Chirot: american "conceptual poetry" & re Debord's Hurlements & Ducasse's Poesies-

this is from a discussion re the "day" books by kenny goldsmith and kent johnson.  the first is a typed, every word of it, copy of one day's issue of the NY Times.  the second version is the book accompanied by a sticker claiming the author to  be kent johnson.

the reactionary situation of american poetics is such that these two incredibly worn out cliches of modernism--copying, using a sticker to claim "authorship" etc-are considered to be "avant"--

>
> It is not so much that so called american conceptual poetry mentions,
> slighly misquoting Brion Gysin, that writing is decdes behind painting, but
> that american poetry itself is often about 100-150 years behind that in
> other countries. Not unexpectedly, once seizing on some of these ideas and
> diluting, deforming, omitting areas, to create a sanitized "homeland
> security" american version of them, the ideas then should turn out to be
> reactionary rebrandings. "Boredom is always, always,
> counter-revolutionary," writes Ducasse/Lautremont in Poesies. Before him,
> Baudelaire wrote of "acedie, la maladie des moines," (acedia, the illness of
> monks), which implies besides boredom a kind of mental masturbation.
>
> The main goal of much of the discussion, as it itself demonstrates on cue,
> is that the current rebranded remakes of revisionary versions of old
> stereotypes and clichesof modern art and poetry is to generate not ideas but
> WORDS. Publish or perish! As Murat has pointed out, plagiarism can get one
> in trouble; while copying the newspaper etc doesn't. hence what better way
> to write safely in an academic and "understanding" setting pieces which are
> simply copies of safe and innocuous documents--and at the same time get
> credit and generate yet more copies of copies and commentaries which are
> copies of commentaries. Soon the filing and data mining sections of the
> Dept are being devoted to the moving about and classifying of an endless
> production of copies of copies . . . each one though may be thought of as
> slightly "different and interesting" if one changes the author's name and so
> in the familiar lexicon, "defamiliarizes, reframes and recontextualizes" the
> samo samo.
>
> The speed with which so called american conceptual poetry is marched right
> through the door into the classroom is part of its "usefulness," that is, it
> generates WORDS--as one of the principle anxieties of poetry and poetics in
> the academic/maintream is the necessity for producing "language" at al
> costs, and preferably at a low cost for a high yield return, which copying
> huge chunks of words does wonderfully..
>
> In the Borges story of Pierre Menard, Menard,an obscure French belle
> lettriste, manages to write his own verison, with Herculaean labors, of a
> few chapters and fragementsof Don Quixote. Incredibly, his version, written
> inthe early 20th century, is word for word the same as Cervantes' text.
> Yet, as the narrator, demonstartes, becuase the words are written, generated
> from within Menard, and in a different time and place, the seemingly
> identical text takes on now a much richer and more profound meaning than the
> original. The difference between menard and say "Day" (or maybe "groundhog
> Dagy"--) is that Menard uses a consciously literary text, while today's
> example under discussion uses that holy of Holies, the New York Times.
> (Which, a great many of its writers would take note of--is also aliterary
> text in at least their articles--)
>
> Paul Celan wrote that "poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself."
> In the "day' forumaltion, "poetry" is imposed on the "non-poetic" as a way
> to lay claim to a new territory a new source for the insatiable demand for
> material--i.e. words
>
> Menard's version of Cervantes is a work that "exposes" a different text
> which is existing in the text as it is, one that takes place within the
> timme period of William James et alia, making the meaning of phrases shift
> quite drastically, though the wrods are the same.
>
> William Carlos Williams in stating that "a poem can be made of anything,"
> made use of a menu; next on the agenda should be perhaps the Encyclopedia
> Britannica or the MacMillan Encyclopedia of baseball, with the statistics of
> every player who ever appeared in a Major league uniform, even if, like
> "Moonlight" Graham, they haver batted or played the field but simply waited
> on deck.
>
> Ancient documents show that originally the writer, as scribe, was a copyist
> of the words and numbers read off or spoken by others. The scribe was
> "instrumental" in the conducting of commerce and diplomacy, of keeping
> records and and deatiling prophecies As a useful member of the ruling
> class's servant groups, the scribe was entrusted with many "trade secrets"
> at times, making room for treachery if one was so tempted. ( I.E.--"selling
> out"--)
>
> In uneasy times such as the present, when security and surveillance are
> daily more intensely imposed on every individual, what could be a better way
> of writing than to become a scribe, a copyist, and so ensure oneself a
> steady position in the realm of the ruling class?
>
> Bartleby, the copyist who said, "I prefer not to," and Flaubert's Bouvard
> and Pecuchet who , after essaying to learn about everything and fail and
> then decide to begin copying again, seem less like doomed souls than
> examples of what kind of stupidity (in Flaubert's view) it takes to refuse
> to be a copyist.
>
> In the Renaissance, when the figure of the ARTIST in capital letters began
> to be developed as a being with Star Power and Romantic Madness etc, it was
> not uncommon to find wealthy households in which there were hanging
> amazingly exact copies of famous originals which themselves were in the
> hands of even wealthier and more powerful patrons.
>
> The owners of the copies were satisfied, because it was not simply that they
> possessed a copy of a great work, like a machine made print of today, but
> that their copy was an "original" by so and so a well known expert at
> copying others' works for the benefit of his clients.
>
> Thus in the era which first really sent into orbit the idea of the Great
> genius Artist, one finds also the example of the highly skilled and
> respected craftsperson who can turn out a good and "original" copy.Of
> Course, in the Renaissance, many things were respected that today would
> horrify--
>
> But then, the idea of a copy by a good copyist as a suitable ornament for
> any respectable home was something of VALUE and a demonstration of the taste
> of the owners.
> . . .
> Perhaps "conceptual poets" can be able to find this sort of employment--and
> so escape the Curse of Saturn bestoewed upon those called Original.
>
> before this discussion had started i was working on a piece of which these
> are excerpts which related to what Christopher Winks writes of--
>
> . Lautreamont writes of using plagiarized material only if one develops it,
> and the *Poesies* is filled with examples from Pascal esp and a few other
> writers, in whcih Lautreamont has changed in some cases just one word, which
> does indeed greatly develop in new openings of possibilities the plagiarized
> quotation. In a way, this method of development is not unlike the
> "detournement" of the Situationists, in which some banality is turned into a
> kind of slogan turned against the original cliché ridden banalities it is
> confronting and deforming . . .
>
>
> Yet there is also the poet's work against the banality the cliché, the
> stereotype, in which the journey is taken ever further into the core of
> language--such as Isou's "the word is the stereotype" forcing him to go
> further afield and delve into the letter itself as the field for poetic
> action and imagination. Isou's idea of a chiseling phase having reached its
> apogee in the letter of Lettrisme enables him to use it also as a fulcrum
> for beginning the new word of the Amplic phases, in which Lettrisme must
> deconstruct everything and replace it with its Lettriste version and so
> start anew working for a Utopian society. (In the background is the letter
> work of Schwitters and also the half joke of Rimbaud's "Voyelles" with the
> color coded vowels used to start all sorts of hallucinatory speculations
> among the young followers of the missing [vanishing, disappearing, no longer
> poet] poet, leading to Des Esseintes' (in Huysmans's *A Rebours*) making
> various forms of colors-sounds associations in the way the Japanese do with
> scent associations, so that a color is played like a note, a letter--the
> idea of a kind of organ on which one sounds a note and its equivalent in
> colors appears--like a kind of minimalist jukebox! Which idea is actually
> found in the minimalist works in a way of Steve Reich and the early Phillip
> Glass.)
>
>
> Isidore Isou, quite early in his career as founder & center of the Universe
> of Lettrisme,-- Isidore Isou, formulator of a species of Gesamtkunstwerk in
> which all the arts and media are reformulated-- though in a manner less
> militant & much less obsessed with mechanical speeds than the same project
> previously remodeled/remodulated by the hands of the Italian Futurists— this
> God Isidore Isou propounded a new form of Historical Development of
> Poetics, based on the alternating periods of the two yin/yang currents of
> the "Amplic" and "Chiseling."
>
> (Isou claimed—and could prove--that his theoretical method dated to his
> early adolescence, before his arrival in post- Liberation Paris from his
> native Romania. His first published works in French on the subject appeared
> in 1947, from the prestigious Gallimard Press, though many others, such as
> the one quoted here, are dated as early as 1942, and were written while the
> poet was still living in his "country of birth. ")
>
>
>
> Larry Wendt in *"The Genealogy of narrative''* gives one a very good &
> concise introduction to these two Isousien tendencies, the Amplic and the
> Chiseling:
>
> In his attempt to rewrite all of human knowledge, Isou had discovered that
> the evolution of any art was characterized by two phases: 'amplic' and
> 'chiseling.' In following the development of the art of poetry for example,
> Isou saw the Lettrist at the end of a long chiseling phase which had begun
> with Baudelaire reducing narrative in his poetry to anecdote, then Rimbaud
> disregarding anecdote for lines and words, Mallarmé reducing words to sound
> and spaces (particularly in *Un Coup de Des*), and finally the Dadaists
> destroyed the word altogether. Isou saw at the end of this phase the new
> beginnings of an amplic stage for culture, from which a whole host of new
> arts, ways of working, and social institutions would eventually spring, with
> Isou at the center of all creative work.
>
> The Lettrist worked on the level of the letter at the heart of what they
> believed to be an experiential language that was to be the basis of their
> new culture. Their *Lexique Des Lettres Nouvelles, *for example was a sonic
> alphabet of a 130 or so sounds from which a new natural language was to
> spring from and from which they composed their poetry.
>
> (Larry Wendt, *The Geneolgy of narrative)*
>
> * *
>
> * ** *"*It's not about notes, it's about feelings," *Ornette
> Coleman famously stated regarding Free Jazz. Isou continually
> emphasizes feelings in opposition to words. For Isou, writing in
> *MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY A) Commonplaces about Words:*
>
> "The word is the first stereotype," but "All impulses escape stereotyping."
>
>
> For Isou, the stereotype goes back to those "Notions . . . [from] . . . an
> inherited dictionary," recalling Flaubert's *Dictionairre des idees recues
> (Dictionary of received ideas), *itself a compendium of the inanities which,
> since they are unquestioningly accepted, makes them appear to be "real"
> ideas, forms, persons, events, knowledge, whose sheer accumulation create
> Isou's concept of the "rigidity of forms [that] impedes their [our
> fluctuations] transmission."
>
> For, verily, are not stereotypes the very embodiment of the "rigidity of
> forms," which create that false sense of their being eternal verities in
> "Naming the Unknown by the Forever," in contradistinction to Baudelaire's
> concept of modernism as the conjunction of the ephemeral and the Eternal,
> that which is eternal within the ephemeral, and that ephemerality existing
> within the appearance of the Eternal?
>
> This reactionary, anti-modernist tactic , recognized by Baudelaire, Flaubert
> and Isou, is the use of Naming to be a Forever which excludes the Unknown,
> producing the stereotype of the word, an impediment to transmission by its
> stoppage of feelings and thoughts, by its "brutality of words" which are
> those "Discharges transmitted by notions."
>
> "Discharges transmitted by notions!" What a great phrase, what an image!
> The ultimate weapon whose use stops just this side of violence turns out to
> be the stereotype transmitted by "notions' which have al the horrible
> solidity of the "Biggest Lies" of advertisements, propaganda, discourses of
> institutions, "stamps of authenticity and approval," while at the same time
> retaining a reassuring vagueness whose very fuzziness causes the mind to
> settle dreamily into it as into a nice fat feather bed. (See Jim Thompson's
> The Killer Inside Me for the Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford's use of the cliché as
> a way of refraining from "the real way" of killing rather than simply
> "boring to death" his victims).
>
>
>
> Isou's Amplic phase is interesting to contrast with the Amplic of some of
> today's American conceptions of production in the poetries of Flarf and
> Conceptualism a la Kenny G. IN the latter, for example, one finds what
> Bartleby said "I prefer not to" to--copying, rather than plagiarism with a
> development, moving of files, data, the poet as office drone aestheticizing
> the means of production for the pleasure of the observing CEO's or "high
> paying high art customers." A kind of useless Amplic mad production is
> churning away while being observed by the owners of the means of production,
> for whom the poet in a sense has become again a dependent worker, not even a
> craftsman, but simply an invisible drone.
>
> ==================================
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