New Reviews at Tarpaulin Sky

nick-e melville's Selections and Dissections reviewed by Stephen Nelson and Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton reviewed by Micah Ling

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The Kearney is great, I haven't read the melville yet - but I googled him and checked out some of his work and like it a lot.

A poem by me

is here. Thanks Charlotte!

HEGEMONY IS TRANCENDENCE

Amy is doing the good work of puctuation. She's breaking art. People probably don't like her [that bitch] becuase the ideas of the aesthetic the sacred the objective QUALITY get knocked about in the tussle. "I would publish more women/fags/indigenous writers if their wor was good enough" here's the page.
and what I said
bearing in mind I'm not quite here as it's 2am the day has been caffine and nicotine and milton and johnson with theory as a condiment

THUSLY:


God damn all this talk of “gender blindness”, “language over body” “quality” etc makes me ill.
“women can’t paint; women can’t write” [VW, to the lighthouse] I suppose that goes for crazies (and dykes can’t fuck w the heteronormative either)
it implies that vaginas get in the way of writing well if you look for quality and don’t publish girls
same agenda as assimilationism
erasure of difference
fucking easy if your on the side with the bigger stick (so to speak)
heh the biopower of writing
(necropower of erasure?)
FIT THE AESTHETIC

why is the aesthetic homogenising, a hegemony?
aren’t people who break that awesome?
Joyce, woolf, genet, guyotat, mansfield if she’d lived long enough
killed the novel – it comes out of the ashes something new, with blood on its face, and eyes aflame – what if that never happened?

all of this shows the fact that poeple get really uncomfortable about reading difference, reading
poems (or whatever) that aren’t mirrors (if I want that I’ll go to the bathroom)
I want poems to break me
(and amys do)

ignore this is the rant of a crazy if you want i should be asleep but no.
do i make sense myself clear? [cf end of preceding line]

I love you all.

Bureaucratic Biopower

Compare this with the bureaucratic regimes imposed within the tertiary system (performance assesment, PBRF, continual justification of work in financial terms etc):

"At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them. So, for example, the tiered rows of seats in a stadium not only makes it easy for spectators to see but also for guards or security cameras to scan the audience. A perfect system of observation would allow one “guard” to see everything (a situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon). But since this is not usually possible, there is a need for “relays” of observers, hierarchically ordered, through whom observed data passes from lower to higher levels." (source - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy)

Good reference here at k-punk , also Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism: is there no Alternative? has a great breakdown of the culture of surveylance in bureaucratic institutions.

Abyss

I was looking through the Archives of one of my favorite bloggers, k-punk (aka Mark Fisher, who writes regularly for Wire, and is the author of a great little book called Capitalist Realism: is there No Alternative) trying to find a post on Margret Atwood, when I stumbled upon this piece. Well worth a look. "An abyss that laughs at creation"
. Great title, no?

Kristeva, Psychosis, Text.

“What Kristeva brings, in a manifold way, into direct relation with (the language of) psychosis is not the pre-oedipal abjection that is constitutive for the subject, but the post-oedipal modes in which the constituted subject strives to repudiate the repudiation that founds it and to seek out, once again, a connection with the corps maternel. For here, the jouissance of the primary process prevails against the reality principal of the symbolic order and thus entails the danger of a “psychotic” disintegration of ego and (paternal) world. To this extent, the literature of the “abject” – for Kristeva, the cardinal form of such second-order repudiation – is structurally psychotic” (Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: the Theory and History fo a Strong Sensation. Trans Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: SUNY Press 2003. 375)