Studies in Practical Negation was a seminar I organized at Kootenay School of Writing in 2001 that grew out of a series of reading groups on poetics, philosophy and politics (held between 1998 and 2001) that marked a radical shift in the pedagogy of the organization (since reverted). SPN was then turned into a series of free public talks presented in conjunction with the Mayworks Festival in 2002. A package of P. Inman’s collected prose was prepared for SPNII and is availabe in electronic form at the Electronic Poetry Center while the talks by Sharla Sava and Diana George/Nic Veroli were published in issue seven of the KSW magazine W. Roger Farr’s talk has been expanded into the forthcoming book Protest Genres and the Language of Dissent. I also include a reply to criticism that the seminar was too theoretical. (Minutes from the sessions are contained in Filler.)
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Studies in Practical Negation (2001)
I-The Parable of the Shit-Eater (July 29).
Discussion of the anti-libidinal non-pluralistic grammar proposed by Sianne Ngai in “Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust.”
II-Elements of Semantic Refusal (September 30).
>Begin “with” reading “of” P. Inman’s Uneven Development & at. least.
>Roger Farr pres. “Strategies of Concealment, or, Intelligibility, Recuperation, & the Hyperlexicalized Text”
>Aaron Vidaver pres. “Negative & Insubordinate”.
>Assess desirability of an Inman concordance (proposed by Friedlander) & “concocting a taxonomy for the vocabulary and rules for the grammar.”
>Evaluate the argument (advanced by Jeff Derksen in Culture Above the Nation) that semantic uselessness, anti-representationalism and materiality make Uneven Development “unrecoupable into the culture-ideology of globalization.”
> End before dusk w/answers to Dan Farrell’s query: “What’s the difference between what Inman writes as stopped attention, on a social scale and stabilization of meaning, on a social scale, necessary for social cohesion?”
III-What Isn’t To Be Undone? (October 27/29)
Part (a): “Liberalism equals the gulag”: negation & equivalency in Bruce Andrews’ I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). A talk by Louis Cabri with discussion to follow. On a Greimasian grid of ‘late capitalism’, Andrews’ “social romanticism” projects the negative counterpart, and domestic equivalent, of Soviet socialist realism. High modernist precedents? Forget it! The order-word of order-words – change! – ever since the consolidation of the bourgeoisie, here is obstructed in every detail. This is a state novel for America.
Part (b): Whiteness & Critique of the Totality. Open discussion. An assessment of the scope of criticality in the writing of Bruce Andrews with attention to Juliana Spahr’s thesis that Confidence Trick (1981) disrupts naturalized whiteness through “continual mocking exposure of dominant identities” (Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy).
IV- Panel on Recent Events: Sianne Ngai, Kevin Davies, Deirdre Kovac, Dan Farrell (November 25)
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Studies in Practical Negation: Four Talks on Culture & Dissent (2002)
Treachery and Betrayal
Sunday May 5 at 2pm
Sharla Sava
A review of Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle, making reference to his indebtedness to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. What I would like to stress, in particular, however, is the role that “the image” plays in Debord’s theory. In order to make this argument it will be necessary to consider not only Debord’s Marxist roots but also the subtle and complex way that he employs “the image”. I am supposing that Debord’s reference to the spectacle was intended not only to identify the pre-eminent role played by the image in consumer society, but also to investigate whether the image could be recovered and employed as a tool for revolutionary dissent.
Sabotage for Idiots
Sunday May 12 at 2pm
Aaron Vidaver
Everyone appreciates the satisfaction to be found in a job well undone. Whether it’s slackening up to interfere with the quantity of capitalist production, or botching your skill to interfere with the quality, or giving piss-poor service, the withdrawal of efficiency is an ever-popular means of striking back at the profit of the owning class. The talk will address the tried-and-true techniques, from “ca canny” to “détournement”, with a prickling of anecdotes from the history of industrial and cultural sabotage.
Instruments of Uselessness
Sunday May 19 at 2pm
Diana George & Nic Veroli
We’re interested in uselessness and desertion as affirmative, joyful practices. We start by raising some questions about the primacy of negation, and the dead ends into which it has led thought (practice). With desertion, what we want to desert above all is self-sacrifice: the striker who sacrifices herself for the future. Deferred gratification is the contamination of time by the negative; working (or striking) becomes waiting, boredom, death. Desertion without privation, desertion without sacrifice, these are the only desertions worthy of the name.
Protest Genres and the Pragmatics of Dissent
Sunday May 26 at 2pm
Roger Farr
Like all speech-acts, protest and opposition often fall into recognizable genres: the leaflet, the march, the strike, the sit-in, the blockade, etc. As interlocutors in these speech-acts, the authorities rely heavily on anticipation and predictability in order to understand, describe, control, and diffuse our actions. Therefore, we need to anticipate this anticipation; we need to identify the predictable conventions of the protest genres, and re-introduce elements of shock, surprise, and misrecognition. We need to make dissent unreadable.
Recommended Reading:
T.J. Clark, Foreword to Anselm Jappe: Guy Debord (1998)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Guy Debord & Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (1956)
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (1867)
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage (1916)
Ozimandias Collective, Sabotage Handbook (n.d.)
Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire (2000)
C.L.R. James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” (1947)
Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Der unterschätzte Mensch (2001)
Alice Becker-Ho, “The Language of Those in the Know” (1995)
Harry Cleaver, “Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism” (1999)
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (1971)
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Reply to Criticism (13 July 2001)
Subject: Theoretical Activities at the Kootenay School of Writing
Dear H,
Thanks for your note on the seminars. Arguments about pedagogy at the Kootenay School of Writing have been dominating our discussions over the past months and these seminars are the preliminary results of an agreement to try out a programme of unremunerated and free public discussion groups in a formal setting this fall. We’ve had one informal group going for about two years, starting with a reading of Jack Spicer and moving increasingly into more theoretical work, through Avital Ronell & Sianne Ngai on stupidity, Derrida on drugs, Levinas and Stein and the impossibile, then, this year, Denise Riley’s Words of Selves, Althusser on ideology, and Judith Butler on subjection.
I myself haven’t yet had any experience in graduate university literary studies outside of auditing a course with Peter Quartermain at the University of British Columbia in 1997—a course where only two students enrolled! There wasn’t much “theorizing” in that, as Peter’s approach was very much to begin and end with “close reading” and considerations about possible contexts in which a poem might gain intelligibility (we were reading Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened by Bruce Andrews). My official graduate work was in archival studies, where the theoretical basis for the practice and methodology tends to be left militantly unthought, especially in the United States, where year after year we get anti-intellectual articles like John Roberts’ “Much Ado About Shelving” that insist that there’s nothing for anyone think about except getting on with the job.
Reg Johanson is putting together the Standard English group. I read his blurb as a smattering of questions, pointed, for sure, but largely open-ended in the sense that Reg doesn’t have pre-made answers based on a particular set of theoretical concepts. I respect the way he has put this together and am pleased the KSW collective has thought it a good idea. He wants to convene with people who are working on the front lines, something he’s been doing with ESL teaching in other parts of the world and with English department-initiated composition courses at community collages in the Vancouver suburbs for ten years. It’s from a discussion amongst dissatisfied or suspicious practitioners that he’s hoping to come to a better understanding of what’s going on in these institutions. I hope they arrive at some theories!
The second seminar, Studies in Practical Negation, seems to be the one that you’re more concerned about. Since it was my proposal, I’m the one who you think has swallowed the totality. It’s a strong accusation and I think a wrongheaded one, since it relies upon misgrafting specific university and professional functions onto KSW. Although theoretical work, whether “Theoryspeak” or a “good kind of theorizing”, may have the kinds of practical functions or effects within the universities and literary-critical professions that you mention, I’m not convinced these functions exist within an organization like the Kootenay School since we do not offer degree programmes, accreditation, competitive grading or evaluations, teaching assistantships, research awards, or professional employment, and have no academic or financial prerequistes for participation, no standards to measure progress through curricula, nor a bureaucracy to enforce regularory compliance. Surely we have other forms of power swarming through our micro-points, but nothing to confer and slight resources to fight over after a third of our $20,000 annual budget is handed over to the landlord.
What, then, is the role of theoretical work at KSW? If there are no professional or academic benefits to be obtained from using theoretical concepts, well or poorly, why use them? The most recent self-description of KSW as “a not-for-profit writer-run centre founded in 1984 to carry out counter-hegemonic writing practices in trans-national, de-institutionalized, anti-professional and collaborative contexts” is a deliberate provocation and historically inaccurate, but intended to draw attention to the politics of the current writers’ collective, however tenuous. We engage in theoretical work in order to oppose nationalist, institutionalized, professional, and individualist writing. If we’re not permitted to use theoretical concepts, we have no way of reflecting upon and criticizing the contemporary culture and economy that we hate. We may use these concepts in a dislodged or uncritical way and thus unwittingly assist in the proliferation and legitimation of what we’re supposed to be fighting. It’s a danger. But it shouldn’t force us to withdraw from theoretical activity altogether, in favour of ... in favour of what?
Your other point, about the supposed exclusivity of theoretical work, is a longstanding problem in most social and political movements, isn’t it? I don’t have anything new to add to that debate. My position is that there should be a space for critical reflection in and around these movements, even if it is disruptive. When Canada enters into civil war I may change my mind.
The seminar I’ve put together is intended to involve people from overlapping communities of interest in Vancouver, though I’m not reaching for an imaginary or “potential” audience, a practice KSW disengaged from after the City of Vancouver pulled our annual operating grant in 1997. In particular I’d like to hear conversations between writers and activists associated with the numerous anti-capitalist affinity groups that sprung up after the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in November 1999. I’m especially keen to hear how activists are working linguistically with opposition and to seek connections between these activities and the work of the writers discussed in Sianne Ngai’s “Raw Matter” essay (in Open Letter) and the work of P. Inman, to begin with. It’s political oppositionality that seems to be the bridge, hence the phrase “practical negation”. The blurb itself is weighted in favour of writing practices rather than activist ones because KSW is the home-base for the seminar, rather than, say, the Independent Media Centre, Tao Communications, Mobilization for Global Justice, or Spartacus Books, just down the street. This may not succeed: activists may not want to read the poetry of Deanna Ferguson, Kevin Davies, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Bruce Andrews or Peter Inman or listen to what Jeff Derksen, Juliana Spahr or Sianne Ngai have to say about their writing, just as many writers prefer not to.
There are, no doubt, a series of exclusions that occur at the Kootenay School—as an organization, as a physical location, as a juridical entity, as an artist-run centre, as a writers’ collective, as a cluster of poetics or heap of writing, published, unpublished and unpublishable. I’m not in a position to identify these tonight, but I doubt if they are connected very closely with the use of theoretical language. I’d argue that the presence of critical theoretical concepts since February 2000—when we moved to a new space to house the Charles Watts Memorial Library, resource centre, discussion group meetings, reading series, and W magazine—has actually attracted a mix of newcomers who know they will gain nothing financially nor make themselves a career in writing though their involvement. Why, then, are these people attracted to the extra helping of theory with their writing? I suggest that it is because theoretical concepts are necessary for criticizing the social reality we’re supposed to be seemlessly reproducing and that these concepts aren’t up for discussion in many other places outside of courses taught by “mavericks” in the unversities, colleges, and institutes. I don’t mean to suggest that any concepts, as long as they are theoretical, will assist in this new bout of negativity. I have a few special ones to consider. But I’m curious to know which of the words in my blurb you find the most offensive.
Yrs, Aaron Vidaver
