The Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies (pills) was founded in 2003 to formalize an ongoing intellectual collaboration between Roger Farr, Reg Johanson and Aaron Vidaver that commenced during discussion groups at Runcible Mountain College and Kootenay School of Writing (1998-2002). As a small affinity group of individuals who are active as writers, teachers, archivists, editors, scholars, parents, caregivers and/or cultural organizers, pills’ mandate is to carry out collaborative research and co-authorship in the intersecting areas of language, literacy and social reproduction. Current activities include co-research into protest genres, utopian pedagogy, and lumpenproletarian resistance, and publication of Parser: New Poetry and Poetics, The Rain Review of Books and Working Papers in Critical Practice.
2. Citations from Recent Work
(from XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics 15/16, 2006)
Enclosure: The end of collective control over the means of subsistence brought about through the collaboration of property owners and the state. First theorized by Marx as “primitive accumulation,” the enclosures signaled “the historic movement which changes producers into waged workers.” Marx described the enclosures as a discrete stage at the dawn of capitalism, in which the English countryside (“the commons”) was literally enclosed by fences, thereby uprooting peasant communities and transforming subsistence agriculture into the industrial production of commodities intended for distribution on an open market. The term has been resuscitated recently by autonomist Marxists, who argue that enclosure is in fact a continual process – the very foundation of capitalist reproduction, witnessed today in SAPs (the manufacturing and management of a global “debt crisis”). The Midnight Notes Collective argues that the terrain of these “New Enclosures” is both immaterial (the internet, information technology, communication) and profoundly material, transforming the very fabric of life itself (genetic engineering, seed patents, privatized water, etc.). Historically, popular response to the old enclosures included arson, theft, property destruction, and rioting. While certain wings of the contemporary anarchist movement have embraced this “diversity of tactics” [see LUMPENPROLETARIAT], most replies to the New Enclosures have been expressed as a desire to “Reclaim the Commons.” Such nostalgia for a lost “organic society” was critiqued by Williams in The Country and the City. As the British autonomist collective Aufheben notes, in advanced capitalist nations the pressing task is not to reclaim the commons, but rather to transform capital into a commons. [RF]
Lumpenproletariat: The surplus population said to exist outside of the productive apparatuses of capitalism. Riff-raff. Bums. Vagabonds. Beggars. Jailbirds. Hooligans. Lazzaroni. Blouson noir. Goldbrickers. Petty criminals. Ne’er-do-wells. Prostitutes. Hobos. Junkies. Rotters. Knaves. Defectives. Scavengers. Thugz. Layabouts. Despised by Marxists. “The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass” (Marx-Engels 494). “The harshest measures of martial law are impotent against outbreaks of the lumpenproletarian sickness” (Luxemburg 74). Adored by anarchists. “They are ‘individual bawlers’ who offer no ‘guarantee’ and have ‘nothing to lose,’ and so nothing to risk” (Stirner 147). “That rabble ... which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate the Social Revolution and bring it to triumph” (Bakunin 48). Central for mid-to-late twentieth century anti-colonial & national liberation struggles. “At the core of the lumpenproletariat ... the rebellion will find its urban spearhead” (Fanon 103). “We downed that [Marxist] view when it came to applying it to the black American ghetto-dweller because we were off the block too, Stagolees” (Seale 153). Recent theoretical debate revolves around whether the term “resists the totalizing and teleological pretentions of the dialectic” (Stallybrass 81) or leads to “bolstering of identity cut-off from social relations” (Thoburn 436). “You are not born dangerous-class. You become so the moment you cease to acknowledge the values and constraints of a world from which you have broken free: we are basically referring here to the necessity of wage labour. This line is one that very precisely separates the working classes from the dangerous classes” (Becker-Ho). [AV]
Standard English: The syntactic, grammatical, and lexical form of written English enforced as the norm. Non-Standard uses of English are stigmatized as “errors” and as signs of failed or incomplete enculturation or socialization. The ideology of Standard English maintains an idea of a pure, transcendent, acontextual correct English in denial of the varieties of English as a global language and the realities of everyday speaking and writing. In the English-speaking settler colonies the failure to reproduce Standard English is also taken as a sign of the failure of a migrant or indigenous person to integrate into the dominant white national culture. Educational institutions demand that teachers apprehend, detain, and “correct” students on the basis of their ability to reproduce Standard English, putting teachers in the role of language cop and border guard. In return, English language, literature, and composition prerequisites for other programs justify the institutional space English departments occupy, and return to them the sense of moral purpose that feminist, queer, marxist, and postcolonial critics had threatened to relieve. It is often argued that “students [need] access to those standard forms of the language linked to social and economic prestige” (Pennycook) but writing that aspires to social and economic prestige would need to conform to the dialect of the socially and economically prestigious, a dialect that may be antagonistic to the representational requirements of most users of English. [RJ]
3. Statement
ksw: “How is poetry a political field of action? What can poetry un/do? What do 'limits' mean for poetry? What are the crucial issues in taking a social (ideological) position with in a poetics today? What relationships arise between cultural production and broader social projects?”
Roger Farr, for pills: Historically, the political agency of the avant-garde has been understood largely through the politicization of artistic form, and through a critique of the relationship between “the work” and the process of its institutionalization within the academic field of “art history”. The avant-garde artist, in this account, rejects the commodification of praxis (lived experience) in favour of a renewed, direct engagement with “everyday life”, producing works which are intended to interfere with or empty out exchange value and to return to the work its political and social agency (cf. Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde). Or, in another formulation, the avant-garde work is viewed as a “pre-figuration” of new social relations, a site in which “structural homologies” (Bourdieu) between the work and the world (read: political economy) may be read, struggled with, and rearticulated. In both of these readings, we see a foundational formalist axiom: namely, that “the work” is capable of producing certain affective experiences that are denied to the audience due to the instrumentalization of life under capitalism. For instance, the “noise and politics” magazine Datacide describes the political efficacy of avant-garde sound this way:
“Musical time is radically different from the time of capital in which our public life proceeds ... musical duration is measurable only in terms of sensibilities, tensions and emotions...”
Thus, the aesthetic or poetic practice of creating “radically different” temporal, spatial, emotional, cognitive experiences—what Jameson in Marxism and Form calls “the administration of linguistic shocks”—becomes “political” at that point where it overlaps with what could be called an activist project of “consciousness raising”: both are aimed at the production of “experiences” which open cognitive space for the emergence of “new subjectivities”. This affect, one hopes, will (somehow) open the possibility for more material or tangible transformations in a broader social field.
In the case of contemporary avant-garde music, the transformation of lived, material social relations by the experience or reception of the work has had some success. The “temporary autonomous zone” of the rave or the festival, as limited and recuperable as it was, at least allowed for the exploration of alternative forms of sociality, largely via the poetics of duration: in other words, there was a more or less concrete relationship between the temporal duration of the work (whether measured in BPMs or in the total duration of the gathering/performance), and the emergence of new subjectivities and social relations. Alternative sociality is, in this case, consequential to the experience of temporality in the work: both meet in “real [historical] time”.
In the case of contemporary avant-garde poetry, however, we feel it must be said that a concrete relationship between the work and its reception in the social field is absent, and that the promise of new forms of social organization is deferred for too long. To be clear, we’re not calling for greater “efficacy” (Andrews) and we’re not lamenting the absence of a literary avant-garde “sub-culture” that might surround our work; rather, we mean that the affective potential of poetry is neutralized by the extent to which it fails to materialize as, or to directly influence, social organization. Because of its theorization as working mainly through the production of “cognitive effects”—a form of “cerebral compensation”—that are mediated through cultural and academic institutions, the politics of the literary avant-garde are more or less exhausted in the work. In short, there is little, if any, material site in which avant-garde poetics become more than pre-figurative. [Note: the ksw, as a writer-run collective that is often in an antagonist relationship to other actors in the cultural and political fabric of Vancouver and Canada, could, we think, be understood as an attempt to address this limitation].
“What do ‘limits’ mean for poetry?”, you ask. pills is interested in approaching this question by straying collectively into the badlands that lie between avant-garde poetry and radical social struggle. What can anti-capitalist, decolonization, and other autonomous social movements tell us about language? What can the avant-garde poetics of the last half-century tell us about the police? In preparing for tentative forays into this terrain, and in addition to the terms we have defined above, we have found the concepts of affinity, autonomy, and recomposition to be particularly helpful in charting a course of investigation and action – in establishing our “position,” so to speak. We hope to nuance these concepts in the context provided by the work of the writers and artists gathering in Vancouver this Summer.
References
Bruce Andrews. “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis.” Paradise and Method: Poetics and Practice. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1996.
Mikhail Bakunin. Marxism, Freedom and the State. London: Freedom Press, 1950.
Alice Becker-Ho. “The Essence of Jargon” in Roger Farr, ed., Parser I (May 2007).
Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: UP, 1977.
Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant Garde. Minneapolis: UP, 1984.
Harry Cleaver. Reading Capital Politically. San Francisco, CA: AK/AntiTheses, 2000.
Tony Crowley. The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Datacide. June 18, 2008. <http://datacide.c8.com/>.
Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Ghassan Hage. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Frederic Jameson. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: UP, 1971.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Russian Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works. Volume VI. New York: International Publishers, 1976.
Midnight Notes. New Enclosures. Jamaica Plain, MA: 1990.
“Negri, Hardt, and Immaterial Labour.” Aufheben 14 (2006).
Alastair Pennycook. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Longman, 1994.
Bobby Seale. A Lonely Range. New York: New York Times Books, 1978.
Peter Stallybrass. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 69-95.
Max Stirner. The Ego and His Own. New York: Benjamin Tucker, 1907.
Nicholas Thoburn. “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable.” Economy and Society 31:3 (August 2002): 434-460.
Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. New York, NY: Oxford, 1973.
