Was so delighted to receive the surprise from Kasey Mohammad this weekend that the videos he thought were lost a few months ago had been found, and could now be given pride of place at The Continental Review!
Books.
s entitled Healing The Western Mind, which as well as being extremely moving for me, made me return to a centre of inquiry which I often think about, and which always manages to put me in an ambiguous state of doubt and shifting decision.“I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.” (J. Beuys)The project of healing society by art is thus also perhaps a veiled form of a rather different project, namely that of making society into art:
“Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a gigantic project.”
And yet, set against this Beuysian model, which moves me, are a thousand other visions of aesthetic therapeutics which I find– and I don’t think the word is too strong –socially and aesthetically rather repulsive. To take one example: during the riots in Paris’ outer suburbs a few years ago, some very munificent journalist suggested that if we “only took paintings, performances, poems out into the poor and violent ghetti, the people may be illuminated by the culture’s higher manifestations”. This is a near verbatim quote, and it’s not necessary I think to point out the simultaneous condescension mixed with an utter lack of pragmatic realism. Nor is it necessary to mention the many oft-repeated scenarios where aesthetic sophistication is accompanied by comparable ethical depravity, dissipating any hope of a keatsian contingency (cf. Primo Levi). (This question came up for me too in a very powerful way a few days ago while undergoing the disturbing experience of Pasolini’s 120 Giornate di Sodoma, where the repulsive Sadic acts of an utterly degraded fascism take place in most elegant art-nouveau surrounds. Pasolini, for once, underlines the fact rather heavily: trackings which take in refined Mondrian-esque abstracts which, next to statues of the Pietà and Christian iconography, are the only decorations visible above captured adolescents forced to eat shit).
But the example of the French journalist is, one might object, just naïve and poorly conceived. If the extent of the problem lay simply in its naïve formulations, I could deal with it. But the dilemma for me is precisely that, even in much more positive manifestations, aesthetic therapeutics worries me. For instance: I know a French poet here whose classes I used to attend, who conducts poetry courses in prisons and juvenile detention centers. He has apparently had a good degree of success with this, (on a social, if not on an aesthetic, level, but this first is after all the only one which counts here). Apparently this work is often beneficial to the prisoners: why, then, when I hear him talk of poetry’s therapeutic effects, do I feel such profound discomfort? Is it a memory of the dangers of pre-Enlightenment “we will improve them, it is for their good” philosophies? Is it the subjugation of poetry to the mere usefulness of the tool (this, I’m sure, doesn’t bother me greatly)? Is it a hangover from reading much Confessionalism which uses poetry to solve the confessional poet’s own derisory neuroses?
Though it is no doubt all this in part, my discomfort is, perhaps, more due to a suspicion linked to the question: can I imagine, in a moment of utter crisis, turning to poetry for consolation? Honestly, I don’t know if I can. For me, these moments of utter difficulty, of which we’re lucky if we have very few, are actually the times when poetry seems to me the most fragile, the most devoid of sense and feeling, the most autotelic, the most incapable, the most distant, the most alone. This is what I was thinking when I read this other passage from Jordan’s blog:
It was over a year ago now that Bella became ill and was hospitalized here in Iowa City with a terrible kidney infection. The only respite or therapy I received in regards to art (poetry and prose, and forget about scripture, all falling short somehow), was the pencil drawings by Sol LeWitt and the lithographs by Philip Guston that were located on the floor of the children's' unit. I am still confused if I should call LeWitt's geometrical drawings or Guston's cartoonish boots examples of what Beuys deemed "healthy chaos," yet since the chaos was mine to begin with, and the work that I took in merely became mixed with my emotional state, allowing nothing to escape--all effort of processing this terrible experience still my responsibility and aim and not the artist's, it would seem justified to say that one can't group visual art solely into period or generation to determine its effect on individual health.
This reflects some of my own experiences, my finding, up until this point, that poetry functions for me in a state of passion joy possibility, where play seems possible, where language is complex, mobile, free. It’s also interesting for me that certain “poetics of despair”, like specific aspects of Celan, for all their majesty, don’t seem particularly healing (look at poor Paul’s leaving of the world).
In spite of these misgivings however, I do wonder if it would be possible, or desirable, to emphasize the therapeutics of poetry, to what extent, and in what way. Is it possible to create a truly, humbly, valuable therapeutic art, which would avoid the dangers of indoctrination and influence, of condescension and high-mindedness?
If Beuys, like few others, accomplishes this, it is perhaps precisely because his works are, to me, so profoundly “passive”, so “unimposing” in the most positive sense. I know I’ve mentioned a few times already in previous discussions my fondness for a re-evaluation of the notion of “passivity”: a true “poetics of passivity”. As Beuys’ performances, it seems to me, do not force healing or “improvement” as hegemonic impositions, nor do they even serve to create a dialectic: rather, their possible therapeutic power seems organically inseparable from their symbolic status, from their instauration of personal and cultural myths. Their passivity means that one may involve oneself in what is happening as a disconnected action, a “being-in-the-world” which is separate from one’s own self, but in which one may participate. (The performance thus explicitly juxtaposes itself against those acts of political or personal horror where we are merely passive spectators, and must simply watch what society or other individuals unfold). The passivity of the performance thus allows, in a rather Brechtian sense, for the birth of an active receptive response. Beuysian therapy thus, in its passivity, creates activity in its receptors. Witnessing– cf. Celan naturlich –the performance, one may imagine or transpose one’s own details, images, idea(ls)s, emotions, situations onto what is occurring. This personal reflection then extends to a sort of consideration of the culture at large: the culture in its state of violence, which is reflected in ourselves. 
Could poetry attain this same degree of passive therapeutics? Do we want it to? The problem for me I think is that, even though I accept this therapeutic status in the context of Beuys, I usually don’t in the context of a general aesthetic theory. There exists, however, a certain dichotomy which presents Beuys and Warhol as representing two sides of the postmodern coin: Warhol a sort of garish nihilistic intelligence and pragmatism, Beuys a moralistic, utopian therapeutism. If this is a divide in post-modernity, many must think currently that Warhol is winning. And the question is: is this a good thing?
My conundrum is that I like Beuys infinitely more than I like Warhol, and yet I don’t know to what extent I can ascribe to or recommend a therapeutic poetics. (I should mention here that, my mother being a psychologist and practicing therapist, I believe a priori I think in the value of therapy, having seen some of its positive effects: it’s when it mixes with aesthetics that the waters become blurry). But I suppose my interest, for the moment, is to know whether anyone finds it interesting to view poetry in this way? Under what circumstances? According to what restrictions? Have there been specific instances in your life when poetry has precisely offered respite, insight, consolation? What did this consolation feel like? Was it a positive thing? Is a therapeutic poetics desirable? What are its risks? Is it not, against Beuys, something to aim for, but rather simply something which may, if we’re lucky, now and then appear?
"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. "We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons."
His company's sole aim, he stressed, was "to make money," which they did -- by slashing the cover price.
"Mein Kampf," published by about a dozen companies over the years, always sold at a fairly steady annual rate of about 20,000 at some 20 New Turkish Lira (11.3 euros or $15) a copy. The Mefisto edition retails at 3.3 euros ($4.5) and sold 23,000 copies in two months."
(1) A video-reading by Joshua Clover in a French graveyard.
(2) A 1 hour interview with Cole Swenson in Paris.
(3) The first video-review, which I'm currently taking notes for and wondering how best to conduct.
Think of it as a syndicated column. Or your favourite star's recurring Tonight Show appearances. (No, luckily no Jay Leno monologue from me: or not yet . . .) Whatever you call it, what's sure is that we at The Continental Review are over the lens to be welcoming back one of contemporary poetry's most powerful "voices" (ick, let's say "poets") for a repeat, and hopefully oft repeating, performance.George Murray, author of the very popular books-blog Bookninja, writes a short appreciation of The Continental Review, noting it's "neat in an artsy, low-rent sort of way, and very valuable as an archive. I hope this keeps moving and getting bigger without necessarily getting better. I really like the grainy appeal of it." Thanks George: nice to see you get the aesthetic.
I've had a really wonderful week here, a wonderful month even, with regards meeting interesting people. I just wanted to take a moment to thank these extremely generous poets and writers who've taken time out from their stay in the city to have drinks with me on warm afternoons, or to let me bother them with a camera in their face!
"I want to visually capture the real monstrousness of the poet's ego-transitions in composition. I think I did a fair job of that in the first one, where I sort of fashion modeled The Power Museum--became the visual intersection between Paris Hilton and Adorno, flickering between total seduction and total negation. I amuse myself, but am doubtful it was caught."
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