Theory, Pop, and Riot Commune for Commune Editions

The writers and editors who comprise Commune Editions—Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr—have written and published an essay that moves through three "coordinates" that, brought together, "[present] a mediation between historical circumstance and poetic substance" and in so doing, orient us to our present, to what they are calling style as "period style." But read an excerpt below, and the full piece, "Period Style and the Art of the Present," to comprehend for yourself.

The coordinates are these: theory, pop, and riot. You have seen them come and go, waft through poems or hang around, alone and in combination. Any one by itself is relatively mute; it speaks only itself, exactly by trying to stand for larger fields that do not wish to be represented: the intellectual, the cultural, the political. Any pair gestures at the present only inexactly, a degraded style often dominated by disavowal. For example you may recognize the vogue, perhaps it arrived in the nineties, for the poetry book with the double epigraph, one a high-minded theoretical passage, the other a cheeky selection from a Top 40 ditty, as if to reassure us that we won’t be overly oppressed by the scholastic in here. I know Deleuze but am not of him, it says, equally insisting I know fun but am not trivial, no really. Or consider the combination of riot and pop, always at risk of aestheticizing the riot as simply a feature of cultural representation, disavowing the riot’s real content and danger. And so on. It is not until all three are set in motion each against the others, all with all, that they make a world, a world that — by corresponding with the world outside the poem schematically, imperfectly, insistently — brings into relief that world’s contours. In the first instance it is perhaps as simple as the world bounded by the academy, the internet, and the social movement. By earth, wind, and fire. None of these can, in the present, provide its own orientation, but all are volatile and present. The limits of theory-pop-riot are the limits of our world, somewhere around here, somewhere around now.

Read on at Commune Editions.