McKenzie Wark, Dispositions

January 29, 2005

[Below is a review that was originally published in print journal Verse (Vol. 20, No. 2 & 3). I've been designing Wark's site, ludiccrew.org, a repository of hihs past writings, reviews and interviews, where this review is also (re-)appearing. It's not my best piece of writing by any means, but Dispositions is interesting, especially in light of Wark's follow up, A Hacker Manifesto, which has garnered a fairly appreciative, but often critical review from Terry Eagleton, writing for The Nation.]

McKenzie Wark
Dispositions
Salt Books, 2002

Prolific Australian writer Wark describes himself as a "media junky" in his 1994 cultural studies volume, Virtual Geography, a study of how four specific events - the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, and the "Black Monday" stock market crash of 1987 - played out, aberrantly but tellingly, in the world media. I'll be honest and say that I haven't read all of Virtual Geography - just checked it out of the library to research this review, in fact - but my impression, after reading the introduction and skipping about, is of an imperative on Wark's part to escape genre with the aim of keeping the products of his academic discipline in the world - in his words, "to live and breathe connected to the time and space of current cultural projects" - an imperative that creates an important bridge between his cultural studies projects and this one.

For a writer of academic volumes to turn to "poetry" - though, in fact, Dispositions exists easily, not forcibly, in the rich overlap of journal, essay, prose poem, Cagean koan, conceptual art project and manifesto - is rare enough, but for the writer to transpose his or her interests, and even writing styles, into the new "creative" endeavor is worth remarking on. (I remember, when working on a volume of Asian American poetry, receiving a small group of lyrics by filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh Ha that were as sentimental and vulnerable as her movies and theory were intellectual and demanding.) While Virtual Geography, engaging and accessible as it is, appears to have suffered the same fate of much writing associated with a specialized form of inquiry, which is that it is not greatly read after initial trends have passed (my copy hadn't been checked out since 2000, and before that 1996, at least according to the stamps on the inside cover) his most recent writing suggests that he sees the critical and the "creative" writing projects of a piece. One book could lead backwards to another, even if the critical volumes - he's written three - are not as idiosyncratic as, say, Guide to Kulchur or Content's Dream. (One other major piece of Wark's writing that is neither poetry or criticism, the "Hacker's Manifesto," is available online.)

On a basic level, Dispositions is clearly "poetry," at least by expanded po-mo terms in the present American context. I think of it as an elaboration of the style of Ron Silliman's earlier "new sentence" works such as "Chinese Notebook," which itself was a modification (a softening up) of a style of writing he discovered in Wittgenstein - the kind of stylistic copping that Marjorie Perloff describes in Wittgenstein's Ladder that discarded the heavy meat of the philosophy and the discipline of the methodology, channeling instead the spirit of adventure, the persistent tone of inquiry, and some of the pathos of Wittgenstein's lonesome, even Quixotic, intellectual quest. Both works share an interest in recording the moments of one's awareness of perception - Silliman, after Olson, might have called it "proprioceptive," while Wark, after the new media theorist Theodor H. Nelson, might link it to "fantics" (the interactivity of man and machine in a shared perceptual and cognitive space). They also trouble the very genre in which they are working - in the process questioning what they are doing there in the writing (as gerund) - simply not knowing what the future will hold while being, at least consciously, in the driver's seat.

Many Language writers walk very close to losing a sense of proportion when describing the effects of one's private activities on the world at large, and in relation to the great themes of philosophy. Silliman's great skill as a writer is his manner of rendering complex ideas accessible but interesting, making one feel like he's a farmer matter-of-factly discoursing about how raising corn plays out in the world markets. But when one suspects that he is more interested in how his singular activities -- his own writing of a particular poem -- is impacting society, the distinctly naïve but clinical tone of his queries appears compromised by a confusion over principles we commonly put under the phrase of "the personal is political." For example, did he really think that the "Chinese Notebook" would have an impact on the tradition of Wittgenstein's philosophy when he wrote:

13. That this form has a tradition other than the one I propose, Wittgenstein, etc., I choose not to dispute. But what is its impact on the tradition proposed?

He then asks: "14. Is Wittgenstein's contribution strictly formal?," conveniently blurring the definition of "form" to mean both the superficial numbering of paragraphs and tone and pace of their execution with the Philosophical Investigations' inquiry into the form of the "language game" and philosophy itself. There is precedent, of course; certainly Eliot thought a pastiche of Donne or Pope would effect how these "masterpieces" were understood, ineluctably changing what they mean, a belief he describes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Cross-genre analogies, however, are more heady, and must have been terribly intoxicating to young, disaffiliated American poets in the seventies, not unlike, earlier, Robert Duncan's channeling of the breadth of Pound's Cantos into his own more approachable poetry. But one wonders if the game, becoming central to a tradition at all, even an untested one, becomes revealed too early. I admire the bravado of asking for this test - later, he writes:

149. What is it that allows me to identify this as a poem, Wittgenstein to identify his work as technical philosophy, Brockman's Afterwords to be seen as Esalen-oriented metaphysics, and Kenner's piece on Zukofsky literary criticism?

This kind of full frontal questioning of genre, along with the play-by-play assessment of the effects one's own writing in the inquiry - "Hey, look at me, I'm on the edge!" - has either fallen out of favor, or reached a questionable apotheosis in works such as Claudia Rankine's novel-poem Plot. I'm only engaging in this digression, however, not merely to mention one of my favorite works of Silliman's (one long out of print) but to note that Wark, coming from the left field of cultural studies and the other side of the world (he presently lives in Williamsburg and teaches at SUNY Albany), has written an excellent book that builds on a tendency or "vector" (one of his own key terms) that he was probably not aware of, or if so, not concerned with.

Structurally, Dispositions is a series of prose poems ranging in length from one to four pages (most are two), arranged chronologically (the first is dated January 29, 2001; the last is the only one written after 9/11) and headed by a curious series of data: the time (not always Eastern Standard), his elevation, his coordinates according to a global positioning device and the "accuracy" of the GPS reading. The global positioning device itself, called the Etrex, appears in his poem like the donkey in Robert Lewis Stevenson's travelogues (no, he doesn't discover it's a female in the end), and it is this basic diad - wanderer and Etrex - human and machine - sullied participant of cultural contingencies and recalcitrant tabula rasa of the memory-less device - that illustrates to the very binary that is collapsing in Wark's view of the world: that the globe itself, overlaid with a series of imaginary but persistent grids and numbers and circled by satellites, is itself something between animal and machine:

West zero, zero zero - a hair's breadth from the Prime Meridian. Close to the place where placeless space was made. Seventy three degrees East of home, and a smudge to the North. The Etrex takes its time finding these foreign bearings, so far from its last look at the subdivisions of the sky. Foreign here is just a question of degree.

As this verse paragraph suggests - rarely are they much longer - Dispositions is very effective in creating a sense of looming horizon beyond which lies an unmapped geography, a sort of "dark continent" effect, out of the very territories that Wark would claim are already completely mapped, not only by satellites but the spectacular system of the media. Since Dispositions is, relative to his discursive works, fragmented - an assemblage of telling "luminous detail" (a phrase of Pound's) - this horizon expands to include matters of the mental interior, the realm of subjective associations that is the psychological novelist's bread and butter.

His thoughts when looking at art, for example, are condensed into five line paragraphs before skipping over to another, perhaps entirely unrelated, topic, or continuing its way but after suffering a lethal, signature slant, hence withholding the generosity of the discursive green lawns of his cultural studies prose. Each dated entry, and within it each short paragraph, then becomes a thought "vector," a directional thrust that might serve to circumscribe a set of themes but will decidedly not bother closing the gaps. This effect might be heightened by the reader's knowledge that Wark is aware that his poetry, unlike his academic publications, is not likely to play out significantly in his field of scholarship - it's the extinct cultural critic who picks up a book of poetry to illustrate a point - nor is it likely to be critiqued as a syllogistically constructed argument. This allows Wark to suggest a field of potential thinking rather than follow-through every assertion with a respectful appeal to the reader's intelligence; his propensity for phrases like the opening line, "The sun shines out of my ass," are shots across the prow in this regard. This suggests Symbolist critic Remy de Gourmont's practice of "dissociative" thinking - the active dissociation of two ideas, such as "duty" and "patriotism," that are held to be nearly one idea in the popular mind but are entirely distinct ("democracy" and "capitalism" might be two such ideas today) - as an informing component of Wark's project, since, more than most poets and writers that I have read, Wark appears to have mastered the idea of knowing what his thoughts are - they can range from the bodily/vulgar to the lofty/cosmopolitan - and then contextualizing them both culturally and within the memory of his sense impressions.

I think it's time for an extended quote:

Not for nothing do they call it train of thought... The chatter of the wheels on rails and the clatter of the mind on skids. Books and magazines and music for distractions.

The folly and the danger, both personal and political, of too optimistic a view of the malleability of nature, including human nature. All those tedious improvers, from militants to therapists. All their purges. They can't accept the impurity in the gut.

That radical pessimism, of Chamfort, of Leopardi. Just because one thinks the worst of one's kind does not mean one believes they deserve even less. One might not suffer another's pride, yet takes no pride in another's suffering.

The pessimist's wager: No matter how low an opinion one may form of what is, to view its absence as something short of an improvement.

The effort to retreat from human folly. To participate knowingly in all human dispositions. To neither kiss nor kill the reigning idols. The measured use of illusion to forestall mania. Between Semtex and utopia.

The affirmation of one thing at least can be overcome. The tyranny of boredom. Which may not sound like much, but it is at least not nothing. What is tyranny if not boredom?

The revolutions of 1989, that great revolt against boredom and tyranny. In Prague, in Budapest, in Berlin. In Beijing, in Taipei, and in Seoul. In Manilla and Pretoria. Revolutions against boredom, not all of which succeeded. The best of them took precautions against installing boredom all over again.

Two cheers for the revolution! The revolution of the pessimists. Pessimists, to whom nothing deserves that third, fanatic cheer.

(The easy intellectualism, coupled with a pessimism that is entirely unallied with class snobbery, reminds me of his late compatriot, the poet Martin Johnston, whose novel Cicada Gambit is an extended meditation on this idea of a sort of futuristic, cosmopolitan cultural ambition - it was meant to be the antipodean Ulysses - without the crown of the "fanatic cheer." It also reminds me of the Thirties poet, American Kenneth Fearing, a Marxist whose sense of humor got in the way of anything like enthusiasm for the revolution, and whose cadences - never insistent or explosive, but with a lively surface - are comparable to those of Dispositions.)

The only table of contents Dispositions provides is a sort of bibliography, or list of sources, for each entry at the end. The excerpt above lists the Brecht Forum, bell hooks, a New York Times book review, and a Benjamin Moore Color Preview - a bit of Dada playfulness? - as among the elements instigating the entry, not Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Guy Debord as one might have expected. Because there are no page numbers, this forces the reader to navigate the book via this convex index -- a klugey circuit that enhances the main theme of the book: finding a determinate sense of place and time entirely dependent on seemingly spurious systems, the "invented" numerical system of coordinates versus the "organic" development of place names. It also makes the book "interactive" - or let's say "ergodic," from Espen Aarseth's terminology, to avoid that overused term - in that some terribly active book handling has to occur before honing in on one's chosen location, alienating the very reflexive act of citation. But this activity is probably not more unusual than trying to negotiate New York, Sydney, or Guatemala by trusting the oracle of numbers on a small, hand-held and battery-operated device (or negotiating the Alps with a map of Paris, as the Situationists suggested).

I don't want, however, to pile on too many polysyllables to recommend this book, which of course will not be for everyone. It is much better written than a lot of literature attempting to describe a new sensibility in the wake the initial blasts of the "digital revolution," much of which is jargon heavy, sentimental or humorless, and belongs on that small shelf of "poetry" that tries to access this spirit at all. Like Gourmont a century ago, Wark could be quietly setting the stage for a fecund, polyvalent new aesthetics; that Wark doesn't beat the drum for an "avant-garde," post or dystopic, sets his temperament right with our times, in which there is a sense of exhaustion about the Futurist or Dada affect. If there is any strong argument for writing that cross genres, it is that a strong media and political theorist can stumble, headlong and spiritedly, into the traditions of poetry.