Attention Span 2011 | Joshua Clover

Bruno Bosteels | The Actuality of Communism | Verso | 2011

A fantastically useful orientation guide for the recent boom in political theory: Ranciere, Moreiras, Badiou, Zizek, various others. I can’t say I share the basic supposition, regarding the virtue of formalizations of concepts which attend the non-abstract problem of state form. But I was grateful to understand a bunch of stuff much better after reading.

Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch | Autonomedia | 2004

We read this book in reading group in the summer; I was interested to discover that many others’ experiences of it were quite different from mine. Someone took it as a defense of witchiness, rather than a history of how the conjured threat of feminine dark magic served as pretext to dispossess and discipline women. Well okay. But I have been pretty obsessed with revisiting the Italian Marxist feminists; while it seems to me more and more that their male comrades (Negri, Virno, Marazzi) got really crucial things wrong, they themselves were making some of the great breakthroughs of the era, ones that are with us more than ever, I think.

Jean-Marie Gleize | Tarnac, un acte préparatoire | Seuil | 2011

What poetry should be doing, if one is willing to submit to the ambiguous discipline of the word “should.”

David Harvey | Enigma of Capital | Oxford | 2010

Basically a primer version of the longer and more ambitious Limits to Capital, attempting to recast it along the lines of his Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. And indeed it is lucid, clear, systematic, and persuasive: a nice reminder that spending decades thinking about a problem set can lead to refinement and immediacy of ideas rather than the opposite. In that sense it’s like a refutation of the idea of “Late Style.” But actually I miss the grander version: in the condensation and reader-friendliness of this account, certain explanations of causality within the dynamic of capital become too clear, too one-directional, less dialectical, and even sometimes mistaken. Of little matter. The best recent guide to the most complex man-made object in the word, endlessly useful, and with luck it will lead readers to the fuller and more frustratingly suspended—and finally more adept—versions.

Uyen Hua | a / s / l (age / sex / location) | ingirumimusnocteetsonsumimurigni | 2011

Tao Lin with a soul, albeit a fascinating and strange one, provisionally new.

Ke$ha | Animal | RCA | 2010

Vomiting up tequila and glitter.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

It is a delight to watch this book become influential, not because it deserves it—it does—but because it is clearly advancing the conversation.

Pasolini | In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology | City Lights | 2010

Pasolini! who had to leave the communist party to be a better communist! Reading this I was reminded of “On A Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” and how we tend to think of that essay as concerning how communism ruined, wasted, and killed its blindingly beautiful writers—until we revisit the essay, and rediscover that the story it tells of Mayakovsky unfolds his misery arising from the failure of the revolution to be communist enough, the ways that it stopped short, blunted itself, made concessions, quit the promise of its total radicality. Also, a couple of the Pasolini poems are translated by Jonathan Richman, which is just the oddest thing in the world. Trying to parse the subterranean connection between the atmospheres of Friulia and the summer air of Route 128 when it’s late an night is a real mindfuck.

Arthur Rimbaud trans. John Ashbery | Illuminations | Farrar | 2011

I haven’t read this yet but I’m sure it’s great.

McKenzie Wark | The Beach Beneath the Street | Verso | 2011

There is some sense now that histories of the Situationist International are like Harry Potter fanfic; the main impulse is to sustain the imagined experience of life in that bohemian Hogwarts of the group’s milieu in a neighborhood or two in mid-century Paris. The vital difference is that there is a self-reflexive claim here about what the imagination might be for, other than self-sustaining profitability.

Ellen Willis | Out of the Vinyl Deeps | Minnesota | 2010

“Willis’s music writing was clear and direct, without gamesmanship, but never one-dimensional. No one had previously captured the nuanced double motion in which rock could generate untold pleasures, presentiments of freedom and equality and unfettered sexuality—but could never escape the gravity of the exclusions and inequities and unacknowledged labor on which it depended. This dialectical conception of the world and its workings can be as every bit as revolutionary as rock, the last great invention of the postwar boom.”

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Joshua Clover is a Professor of English Literature at University of California Davis. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled The Epic of Capital, bringing together the study of poetry with contemporary political economy, and finishing a poetry collection called Tranche/Syntagma.

Clover’s Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span – Tom Orange

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space | Palm Press | 2008

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006 | Omnidawn | 2007

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us.

David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Oxford University Press | 2007
Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Picador | 2008

Particularly instructive when read together.

Maggie Nelson | Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions | University of Iowa Press | 2007

It’s about time someone like Nelson has come along to explode the conventional wisdom on these matters! Her refusal to accept the terms of debate on their own terms is utterly refreshing.

Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World | Random | 2002
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Penguin | 2007

“Everything’s connected” goes the ecological credo, but Pollan’s exemplary studies show that credo operating with new subtleties and depth, a true parti pris des choses that is at once a profoundly important politics and ethics as well as ecology.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa Press | 2007

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with.

Charles Gayle (alto sax), Sirone (bass) & Rashied Ali (drums) | Stadtsaal, Burghausen (Germany) | 8 March 2008 | audience recording circulated via dimeadozen.org

With this formidable rhythm section behind him, Gayle trades in his trademark scorched-earth tenor saxophone for a lighter and sweeter horn. Be assured, his alto tone is still incredibly biting and intense, but it’s somehow more soulful, warmer, more human. He has blended the blusey wail of Ornette Coleman, the flurrious attack of John Coltrane and the ecstatic leaps of Albert Ayler with his own genius to become a true master of the idiom.

Harmony Korine | Mister Lonely | IFC Films | 2008

An expatriate Michael Jackson impersonator alone in Paris finds the company of kindred spirits when he is invited by a Marilyn Monroe to join a commune of other impersonators in the Scottish highlands. The trailer for this film made it look overly sentimental and sappy  — in stark contrast to the shock tactics of Korine’s previous efforts (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy). To my surprise, however, and with the addition of flying nuns under guidance by Werner Herzog in cameo, Korine has put together a truly touching mediation on freedom, marginalization and utopia, and what it means to discover and be yourself in all its joyous possibilities and painful limitations. Attending the Nashville premier, which featured a special appearance and Q&A session by hometown hero Korine, was an added bonus.

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More Tom Orange here.

Attention Span – Joshua Clover

Giovanni Arrighi | Adam Smith in Beijing | Verso | 2008

As a view of the future, with at least a partial hope that the next global regime might be less exploitation-based, it seems strangely optimistic. As a description of the now, and of the relation between interstate and intercapitalist developments, it’s clear-minded and ambitious. As an account of the jagged decline of the United States as global hegemon, it’s a blitz.

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008
M.I.A. | Kala | Interscope | 2007

The benefit of Edge being a little shambling in their publication schedule is that I have gotten to put some version of this book on the Attention Span list for eleven consecutive years. For all the magnificent of the parts (with Lateral Argument still magnificentest), the book is the thing: an overlapping structure which asks you ceaselessly to reevaluate the scale of parts and wholes, to read every passage as an ambiguous instance shifting within a structure within a circuit. In this sense it’s a triumph of thinking globalization/late capitalism/the lives within it, comparable only to the markedly different Kala, M.I.A.’s album which nonetheless takes up very much the same problem, about the representability of part and whole in the world-system. Or: it’s basically the soundtrack for Mike Davis’s World of Slums. In making a mystified situation experienceable —in this case the circuits of economy, terror, epidemic, and culture that form what we call globalization—it stands with any work of art this millennium.

David Harvey | graduate seminar podcast on Marx’s Capital | davidharvey.org | 2008

Also available from iTunes. So I guess this is pop culture.  It feels that way, which is nice.

Bhanu Khapil | Incubation: A Space for Monsters | Leon Works | 2006

A reminder—lifesaving—that even the problem sets that don’t compel you (I mean me, in this case) might compel someone else toward something fantastic and surprising and compelling, so might be truly useful.

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine | Metropolitan Books | 2007

A hybrid of a book: history, journalism, theory. These are coordinated to secure the claim that the structural similarities of torture strategies and Chicago School restructuring policies are neither incidental nor abstract. It’s the political economy, stupid.

Donald MacKenzie | various essays | current

Researcher at University of Edinburgh, he works on “the sociology of financial markets,” which means among other things that he’s pretty good at explaining “the new economy” to people like myself without much aptitude. Many of his papers are available from his faculty website, above.

Chris Nealon | Plummet | unpublished manuscript | 2008

It pains me to say it but no, I don’t think modern dance redeemed the industrial landscape

—unless you count that last audition scene in Flashdance

Ecstasy instead of classicism: every generation feeling it

Classicism: build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way

Mark Ovenden | Transit Maps of the World | Penguin | 2007

A good introduction to some basic problems in system mapping, from the confrontation between topographic and diagrammatic to the placement of names. Also a good occasion to smoke pot and wonder what might cause some cities to have by far the coolest transit maps: Montreal, Rio, St. Petersburg. The 1977 Moscow map is one of the most striking graphicalizations ever. The book thinks it’s “Like knitting needles spearing a ball of yarn.” I think it’s a primitive picture of overdetermination.

George Stanley | Vancouver | New Star | 2008

…knowing
it’s this time, no other, this transparent
collision of times, of times flowing through each other,

times with their inside stories (p.120)

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni | 2008

when is speech that          and not just in a bubble
when art thou?                 acted upon

by another’s       resolution
and where?

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More Joshua Clover here.