The Errancy: Dark Knight (commentary)
Charles Bernstein’s poetry has always had an implied politics, and he is skillfully theoretical. But in the QuickMuse prompt poem he leaps directly onto the back of the current American problem.
We are in a critical moment in U.S. history. Everyone feels it: an expensive war designed for profit and world control, high gas prices, a declining middle class, and widespread despair over the economic future of our children, the first generation since WWII not to have better prospects than their parents. And those failings are nothing when compared to the moral losses we have suffered.
The nearly imageless poem that resulted was influenced by my recent reading in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the comments of thinkers Deleuze and Guattari on the body as a “desiring machine.” We thought we were prophets, discovered that we are only about profits, and now we are forced to prophesy once more. Don Quixote was a comical knight errant, tilting against windmills. His errand errs; he follows a wandering path. This makes him an agreeable, comical, and noble character. The poet Cole Swensen is writing a paper on the value of such error to poetic discovery, thus truth. But the current American adventure is far worse. Bush and Cheney have not simply followed a blundering path. They have pursued directly what they value and don’t care about the rest. Even with Katrina, the government’s motive was disaster profiteering, the toxic FEMA trailers being only one example. Our loss is not only of the dream; it is also of the actual. The nation is migrating beneath our feet, making strange what was familiar. Did you ever go back to the town where you were raised and realize how foreign you are to it? Our situation is one of internal exile, because the change designed for us was intended to be permanent.
The door “locked open” refers to the state of our information and news gathering systems. The gate keepers tell us the door is open. But we are not allowed to enter. Because the frenetic entertainment industry seeks to keep us entertained, we stand in the locked-open smiling uneasily.
The New Pleasantry (reality television, happy talk news shows issuing false news) is part of the New Peasantry.
I feel a little silly, standing in public with my cardboard sign that says, “The end is near!” But the critique is richly deserved. Inanity is our characteristic mode; therefore, as Adorno predicted, there can no longer be tragedies of heroic size; finally, I should add, no people of size. Thankfully, we are not yet small enough for the time we are forced to live in.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
here’s something political in a brechtian vein[one of a series]:
HOW TO FAIL A STATE…
by Michael Roloff
A failed state
Is like a dwarf star
It never made it, poor thing
It needs a think-tank to keep it on life-support,
Michael O’Hanlon of The Brookings perhaps…
He’s good for a new set of suggestions every month…
I’m sure he goes to church on Sunday and prays for failed and failing states…
And gives no end of Fs
Instruction on how to produce a a “failed state”:
Get a Stan of some kind, rattle its government in your money maker…
Create a fright…
Get an interested party to intervene…
Initiate an uprising against the invader…
What the hell, the U.N. won’t mind.
Lots of things you can do…
No end of opportunities…
But first you need to define a state… Well, there must be a government that holds the majority shares of violence power to dispense, yes Flower Children, that’s how things are…
Thence you find something that approximates the definition…
You destabilize something that ends in Stan… or Lia… or La
its becomes shaky…
the outlying provinces are not in its control..
You get a foreign power to invade it… say, some bears, or coyotes or ants…
You support an insurgency against the occupation…
You supply it with weapons…
When the insurgency is a spectacular success
You parade a few of its leaders for the media…
the invader withdraws, licking wounds…
withers on the vine because congress, mission accomplished, won’t fund it…
now the insurgency fends for itself in a country wide civil war between insurgency leaders transformed into war lords…
if you have a special animosity for them you call them thugs…
what the hell
call them anything you want
nothing they can do about it anyway…
killing by naming,
that too has been going on a long time…
that kind of consigning…
And hoopla, Michael O’Hanlon has his a geographic entity that he can call a “failed state”, something like a dwarf star, poor thing, that never had its shining day… and you bring in the think tanks to think upon the misery.
You hold conferences…
Someone gets another degree…
You hand out grants…
You import some left over insurgents that want to study law or maybe also start a Stan restaurant of some sort…
You find some bleeding hearts…
And everything is cool unless it isn’t.
© Michael Roloff, 2008
January 24th, 2009 at 4:24 am
Commentary and Response To; both brill, needs a larger audience, though. Just a small question for Michael Roloff: is what you wrote an example of the Hegelian dialectic tactic?