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Here's a site run by autonomedia.org and interactivist.net with writing by Stewart Home, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Negri, etc. I'm pasting in the first paragraph of a book review by Stewart Home below since it seems to have something to do with what Darren and I have been talking about regarding "writing" and the multi-authored blog, etc. Compare Home's ideas to some of what is happening on Silliman's site -- I'm sure that RS would agree with what is by now a truism regarding the bourgeois subject and "style," but my sense is that the cult of style -- as much as RS is positioning himself against the "school of quietude" -- is very much alive in his critical vocabulary; certainly no Language poet has gone as far in the critique of the bourgeois subject as the Situationists and their kin have. For the most part, I've never had any problem with the "bourgeois subject," at least some varieties, as it's been so long since we've seen anything else that I think even the most "radical" among us are more or less bourgeois (and the most un-bourgeois tend toward the side of religious fanaticism, even of a secular sort, but there are fewer of them in the art world). I kind of think of Andy Levy as probably the most obvious example of someone redolent of the aura of hearth and home but more or less affecting a "radical" open style, but much Language poetry is somewhat infused with the hankering after "style" and whatnot. My sense is that many writers who dismiss "style" as a bourgeois tick have simply never been able to acquire a style worth preserving -- it's not easy to do -- and are often readable, even compelling, but ultimately bland (dare I say anemic? winky winky) writers. But as James Schuyler once said, if we're not bourgeois, what are we?
Interactivist Info Exchange: Independent Media & Analysis
The Return of Proletarian Post-Modernism Part II
Luther Blissett's recent best-seller, 'Q'
by Stewart Home
Q is an intricate historical novel by four Bolognan authors deploying the name of the inglorious footballer Luther Blissett. Stewart Home, a champion of 'multiple identities' who has also published under this name, detects in Q's cultural bricolage an ascending dialectical movement between rebellious practice and theory.
More than any other art form, even painting at the height of its ‘realist’ phase, the novel is tied to the rise of the bourgeois subject. It is for this very reason that fiction writing has tended to lag behind the other arts, and novels are nearly always ascribed to single authors. Indeed, that past master of bourgeois reaction, George Orwell, made books no longer being written by individuals one of the great horrors of his risible dystopia, 1984. In many arts, and only most obviously music and film, openly acknowledged collaboration is the norm and the ongoing weakness of the novel as a mode of cultural expression can be ascribed at least in part to its one-sided and pseudo-individualistic development. Well established writers tend to find it difficult to collaborate because they insist the stamp of their own style should be left on everything they touch, leading to disagreements and a lack of cohesion when they attempt to work in concert. When one or more collaborating writers find it either difficult or impossible to accept the revision by others of their contributions to a group project, it is each author’s weaknesses rather than their strengths that are multiplied. Innovative writers happily lacking a ready-made cultural reputation are in the fortunate position of being able to take a dispassionate view of those moribund artistic conventions rooted in the notion of style. Thus it comes as no surprise that the most successful recent example of a jointly effected anti-novel should be the work of ‘young unknowns’. The book is called Q and although it is attributed to Luther Blissett, the vigour of its anti-narrative is rooted in the fact that it emerged from the combined imaginations of four young upstarts who just happen to live in Bologna and scribble in their native Italian. The gulf between Q and most of the books currently dominating the bestseller list is the difference between masturbation and sex.
Posted by Brian Stefans at June 26, 2003 11:38 AM | TrackBack