Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Ohhhh! Kick boxing, not kike boxing. I think that's what they're looking for. A query from Google France solves the mystery. (Though there's the barest chance they could be looking for information about my grandmother's cousin the great Barney Ross.)

Just read an essay by Ian F.A. Bell in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound arguing that textuality in general and laws in particular in Cantos 52-71 are Pound's safeguard against tyranny—in other words, a government of laws, not men. Perhaps the Adams cantos will make this clear to me, but Pound still seems to me to put far too much faith in the wisdom and charisma of individuals—the most wobbly (not Wobbly) possible of "Unwobbling Pivot[s]" (Canto 70). He does show his American stripes by attacking any authority/hierarchy based upon blood and birth, at least; what attracts him to the Confucian mode of government is that it's a meritocracy of mandarins. Bell's essay is most useful to me in his discussion of Pound's desire to pursue and represent unalienated labor and the thing in its use-value. A fantasy outside of systematic, Marxian analysis—as Doug Mao puts it, "the 'value' of whic Pound speaks seems, in the end, something like a rating of usefulness set by tacit consensus, whereas in Capital use-value is effectively removed to the realm of an undiscussable Real almost as soon as it appears" (Solid Objects 179). So in my reading, pastoral becomes an image of this dimension of the Real (always necessarily distorted—an image produced by the aporia of Being, the sense of "something missing," at the center of everyday experience under capitalism) in which things have their use-value restored to them. This works very well with the images in the Eclogues of shepherds making songs and gifts and bartering them; the economic becomes a superstructure of the cultural base in Arcadia. Pound's exaltation of Siena's Monte dei Paschi bank, "BANK of the grassland" (Canto 43) is determined by its aspiration to render exchanges immediate, which is to say, to repress exchange-value. That this repressed must return—that Siena's modern equivalent, the dated currency of Woergl (Cantos 41 and 74; also see Pound's essay "Civiization, Money and History) cannot long endure, only goes to show how a fantasy of the local and immediate can't go very far under modern capitalism. The value of the image remains: Bell quotes someone I'm probably going to have to read, E.P. Thompson: "We shall not ever return to a pre-capitalist human nature, yet a reminder of its alternative needs, expectations and codes may renew our sense of our nature's range of possibilities."

The above is probably why Lisa Jarnot finds most poetry blogs "boring," but I'm going to link to her anyway.

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