David Brazils Economy. The use of the labour-power is labour itself. The opening line of Economy, Am I doing the right thing with my time? A typewritten scrap heap. Waste as muse/ muse as waste. Paper, as turned in George Oppens poem titled Drawing, Not by growth/ But the/ Paper, turned, contains/ This entire volume, and even more. The poets mode of production, while historically conditioned by the social division of labour, is not an interventionist praxis, which irrationally bows down to the ideology of bourgeois functionalism (say, the proliferation poems for/on Gaza, for example, the ones by Sudeep Sen and another, which were featured in The Hindus Lit Review), but rather a sui generis activity which interrupts the very totality of capitalist exchange relationships. The work performs this interruption by immanently working out the political condition of its own emergence as a Poem. Practice: a theory of literary production/ Theory: a practice of literary production. In Economy, thought and thinking transmit each other as Brazil de/composes what ends lent to content mean Poem formally--- an economy of prosody. But does the work perform itself as a social fact, in that is it is a determinate negation of the society? On the first few reads, Brazils labour of the negative seems to further the still delimited dialectics of form and content in Oppens discrete constellations, Written Structure/ Shape of art/ More formal/ than a field would be/ (existing in it). Oppen offers a dialectics of resistance by disclosing the relational field of value production within which the work not only contiguously emerges, but is simultaneously implicated in. Thus, despite Oppens processual conception of the poem as an object, it remains, as he acknowledges, a finished product which hides its parts, as does a frigidaire. But in that it formally seems to reveal its emergence, Brazils own de/composed lyric must not be understood as having transcended the fetishistic coherence of an artwork. Instead this gesture which claims to unveil the delusion that art otherwise is, is itself, if not a delusion, then certainly a historical affect. It is the affirmative obverse of this reflexive lyric composition that the work is so precariously poised, and even tips over into performing the theodicy of a reconciled self-consciousness (the point at which/ incommensurables can come to touch,/ that points the/ holy/ that is whats / Economy . . . for which A MEASURE/AINT), and becomes, perhaps unintentionally, a surrogate for the otherwise unachieved/yet-unachievable bounty in the social life. The work needs to be understood as a historical affect--- what this hastily written facebook flash note/review is not capable of doing--- not only its means of production (a caveat of the processual lyric is the physical body of the work--- the use of a typewriter in the new millenieum to produce a singular work, whose scanned/xerox/ mass re-produced copies one reads) but also the historical conditions of its production. available as a pdf: littleredleaves/ebooks/catalog/david-brazil-economy
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:35:44 +0000
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