John Bloomberg-Rissman responds to my "RS/OOO literary theory" post

Too long to put in a comments textbox, I'd like to post here John Bloomberg-Rissman's very insightful answer to my outline of  SR/OOO literary theory. Below is the text as delivered to me in an email attachment. As I've said, I will offer concluding criticisms of my own in a later post. Thanks for keeping the discussion going, John!
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Conrad: There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist critique (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO).  

JBR: historically speaking, SR/OOO distinguishes itself from what you call “traditional postmodernist critique” via the claim that postmodernism has tended to privilege textuality as primary and SR/OOO privileges the “beyond the text”, rendering textuality just one kind of thing among others. It also distinguishes itself from Husserl and Heidegger in that both H’s do ontologically privilege the human, whether by privileging the phenomenal experience or by privileging Dasein. Admittedly, Harman’s stepping beyond Dasein begins in his analysis of Heideger’s tool-being, but Bryant uses Bhaskar’s critical realism as his stepping-stone out of the phenomenal realm into the noumenal, where texts are indeed just another object. There are differences between OOO practitioners as to whether this leads to a “flat ontology” or whether there are still degrees of real … So I don’t think that it’s quite fair to simply assert that SR/OOO derives from “traditional postmodernist critique”. In fact, I think actor-network theory, science studies, and Kant are crucial to rooting SR/OOO – tho of course so is Deleuze … But of course no one who lives after the great age of c20 French and German philosophy can (or should be) “immune” to it …  it might not have been Arnoldian, but the rise of Hitler/Stalin, the war, the Shoah etc would shake one’s humanism to – or past  - its roots …   

It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S. Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated. 

JBR: see above: I think you need to prove, not simply assert, that SR/OOO is “a new poststructuralist wave” … not saying it’s not, or that what SR/OOO asserts as it’s genealogy is accurate, just that … Oh, and by the way, other SR/OOO practitioners root themselves otherwhere, e.g. Brassier would hate the above to be applied to him, Bogost is rooted in computers and gaming, Grant in Schelling, etc etc …

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality.  

JBR: towards everything. 

And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after."  

JBR: Conrad, I think you need to distinguish between context and content. Between literature and any particular text. It’s certainly possible to discuss textuality or literature or art or whatever before the fact of any particular text/object (tho of course with the knowledge that the addition of new texts/objects to the body of existing texts/objects will change that discussion – I mean, that’s Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, right?). But I don’t see how one can discuss a particular text/object avant la lettre … Oh, and I’ve never met or read a word by anyone in SR/OOO who denies history in any way. In fact, Levi explicity mentions that OO Criticism might fall somewhere between New Criticism and New Historicism … 

Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick.  

JBR: what is the antecedent of your “its” in “its place”? Arnoldian humanism, right? Now in what way is that not an OS? And in what way is it privileged over any other OS? 

For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously... 

JBR: I certainly agree with Eileen. I think that this is exactly the case. That’s what I tried to make clear in our discussion, and in my postscript. I have to admit to not seeing a single thing wrong with this. 

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive.  

JBR: Since, apparently, all criticism has an OS, including yours, we are no more in a Year 0 than we ever were, or, better, maybe, we are always already in a Year 0. I kind of think so. Question, why are texts now ‘post-texts’? In any case, whether we are in Year 0, whether texts are now post-texts, as long as thriving is happening, it sounds ok to me. 

But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general,  

JBR: Joy is troubled, yes, but what in her troubled state is troubling? I mean, what is there in her analysis of traditional humanism with which you disagree? 

anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit  

JBR: Why is it a deficit? What have we lost, exactly, by critiquing traditional humanism in order to improve it?

and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access? 

JBR: when you write “he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique” you are absolutely right; and the key words are not “the very past”, they are “philosophical critique”. According to many philosophers and historians, the noumena were present to us (philosophically speaking) prior to Descartes, who thought only God guaranteed the reliability of our senses, and therefore our ability to contact noumena directly. But things went really wrong with Kant, who cut off all contact (Nick Land called Kant’s philosophy something like “the biggest panic attack in philosophical history”). OOO wants to get us out of our heads and back into the world, where we are anyway. It’s about time, after all, given what we’re doing to it (tar sands, global warming, etc etc) Tho every OOO philosopher gets Kant’s argument, and is troubled by it … 

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be fine tuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist. 

JBR: Yes, exactly. Except maybe for the simpliciter. Maybe. As far as making a difference goes, I’m reminded of the title of that Kenneth Burke article, “Literature as Equipment for living.” Tho, of course, that’s only part of what Bryant means; he’s also saying that we are unaware of the myriad objects that don’t affect us in any way (e.g. intestinal bacteria when everything’s working right).

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) 

JBR: Yes, exactly, exactly. OOO is profoundly non- (tho ***not*** anti-) anthropormorphic. Tho, as noted above, not all are agreed on flat ontology. 

 What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning.  

JBR: While I have problems with the notion of authorial agency – I’m a traditionalist on this – it seems to me, as a writer, that an author is often the worst reader of her text – and one with no control over its social reception and significance, once it’s out in public, I asked Levi about meaning in a comment left at his blog post and I think he understands something different by meaning than either you or I. I think there’s no doubt that texts do carry meanings, tho it is difficult to say quite what this “means.” See the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus … 

Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. 

JBR: tradition goes by the wayside? I mean, isn’t affectivity via what you call something like “the lyric self’s voice” (which may or may not have anything to do with authorial intention) about as traditional a way of literary (or any artistic, religious, etc) effect as could be imagined? But that may be beside the point. I think your notion of “traditional avenues” is something we never quite got to in our previous discussion. And I feel that it ties into your “benchmarks, or standards” or whatever you want to call them 

More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘ Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon. 

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered.  

JBR: Re: “It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered”, I don’t understand how it could be otherwise. 

In fact, to call these literary interpretations in the first place, loaded with all their traditional Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language." The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another.  

JBR: Yes, of course. One of the first problems I had with OOO was over its implications for “politics” – used broadly … Turns out that everyone involved in OOO has very specific “politics”, i.e. an interpretation of, and desire for, reality that they privilege. Ontology might be flat; but that doesn’t mean the end of ethics. When questioned about this the standard OOO response seems to be something like, “of course humans anthromorphize; pencils pencilomorphize, rocks rockomorphize” etc etc – and yes, they know they’re speaking metaphorically, that is, literarily.  

Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us.  

JBR: I don’t think **any** translations are excluded. Everything translates everything and each thing is translated by each other thing are not mutually exclusive. Poems translate us and we translate poems, at the same time the chair we’re sitting in as we read translates us and vice-versa, and the air we’re breathing as we read translates us and vice-versa and every bit of knowledge in our brain, e.g. Aristotle, Longinus, Arnold, Deleuze, etc etc, translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the war in Afghanistan translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the shape of the book, and the color of the paper, and the ambient temperature, and so on and so on … the deal is, it’s never just an encounter between us and some bare text. 

An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover. 

JBR: I should hope so! Tho he’s not much read in contemporary poetry circles these days, he should be, and will be again (tho I know that’s not what you’re getting at here …)

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in my next post. 

JBR: The main thing I’m trying to say it that I don’t think we have an either / or here: either Arnoldian humanism and values or no values whatsoever. I think what we have is, as Joy has it, and as I tried to say in my postscript, and attempt to find a better humanism, which keeps what still lives in the tradition (however defined) and tries to improve on it, to further democratize humanism and all other isms (rockism, pencilism), to make life better for ALL of us. To quote Deleuze/Guattari, it’s not or, it’s and.  

SR/OOO literary theory: where ontology meets poetry (perhaps)

There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered (thanks to John Bloomberg-Rissman) two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist theory (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO). It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S.Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated.

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality. And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after." Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick. For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously...

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive. But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general, anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a  more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access?

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be finetuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist.

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning. Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon.

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered. 'Code' is a word that's often used to designate both the agency & status of those properties in things with regards to which "manners of translating differences" can be registered. Alex Reid even goes so far as to give a literary reading the same ontical status as a "Google search spider", saying

Code is a characteristic that certain objects may have. It results from a particular kind of assemblage production. Other objects (e.g. humans) have the capacity to encode in their relations. This might mean literally marking a code or more abstractly naming objects. Clearly our encoding/naming of objects never fully captures them, but it can have an impact upon them, as when you name an animal your "food." In English Studies we use terms like "text" and "reading" quite liberally. This makes sense inasmuch as we encode the world we see and interact with that code. However, here I want to be more literal and think specifically about interactions between objects that are marked with codes and objects with the capacity to decipher those codes. So this could be a human reading a book, a Google search spider crawling this page, or a supermarket checkout counter scanning a bar code

 To call a reading of Yeats a literary interpretation in the first place, loaded as it will be with all the usual Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language", by which Bryant might even mean Reid's "Google search spider". The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another. Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us. An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover.

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting but insufficient. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in a future post. I'll need some time to familiarize myself more fully with 'critical realism' theory.

Svenska Twitteruniversitetet: a radical online university

I thought Twitter would amount to nothing more than a syncopated Facebook: with mainly impulsive & sporadic rapid fire speech from people who've whittled the one-liner down to a significant artform. I'd never have suspected to find in this language-hacking a possibility for anything like interesting academic debate. But I have recently discovered it in the form of a Twitter University. Here's The Swedish Twitter University but one shorn of academia's usual editorializing and chronic vetting, an online format that can be sustained only by views brought generously to the Twitter-symposium: here's a real 'democratic' forum, in short, for discussion begun by impassioned authors and theorists who allow their own ideas to grow & develop through response-tweets. In fact, the textbook's been turned into an active online university.

Perhaps it's not 'university' so much as the embodiment of a 'multiversity' ideal very attuned to contemporary Deleuzian understandings of the nature of things: a celebration, in particular, of the quintessentially open text as Barthes may never have imagined it. Administrator Marcus Nilsson spells out for us a 'concept' of the Twitter University almost as an Oulipo restrained-based exercise, with specific instructions as to number and character limit of tweets and even a recommendation not to allow responses, enjambment-style, to flow without full stops from one tweet to the next. Of which, more below:

The Swedish Twitter University: Mind-blowing Ideas in 25 Tweets

The Swedish Twitter University (@SvTwuni) is a place where interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format.
The presentation must comply with certain constraints, meant to stimulate creativity and challenge the tweeters to formulate their ideas as effectively and interestingly as possible:

• A presentation will be a maximum of 25 tweets long. Each tweet has a 140 character limit.
• Each tweet must be broken naturally—no ugly enjambement!(sic) That is, a sentence, clause or phrase may not overflow arbitrarily into several tweets. That’s not to say each and every tweet has to end with a full stop — follow the spirit and not the letter of the rule and be creative!

The tweeter should pay attention to questions from the audience for a total of at least one hour from the start of the presentation. Answer tweets do not count against the total 25. Both questions and answers should contain the hashtag assigned to the event by @SvTwuni. Each presentation will be archived together with the questions and answers from this hashtag.

It’s fine to blurt out all your 25 tweets at once and then take questions, but it might be more interesting if you exploit the fact that Twitter is a conversational medium: adding pauses and answering questions as you go breathes life into your lecture, and since answers don’t count towards your total 25 tweets, answering questions from the audience can give you a few extra tweets to develop your idea in further detail.

If we take Eileen A. Joy's December 20th "Notes Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism" presentation (brought to my notice by John Bloomberg-Rissman), simple tweeting conventions turn into a fairly coherent and informative presentation of views on "speculative realist" literary criticism (to be permanently archived at Nilsson's site), comprising of the usual acknowledgments, academic terminology & data points (A fuller explication of SR theory can be found here). The format's rather simple, withTweeter, a STU room and, of course, a Twitter account to get things going.

In general, I'd say I'm impressed more with the 'how' than the 'what' of Joy's Twitter U. lecture (though I was drawn to this place on the recommendation of someone with whom I've been having an equally interesting discussion on the scope, and limits, of the literary work). Though the topic may have any number of diverse meanings and there is no shortage of critical schools to choose from (some of the more interesting newer ones being 'affect-theory', 'onticology', 'OOO' ), it's only as social media that the Twitter U. can allow Joy's views to take shape and find its audience. Certain online conventions may be mandated (as site owner Nilsson obviously makes clear), a format prescribed and a sort of screening process for Twitter presenter-applicants may be put in place but it's to the essential 'aleatoriness' of online communities that that both the attractiveness and efficacy of Twitter University is primarily due.

I might be tempted to say (in a McLuhanesque moment) that the strangeness of recent critical theory is a function of Twitter-like technology. Even a passing familiarity with some of the theory cited in Joy's Twitter lecture, with its talk of "multitudes", "discrete actions" & "propulsive mechanicity", gives it its own uniquely IT character: and doesn't OOO theory title itself rather resemble the on-off circuitry on which all online discourse depend?

"Juan"

In a 10’ X 6’ hovel, strapped on hands and back
  til he’s red Juan said    “In one more chamber, just one”.

He's decades younger, & ficus pure  & he'd have run
  —only he!— bare-footed  against the rocks, for her

Sorted badly under the rumors, the wine and valley,
             & the arroyo heat

only she'd have seen (only she) the cross thru a veil

To redden after prayers is to need it, wrapt in armlets

              A panel each for their love!

Václav Havel dies

 Václav Havel was a poet, essayist and dramatist but also a political figure whose activism and imprisonment in the 70s led to a presidency of the first Czech Republic. In fact, the literary figure and politician blended marvelously in this one individual. Here's someone whose writings chronicled the politics of a nation he helped to liberate from its Soviet oppressors. Here was a poet-prince.

How wrong Plato was!

Halte là ! Pierre Assouline moderates comments

Pierre Assouline

Pierre Assouline has had enough of the blog parasites, trolls and proverbial shit-disturbers who've invaded his very popular les république des livres. As many as fifty comments per day, he says, have to be removed, presumably taking up a too disproportionate amount of his own blogging energies. It's a tough type of balancing act he must perform between safeguarding the ideals of free public expression and having to police the hostile online activities of a handful of savage nay-sayers (poignée de nuisibles) .

Trop de commentaires sans rapport avec le billet du jour, trop de liens hors-propos, trop de trolls, trop de parasites, trop de bavardages privés sans intérêt… Depuis quinze jours, je dois bien en retirer une cinquantaine par jour. Halte là ! Même si tous n’agissent pas en bande dans le seul but de casser l’entretien que nous sommes, et de tuer les échanges sur ce blog, il faut sévir, la liberté d’expression des citoyens de la République des livres dût-elle légèrement souffrir du différé de leurs opinions. Or je n'ai pas vocation à faire la police du matin au soir, parmi les quelque 400 commentaires postés chaque jour en moyenne, entre les robots, les insulteurs et les egos divers et variés.

(Too many comments off topic, unrelated links, trolls, parasites and gossip...I've had, over the past five days, to eliminate as many as fifty comments per day. Enough! If readers cannot stop disrupting the tenor of our discussion and killing blog exchanges, the freedom of readers to express differing opinions will be somewhat compromised. I certainly cannot police,day and night, the activities of bots, chronic nay-sayers and wildly different egos who appear among the more than 400 comments posted here daily.)

It will be necessary to screen out certain (undesirable) types of blog comments. Assouline's reasoning, and I couldn't agree more, is that in no way will the quality of debate & discussion be diminished if he does: in fact, without them the waters become clearer. The few who disrupt and try to kill intelligent discussion can be safely ignored. It's in no way a question of "censorship" either. Assouline seems to be saying the good of the many outweigh the nasty privileges of the few.

Aussi, à partir d’aujourd’hui et jusqu'à nouvel ordre, les commentaires ne seront plus diffusés en direct mais placés en file d’attente jusqu’à ce que le tenancier les ait personnellement visés ou refusés. Nous ferons en sorte que la vivacité du débat, sa véhémence parfois, ne perdent rien de leur sel déjà légendaire, et que son intérêt ne se démente pas. Il n'est pas dit qu'une poignée de nuisibles aura raison de notre goût de la conversation. Ils peuvent toujours dénoncer la "censure", cela n'y changera rien.

(From now on and until further notice all comments will be moderated. I will ensure that the accustomed liveliness of debate, even at its most passionate, continue here unabated, and that interest in my blog never diminish. I will never accommodate a handful of shit-disturbers in the interests of free expression. Denounce "censorship" all you like: it doesn't change anything)

Shades of Ron Silliman! Well, not quite that drastic since Assouline is prepared to sift through all the online chaff for the good discussion points worth publishing. As we know, Silliman's unthinkingly stifled free speech altogether, strangely incapable of compromise of any sort.

 Bravo, Pierre!

"Poeti greci": in defense of ancient literatures

Journalist-blogger Ottavio Rossani has announced at poesia the publication of an anthology of ancient Greek writings titled Poeti greci. Da Omero al VI secolo d.C., a work of ancient poetries translated and edited by the esteemed Greek and Latin scholar Vincenzo Guarracino (August 2011). Rossani's post is more than just a notice for a book launch; it's an important defense of literary classicism, one intended primairly for high school students enrolled in the rigorous classical studies program (Un’opera necessaria, anche per finalità didattiche nei licei classici). The reference to high school studies got my attention.

The liceo classico is an academic course of studies, at the high school level, in which university-bound students between the ages of 14 to 19 learn the ancient Greek and Latin languages and their literatures. It's the contemporary Liceum. Rossani's review of Guarracino's text praises both editorial and marvelous translation work.To include both the major and less well known literary lights is not to invite the teacher and impressionable adolescent to give an approval rating of ancient authors, determining which authors, or types of poetries, failed and which succeeded, and why. With author selections coming from an authorized Antologia Palatina (Palatine Anthology) source, the curriculum objective is to give a balanced literary & historical overview shorn of uninformed critical judgement (English translations mine).

Tralasciamo qui di parlare di poeti consacrati dalla copiosità delle opere lasciate e dalla fama che ne è conseguita per l’altezza della scrittura e per la veridicità esistenziale delle loro intuizioni come Omero, Esiodo, Sofocle, Euripide, Eschilo, Pitagora, Platone e Aristotele (potrebbe essere una sorpresa constatare che anche questi ultimi tre padri della filosofia sono stati anche poeti, autori di epigrammi, inni e odi). Piace invece sollecitare l’attenzione su autori meno noti o addirittura ignoti, ai quali Guarracino da restituito il merito di avere scritto epigrammi di notevole incisività oppure liriche di grande emozione.

( Let's not just talk of poets famous for both literary output and literary excellence and cultural significance, such as Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle: it may even come as a surprise to some that the last three-mentioned "fathers of philosophy" were also poets, authors of epigrams, hymns and odes. I'd like to draw attention to the inclusion of authors who are less well known or who've been unjustly ignored. It's to Guarracino's credit that he's portrayed them as authors of epigrams of incisive & lyrical beauty) 

Guarracino's anthology encourages a literary studies that leads to literary appreciation: rigorous language study coupled to history and culture studies can do nothing but usher names like Sappho, Nosside, Archilochus, Anacreon and Pindar into the light of public discourse. Presumably the editor-translator has something like an Arnoldian ideal of cultural transmission in mind, a consolidation in young imaginations of the best from the past, but there's also the matter of literary influences. A young classicist in training may choose to specialize in her postsecondary years.

The classical canon can also be a living breathing influence on a twentieth century poetics ,as in the case of the pattern poems of Simias of Rhodes. Not a case of slavish imitation but, again, of preserving from the past what's best and innovative in the arts & sciences. Even the incisive epigrammatic style of a Karl Krause or Alberto Casiraghy (perhaps even Chesterton, Hitchens) can trace its form & impetus to ancient poets, scientists & thinkers. The principle of literary transmission (what works are worth examining and why) and influence (how they can inform a contemporary sensibility) is a clearly traceable one:

E Guarracino è andato a pescare soprattutto appunto nell’Antologia palatina un gruppo di epigrammisti di grande forza espressiva e di universali concetti che ancora oggi sono validissimi e potrebbero guidare la convivenza civile. Il che significa che in fondo chi scrive alla fine non inventa quasi più nulla, e spesso senza nemmeno saperlo non fa che riscrivere idee e concetti, massime che sono stati già elaborati dai predecessori

(Guarracino has found in the Palatine Anthology a core of epigrammatic writings of such great expressive and universal significance that they're available today as valid models in a contemporary civil society. The writer really invents nothing, and may not even recognize the influence of received ideas, perhaps even unaware that it's all already been said by his predecessors)

To appreciate classical authors is not just to determine how and why the great literary exemplars from the age of Homer onwards work but to see in them imitation models. This is the upshot of Rossani's review of Guarracino's anthology. The classical past is an inexhaustible and rich repository of qualities of love, wisdom, & a true literary sentimentality that never get 'old', even to the iPhone and Facebook generation. With understanding comes reverence for the classical past, and the desire to write (perhaps to be) like them. What wonderful ideals to instil in young minds. What a wonderful European educational model.