Nmherman on 26 Jan 2001 17:31:39 -0000


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[Nettime-bold] Fwd: [Genius2000Conference2000] more on poetic language & Utopia 

 


And here is something by my favorite Insurance Company Vice-president (and I consider the insurance companies to be the most evil of all institutions, at least colleges give young people a place to do recreational drugs and to hook up, at least the media manages to present some interesting television shows):

                                          You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That's it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling in a gilded street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

Okay, that was Wallace Stevens and Notes towards a supreme fiction. In the coming age of the metahip, the planet and race will be saved by a return to poetic language. The legions of the metahip will communicate in poetic language and as the legions of the metahip swell, the systems of oppression will begin to slowly, then more quickly, fall apart. This is not an apolitical, art for art's sake type of proposition. Poetic language is ideologically neutral in one sense, but it certainly can't be idealogically neutral given the current state of the world. In the DC protests of W.'s illegitmate assent to the emperor's palace, the angry mobs were communicating almost entirely in poetic language. Poetic language is the language in which people return to an awareness of themselves as bodies, surrounded by and interacting with other bodies. In a society that tries in every way to distance us from that fact, poetic language is revolutionary.

 

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