The registering within poetic communities of how everything, even the critique of commodification, gets commodified, comes in [at least — ed.] two flavors. The first can be summarized as Well, it's become a fact of life, and we should all just get both over it and with it, which is to say, stop complaining and ride the current as best you can, p.s. you're already compromised, p.p.s., they've done so well they must be onto something. No links needed for various exemplars of this tradition, I trust. The other flavor looks more like a despairing measure-taking of how much effort it would require to exceed the current horizons of recuperation technology.
Neither of these has much appeal. But it seems worth mentioning that only one of thm is dialectical. The Moderns, for example, understood this very same problem and if it didn't finally solve it (couldn't, by its very nature, according to the elegant, sorrowing argument of T. J. Clark), well, they conspired with history to produce Modernism by trying.
Or to pose the difference between the two stances differently: the former takes the position of the knife-bearer in Frank O'Hara's parable and indeed gives up, simply because, you know, capitalism was a track star at Mineola Prep.
Posted by jane at September 13, 2005 07:21 PM | TrackBack