Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Steve Evans
Subject: Shake Those Dirty Hands
I appreciate the candor with which James Sherry and Ron Silliman have
recently discussed their "positions" vis-a-vis corporate power, but I am as
suspicious of the subjective titillations of "holding contradictory ideas" (which
cd easily mean: deceiving myself about the meaning of my actions) as I am of
fantasies of a "pure outside."
Ron suggests that he and James and Kit Robinson and Tom Mandel have
"gained more" from their engagements with corporate capitalism than they
would have from "abstaining" from the "human drama of the marketplace."
Since I gather that Ron has "gains" of other than a financial sort in mind when
he writes this, I would be interested in knowing more about them. Is it a matter
of gathering intelligence (so to speak) that informs one’s oppositional work–
one’s poetic practice, one’s political practice as a citizen, one’s critique? Is it a
matter of actually exercising counter-agency within the arena of corporate
power, or of obedience in one domain being converted into dissidence in
another?
I have to admit that the politics of occupational complicity do not strike me as
especially viable–which is another way, I guess, of saying that the
contradictions incurred along Ron and James’s way(s) don’t strike me as
strongly "positioned" ones. (By the way, I intend no disrespect to the personal
resonance such contradictions may have for the few people who experience
them.) Nor do the "dialectics of the credit card" go very far toward redressing,
eg., North-South relations.
There seems to me a difference between saying: (1) our attempt to curtail or
abolish the power of capital has evidently failed, and the available "choices"–
given this failure–are for the most part unacceptable ones that I nevertheless
have to accept; and (2) my ability to actualize a radically ungeneralizable
trajectory is in fact a measure of my political acuity and a sign of my
superiority to those who "abstain" from "complicity."
The vacuity of "dropping out" is not proof of the acuity of checking in. Both
smack of extreme voluntarism in light of the structural exclusions of global
capitalism.