ARMED CELL 1

ARMED CELL 1

COMMUNISM TODAYTIQQUN STYLEMONEY SHOT THROUGH GLASS CRANE FLOOR

“IN THE FUTURE, THE CITIES ARE BURNING”

DIALOGUE ARMEDSOME POETIC TERMSTRANSITIONAL DEMANDS

BLOWOUT PREVENTER: A TRILOGY

STALIN IS GREAT

PHALANSTERY FOR IMAGINARY FRIENDS

100 PARTIAL THESES ON BEAUTY

TEXTUALITY AND ANNIHILATION: JOSHUA CLOVER’S “GILDED AGE”

DAVID LAU

JEANINE WEBB

ROGER FARR

DERECK CLEMONS

ARA SHIRINYAN

WENDY TREVINO

DAN THOMAS-GLASS

BRIAN ANG

ARMED CELL 1

Edited by Brian Angarmedcell@gmail.comarmedcell.blogspot.com

Cover images by Paul Chanph-chan.com

Physical edition of 100Free

ARMED CELL seeks to publish what is urgent and necessary in poetry and poetics. It insists on militancy “working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety” (Alain Badiou) to confront the notion of there being at present “too much anti-capitalism” (Slavoj Žižek) and not enough direct action against “capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history today)” (Giorgio Agamben). ARMED CELL seeks relationship with those engaged in research and practice with this matrix of concerns, in order to be, like Lenin’s pre-revolution withdrawal to study Hegel, a site for the study necessary for executing political actions.

ARMED CELL 1 was first distributed at the Durruti Free Skool, Berkeley, California, 12–14 August 2011. ARMED CELL 2 will appear in February 2012. Submit cover images and writing by the end of December 2011 for consideration.

COMMUNISM TODAY

1

Call-in request line binding forcecut back, foughtwith Mozart and the percussion great called Non-Los Angeles. They came around the

building with our comradesin front of them as shields. Fuck Dave Kliger. Which one of these anarchist faggots stole my SIM card?See if the janitor has the key to open these doors.

He’s the person we need everything.The telos today closer to undead, insurrectionary Velazquezes incapableof enduring independent labor monitors—wild Mike is straight up drugs. Sri Lankan and

subjective confusions adopted that languageas in Balzac when rude boyshad rivers to cross.A snort of laughter to knot

en El Encanto Sanitariumnear the freeway river flowing 100,000 stanzas,let Placitas bloom 1,000 at a timequickly into inauspicious jobs.Occupy everything, including Humanities

DAVID LAU

2

Moody’s ratings vultures have no process for light picnic table, but they do bring chemical

sprays to The City of London, humid with so little high morale,such a limited call-up of man.

The time windowin the dime bag

near our distant sun of fungal alphabets,

papeles for horses.Roll out the analysis of the base on

a turquoise Ho Chi Minh hard by the pachyderm

bobcat of bridge. The tossedoffice goes down, riverine

in the peculiar behavior of exponents.We totally had a flier for this one

3

unlike the Mrak Hall walking style

of Kresge’s Pomo Afro Homos hard by the triangular, submerged water fountain. Tap rooted tandoori shore flickers with shelterbeneath the sandwich cart,fermented chile bean paste twilight.

Guns out with these gents, Carter and Huggins, Oscar Grant.The movement ends ICE raids.Takes places.

4

We’re just back from a lawless area in the south of the country called Irvine, determined by valleys of the Irrawaddy.Is anyone worth poisoning?

Which one of us will be the elf king? I’m just chilling

with several distinct calls, among them callsdescribed as “boom,” “olive wood,” and “delirium.”

Torches and tire fires “boom” the movement,cross out the movement to move.

TIQQUN STYLE

Crave you Exarchia chromed up with Koukoulofori?Syntagma sipping on slurry? Do you like banks?Neither contest nor demand constitute force. Prisoners or farmers. No flaneur.(Lost this precarity given newfangled “security.”) Don’t desertify, don’t propagate liberalismwith the urgency audible to power.Dodge fares, steal / practice escape.Seed trade the total submission called legal. Communize the simple lands of the old world. Crave you the subject / simultaneity early and lake.Time ceased waiting life linked thought.Give up desires without intensity, democracy. Crave you sectarianism, particular truth. Not afraid / forming gangs—we arewhat has cubicle isolation,squat scene, criminal origins, field work, 80s purge. Scrape out the inside, the false differences,flight facilities. (Exhaustion.) Don’t give in.We are in a civil war, irremediably there.Multiply and consolidate the fly artwork.Deep cogitations then sleep. Normality subsidized this lingo. In London police struck and nearly killeda young man called Alfie—dripping in gold.

MONEY SHOT THROUGH GLASS CRANE FLOOR

Electro riot tonight, May Day, Santa Cruz.The windows of Urban Outfitters were smashedafter Hova’s song about New York came on the skateboard drive PA. Nobody looted a thing. (A few months later hella goodbye Oakland Foot Locker.)

The crowd’s fissiparous dissolution came as it neared the clock tower and we wound up at the Red Room. Liv was pissed. I don’t remember anyonesaying, “When the jewelry placewent down our Justice song was on.”

We had numbers. The homie Pat broke up some fights. Don was there.Homie’d been quoted in the Times.Bonnano (in a cheap suit), Maya, and I walked together, hurried (better), as the black flag went up over the action. Jo told me she didn’t want to get arrested. When the bouncers at Motiv dragged Sam down, a masked groupuscule freed him up.

Back at the neon red debrief nobody said much.“We crossed this Burmese river” or, “The Punjab is a land with five rivers.”I drank from a glass of beer and remembered the Alexander Kluge VHS The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Woman.The wind was blowing down treesAt the port of Long Beach,a Mitsubishi crane un-stackeda glow-blue sheet of wind.I’ve been rolling around with a bunch of Fleetwood Macks. We are the crisis.

JEANINE WEBB

In the future, the cities are burning.

o In the future, ask your DNA. o In the future, instead of working we will design brumous zoompods and poem denominations and slide ghouls and refractory dance studies. o In the future, we go to a bar with a megawave until the price signal no longer works at last call. o In the future, I open this book by a friend it is full of quadrilaterals and riot cops the thing is, misery means factory.

o In the future, we are in the present. o In the future, breath’s hit blueprinting seems indecently seems contrasted office aversion early galvanic radio bedstead’s part epitome then laser relief. o In the future, everyone will be imprisoned for 15 minutes for the theft of the Mona Lisa. o In the future, dolphins will no longer own stocks or attack drones. o In the future, our galoshes have galoshes.

o In the future, our Americas lack Americas.

o In the future, our terrorists have terrorists. o In the future, cannibalistic life dearly open fought 6 firecrackers says firecrackers high boat already queercore. o In the future, our time machines have rhyme machines. o In the future, our dimes will have duende. o In the future, I was walking up La Brea having smilodon thoughts and dire wolves in my sneakers. o In the future I was reneging—no, regenerating with vigor. o In the future, O the sorrow of earthworms in ash colonnades. o In the future, O uprisings hip hop mote cushions K-pop underwear. o In the future, green fractal underbrush by the urban farm, plein air portraits of mosaic virus. o In the future, technocratic “maverick” parodic Han Solos encased in platinum.

o In the future, beautiful bangles and angles of sexy nanotubes. o In the future, we were womaning up and maning down. o In the future, factories of lyrical change. o In the future, bandeaus of sandollars and the hull like a wingspan. o In the future, the burning throes of the fictional past. o In the future we and we and we and we and the open air markets traversed by limned chile grifters. o In the future, take it all off. o In the future, O anaphorapodes. o In the future, the open wounds of Futurists. o In the future, the kindness of the enfant terrible. o In the future, [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]. o In the future, terminal awesome sparkle fansub yo mama turf quails communizing lucid.

o In the future, homes we give each other underwater. o In the future, astral catalepsy of the present. o In the future, the foreclosure of the foreclosure of history. o In history, the future of the present past. o History: the moment we caught up to desire we lacked the language for it.

During its second phase (1962 – 68), the “politics of communication” emerged as a central concern for the Situationist International, as evidenced by the rapid succession of tracts published at this time in which language is brought into focus; these include “Priority Communication” (IS #7, 1962), “All the King’s Men” (IS #8, 1963), “Words and Those Who Use Them” (IS #9, 1964), and “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary,” “Communication Colonized,” “Decomposition and Recuperation,” and “The Ideology of Dialogue” (IS #10, 1966). The SI’s concern with language was in part a legacy of its having devolved from Lettrism, and from the beginning was deeply inflected with the theoretical ambivalence the SI maintained in respect to the revolutionary agency of the avant-garde, whose historical failures and limitations they strove to overcome in both theory and practice. Like so many avant-garde groups before and after, the SI held that art and poetry, as separate, specialized activities, had to be suppressed before they could be given their fullest “expression” in revolution. This dialectic was made most explicit in a germane 1963 tract, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art,” in which Debord defines the SI’s project as “an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on,” he writes, “any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.” The problem of overcoming art as a separate sphere of activity – a problem that preoccupied the SI throughout the mid-60’s and which eventually became the impetus behind many of its notorious purges – was framed primarily as a problem of having to overcome the impasse the avant-garde had reached in terms communication: “[t]he fact that

ROGER FARR

DIALOGUE ARMED

It makes sense to move against the enemy’s communications, but one’s own will be stretched in the process, and their protection must also be considered.

– Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, A Game of War (1987)

[…]

____________From “Gangland and Linguistics” – an introduction to Alice Becker-Ho’s Essence of Jargon (forthcoming, Autonomedia).

the language of real communication has been lost is what modern movement of art’s decay, and ultimately of its formal annihilation, expresses positively. What it expresses negatively is that a new common language has yet to be found.” Where Dada had succeeded aesthetically in its negations of mass-communication, it had failed politically to provide a means through which an alternative could be realized; in contrast, the Surrealists had succeeded in realizing the imaginative potential of language, but had done so without mounting a serious challenge to the spectacle, which in the SI’s analysis was tantamount to strengthening the spectacle’s command. Overcoming this impasse required nothing less than overcoming the avant-garde’s historical failure to realize its own “formal annihilation” in the development of a countervailing means of revolutionary communication, or, as Debord called it – “a praxis embodying both an unmediated activity and a language commensurate with it.” Under the society of the spectacle, however, which was theorized as an authoritarian communication regime where “the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,” such a language could have no existing, material basis from which to develop without first taking “effective possession of the community of dialogue” – a project which, as Mackenzie Wark has noted, is also emphasized in Becker-Ho and Debord’s celebrated Game of War, a board game in which the “‘war’ can be fought as much on the plane of communication as on that of extensible space.” For this reason, the SI’s “politics of communication” led them towards forms of minor-political contestation that began with the construction of new social relations at the level of everyday life (“the constructed situation”), which would eventually intensify and coalesce, via a movement of dispersal and conflict, into insurrection and revolution, until the original “communities of dialogue” were fully socialized in a federated network of self-managed worker’s councils:

“In-group languages — those of informal groupings of young people; those that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as the trobar clus and the dolce stil nuovo — are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct, transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to federate such poetic “soviets” or communication councils in order to initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to resort to the enemy’s communication network (that is, to the language of power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its desire.”

The Situationist theory of revolution was thus predicated upon the creation of new social relations brought about not through art – which like the spectacle could only represent, or at best prefigure these relations – but through playful, embodied language practices tied to new forms-of-life.1 For this reason, Debord concluded that revolution was only possible when “dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world.” In Essence of Jargon, one of her several works on “the language of the dangerous classes,” Alice Becker-Ho provides evidence, quite literally, of armed dialogue:“[i]n argot,” she writes “words are weapons that can be loaded or unloaded at leisure, as circumstances dictate: they ‘give cover’ or give the signal, inform or disinform, amuse or threaten.” Indeed, while it should be kept in mind at all times that “[t]he world of outlaws… is a brutal and dangerous place where you need to prove yourself with more than mere words,” insofar as words are concerned, slang responds to the weaponry of spectacular society with its own, superior “illusion-generating” devices, in order “to reappropriate the [former] for itself.” As Agamben argues “[w]hat we encounter in the spectacle is our very linguistic nature inverted. For this reason (precisely because what is being expropriated is the possibility of a common good), the spectacle’s violence is so destructive; but for the same reason, the spectacle still contains something like a positive possibility–and it is our task to use this possibility against it.” What we encounter in dangerous class slang is precisely this “positive possibility,” materialized as the inversion of our inverted language: “slang is essentially the enemy’s vernacular turned upside down, then disguised.” Thus, where “the masters of [the spectacle] seize signs, defuse them, and turn them upside down,” slang corrects this relation: “slang views the world as a dialectical totality where each thing contains its own negation; a place consequently where everything can be turned around and take on the opposite, or a complementary, meaning.” Slang, as “the language of contradiction… dialectical in form as well as in content,” is therefore able to “put things back in their proper place.” As Becker-Ho demonstrates in Essence, this act of seizure and reversal is accomplished in part through elaborate feats of linguistic détournement, or what linguists call “relexicalization” – that quality intrinsic to every anti-language whereby normalized words are re-encoded with new meanings, through techniques such as “phonetic alterations by means of the reversal of syllables, morphological distortions accompanying suffixations or the distribution of infixes, semantic alterations such as the replacement of a noun by its adjective, and particular use of metaphor.” To select from Essence just one example of how these devices are at play in the production a slang word, we could do worse than the following:____________1 This point cannot be overstated, given the increasing tendency to reduce the SI’s work to a collection of rather dubious aesthetic concepts.

FLIC, FLICARD, FLICAILLE: the police in general (this term only begins to appear in the nineteenth century, since which time it has managed to achieve currency among the police themselves) flek (Yid. ex Ger. Fleck, Du. vleck): dirt, stain, blemish. A term from diamond-cutters’ jargon, where it means a flaw or (coloured) speck in the stone [Fr. paillette, crapaud, gendarme, dragonneau] whence FLAQUER, DÉFLAQUER, NAQUER DU FLA [in butchers’ slang]: to defecate, to vomit, to give birth, to drop. The derivatives FLAQUE [excrement], FLAGADA [exhausted], and a few metaphorical constructions in French such as “clair comme un tas de boue dans la gueule d’un flic” [lit. as clear as a load of dirt rammed into a copper’s mug], or again “du poulet on en bouffera encore quand eux boufferont de la merde” [we’ll still have chicken (du poulet) to eat when coppers (les poulets) are eating shit] serve to underpin this image for the expression FLIC à dard, see AS above in typographers’ slang CHOUFLIC means a bad workman fink (slang): bastard, shit, strike-breaker, policeman, informer; to fink: to inform, to chicken out, to back out, to fall through, to fail, to flop.

Such techniques of lexical inversion were of great interest to the SI. In fact, as early as 1960, Kotyani had called for “a little glossary of détourned words” in order to counter “the big lie that the racketeering interests impose on the whole gangland of social space.” To expose this lie, Kotyani proposed a series of relexicalizations: “‘neighborhood’ should often be read gangland. Similarly, social organization = protection. Society = racket. Culture = conditioning. Leisure activity = protected crime. Education = premeditation.” Such a glossary, if it had been fashioned, would have gone some way in fulfilling Debord and Wolman’s early call for “ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life.” Indeed, the techniques of ultradétournement, they argued, were already observable: “[g]estures and words can be given other meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical reasons. The secret societies of ancient China made use of quite subtle recognition signals encompassing the greater part of social behavior (the manner of arranging

cups; of drinking; quotations of poems interrupted at agreed-on points). The need for a secret language, for passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite.” Six years later Khayati revisited the glossary proposal by suggesting an even more ambitious book. In his “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary” (1966) he wrote:

“[o]ur dictionary will be a sort of code book enabling one to decipher information and rend the ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual dictionary, since each word has an ‘ideological’ meaning for power and a real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present historical phase. Thus we will be able at each step to determine the various positions of words in the social war.”

Unfortunately, by the time the SI had dissolved in 1972, neither the dictionary, nor the glossary, had been produced. And yet, as the social war intensifies, the uses such a book could be put to, if it were to appear, become clearer by the day.

References

Becker-Ho, A 2004, The princes of jargon: a neglected factor at the origins of dangerous class slang, trans. J McHale, Mellen, New York.

----------. 1995, “The language of those in the know”, trans. J McHale, Situationist International online, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/postsi/language.html>.

----------. 2011 (forthcoming), The essence of jargon, trans. J McHale, Autonomedia, New York.

---------- , nd, “The limits of play”, trans. J McHale, unpublished manuscript.

Becker-Ho, A and Guy Debord, 2007, A game of war, trans. D Nicholson-Smith, Atlas, London.

Debord, G 1963, “The Situationists and the new forms of action in politics and art,” trans. Ken Knabb, Bureau of public secrets, viewed 4 July 2009 <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/newforms.htm>.

------------. 1967, The society of the spectacle, Black and Red, Detroit. Debord, G and G Wolman 1956, “A user’s guide to détournement,” trans. K Knabb, Situationist International Online, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html>.

Kaufmann, V 2006, Guy Debord: revolution in the service of poetry, trans. R Bononno, Minnesota UP.

Khayati, M 1966, “Captive words: preface to a Situationist dictionary,” trans. K Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.captivewords.htm>.

Kotayni, A 1960, “Gangland and philosophy,” trans. K Knabb, Situationist International Online, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/gangland.html>.

Situationist International 1961, “Instructions for an Insurrection,” trans. K Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/6.insurrection.htm>.

-------------. 1963, “All the king’s men,” trans. K Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/8.kingsmen.htm>.

-------------. 1964, “Words and those who use them,” trans. TY Levin, Situationist International Online, viewed 4 July 2009, <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/words.html>.

Wark, M, 2008, 50 years of recuperation of the Situationist International, Princeton Architectural Press, NY.

SOME POETIC TERMS

for the Pacific Institute of Language and Literacy Studies, Vancouver, BC

Assonance: a limited plan of action based on a conception of how, in a restricted phase of a conflict, to use effectively the available means of action to achieve a specific limited objective. Intended for use in implementing a wider strategy in a phase of the overall conflict.

Ballad: an area to which access is controlled through an entry point and limited to autho-rized, appropriately screened personnel and properly escorted visitors.

Couplet: a non-market mode of economic integration where goods are moved between symmetrical groups.

Diction: unrestrained by convention or morality.

Foot: a minimum of defense against attempts at political or ideological recuperation by power or against repression.

Free verse: Measure of disorganization or degradation in the universe.

Iambic: activities, transactions and assets, often illegal, which are not registered or other-wise acknowledged by respective state authorities.

Limerick: the system of cogs and chains by which power is transmitted from the periph-ery to the centre.

Line: an interruption in the train of thought perceived by the person as someone remov-ing or taking away his thoughts.

Meter: arranging the members of a society into a pattern of superior and inferior ranks.

Pastiche: the imitating, copying or counterfeiting of products. Systematically breaching trademark rights, patent rights, copyrights and other commercial rights.

Realism: a cage from which there is no escape.

Repetition: a delusion that the self or part of the self, part of the body, other persons, or the whole world has ceased to exist.

Sestina: traps based on control of the center or loss of control of the center.

Sonnet: the flanks of the opponent are attacked simultaneously in a pinching motion after the opponent has advanced towards the center.

Terza rima: any provision in a contract that allows one or more parties to end the con-tract upon the occurrence of certain events.

Tone: deliberate action aimed at weakening an enemy through subversion, obstruction, disruption, and/or destruction.

TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS

from MEANS

for Aaron Vidaver

The spokesperson is the person who, speaking about a group, speaking on behalf of a group, surreptitiously posits the existence of the group in question, institutes the group, through that magical operation which is inherent in any act of naming. That is why we must proceed to a critique of political reason…

– Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

the people as people before the people– Louis Cabri, “Bys”

It is what the people want in a very literal sense. What the people want is a more thorough conversation on reproductive health issues. The people want a worthy successor. Because it is what the people want. What the people want is a united front of all progressive forces. The people want an app equivalent to “shopsavy.” Biased news is not what the people want. The people want another invasion. Clean diesel is what the people want. What the people want is a way of keeping in touch with what matters to people today. Contrary to what you may believe, this is not what the people want. Communism is not what the people want. Credit card processing is what the people want. The people want unpredictable biological children. What the people want is bacon. The people want chicken. What the people want is candor. The people want application software. Every poll shows this is not what the people want. Free higher education is what the people want. Growth is not what the people want. The people want cold beer and hot showers. The people want usable devices. What the people want is chicken. He does so because it is what the people want. The people want for their team to reach the finals. He is not what the people want. What the people want is a door. I can say (and know) this is not what the people want. The people want for us to stop having these rhetorical wars and start solving the problem. I sincerely believe that lasting peace is what the people want. I think this is what the people want. If well-designed and quirky sportswear is what the people want, then let’s give it to them. The people want invariably the same as what the person using the phrase

wants. What the people want is for our laws against gambling to be uniformly enforced. The people want very simple things. What the people want is for you to try. The people want to get rid of Ahmadinejad because they believe that his majority is a fraud. It gives them greater confidence to just continue lying that “this is what the people want.” It is not what the people want. The people want the protest to end. What the people want is forever secondary to what the movers and shakers want. The people want to look at stuff. The people want more effective selling time with better leads that have high odds of converting into pipeline opportunities. It may be a little too risky to place our faith in some dialectical claim that this is not what the people want. Legislation is NOT what the People want. Of course it is dangerous to propitiate violence, but armed conflict is what the people want. Peace of mind is what the people want. People never get the government they deserve because government is not what the people want. What the people want is health services that are accessible. What the people want is irrelevant and I’m not sure if it’s salvageable. The people want not often what we give in our information and services. The people want to reduce the malicious abuse at all levels. The people want what our forbears wanted. The people want widescreen DVDs. Right now it is not what the people want. The left always thinks they know what’s best for the country while refusing to accept that what they want is not what the people want. The people want a revolution. The people want peace. What the people want is not always difficult. The people want a government that obeys the law. Perhaps the current system of self-serving professional politicians and ambitious lawyers really is what the People want. The people want a real debate on the subject. The PNG Community Coalition Against Corruption says this is what the people want. The spending in this bill is not what the people want. This health reform bill is not what the people want. What the people want is not taken into consideration. This is not what the people want. This is what the people want. The people want similar unanimity for solution of their problems. This is what the people want: “jingle” if you will. This kind of sudden change in Iran is not what the people want. The people want simply what is reasonable. What the people want is simple. This landscape is what “the people” want. To me that’s not true, that is not what the people want. The people want to see a mask over her face. Too much reality is not what the people want. The people want some deal stitched behind closed doors without the consent of the British. What the people want is single payer medicare for all coverage. We have to limit the power of the trade unions because that is what the people want. What is “popular” is what the people want. The people want someone to listen. The people want someone who will be there for them “no matter what.” What is important is what the people want. What Team Obama is doing is not what the people want. The people want the key to having a good business. Despite over 90% public disapproval, it goes without saying this is not what the people want. After all this is what the people want.

DERECK CLEMONS

BLOWOUT PREVENTER: A TRILOGY

Will Help Determine Why It Didn’t Work As Intended

So far its resistance to the rule of law has only brought the projects she’s inhabiting, a performance of options, & lawsuits—for identity theft. & if not that, then copyright infringement. In this case, to inhabit, feeling warmth, appearance. Affordable materials. The screen (“What do you mean, ‘What about Alice?’ She doesn’t exist! This whole scene is over in like a second, & that’s it! I’m not even going back to my apartment—I’ve never seen it! I was on the sidewalk, then on the subway, & now we’ve been sitting here. We’re two hours old! We’re freaks!”) in an increasingly cinematic distribution of the image into the empty theater seats. Into specific topics, including the role of the duplicate in war, in audiences & in the rise of the director & the avant-garde, their own efforts at ownership, the effect of cinema on live performance, of live performance on the law, the performance of the law, social relations, disaster, or crisis, news, the effect of an audience on a television commercial, on Broadway, & on a speech by the president, at church one Sunday. Obama was studying the effects of audiences on the appearance of his children. One of the sisters, Linnet, breaks down on a viral YouTube video: a series of classrooms & prison cells unfolds from Jane Eyre’s head, her recent project. The word “renter” became a stand-in for “no count.” Poor renters are to be reviled. Judge Berrigan has found she’s giving no consideration to the apartments themselves. Plan B saw the police were on one of the Parade Cams! visibly abusing their authority.

Racist by design, most of America & most of the world of class-driven societies acknowledge that & rebuke those patterns & denounce those patterns. Racism is a clear thought between those two paragraphs. She’s tried to see their image set against itself & then point at the one that gives her a greater sense of her occupying traditional social structures. Judge Berrigan has found little she would call inappropriate. She will find her appearance & will now comment. Related topics: real estate. Sponsored Links: 1 Weird Trip to Belly Fat. An image set is against itself capturing its distribution on Broadway. The audience is self-replicating; self-replicating, an image occurs, as plots & Jane’s being in the audience. Recommendations: The optic, the arrival of visiting parties, shared settings; for instance, a New Orleans parent says her eighth-grader was put in a “cage” at school. 215 people shared this. Social plug-in: the visually arresting. From Our Advertisers: Advertise With Us. Popular Tags. What’s this? Share this story. More stories in Opinions. Previous story—“I don’t get a period—I’m a cartoon character.” Rather than recede from this sequestered position, Judge Berrigan’s eyes blur as she tries to gaze at a transparent subject, the spectators bending to describe the subject, a text, a pageantry of active positions, the means by which one folds back on itself in examination. To participate: to withdraw, leaving behind a cardboard cutout. The first of your friends to like not providing enough documentation was caught in “this location.” A bedroom door closed after her. You just proved you’re not from New Orleans.

Further Testing of the Failed Preventer

Just blocks from the building, that incident occurred. The Sunday night clash between police & marchers links several people to a sign on a door that noted the group Iron Rail was closed at “this location.” A posting on their website puts the closure in mind of the city’s recent crackdown on a costume sale at a bar on Frenchmen Street, the arrests last year of brass band members for playing their horns at night, &, once again, the police clash with marchers just days ago. Victor Pizarro, spokesman for Plan B, said he is confused by the NOPD’s actions. He noted that his group Plan B has operated for 11 years & is intended for viewing, image-making a crucial part of the group’s hopeless attempt to feel united with the spectacle; they cannot feel it. A passive player, Jane has the power to remove her gaze & thereby end the scene; it’s the active player that cannot do so & remains arrested by the ongoing conflation of outward grounds & inward imagination, such that the latter, with the social relations it makes possible, is eviscerated for profit & nonetheless useful. Related topics: marigny, new orleans, nopd. You just proved you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Then you misspell “you’re.” How’s that library filled with knowledge & encouraging “the people that care forgot” to read? Inappropriate? Alert us. & alert us to performance activity & how it relates to its audiences, especially how it points at which repetition occurs, or how a rhetoric issues from within oneself, a point at which an audience performs. Jane tips increasingly out of her dress & is everywhere in contemporary culture extended from an audience on television, out of & back into the market, where one is for viewing & can edit. As long as you go back to whatever big box suburb you’re from & buy a laxative or whatever. You overweight fast food chugging subservient fool. We spell “Metry”! If you were from here you’d know that. The act is collaborative & constantly updating, located on a muddy lawn. The police were frustrated. One woman was arrested for taking pictures.

During the April 20 Rig Explosion

The Parade Cam! showed up. Meanwhile, an audience rebuked those patterns & denounced those patterns. Each member saw herself as volumes of metric data, volumes of activity. The situation made it impossible for his staff to rebuke the patterns. More testing may determine the fundamental safety design problem with the pods that controlled the massive device, so BP asked that more testing be done to confirm that. In an image adjacent the flattened & chugging text, The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation & Enforcement & U.S. Coast Guard show off the blowout preventer, which is lashed to a barge docked at a NASA assembly facility. “Not sure if want,” reads one caption. Chacko & Berrigan glance down, reflexively checking the ground beneath their feet. Haliburton did the cement job. BP & contractor Halliburton were aware that tests of the cement showed it was not stable. “It care forgot: inappropriate,” reads another. Jane straightened the sleeves of her blouse, her dangerous life flattened. The President trolls on the radio. He suggests the audience mingle in sequestered columns of adjustable measurements, tax returns & documentation of income. Jane says they need to put that blowout preventer back up Dick Cheney’s rectum, where it came from. One woman was arrested for taking pictures. A former co-worker of mine, a peaceful man playing a horn in the band, was tackled, pepper-sprayed & tasered; the police broke not only his horn but also his cheekbone.

The significance of thetheoretical works of JV Stalinis great.He generalized all theideological inheritance ofVI Lenin

bons mots exchanged betweenLillian Hellman and Joe Alsop,the boss slapped him down byreminding him that Hellman“still thinks Joe Stalin is great.

Comrade Stalin is great scholar,In linguistics,he’s the boss.

In Russia,53% of population think thatStalin is greatguy.Check “Return ofSoviet Empire” topic.

Stalin is great because –he killed more Germans than us?And that is agood thing?But I thoughtkilling people wasBAD.I just makes MOREenemies.

ARA SHIRINYAN

STALIN IS GREAT

Josef Stalin isgreat grandfather ofSaddam Hussein.

I think Stalin is great as amilitary powerhouse

Stalin is greatif not for him,USSR will not become amajor playerin international.USSR Must have abig military,it is such abig country

What was the book I read about arussian journalist that got sent to thegoulag becausehe did not write as manySTALIN IS GREATas he should have written

am to tell you thatStalin and theSoviet Union areKaput,that Hitler is great, butI tell youStalin is great andHitler iskaput.

what about all the artists . . . .you couldn ’ t write anything thatdoesn ’ t sayStalin is great ,USSR is greatbtw trowI do not need to follow your mumbo - jumbo“ Stalin is great ” theories to keep myleftist cridentials valid

Stalin is great challenge forbook-minded researcher.Lawmakers inwest Russian city. want to honorSoviet dictator.

I don’t care if yougo stand out in the hallwork on your‘Stalin is great’ report.Just shut up andstop trying to tell usnot to observeGod,

You won’t believe me,but the site was always walled with“Stalin is Great” postsand other blatantlypro-Communistrhetoric.

WENDY TREVINO

PHALANSTERY FOR IMAGINARY FRIENDS

In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations.

– David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital

Bloo was like a hippy telling a Buddhist to shut upBecause he wouldn’t stop telling people to shut upBecause throughout the war they’d been so

Quiet Eduardo was like Cesar Chavez and Che shaking their headsLike Pinky mirrors Firefly in Duck Soup like who wore it betterFrames dresses and action figures the last that nobody

Comes in Wilt lost like most of his arm was imagined tallFather stay at home like a Coca Cola-iced tea taste testGrandma sister’s husband’s brother &

Still alive Coco could do slapstick but only at podium like HarpoLike that was a curse contingent with credit the university’s callFor jihad against the Cotillion PTA the criminalizing of

Slapping Mr. Herriman fought in one of the wars worried he enjoyedShopping for his girls too much sent them all to college But was mostly tired always between meetings a

Communist Cheese was post-Dr. Strangelove pre-something id shaped smudgeSpread around the eyes of Jackie Kennedy in the commonestOf dreams the passports & degrees counterfeit

DAN THOMAS-GLASS

100 PARTIAL THESES ON BEAUTY

1. For, once shorn of what Kant calls interest, satisfaction becomes so indeterminate that it no longer serves to define beauty

2. The doctrine of disinterested satisfaction is impoverished vis-à-vis the aesthetic; it reduces the phenomenon either to formal beauty

3. It is striking that an aesthetic that constantly insists on subjective feeling as the basis of all beauty

4. It holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hieroglyphic, but for everything composed of beauty

5. To say that art is not identical with the concept of beauty

6. This subject matter would indeed become beautiful in a higher sense through its function in the pictorial composition, for instance, or by its participation in the production of a dynamic equilibrium; for, according to a Hegelian topos, beauty

7. The perpetually recurring becomes that antithetical other without which art, according to its own concept, would not exist; appropriated through negation, this other—the antithesis to beauty

8. In the history of art, the dialectic of the ugly has drawn the category of the beautiful into itself as well; kitsch is, in this regard, the beautiful as the ugly, taboo in the name of that very beauty

9. Formalistic classicism commits an affront: Precisely the beauty

10. In the penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting—in objecting to which the apologists of the status quo can think of nothing more substantial than that the world is ugly enough as it is and art therefore should be responsible for idle beauty

11. The mythical terror of beauty

12. If one originated in the other, it is beauty

13. Putting the concept of beauty

14. The definition of aesthetic as the theory of the beautiful is so unfruitful because the formal character of the concept of beauty

15. If aesthetics were nothing but a systematic catalogue of what is called beautiful, it would give no idea of the life that transpired in the concept of beauty.

16. In terms of the intention of aesthetic reflection, the concept of beauty

17. The idea of beauty

18. If it dispensed with categories, aesthetics would be no more than a hermetic historico- relativistic description of what beauty

19. The fatal universality of the concept of beauty

20. The transition to the primacy of form codified by the category of the beautiful inherently tends toward that formalism—the convergence of the aesthetic object with the most universal subjective determinations—from which the concept of beauty

21. Nothing would be achieved by setting up a material essence over and against formal beauty

22. The image of beauty

23. The shudder in the face of this is rescued by beauty

24. This was a process of formalization; therefore beauty

25. The reduction that beauty

26. If beauty

27. In all subsequent art of any import this counterelement to beauty

28. This occurred already in Euripedes’ dramas, where the horror of mythical violence redounds to the unblemished divinities, the Olympian consorts of beauty

29. The law of the formalization of beauty

30. Terror itself peers out of the eyes of beauty

31. With all the ambivalence of triumph, what subjugates expression—the formal character of beauty

32. The affinity of all beauty

33. In serene beauty

34. Ever less is the beautiful achieved in a particular, purified form; beauty

35. Loyalty to the image of beauty

36. Once however the beautiful, as homeostasis of tension, is transferred to the totality, beauty

37. It is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty

38. Incidental beauty

39. By contrast, the autonomous work, functionally exclusive in itself, wants to achieve through its own immanent teleology what was once called beauty

40. If in spite of their division, purposeful and purposeless art nevertheless share the innervation of Sachlickkeit, the beauty

41. The beauty

42. Natural beauty

43. The reason for this is not that natural beauty

44. Therefore reflection on natural beauty

45. For this reason the turn against natural beauty

46. If the case of natural beauty

47. The reorientation of aesthetic theory toward natural beauty

48. Hegel obviously lacked the sensibility needed to recognize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name— natural beauty

49. The substantiality of the experience of natural beauty

50. Over long periods the feeling of natural beauty

51. The superiority of natural beauty

52. Kant lodged the sublime—and probably along with it all beauty

53. The degree to which the concept of natural beauty

54. Certainly these cultural landscapes do bear the character of inviolability that the accepted view associates with natural beauty

55. Without historical remembrance there would be no beauty

56. Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty

57. In the experience of natural beauty

58. The less secure the experience of natural beauty

59. Just how bound up natural beauty

60. Nature, as appearing beauty

61. To this extent the difference between the two forms of beauty

62. This much is true in Hegel’s theorem that art is inspired by negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty

63. Just as in the early bourgeois times natural beauty

64. That the experience of natural beauty

65. The anamnesis of freedom in natural beauty

66. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty

67. This is why genius, once it has become aware of itself, is no longer satisfied with natural beauty

68. For natural beauty

69. What is innervated in the response is, unequivocally, that natural beauty

70. The rigid concept of natural beauty

71. With the expansion of technique and, even more important, the total expansion of the exchange principle, natural beauty

72. Coined in opposition to absolutism’s wigs and formal gardens, the concept of natural beauty

73. Even adequate experience of natural beauty

74. This, however, does not amount to the condemnation of the category of natural beauty

75. The “How beautiful!” at the sight of a landscape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty

76. If, however, this allegory were substituted as the achieved state of reconciliation, it would be degraded as an aid for cloaking and legitimating the unreconciled world as one in which—as the claims goes—beauty

77. Genetically, aesthetic comportment may require familiarity with natural beauty

78. A qualitative distinction in natural beauty

79. Obviously, under the pressure of developments in painting the definition of natural beauty

80. Guilt for the evil star that hangs over the theory of natural beauty

81. Contrary to that philosopher of identity, Hegel, natural beauty

82. The shame felt in the face of natural beauty

83. The concept of the subaltern occurs literally in the passage of natural beauty

84. Thus it is from the deficiencies of immediate reality that the necessity of the beauty

85. The encipherment of the artwork, one facet of its apparition, is thus distinct from natural beauty

86. If the Platonic ideas were existence-in-itself, art would not be needed; the ontologists of antiquity mistrusted art and sought pragmatic control over it because in their innermost being they knew that the hypostasized universal concept is not what beauty

87. Hegel did indeed define beauty

88. Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty

89. Pain in the face of beauty

90. The historical subject of beauty

91. Polemically he attributes what is not thing-like in art to natural beauty

92. Because beauty

93. Hegel’s thesis, that art beauty

94. Those who brag of having “got” something from an artwork transfer in philistine fashion the relation of possession to what is strictly foreign to it; they extend the comportment of unbroken self-preservation, subordinating beauty

95. Yet, because of this purely physical immediacy, the living beauty

96. Precisely the beautiful, which presents itself as independent from the subject, as absolutely something not made, falls under suspicion of being feebly subjective; Hegel equates this directly with the indeterminacy of natural beauty

97. In fact, the spiritualization that art has undergone during the past two hundred years and through which it has come maturity has not alienated art from nature, as is the opinion of reified consciousness; rather, in terms of its own form, art has converged with natural beauty

98. By rejecting the fleetingness of natural beauty

99. This is implicit in the definition of beauty

100.The unstillable longing in the face of beauty

BRIAN ANG

TEXTUALITY AND ANNIHILATION: JOSHUA CLOVER’S “GILDED AGE”

“Gilded Age” begins with a set of descriptions of conclusions from textual operations: persons are under restriction of movement (“they are not allowed to travel”), representation as violence (“this poem may be a kind of betrayal”), and persons have been dispossessed of tools for agency (“they have had their tools taken away”). A description follows upon the process of textual operation itself: methodological and received formal rigor disallows the contamination of “poignancy.” The presentation of conclusions shorn of context foregrounds the contingency of the conclusions upon their systems of relations. In a textual operation in which signification can only be produced by a system of difference, signification is restricted to the system’s finite representational capacity: textual free play, in theory and historical practice, is also a prison. The poem distinguishes between the experience of a textual operation and the material conditions in which the experience occurs by a description of material conditions: a standardized “town where there are many car dealers and fewer charms” and “no tools,” the material conditions of deprivation different than the representation of it; a town with satiating commodities like “soda agrume” and an archive of representations of historical disorders (“Library of Riots”) at hand for consumption. Material conditions produce heterogeneity of subjectivity: “all of this seemed to some a special effect” while for others it is “life,” experientially totalizing without significance. Both the real of material conditions and symbolic “life” are in part constituted and constructed by the materials and experiences of texts (“like life part of it was made from texts”). The poem then launches a catalogue of titles, quotations, names, terms, and descriptions organized by sound. The organization by sound without elaborating on the materials’ significance emphasizes the materials’ range of reference on multiple possible dimensions, including:

____________Joshua Clover, “Gilded Age,” Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 3, 2010. Online at http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/issue3-three/clovergildedage.html.

Spatial the materials are drawn from across the globe and the perspectival references range from continental sub-regional (“South Asia”) to street level (“Rue des Pyramides”)Historical the materials are drawn from music, film, and events from 2010 back to The Phenomenology of Spirit published in 1807Typological the materials can be categorized under or in proximity to literature, music, film, locations, finance, theory, art, philosophy, and eventsCultural the materials range from highbrow (i.e. “24 City”) to mass (i.e. “California Gurls”)

The materials are the materials at hand: products of the present mode of production and remnants from the past. From the totality of signs, the poet’s sensibility chose and organized a partial catalogue of materials that condition the poet’s subjectivity, and the range of reference refracts the heterogeneity of possible subjective accessibility for experiencers. Most of the materials’ referential specificities are accessible through the Internet, the latest technological development representing collective knowledge, but the catalogue’s range also reaches into local experiential milieus. For instance, “Tim On The Cover Of The Chronicle” refers to the front page photo and article of the March 5, 2010 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle about the March 4, 2010 protest concerning California public education fee hikes, during which protesters marched onto the Interstate 880 freeway and blocked traffic before being arrested, which the photo shows. I know the reference because the event was part of my experiential milieu, but the reference is not generally accessible. On the opposite side of the spectrum of accessibility, “Queer Substance Stance of Critique” and “Method” remain opaque to me in their referential specificity. The catalogue’s organization by sound emphasizes the materiality of language, with attention as atomized as the letter (“Matisse Backward Is System”) and, immediately following in the next stanza, the syllable (“A thing like a frag / A thing like a syn / A thing like a tag / a –ma a –ment”). The catalogue augments the emphasis on the materiality of language with retaining the unity of the sign by not annihilating reference: a primary effect in the catalogue is the melee of difference in the domain of reference. A sign’s dissemination in the totality of signs is conditioned by its referent, as in a recent development of representation and dissemination, the “metatag,” the data in websites including keywords and physical locations used for indexing by search engines. “[T]he fire in the bank,” its referential specificity focused by the co-presence in the poem of “Syntagma Square,” near the fire, refers to the fire that killed three workers in a bank during the tumultuous

anti-austerity protest in Athens, Greece on May 5, 2010 and was widely disseminated in the media, becoming part of collective knowledge on the Internet indexed by metatags. The representational and disseminating apparatus of the Internet is a latest development of present material conditions, part of the larger tendency of postmodernism in which the former distinctions of society and spectacle collapse and blur:

“If an image disappeared its place was immediately filled with a kind of neutral plastic material we knew as the social stuff. And a new image would appear elsewhere with a gentle whoosh because the visible kept a careful equilibrium. Except it wanted to expand and sometimes when you woke in the morning there would also be an unfamiliar image where an old image had been […]”

From the partiality of experiential subjectivity, itself a product of material conditions, it is impossible to fully grasp the totality of material conditions and its spectacular characteristics: “[…] and we didn’t know if they were pasted one image on the other like an old billboard or if the new image covered over the social stuff or maybe it was what the stuff had become” (my emphasis). The real of material conditions is approachable through representation: another recent development of the Internet is “word-clouds,” visual representations of metatags, “themselves an allegory for the social stuff and like all allegories it went both ways.” Word-clouds as a symbolic product of the Internet are conditioned by the encompassing present mode of production and its cultural products, and as an embodied expression of these logics, can symptomatically reveal their tendencies beyond the limits of experiential subjectivity. As a contemporary representational development, word-clouds can reveal its moment of the ever-changing “social stuff” in ways that older allegorical symbolic acts cannot. The distinction between the experience of a textual operation and material conditions is restated with attention to subjectivity: “Working from a text I felt guilty for working” because “out the door” is the oppressed “global underclass.” The subjective affects of guilt and irony (“you’re just like what’s up”) are products of material conditions, but in the not simply determinant heterogeneity of subjectivity there is also utopian desire for a different mode of production’s temporality: “We knew it was time to leave our time.” As the present mode of production’s temporality is totalizing while subjectivity is heterogeneous, “Love,” in a consistent genericity, “cannot help with” rupturing postmodern temporality: love must be problematicized to be useful in this regard. The imaginative capacity for rupturing postmodern temporality is possible because of local experientiality in the heterogeneity of subjectivity: “And all this talk of zones of ambience is possible because [….]” Being (“you live”) in the specificity of space and time (“a street that is mentioned by name in Zone just 98 years ago”; Rue des Rosiers, Paris, France, 2010) is overdetermined by the sedimented characteristics of the

space’s past: the cultural (“the quarter that is the Jewish quarter in a neighborhood that is the gay neighborhood […] the street with the lesbian bars”), the representational (“Zone”), and the economic (“at one point 95% of the nation’s clothing made here”). The sedimented past is part of the space’s present consumable image: “now it is fashionable as life is fashionable […] an image of your life.” The poem can represent all this, even “the pleasure index of the air” and “pheromonal haloes,” but to “love all this” in a feedback loop of produced subjectivity serves to reproduce the stasis of postmodern temporality and the conditions of work (“you will never be free of the work and no one is transformed as the world is transformed”), including the produced subjective affect of class performance (“its wine is my wine when I can afford it”). Rupture requires annihilation of the present’s contents, and “annihilation not as text,” the present’s contents’ representation, by a textual deconstruction, but “really now,” of referred-to material conditions. In the severity of this position, what can poetry contribute? Poetry as a weak cultural product of the age, that is to say as a relatively weak field of intensity of capital, affords reduced institutional enforcement to criticism of the age (“An age which no longer loves poetry has betrayed itself”) to poetry’s powerful representational and textual capacities through its medium of language and arsenal of tradition. “Gilded Age” by its title uses this representation of the late 19th century in America to emphasize the similarity of that age and the present age’s glittering immense arrays of commodities and position of transition into a new age through a period of economic depression, primary concerns of the poem, historical in the former and emergent by its very imaginative possibilities opened by present material conditions in the latter. The present understanding of the late 19th century as “The Gilded Age” is formed by the representation of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel of that name. The poem contributes to this severity by founding its authority by plagiarizing from tradition from Isidore Ducasse’s 1870 book Poésies, “There are not two kinds of poetry there is only one” and “The first principles must be beyond dispute,” enacting Ducasse’s poetics stated in Poésies, which also plagiarizes: “Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.” “The first principles must be beyond dispute” was also plagiarized by the Situationist International in “The Role of the SI,” Internationale Situationniste #7, April 1962, another work that aims at grounding authority, and as a part of the history of that line, also becomes a part of the poem’s gesture. The plagiarized statements are foundational gestures in themselves by establishing their authority by subordinating positions other their own, and the poem adds its own criterion banishing from poetry anything not “Jacobin and unyielding.” The poem specifies the multivalence of its oppositional stance as a characteristic and not a basely determinant one: “The best poetry will have contempt for its era but so will the worst.”

The poem affirms its plagiaristic intertextuality by declaring that poetry “must be made from everything / including text […] the minimum formula for realism,” for a postmodern realist poetry would emphasize the reality of the unprecedented entanglement of textual constitution of subjectivity in material conditions as well as recognize its own status as text. The poem adds another criterion for the supremacy of the “best poetry” over all of the “worst,” specifying that poetry “not align itself / with texts” and the post-structuralist wager of liberation through textual free play but that poetry “must align itself with work – meaning hatred / of work” and recomposes love as deployed by the act of the poem to be “in love with annihilation” toward this alignment, and renders itself to truth by declaring that “the rest is sophism.” The poem’s explicit authoritative subordination and self-affirmation as text take those revelations away from a textual deconstruction in advance. By subordinating its own authority as text to the annihilation of material conditions by aligning itself with the hatred of work, making itself a mediating aid to the indeterminate negativity of annihilation, the poem makes the valorization of its authority contingent upon annihilation outside the text. “Gilded Age”’s authoritative wager stands or falls on the realization of its call for poetry, with its multivalent textual capacity to make intricate insistences in its produced signification and representational apparatus to approach the real of material conditions, to delineate the limitations of its textual agency and aid annihilation, “really now.”

____________Thanks to Aaron Begg for critical comments on a draft of this piece.