From “Editorial Coda: Notes on Struggle and Cosmology”

By Rich Owens.

More than capitalism, history itself is crisis. Contradiction, violence, antagonism – these will outlast capitalism just as they preceded it, perhaps even yielding a comparable string of commensurably horrifying outcomes as history continues to unfold. This is not to apologize for the crises constitutive of capitalism, but rather to suggest that, while the horizon of capitalism resides at all times within crisis, the limits of crisis may not be breached by the collapse of capital. Put differently, if capitalism is crisis, it should not be assumed that crisis is capitalism. Polis, however, social in orientation and prior to capital, emerges with crisis, through crisis, as a gesture towards ameliorating crisis. But if polis is that which aspires to reconcile crisis, it can only do so through struggle.

Elsewhere: Damn the Caesars.

From “Public Management Reform”

By Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert

The relationship between poltics, public management, and public opinion is a contentious area, and one in which systemic data are at best patchy. Having made these caveats, we will attempt to draw out a few broad propositions from the evidence advanced above.

First, public management reforms have altered the relationships between elected and appointed officials, in a number of countries and in a number of ways. In this sense, at least, they are not ‘neutral’. It seems likely that these changes have been greatest in the core NPM countries, somewhat less in the northern group of European countries, and smallest in the central European group. Second, there is an absence of convincing evidence concerning the willingness or ability of executive politicians to become the the ‘strategic managers’ of their portfolios. The kindest thing that could be said about the reform models that cast politicians in such roles would be that they are unproven and seem to fly in the face of known incentives to behave in a more traditional ‘political’ fashion. Third, managers do appear to have gained extra authority in a number of ways but at the same time political control has been vigorously reasserted in many of the twelve countries. There is no necessary contradiction between these two developments – the public sector is large and diverse enough for both to be happening at the same time. In specific cases, however, there may be a quite definite tension. Fourth, any suggestion that public management can be radically depoliticized […] is either a misunderstanding or flies in the face of evidence from many countries. The allocation of, say, health care resources or decisions about educational standards or major public infrastructure projects are all inherently ‘political’ decisions, whether they are taken by powerful politicians or tough public managers (or, indeed, medical doctors or teachers). The public will often see the political authority as ultimately responsible – or, at least, sharing responsibility – however much ministers may protest that these are technical or professional decisions which have been taken by the appropriate officials. Fifth, there is a certain ambiguity in much of the rhetoric around strengthening accountability and increasing transparency, in so far as the executive politicians have used the new politics/administration split to redefine policy weaknesses as managerial failures. This enables political leaders to shuffle off direct responsibilities for things going wrong – or, at least, to try to. Furthermore, it appears that legislatures have been slow to take up and use the increased flow of performance data which greater transparency and the contemporary emphasis on outputs and outcomes afford. […] one might say that even when a ‘real result’ manages to climb over the conceptual, methodological, and political barriers, and escapes into the wider public world, it is often left wandering around looking for an audience. Sixth, few of the specific reforms appear to have been undertaken in direct response to ‘public opinion’ – although some such rationale has quite often been claimed. Privatization, the introduction of market mechanisms, downsizing, and the promotion of PI systems are the products of elite, not popular, agendas (even if public opinion has subsequently accepted some of these innovations and begun to make use of them). The sector of greatest tension would appear to be the welfare state, the basic elements of which remain enduringly popular in most countries but the expense of which inevitably draws it into the line of fire of the cost-cutters and downsizers […] Seventh, any simple picture of public opinion as being ‘for’ or ‘against’ ‘big government’ is misleading. Such evidence as is available shows that, however limited the public’s knowledge may be of the specifics of reform, popluar attitudes towards government are multifaceted and, in some respects, quite sophisticated.

Soundeye – Sunday & Monday

Sunday morning, final session.

Fergal Gaynor read from VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces, which collects work from tennish years & comes in at under 80 pages. I think he’s put the font up a bit. A terrible showing. Fergal said that as part of his job in the information sector, new acquisitions have to go through him, & vice-versa, & “Lower Realms” may perhaps involve skim-reading & bar-coding vast lost libraries of Gnomic arcana:

There are cars.
There are codes and terminals.
There is a sea that howls.
There are stars,
material fires
describing letters
at the eyes’ limit.
There are three classes of men:
of clay, of flesh, and divine.
There are houses,
isolated and clustered,
in each shell
individual lives.
There are signs.
There are no rivers.
There are bushes
from other continents
planted by hotels.
There are wet periods.
There are dry periods.
There is up, down,
to the left,
to the right,
before
and behind.
There are cities
that spread like organisms.
There are organisms
that are nothing like cities.
There are churches,
mosques and meeting halls,
as many as there are prophets.
There are armies
manoeuvring by day
manoeuvring by night.
There are toothbrushes and showerheads.
There are serpents.
There is prosperity
flowing from prosperity.

Thomas McCarthy used a musical metaphor to tell apart Fergal’s art from his own – the big John Cage tonality ciao as against jakey Caoineadh nationalism chaoplexity respectively, was it now? – but I didn’t think it was a whole new band, just quite a few instrument changes. He said that he honoured the modernist project, one which he characterised as withholding its counsel from the project called Ireland until such time as a culture emerged which was capable of receiving it, a custody which he also honoured. His poems were not, as Bob put it, conspicuously not modernist. I hallucinated many tall translucent fluted pillars during them: internal rhymes?

Geoffrey Squires has a sketch in his wallet which he says is of his daughter’s sink. Geoff’s first poem was filled with silences, & reminded of Heidegger & of late Beckett, both probably worlded up (q.v.). I thought, “There must be something comic in this” but I listened very hard for it & heard hardly anything. Echo-lolcat-tionfail. Miaow-wham. No, not nothing though. Then some naturey poems from an earlier period & finishing with some new translations. “My cat and I are of one mind.” Altogether masterful & succinct. I bumped into a dazed Geoff groupie afterwards. You should buy him this, he told me he’s big into pop-up.

Fergal leapt up the male staircase as if to say:

Stone
flows
slowly
like a stairs
at the base of which
a suppliant
waits

Fergal did not thank Jimmy and Rachel Warriner for organising SoundEye so much as openly gloated that they had, not him. He soon sipped his Beamish, was it, with the air of someone who had just sold a bottle imp for two and six. People were going by now but myself and your one lingered like a bad smell & something posh spritzed to cover it. Tried to write a review of Gerry Loose’s Less – mehyaw. Chased down Fast Morvin’, Gerry Footloose and Steve McCarefree in my high vis red beret for a penultimate touring Beamish. Karen & Fergal too. Something about the institutional resistance to the abstraction of language compared with music, cinema, visual arts. Why? Because it is the medium of legitimation for so many material interests? &/or for other reasons? Also something about modernism as a quasi-secular revival Gnostic heresy (cf. Fergal’s recent stuff) & also perhaps as this identity being most emphatic in the rationalist/enlightenment moment of these projects (cf. Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; cf. anti-Nicene theology as a kind of proto-rationalism against proto-dialectics; Fear & Trembling the blue sky transitional thought piece).

Who was it now, being complimented without caveat in a safe & non-judgemental setting, on their computer game sublime, at Trevor’s table, the very next day? Not Mike so Milton maybe – Owen was sitting there in this particular effervescent raiment, & there’s this poem of Trevor’s dedicated to Owen which ends “World-up!” so I thought, did Owen one day say to Trevor, “Word up, Trevor” & was he misheard as the bells pealed, & did they get to talking about Mario, words, worlds and levels? Are our worlds, & is the world of the happy and that of the suffering, traversable – & are they commensurable by any liquid system other than capital? (See NOTE).

On the first day Trevor read an apparently good poem leading through series of reproaches along the lines of, “Never imagine that. Don’t for one second think.” Netbookéd Anna was the true core of news. She channelled the latest arrest & then read us some Shelley as it pertained to David Cameron. Disanalogies can be shmooshed if there are two of you – one holds the frames in alignment & the other shmooshes with their thumbs. Trevor was going on about when he’d last played a Mario vehicle there’d been no electricity or even light under foliage & they’d just had to dress up as plumbers & go hunting real giant fungus. Can constitutional liberal democracy draw up a system of checks and balances which reflects real influence blocs & safeguards its foundational principles in any substantial degree, & what might a check on the press look like even in the abstract?

A different we walked the hounds Flux and Jiggy and the cur. Your one’s latte tasted bitter and my black Americano incredibly gentle and frothy. The pair of dicks we retain to get to the bottoms of both dismay. Namaste, non-masts. While the boarding passes were letterpressed I saw that subscribers to the UKPoetry listserv had been beefing and some of them had – fuck, Geraldinehad left? Now who would – I freedove the archive for the pearl of Marianne Morris’s mid-Naughties flounce-taking from the same list after some broygus with Geraldine Monk in her meaner-Tina-Loy-fay phase, but must have dreamt it. Why do people leave listservs and why do people leave Facebook? We all have self-defiant days, soon hammering the needles we bent for our coats to hang on flat again, supergluing the works barrel only a tick ago we had the guts to shatter, for one final intravenous curtain call, final final version 6 final.doc. Your one is very high-achieving but no matter how little time I leave between logging into Facebook she’s logged in in the interim. Odysseus had a classy “lashing” mast but to forgo FB we must shove our hands in smegma to the wrist she always says. So the spirit in which Boris Jardine deletes Crystal Defenders from his Nokia / Lila Matsumoto quilts her communist apron – I get that spirit and I also get boycotting FB (though not UKPoetry – unless over Keith Tuma’s financial support of puppet bands) but “leaving” with any other motives (I don’t like it “here”) looks to me suspiciously like a technophobe’s fuck-up – like renaming the icon you’re trying to double-click on spacebar, or typing your email password (mahmoudelbarasi) in the Bing search box. A kind of iconoclasm working at the level of massively networked symbolisation, which “negatively” idolises the representational dynamics it “smashes” would be putting it a bit strong. Ah go on so. There is the choice instead to update your Facebook page – “I rarely check my messages, contact me by email or, in an emergency, Lassie” – or to divert a Listserv to a folder or an address you can browse once in a blue moon. It was weird to be in an internet café where Jonty Tiplady wasn’t writing poems: abroad is very detailed. You buy your security bag for gels and fluids from a gumball machine for instance. Mounted our plane. Some bargains in there like. Some of the lower sky we flew over was especially fine. The inflight movie was Aaron Sorkin’s UKPoetry. “The UKPoetry is cool.” Your one said the strips in the sea were strong currents. Correlated to the plane’s banking the Leith harbours mirrored a swiftly rolling constellation of cloudscape specimens, with occlusive facets cut into each water and out of each moment of imagery by drifts of sea flora or scum or by rougher water. I was as happy as if a facesucker, that had been on me in Marchmont, had gone to Leith. Your one had an altercation with the air steward-cum-pot collector. “I have my third wave hat on now.” It was resolved eventually as in Uganda in 1976 by special forces. My mother met us at the terminal building and gave us some spinach and mushroom calzone, green salad, giant cous-cous salad with pepper and sundried tomato, amoretti biscuits, biscotti, strawberries cast in chocolate, Tesco finest sundried tomato crisps, fruit salad and semi-skimmed milk. The Thick of It before even unpacking my Type G to Type C outlet plug adaptor. It is so fucked up because Malcolm Tucker gets fired.

Note: A “level” in a computer game is often a kind of place (or kind of “timeplace” perhaps) but it is also often an overall measure (or constitutive feature) of a character’s prowess. Typically when you “go to the next level” or “beat the level” it means you ascend to a new place or timeplace or world (which is sometimes the same as a level, though sometimes a run of levels with similar decor), however when you “level up” or “go up a level” it means your personal prowess grows – your hit points and abilities. “World-up” is thus not only a play on “word up” (likely an allusion to Neil Pattison’s recuperation of hip-hop hiyas & fare-ye-wells as images of the damaged public sphere) but an invocation to make all the changes characteristic of timeplace upon the few meagre pixels of a hero, probably upon Luigi in an idle loop – an embattled image of an identity which probably cannot “be the change it wants to see in the world” because to so do would be to “world-up!” but it can but level up, & however high its quanta climb, the world cannot site & sustain identities whose extrapolation would disclose the necessary world to the extant world (and, nebulously, vice-versa). Eh? In philosophy (all) “world” is also a word to trigger strong anti-positivist associations & in particular resistance to the putative reduction of life to affairs which can be put as propositions & vectors which can in principle be quantified. For instance, any reduction of a world of “background” competencies & equipment can be held to leave out that world’s vital bits. So are our worlds, & is the world of the happy and that of the suffering, traversable, & are they commensurable by any liquid system other than capital?

Note (unlinked): It’s a bit weird. It all makes me want to feel my mind being blown by experimental art, as I guess it was more easily & more frequently the first time I went to Cork — I must have been like 21, 22. Were there maybe fewer precedents & parallels? It’s kind of nostalgia as sloth — wanting to feel carried at the back of the North Wind to places I know I can get to on foot. (Maybe collective longing for Golden Ages is an ideology partly composited of many individual memories of juvenile phases in which thought & feeling, or some more nuanced versions of those categories, go tightly & swingingly hand-in-hand).

Note (unlinked): Montaigne uses the term “the fourth estate,” nowadays often used of the press. Trans. Florio (1603): “Having other times gone about to endeare and make some one of our observations to be of force, and which was with resolute auctoritie received in most parts about us, and not desiring, as most men doe, onely to establish the same by the force of lawes and examples, but having ever bin from her beginning, I found the foundation of it so weake that myselfe, who was to confirme it in others, had much adoe to keepe my countenance. This is the receipt by which Plato undertaketh to banish the unnaturall and preposterous loves of his time, and which hee esteemeth soveraigne and principall: To wit, that publike opinion may condemne them; that Poets, and all men else may tell horrible tales of them. A receit by meanes whereof the fairest daughters winne no more the love of their fathers, nor brethren most excellent in beautie the love of their sisters. The very fables of Thyestes, of Oedipus, and of Macareus, having with the pleasures of their songs infused this profitable opinion in the tender conceit of children. Certes, chastitie is an excellent virtue, the commoditie whereof is very well knowne; but to use it, and according to nature to prevaile with it, is as hard as it is easie, to endeare it and to prevaile with it according to custome, to lawes and precepts. The first and universall reasons are of a hard perscrutation. And our Masters passe them over in gleaning, or in not daring so much as to taste them, at first sight cast themselves headlong into the libertie or sanctuarie of custome. Those that will not suffer themselves to be drawne out of his original source, do also commit a greater error, and submit themselves to savage opinions: witnesse Chrysippus; who in so many severall places of his compositions, inserted the small accompt he made of conjunctions, how incestuous soever they were. Hee that will free himselfe from this violent prejudice of custome, shall find divers things received with an undoubted resolution, that have no other anker but the hoarie head and frowning wimples of custom, which ever attends them: which maske being pulled off, and referring all matters to truth and reason, he shall perceive his judgment, as it were overturned, and placed in a much surer state. As for example, I will then aske him, what thing can be more strange than to see a people bound to follow lawes he never understood? Being in all his domesticall affaires, as marriages, donations, testaments, purchases, and sales, necessarily bound to customary rules, which forsomuch as they were never written nor published in his owne tongue, he cannot understand, and whereof he must of necessity purchase the interpretation and use. Not according to the ingenious opinion of Isocrates, who counselled his King ‘to make the Trafikes and negotiations of his subjects free, enfranchize and gameful, and their debates, controversies, and quarrels burthensome, and charged with great subsidies and impositions.’ But according to a prodigious opinion, to make open sale, and trafficke of reason itselfe, and to give lawes a course of merchandize, is very strange. I commend fortune for that (as our historians report) it was a Gentleman of Gaskonie, and my Countriman, that first opposed himselfe against Charles the great, at what time he went about to establish the Latine and Imperiall lawes amongst us. What is more barbarous than to see a nation, where by lawful custome the charge of judging is sold, and judgments are paid for with readie monie; and whore justice is lawfully denied him that hath not wherewithall to pay for it; and that this merchandize hath so great credit, that in a politicall government there should be set up a fourth estate of Lawyers, breath-sellers, and pettifoggers, and joyned to the three ancient states, to wit, the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Communaltie; which fourth state having the charge of lawes, and sometimes auctoritie of goods and lives, should make a body, apart and severall from that of Nobilitie, whence double lawes must follow, those of honour and those of justice; in many things very contrarie do those as rigorously condemne a lie pocketed up, as these a lie revenged: by the law and light of armes he that putteth up an injurie shall be degraded of honour and nobilitie; and he that revengeth himselfe of it, shall by the civill Law incurre a capitall punishment. Hee that shall addresse himselfe to the lawes to have reason for some offence done unto his honour, dishonoureth himself. And who doth not so, is by the Lawes punished and chastised. And of these. so different parts, both neverthelesse having reference to one head; those having peace, these war committed to their charge; those having the gaine, these the honour; these knowledge, these vertue ; those reason, these strength; those the word, these action; those justice, these valour; those reason, these force; those a long gowne, and these a short coat, in partage and share. Touching indifferent things, as clothes and garments, whosoever will reduce them to their true end, which is the service and commodity of the bodie, whence dependeth their originall grace and comlines, for the most fantasticall to my humour that may be imagined, amongst others I will give them our square caps; that long hood of plaited velvet, that hangs over our womens head, with his parti-coloured traile, and that vaine and unprofitable modell of a member which we may not so much as name with modestie, whereof notwithstanding we make publike shew and open demonstration. Those considerations do neverthelesse never distract a man of understanding from following the common guise. Rather, on the contrary, mee seemeth that all severall, strange, and particular fashions proceed rather of follie or ambitious affectation than of true reason: and that a wise man ought inwardly to retire his minde from the common presse, and hold the same liberty and power to judge freely of all things, but for outward matters he ought absolutely to follow the fashions and forme customarily received. Publike society hath nought to do with our thoughts; but for other things, as our actions, our travel, our fortune, and our life, that must be accomodated and left to its service and common opinions: as that good and great Socrates, who refused to save his life by disobeying the magistrate, yea a magistrate most wicked and unjust. For that is the rule of rules, and generall law of lawes, for every man to observe those of the place wherein he liveth.”

Note (unlinked): The Jowis and thair errour ar confoundit

From “The Unspoken Constitution”

By Stuart Weir, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, et al.

We, the elite, do not believe in the kind of constitution most other advanced nations have — those that boast a belief in popular sovereignty; with resounding declarations such as ‘we, the people’, and that tend to contain rules about how governments should act. We describe ours as the ‘unwritten constitution’. It is a collection of laws, fictions, powers left over from the old monarchy and powers that we make up as we go along. It allows us to decide what governments can do; and best of all, only we have the power to change it. We disguise the fact that it is neither popular, representative nor accountable through a set of myths about the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, Magna Carta and the rule of law. We hide our power behind a grand title, the Sovereignty of Parliament. It has a democratic ring to it, but legally this sovereignty is vested in the Crown in Parliament, or in plainer language, in the hands of the Prime Minister and government within Parliament. This enables us to combine executive and legislative power and allows us to keep the judges in their place. Parliament by and large passes all the laws that we tell it to, or better still, we can employ devices, known as statutory instruments, to make the law so that we do not have to bother with Parliament that much. Parliament, far from being representative of the people, is actually our bulwark against the people. We are also able to treat the people not as citizens but as subjects. We encourage people to believe that they are free, though actually they are in chains, unfelt but real chains nevertheless. One most helpful myth is widely believed – that the great virtue of the obsolete electoral system that we use for elections to Parliament is that it enables the people to ‘chuck the rascals out.’ Actually it is the secret of our grasp on power. Elections are unavoidable, but we can reduce their unpredictability in a variety of ways. First-past-the-post elections limit the number of parties that have a chance of winning power, and most MPs – four out of every five – can count on being returned at a general election (if not after an expenses scandal). Moreover, once in power governments can usually expect to be returned over a series of elections. The electoral system for the House of Lords is even more efficient – we do not have one.