A SHORT & EASY COMMONPLACE BOOK

The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made , not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available--always n -1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n -1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and crabgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.

                        --Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Within the academic environment, thought tends to be rationalized--subject to examination, paraphrase, repetition, mechanization, reduction. It is treated: contained and stabilized. And what is lost in this treatment is the irregular, the nonquantifiable, the nonstandard or nonstandardizable, the erratic, the inchoate.

Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that's what I want from it, what I want to say about it just here, just now (and maybe not in some other context). It leaves things unsettled, unresolved--leaves you knowing less than you did when you started.

There is a fear of the inchoate processes of turbulent thought (poetic or philosophic) that takes the form of resistance and paranoia. A wall (part symbolic, part imaginary) is constructed against the sheer surplus of interpretable aspects of any subject. You fix upon one among many possible frames, screens, screams, and stay fixed on that mode monomaniacally. Such frame fixation is intensified by the fetishizing of dispassionate evaluation not as a critical method but as a marker of professional competence and a means of enforcing a system of ranking.

                        -- Charles Bernstein, "What's Art Got To Do With It?"

Only what does not fit into this world is true.

                        -- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Download my CV.

Download an essayentitled On the Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Download an essay entitled Arrhythmia: Forms of Duration in Contemporary Poetry

Download an essay entitled A Poem of Laughter and Forgetting:
Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy

Download an essay entitled Derrida’s Cat (Who Am I?)

Download an essay entitled Should Poetry be Ethical or Otherwise?

Download an essay entitled Voices of Construction: On Susan Howe’s Poetry and Poetics (a Citational Ghost Story)

Download an essay entitled Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)