Paul Chan: Mixing Materialism and Activism

I met Paul Chan a few years ago in NYC when I was working for the Electronic Literature Organization and he was a finalist for one of the two awards. Paul impressed me with his dynamism, and I wish I could get back to the States to attend his production of Waiting for Godot.

From a literary perspective, the move from producing morphing e-texts to staging Beckett in a New Orleans neighborhood left for dead makes complete sense. In both instances, there's a savvy literalism at work. A literalism that doesn't function, as some critics have argued, by nihilistically destroying meaning; rather, this literalism insists that although we ordinarily overlook meaning's material supports,it's senseless, and ultimately impossible, to remain always blind to the ecosystems in which meanings are enacted.


As I argue in "Senseless Resistances," the manuscript on which I'm presently working, the material resistances in the composition and the systems with which it comes into contact impede communication, generate affect, and catalyze the cognitive work required to bring the composition to life as a significant entity.

To those who would claim that such a materialist approach to literature and art is formalist, I would agree. To those who would claim that formalist approaches are inherently apolitical, I'd point to Beckett's involvement in the French Resistance or Chan's antiwar activism. Chan makes a distinction between politics (collaborative and goal specific) and art (individually produced, resistant to instrumentalized uses) that is worth retaining, if only to remind us that our lives are multi-faceted and engaging in one activity doesn't preclude another.


On a side note: Glad to see Paul rockin' the Nebraska cap, particularly after my beloved Huskers experienced such an awful football season. (The University of Nebraska Press continues to release quality books in literary studies, e.g., Nicholas Spencer's After Utopia and Marco Abel's Violent Affect, both of whom are
faculty members in UNL's English Department. If only they'd publish them in paperback.)

Puncturing the Pinhead Pundits (Who Promote Faux Patriotism)

Bill Maher mocks the ostentatious display of patriotic symbols on the grounds that these accessories simply provide cover to faux patriots, people eager to give the illusion that they're supporting the country, the troops, the military, etc. but who would prefer not to make an actual sacrifice.

Kudos to Maher for his spirited defense of Barack Obama's explanation for not wearing an American flag lapel pin (the pins have become a "substitute for true patriotism") and for calling the mainstream media, including ABC's Claire Shipman, for its blantant hypocrisy and for manufacturing faux news events. The punditocracy promotes the notion that political candidates should be judged according to nebulous and subjective criteria such as "authenticity" and "character" and candidates who don't spout the predictable platitudes the pundits and their handlers want to hear are quickly deemed "unelectable."

Thanks to Jim for e-mailing me this article. On the one hand, I'm glad to get some breathing room here in Sweden from the moronic press coverage of the US presidential race. The vacuousness of the discourse is especially apparent when you're outside looking in to the fishbowl. On the other hand, I'm fascinated by the techniques used to depoliticize the public sphere by diverting attention away from real problems that the government leaders need to confront, e.g., the rotting infrastructure, the health-care crisis, the declining standard of living, the rising debt, etc. And these are just a few of the domestic issues.

Ralph Ellison's Endless Revisions

Ralph Ellison's failure to publish a finished follow-up novel to Invisible Man during his lifetime has baffled critics and scholars of American literature. While a posthumous text, larger than Juneteenth, is imminent, the scholars who edited Ellison's volumes of writing into the forthcoming book to be published by the Modern Library suggest that Ellison's embrace of word-processing technology led Ellison to revise, repeatedly, already well-crafted sentences. Anyone fascinated as I am about how how technologies, particular the digital computer, alter the way we think and write will want to read The Invisible Manuscript, which contains something of a cautionary tale about writing with word-processing software: Computers make it easier to rework your writing, yes. But avoid the temptation to revise pepetually. Writers, particularly those with perfectionist tendencies, can get lost in syntactic detail and lose track of the larger project.

Summer Reading (ENGL 105: English & American Fiction)

A list of what we'll be reading in my English and American Fiction course this summer: Books for ENGL 105, Summer 2007

Connected Composers: Making Music and Money Online

Clive Tompson's "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" describes how blogs are changing the dynamic between musicians and their listeners. Blogs provide musicians a way to find an audience for their tunes, but fans are coming to expect more from them. Fans don't simply want music to be readily available for downloading; they want the musicians to be available for chit chat; they want the musicians to be their "friends."

Audience-artist interactivity is an interesting phenomenon, but I wonder whether the model is sustainable. Artists are often reclusive for a good reason: creation takes time and requires a level of attention that isn't possible when one must constantly check her e-mail or update her blog.

I've learned this lesson the hard way, through experience.

Questions this article raised for me: Are the Internet and e-networks making audience interaction necessary for artists and musicians who want to support themselves financially through their art? Will artists have the time both to communicate with the audience and to create quality compositions? To what extent will economic considerations - both financial and libidinal - shape the form of these compositions?

I know that my professional commitments - reading, writing, teaching, etc. - prevent me from blogging as much as I would like. Right now academia, at least the institution and the department in which I work, does not really provide the infrastructural resources to integrate blogging into the curriculum. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

While I love the convenience of networked discourse, electronic communication technologies can lead to hurried thoughts. Too often the aim is simply to hit send and make a connection. More time and thought must be given to the act of composition, to the creation of a message worth communicating.

As a teacher of literature, I devote much energy to making students more mindful readers: they need to be trained to slow down and pay attention to the workings of language, both their own and others's. I've found that electronic communications can distract students, who are no accustomed to being pereceptive observers of texts, or, for that matter, the world in which they live.