. This also means that we can avoid prematurely characterizing one tradition or another as being more compatible or relevant to a given problem of artistic creation. Even among the mainstream tendencies, within each tradition, locked more tightly into their respective models, we would not expect that any one of them would “line-up” consistently on a debate in Language Poetry, for example. The analytical tools at linguists’ disposal only allow for the most tentative approximation to any given set of opposing views, a good way to get started in any case. At the level of discourse, in relation to stylistic questions, and problems of genre and register, there have never been clear demarcations of separation. And in the realm of sentence and word level grammar, there is no reason to think that any of the current theoretical models would provide more useful insight than any other beyond the most general observation. One interesting approach might involve the two related but also diverging senses of the term “license.” But we shouldn’t expect to see any hard and fast commitments here either.

Returning to the essay, the question is asked (with a Cognitive Linguistics perspective in mind): “in what sense … would grammar, as the subconscious mapping of temporal and spatial frames that govern speaking and understanding represent ideational refractions of this or that set of power relations? Is it that these mental processes are primarily enacted, at depth, by sociological stuff? How so if so?” If we accept that much of, if not all of, the actual mental grammar, comprised of the subconscious frames, the inner workings and interfaces that integrate the vast knowledge network of language, is not subject to awareness, one hypothetical answer to Johnson’s pointed question turns out to be quite surprising. This construal of grammar might not represent, nor be determined by, power relations and sociological stuff, in any sense. In a different sense, there must be all variety of live connection and interface between phonology/morphology/syntax and semantics, and in turn with the entire wider context of meaning. But it’s likely that the core grammatical structures do not allow the unlimited and unconstrained penetration of our beliefs, prejudices, cultural predispositions and political preferences. And whatever the nature of these interfaces between semantics per se and the strictly linguistic components of grammar turns out to be, it’s not likely, again, that we have the ability to deliberately and consciously reflect upon their inner workings, the internal mechanisms of this “way station” between sound and meaning (to borrow an apt description from Jackendoff). All of this of course poses a severe obstacle for proponents of the theory that all aspects of language, including all components of grammar knowledge, are influenced by one’s ideological obligations and position in society. The obstacle appears even more difficult to overcome for the claim that mental grammatical structures lend support somehow to this or that social project or political worldview. Few people would deny that there is a connection between linguistic forms and concepts; if you accept that there are interfaces between syntax and semantics, then there has to be some kind of relationship. But the problem is multifaceted and is not well served by the everything-is-a-part-of-everything method of analyzing complex systems.

Now it just might be that these same general considerations are relevant to the essential properties of other complex human faculties such as musical cognition, presenting the possibility of a fundamental and organic intersection among linguistic knowledge, music, and the different forms of verbal art. The possibility of a common or at least overlapping genesis in prehistory lets us talk about fundamentals in a new way, even from the point of view of biological endowments that underlie these competencies. During the period of dominance of behaviorism, in the “West,” and socialist realism, in the “East,” ideas like these were viewed as weird and mysterious, even dangerous. The idea was that “human nature” could be anything that social forces shape it into. There is still an aura of mystery and uncertainty about all of this, but that’s what should help keep the lines of dialogue open for a while to come.

[1] Interested readers are invited to consult a bibliography under construction at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/nf4/ that includes links for further study and discussion on the topic of this review.

Work cited

Jackendoff, R. (1994). Patterns in the mind. New York: Basic Books.

Last night a close Sunni friend confessed to me that she had no idea so many combat deaths in WWII were caused by flying pieces of shattered bone. I confessed to her that I had no idea the vast majority of the world’s Muslims were followers of the caliphate. And imagine, I said, if you were allergic to sand. Imagine, she said—for every American killed during that war, 5 Japanese were killed, 20 Germans were killed, and 85 Russians were killed. Or something like that. Imagine, I said, if you were allergic to gluten. Imagine, she said, what it means when hell becomes just another place on the map. That reminds me, I said, of what Richard Boone growls to Paul Newman near the end of a terrific 1967 western: “Now what do you suppose hell is gonna look like?”

Last night I found myself at a powwow north of Pocatello, Idaho, wondering why so many Mormons decided to settle here. It was a sunny day, scorching hot and bone dry. There was a massacre of Shoshoni taking place midwinter an hour’s drive to the southeast, while at the powwow, an eagle feather dropped from a dancer’s costume, and time stood still for a moment. After the massacre, I found myself in downtown Pocatello, where everyone was dressed in Civil War garb. My wife was there too, trying to pretend she didn’t know me. She was hawking her first book, about a little-known massacre of Shoshoni, which, she’d concluded, was followed by a mass rape. “Look,” I heard her say to one old man with a beard and three wives, “this kind of thing is happening today.” And when I heard her say that, I suddenly recalled that we were trying to option a screenplay about the massacre.

Last night I awoke in deep pain, having gone to bed too soon after eating too much pepperoni and sausage pizza. I got up, took a piss, and recalled a poem I’d written while working as an engineer in a pharmaceutical plant. It was an unabashedly lyrical item, written before I really knew what “lyrical” meant, having to do with Theodora of Byzantium, Lepidoptera, and my beloved Claude Achille, who while on his deathbed could hear the Germans bombing his beloved City of Light. Were they using Zeppelins at the time? I didn’t think so. La Mer played softly in the background, transporting me to a discourse—and here I beg you to listen closely—in which the problem of the critical idiom was posed as having primarily to do not with knowledge production, but with knowledge relations. In which case, I could hear myself respond, why am I having such a difficult time relating? And then it dawned on me, even as the morning sky brightened—giving me pause to consider what it means for paper to reflect blue light with a wavelength of exactly 457 nanometers, 44 nanometers wide—that this had much to do with days long past. In particular, with those visits I would pay to my mother while she worked as the main receptionist at General Electric CR & D in Schenectady. I was pursuing a doctorate in English at the time. Across the lobby from my mother’s desk sat Edison’s desk, atop which burned a low-voltage, tungsten-filament, incandescent bulb that, as I recall, had been burning for many decades. If you walked through the reception area, it opened out to a veranda overlooking the Mohawk. I would sit in a chair beside my mother, and we’d chat for a half-hour in between her various duties. I learned some local institutional lore—the days of the deformed and brilliant Steinmetz, the mechanical horse once built there, contributions to the Big Bang Theory. One of the scientists gave me a copy of the The Principle of Relativity, with original papers by Einstein, Lorentz, Weyl, and Minkowski. “A DOVER EDITION DESIGNED FOR YEARS OF USE!” $1.75. It sits even now on our shelves. One bright August day, while I was visiting with my mother, the mailman dropped off a number of packages wrapped in twine, which my mother signed for. She looked at the twine, tsking gently, and retrieved a large pair of shears from her desk drawer, snipping the twine from the packages. She turned to the waist-high cabinet behind her, saying, without any particular emphasis, “I try to show them how much they waste.” And as she said this, she reached down into the cabinet to pull out a ball of twine perhaps one foot in diameter, quickly wrapping the snipped twine around the ball and knotting it into the other snippets. “Jesus Christ, Mom!” I laughed, trying not to laugh too loudly. She smiled, still irritated at the “waste.” “You should have seen the last ball I showed them—it was this big.” She spread her hands apart to indicate two feet. A quick burp, and it was back to bed for another couple of hours of shuteye.

Human life – a tear,

The severity of the coreligionist, solipmachist,
and in profile, yes, the spitting image of Sforza,
only without that freaky red hat.

smeared across the face of the earth

Ennervated in the best sense of
the word – as if the minister of transport
himself, was your back up singer.

it’s good to see even without a flashlight —
ubi bene, and, in principle, ibi patrica, —
cultures in general are branching out.

by dirtied Kulacks
fallen from bicycles into the mud

quantities of free time,
and furthermore either stakes in the top of the head,
or benefits for the unemployed.

A force that is alien to a body, a harvesting machine
will wash away with the help of a jet (the enraged man)
lumps of that, which did not become word.

O great thermonuclear synthesis!
and products everlasting. Knight
in a tiger’s skin, squint your eyes at this:

there won’t be enough places for tanning
nuclearly. There won’t be enough radars,
to stop chaotic movement,

organic metamorphosises,
there won’t be enough tear ducts,
but the girls from the epigraph will be just enough.

of girls.
— Vera Pavlova

—

Do not hope for god, hope for your own lack of talent,
Give up washing, like Stirlitz. Represent an independent bourgeois,
fire the saleswoman, fire the cashier. Demand the manager. The danger
is that money (not all that stuff from before) may and may not be necessary. The repertoire
ultimately is limited — by grace of the financial climate — to what was earned.
Take it out of your pocket and count it quietly —
enough should remain for the airport’s vokda and a taxi somewhere.
All this, you’re beginning anew — don’t start.

Retort by Madame de Stael

When will it happen, the Eighteenth Brumaire, —?—
but gentlemen, it’s high time,
passions have enveloped the already large masses——
decent citizens — — —
although coquettish, rightly, my god,
all this is better than dredging up l’esprit de parti——
here is the engine of those vulgar adors,
that are dispatched towards the sorti on the side,
without the inclusion of every and all —
the future Robespierre said — that
spare souls are already almost — — — —
that two million
in France — (and that’s only here) ——
that’s what, we’ll see,
that what will be next, —
in the sense of — further on — further into the woods.
* * *
Why couldn’t they finish simply in check — — —
On a chessboard, O but the times… ——
And after sex Manuel does not clean his sword! —

Пробуждение в 5.24, будний день, и нижеследующее размышление о сем факте…

Жизнь человеческая – слеза,

Строгость единоверца, единоборца,
а в профиль, ну вылитый Сфорца,
только без красной бредовой шапочки.

размазанная по лицу земли

Расслабленность в лучшем смысле
этого слова – как будто бы сам министр
транспорта у тебя на подпевках.

хорошо, видать, и без твоего фонарика –
ubi bene, и, в принципе, ibi patrica, -
культуры в основном различаются

перепачканным кулаком
падшей с велосипеда в грязь

кол-вом свободного времени,
а дальше либо колом по темени,
либо пособие по безработице.

Сила чуждая телу, уборочная машина
смоет струей (взбесившаяся мужчина)
ошметки того, что не стало словом.

Велик термоядерный синтез!
и продукты евонные. Витязь
в тигровой шкуре на это щурится,

и не хватит мест для загара
атомного. Не хватит радара,
чтоб прекратить беспорядочное движение,

органических метаморфоз,
не хватит слезных желез,
но девочек из эпиграфа точно хватит.

девочки.
В. Павлова

май 2007-ог

—

Не уповай на бога, надейся на собственную бездарность,
не мойся, как Штирлиц. Изображай независимого буружа,
костери продавщицу, кассиршу. Потребуй менеджера. Опасность
в том, что деньги (не то что раньше) могут и не понадобиться. Репертуар
в конце концов ограничен – спасибо финансовому климату – заработал.
Вынь из кармана и спокойно пересчитай –
должно остаться на такси куда-то и водку аэропорта.
Ты начинаешь все это заново – не начинай.

21 июня 2007

Реплика мадам де Сталь

Когда же восемнадцатый Brumaire, -?–
но господа, пора б ему случиться,
passions объял ряды уже вполне —–
приличных граждан - - -
хотя кокетство, право, боже мой,
все это лучше обозвать l’esprit de parti —
вот двигатель тех низменных страстей,
что отправляют в сторону sortie
без исключенья всех и каждого –
грядущий Робеспьер сказал - - что
лишних душ уже почти - - - -
что два мильона
во Франции – (и это только здесь) —
что ж, поглядим,
что будет дальше, —
в смысле –дальше – дальше в лес.
***
Чего бы им закончить просто шахом - - -
На шахматной доске, но времена… —
И после секса Манюэль не моет шпагу!-

15 августа 2007 года

You can be a forthright Beatnik, sincere
insight blossoms burning political

You can be jauntily arrogant, immersed
in New York’s powerful rhyming days and
steady pop relations

You can be Black Mountain bardic boom voice
dispensing subjectivity (see Beatniks above, line 1)

You can be the heart of a jaguar
beating with dense thuds in Amazonian flora

You can be a Marxist Post-Structuralist or something
(though this would seem a contradiction)
and take on the wobbly
experience of subjectivity stressed in words
and buying things

You can be Walt Whitman and speak
for the people, or whatever he says we are in his mystic gravy

You can be a dead author declining
the value of the subject according
to the fictions of many

You can be a generator for irony from
the googly matrix of Google (see Marxist Post-Structuralist above, line 10)

You can be a Grand Pooh-Bah caging
poets in cagey categories
collecting blood and shit for the storage
of future geneaologists

You can be an important, award-winning figure
for creative writing students
who touch themselves with your greatness
throbbing away the night

You can be coolly educated
on Foucault and Deleuze, it’s okay
we all do it, but run to your nearest Anglo-
Saxon dictionary
before you say anything about it

You can be an elliptical person, or
just pretend to be
post-modern despite
the U Iowa degree

You can be disturbed and frightening
when you’re young on drugs and sex
(we all secretly love you)
but it gets old unless you sublate
it, like a master craftsperson

You can be a new formalist, we like
your sturdy attention to how words move
just catch up to the speech and concerns
of pulse-beat human beings

You can be a dabbler in verse
working the day job with kids
or a devoted adept
alive in the work and with kids

You can be a liberated individual
because a lot of truly great action has gone down
to let you share in the freakery of identity
but in your poetry consider
how to most damage Capital!

You can tickle Grand Pooh-Bah (see above, line 21)
in his Hut
by laughing out loud
or cutting the equivalent
of electronic farts
in his blog’s comments fields

You can be an identity ethicist (see above, somewhere)
blasting tunnel vision
upon the object you desire to be

You can be a burnt-out radical innovator
or just tired with words and watch
the accumulating compromise of
your life pass by

You can be a saintly sage inspirer
of the generations of copy-niks
who must imitate the style and finesse
you so graciously release from the dark abyss
of unconscious word life

You can be drunk staggering fool
high on any manufactured pharm
barfing your morning ritual
hung-over sleep-deprived waiting
for that first can of beer

You can subvert the romantic modus
of genius, inspiration and taste
but that’s old hat

You can sleep with a teacher or student
to break the transferential code
of pedagogy or simply to make
a name in the banter
that makes a scene a scene

You can be reserved, austere, pitiless agent
of the toothless muses
but take it easy
someone may laugh

You can publish the elder poets whose work
remains in neglect, make a name
for yourself as another maker of
maps in the poetic geneaologies

You can live in bitter confinement
nine-to-fiving in economic servility
bile for all contemporary successes
your neglect demands respect

You can be a Buddhist ex-alcoholic
teacher of invention
ethos what is ethos
but the beginning of self
education

You can be physically distinct
and watch time drag its claws
through features
of your author bio photos

You can be surprised to one day like
something that maybe you wouldn’t have
some time back
when rigid boundaries mattered

You can be hateful for
how the cards are stacked
never enough attention finds
its way to you

You can be the voice of the Cosmos
goddamn!
or sing the songs of greenery
in respect of seasons

You can be a writer of sonnets like
Shakespeare, Keats, Denby, Berrigan
in them things could out
the self in words to make
a monument against the vast
black blankness of time

You can turn upon your audience
cut them no slack in epigrams
that bring them up to the self
recognition of ethical compromise
in dubious dream-wave attention

You can experiment with the alphabet
write with vowels and thesauri
to excavate the obsessive
violent contradictions showing
bodies violate language

You can be a writer of epic drafts and
committed 1960s dreams of
revolution but
why bother

You can be passionate about many issues
and still miss the “bigger picture”
someone wants something for everything
this is the problem with democracy

You can be a potato
zoned in the breeze where bees buzz
in lyric nothings
where humming birds join them
getting stoned in the pollinated stems

Drones

Drones take the air
Out of our wings

The queen moans for their entry
And death seems an easy payment

For such pleasure erupts in nerve endings
Rapidly measuring commitment

Drones scour the surface
Of enemy industry

Moving out on anonymous
Missions to route

The uncourted, the rejected
Obsolescent mind

And alien intelligence
Chatter in the hives

A static drone 
Lows into the system

We follow Lynn around. Originally, the greenhouse was all sealed up, and tourists couldn’t go inside. Now it doesn’t matter. We walk through the Biosphere 2 gourmet kitchen, and past one of the Biosphere 2 bedrooms with abstract expressionist paintings hanging on the wall. One of the original Biospherians painted them, apparently while suffering from acute oxygen deprivation. We troop through the rainforest, and the marsh. We stare at the million-gallon ocean and listen to the lonely pulse of the wave machine, slow and regular, like the fading pulse of some monstrous dying thing. We stand there for a while, looking out over a dead sea under a sky of steel trellis and glazed glass. Lynn mentions that there wasn’t enough money to construct a solar power system and make Biosphere 2 truly self-sufficient. Instead, it gets its electricity from the local electrical company. No one on the tour says anything, but I’m pretty sure we’re all starting to think the same thing: that Biosphere 2 isn’t just a failure, but a Colossal Fiasco, and this causes all of us to lapse into a kind of embarrassed silence.

After the tour, Lynn ditches us, leaving us all to wander around the place, alone and unsupervised. There are no surveillance cameras. No docents or security guards. I say to Sarah that it feels like we’re astronauts who’ve responded to a distress call from some space station in deep space. When we get there, all the machines are running and the computers are automatically taking care of things, but the space station crew has vanished without a trace. Sarah and I creep from one ecosystem to another. We notice the ants. There are ants everywhere. Biosphere 2 is overrun with them. As the other species died off, the ants kept multiplying. Swarming over the handrails and the tropical plants. Swarming over you, too, if you’re not careful. We wander down into the basement. A huge concrete crypt beneath the Biosphere. There are gillion-gallon water tanks down there, and evaporative coolers as big as a house. There are no fiberglass rocks down in the basement, like there are topside. No landscaped terraces or banana trees or viewing platforms. The basement is full of the hidden machinery that was supposed to make Biosphere 2 bloom. The machines worked just fine. Precise and computer-controlled and energy efficient. Dropping precisely the right amount of rain on the simulated rainforest. Keeping the humidity in the simulated desert low. In the end, the machinery was the only thing that worked according to plan.

By 1994, things got ugly. Ed Bass wanted his greenhouse back. The hippy “visionaries” managing the place resisted. Restraining orders were issued. Federal marshals showed up. At some point– and this is where things get especially confusing– a couple of the former Biospherians (one of whom was a Belgian engineer who called himself Laser) broke into the Biosphere in the dead of night and opened up all the emergency exits and busted out a couple windows. I’m not sure why they did this. Needless to say, the billionaire oil tycoon and the eco-cultists were no longer on speaking terms. It took a couple years, but in 1996, Bass convinced Columbia University to take over management of the place. They tried to move away from the Disney Science of the original Biosphere and do some real research. Columbia lasted for a few years, but Lynn tells us they recently jumped ship. Now Biosphere’s future is up for grabs. I read somewhere that Mr. Bass is thinking of developing the land around the Biosphere. Building a bunch of tract homes he’ll call something like Biosphere Estates.

Outside Biosphere 2, Sarah and I walk past a row of interpretive plaques that neither of us has the heart to read. We’re pretty sure we know what they don’t say. They don’t say that Biosphere 2 has all the elements of a Greek tragedy. A not very good, B-grade Greek tragedy, in fact, featuring an arrogant billionaire with big but totally hazy ambitions, a Greek chorus of freaky voodoo scientists, an insane project, and a series of disasters that reduces the whole thing to ruins. Maybe that was the point all along. Maybe Ed Bass is an eco-radical genius, and he figured the best way to demonstrate the fragility of Biosphere 1 was to build Biosphere 2 and watch it crash and burn. A dramatic lesson that would cause people to set aside their plans to colonize Mars, and stop treating this planet like a disposible diaper. If that was the plan, I guess it failed, too.

1)    Poetry invited you in earnest.  Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany.  Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked.

2)    Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry.  English professors, high-school English teachers, poetry librarians, and poets at writing workshops all do their best to define a canon of poetry.  As paid lovers of poetry, they set a few of their close friends alongside the Bard, Goethe, and two or three multinational poets who are there to prove that they’ve done some homework.  They publish in journals, and talk to middle-class, white students in the nation’s elite universities.  These individuals, these self-made doyennes, who get paid to make love to poetry, nonetheless defy in their very institutional rigor the kind of open, unlaced escape that poetry has been trying to execute since at least Mallarmé.   If they really loved poetry, they would be helping her do what she really wants to do, which is to remake society.  Instead, they grow old and fat, drinking and smoking with a few of their contemporaries, rarely traveling, and never introducing her to new people.  Poetry secretly hates them.

3)    Worse yet, the teachers of English take poetry out of the place where she was born, the place where she is most happy, lounging comfortably on a series of velvet cushions, making eyes at pretty goatherdesses; a creature of the drunken midnight song and the very short book.  She has been forced, against her will, into great hulking anthologies recited aloud by massive numbers of students.  Poetry has become the sexual education of the masses, describing reductionist slides of the uterus and scrotum in a bored voice - and this is what is known as “appreciation.”  She hates her job.  She longs for her old friends, opium and morphine; the familiar company of a few debauched radicals in a dark, smoke-filled basement.  She has been forced to open herself to series of sterile and noncommunicative strangers, paying with her identity to suit the masses. Poetry has been used. Poetry doesn’t want them to fuck her; she wants you, and she always has.

4)    Through so much abuse, poetry has been denied that very wide-ranging over life and landscape upon which she thrives. She longs to range promiscuously through the great, vast, and terrifying abyss of everyday speech, including but not limited to the ululations of girls in the middle of orgasm and the political if market-driven lyrics of American rap. Poetry wants to be free.

5)    Poetry might get you the girl you want in bed, so long as it’s a graduate student, especially one who’s taken poetry as a subject.  But let’s be honest here - isn’t the graduate student sleeping with you secretly because she hopes that all this - the sly exchange of favorite poets, the chance to display all of her favorite quotes, the intimacy with you, everything - is going to get her a job?  Even the person she becomes through it - edgy, radical, able to swill of reams of William Carlos Williams in one go - is a job-getting person, not a world-remaking person, not a revolutionary, not a nurturer of dreams, a force in the world. 

But didn’t you end up here because you hated job-getting mankind in general?  Couldn’t stand it?  Liar.  Cheater.  Bastard.  Son of a bitch.  And her:  Bitch. Slut.  Trashy whore.   

Poetry, the way things are now, is not going to help you get the girl of your dreams.  She’s only bringing you women who aren’t good for you, and you know it, and she knows it, and it has to do with poetry not being properly fucked. 

6)    In merely loving poetry, one can comfortably fantasize about meeting her family, inheriting her fortune, and settling into a little nest together, with all the ancestral portraits hanging in gilded frames upon the wall.  Pound, Keats, and Marvell are coming over for weekend pancakes and bloody marys.  Only after one is actually engaged, of course, do the family dramas start to emerge: the brewing hatreds, the flight into the church or into fascism, the suicidal and schizophrenic tendencies, the evangelical who wants only to convert you or convince you of your irredeemable doom.  Many of them are mean, and the meanest ones won’t leave you alone.  They want things of you.  They make demands.  They sneak into your bank account, they make alliances against you, they tell her you’re not good enough.  Nor are they all charming themselves.  The family tree is dark with withered roots and no-shows, with black sheep and failed writers you would rather not know.  You may find yourself one of them, sneered at by the better-groomed heirs, deprived of a chance at the family inheritance and the doors it would open.  You might regret your choice, and start to hate yourself and your decision.  It may even come between you and poetry.  It is best, my aunts used to tell me, to accept all invitations early and get to know the worst of the worst before you’re actually married.    All good reasons, sooner rather than later, to begin fucking poetry.

7)    You and I both know the small, dwindling, morbidly monomaniacal crowd who read contemporary poetry, most infected with a furious and Oedipal attempt to find each poet’s weakness so that they may take his place, if only for another two-year stint at Iowa.  The culture of performance breeds schools of individuals whose prime motivation is to promote themselves.  This broken world needs to find a way to employ its most sensitive subjects not in emotional masturbation but in something like an ethical pedagogy. Fuck poetry.

8)    Poetry seminar(ie)s are lifeless convents where lovers of poetry are isolated within a world of form, and end up making friends with other such dilettantes from the white suburbs, capable of attending such elite programs with no hope of income simply on the basis of their parents’ successes and aesthetic education.  None of them have much experience with travel, dialogue, or politics.  Who wants to read what they have to say?  Fuck poetry. 

9)    The monomaniacal display of ego has no more place in our culture.  It hasn’t been revolutionary since 1917, and it’s being outdated further on a daily basis by the virtual cult of collective language.  Everybody who understood language abandoned poetry three years ago to start posting surrealist manifestos on craigslist, writing eloquent personals ads, and expressing themselves through graffiti. Fuck poetry.

10) Language is powerful, seductive, transformative.  No one knows this better than those who have studied poetry.  The best of it is always pushing the genre to new forms.  From epic to song to novel to something more suited to the emerging castes, wants and values of our changing political season.  Those who love poetry should want to destroy it.  Learn to love fucking poetry.

11) Poetry, now read by a small and dwindling public of other people with literature degrees, has lost its earlier identity.  It no longer claims to direct the souls of the loyal ruling class, it no longer preaches to the bourgeoisie as a whole, or desires to embody the values of the race.  Poetry has lost its claim as a moral compass.  Fuck it.

12) Poetry is not bread and wine.  If you want to feed the world, start a nonprofit to bring wheat and rice to those starving million who die of famine every day.  Do not, do not, do not, if you want to love the world, write a single more poem in the place of bread and wine.  Leave poetry alone. Fuck her and get over it.

13) The fact is that the darkness will come, and the tiger will eat the village’s children, those who haven’t already turned into zombies as a result of being treated like machines.  Nobody knew it better than T. S. Eliot.  Poetry knows it.  If you hate the silencing of that truth to your core, quit the antidepressants today.  Spiral down with me into the hateful, grim silence which no poetry can cure, and as we write bitter, undisciplined screeds of maniacal self-hatred and powerless-reform, we will laugh with pain as we come to know what it means to fuck poetry. 

14) Poetry was intended to channel a transcendental beauty that would strip the subject of her present context and remove her to eternal time.  Poetry is against politics, and has no place in an era of global crisis. Stop drunk-dialing poetry and learn to deal. 

15) We have created an academy full of drug addicts who use poetry to numb the creeping voice at the back of their heads, the one that says that they don’t try, work, produce hard enough, saying that the world is a cruel and bitter place filled with tragedy, and telling them to change their life lest the tiger prowling in the jungle today come tonight into the village and slash the sleeping infants limb from limb.  If you don’t want to listen to that voice, you belong in one of the professions where one can most effectively drown it: stock trading, national defense, advertising perhaps.  Consume and guzzle your way to oblivion from the inherent insecurity of the present.  Poetry is an ineffective anodyne, and using poetry as a valium supplement bespeaks a weak conscience that has never taken the severity of global trauma seriously.  Forget poetry entirely.  Morphine, heroin, and cocaine are all better for what you need to do.  Gucci, Prada and self-satisfaction are even better.  If you’re just trying to salve the voices of doom, you do not belong in the academy, you make no one (not even yourself) happier by being there, and you do not deserve to live off of poetry. Fuck her and leave her; it’s better for both of you.

16) The big questions that are determining our survival as a race are these: famine, global warming, the privatization of public welfare, the mobilization of internal polity in elitist frameworks only crudely understandable as democracy, and the perils of corruption and promise of microfinance.  Contemporary poetry addresses none of these.  There are more important things to do.  Fuck poetry.

17) If you want to feed and nourish the woman in your life, get out of your relationship with poetry.  Learn to cook.  Send her perfect ginger snaps coated with toasted almonds; sear her a side of glazed duck, and fry for her a series of bright green vegetables and send them over with pots of aioli on the side, garnished with orange nasturtium blossoms.  Brew for her your own cabernet, squeezed from grapes raised in the California sun on your own five feet square of yard, tended every moment of the day, and stored in deep cellars until it was rich, shadowy, subtle, cool. Poetry might arouse your girlfriend, it might tickle her, taunt her, and even make her warm inside, but today’s poetry offers precious little in the way of wisdom meant to help her do, be, or even survive in a world that steals more of her the further she becomes from job-getting girl.   Food and wine are different.  It will be better for the woman, and better for poetry, if you trained yourself to cook every time you got the urge to write.

18) I can only fantasize about another kind of poetry late at night, caressing my own body, after making love to a bottle of whiskey, when I dream about the poetry I used to know, so unlike everything poetry is doing now: a poetry of political economy that would so wind and unravel the current discourse as to break inside and outside both into something wholly new.  I want, I whisper in my most intimate moment, I want someone capable of fucking poetry.