As Anyone Who’s Ever [_________] Will Tell You, [_____] Was Wrong

This post is about an event called an object called a book called 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 the Joy of Cooking by a event called an object called a person called Tan Lin. Tan Lin is an American poet and visual artist who, as anyone who reads poetry or watches art will tell you, is a Big Deal: often described as being at the forefront of the post-L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E generation, his thinking seems to opt for far more mecurality than the Bernstein/Silliman/Andrews/Scalapino types preferred. Whereas their political intentions are treated sincerely outside if not in the text (radically democratic, anticapitalist) Tan Lin’s biographical and poetical statements – iffing they can even be attributed to him, sheathed in contradictory stories and tongue-in-cheek bequests as his fleeting moments of authorial presence are – seemingly tempt us to revel in the relaxing/laxative (?) symbiosis of language-and-experience with capital-and the sacrificial-infrastructure-of-agency. Read these two articles:

http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3467

https://jacket2.org/reviews/cooking-book-low-level-durational-energy

And right off the bat, here are some ways I think you’re invited to think about 7CV.

1. The Tenure-Track Theorist Approach

It’s a book that wants you to get that it cannot be read. To ‘read’ all of 7CV, you would not only need the nice and recognizable trade edition I have, you’d also need the .pdf version distributed online through Lulu, and the recent second edition that uses Google translation to shift its Chinese translation back into English; then you’d need to wade through the Critical Reader available online as well, which is just as long as the book itself, each page selecting text from critical thinkers in poetics, visual art, cognitive science, philosophy and communications theory (as if being aware of this appendix will grant new insight on 7CV as source, which it clearly doesn’t pretend to be in the first place). There are editions of the book reproduced as placemats, posters, in disco-style sound/video installations and in hardcover archived indexed manuscript fonds. Presumably the shifting medium of 7CV will continue to shift over the next year or so, this being the average lifecycle of advertising campaigns, making it impossible to say when it was published, if one can even be sure it has been published yet – your first option is to view the book as unreadable, to be convinced that there can be such thing as an unreadable book.

2. The Struggling Suburban Family Approach

It’s a book of poetry! Fun! This is where skill at being a dumb reader really pays off, but I welcome this dumbness and love partaking of it. Sure blah blah blah about being forced to question our reading styles and the veracity of content and so on and so forth. In what way are we forced? Honestly, we’re not forced. This book isn’t holding a gun to anyone’s head, or at least, Tan Lin hasn’t released it in Russian Roulette or Campus Police version yet. Read all of his touching stories about meeting his wife and making it as a starving artist and, sure, keep their probable falsity in mind, but treat it all as a coherently incoherent fiction! When the book says it wants reading to be relaxing, why should we think therefore that relaxation is to be avoided? Take the blue pill. The pages are full of nice shapes you can gaze at now and then and they resist being recognizable, so you’ll get plenty of time out of the text without feeling the boredom that comes with familiarity. In the gaming industry this is called “replayability”. Some games can take up to 80 hours to fully enjoy!!! 7CV is full of good poems if you want them to be poems because everything is art, right? These poems are better than those that appear in most books, whether they claim do to fancy shit or not – your second option is to view this book as whatever you feel most comfortable viewing it as, because the fortress of your inner librarian is impregnable, but because you’re even aware of its existence I bet your comfort zone is poetry.

3. The Corporate-Funded Research Institute Approach

It’s not a book at all, but rather the advent of a new kind of information processing carried out within the phenomenal experience of the cultural worker. Tan Lin, according to certain conceptualist discourses at least (Jeff Derksen), is engaged in a research project. Maybe he wants to know what you want when you enter a book/event like this one (from start to finish: from slavering over the authorial bildungsroman, to the accidental history of 7CV’s personal and intellectual composition, from the production and distribution and acquisition of a material-text-become-commodity, to the critical reception and taggable lineages it becomes affixed to by readers, to the afterlife of reading experience which infiltrates and delimits the bildungsroman of the reader themselves); he wants to know how you chart this event through its incredibly suppressed and slowed-to-the-melting-speed-of-glass duration, he wants to know what it does to you as experience, and what it does to other experiences, once it becomes part of you. We shouldn’t assume, just because the data he gathers through the 7CV event is inaccessible to him (all data is inaccessible as data, after all, it’s just that in this case he’ll have a hard time finding ways of treating it beyond attaining an omnipotence that would let him witness the full unfurling of the event intersubjectively), that there isn’t an experiment being conducted. Perhaps this experiment is merely silhouetting the larger experiment of event-regulation as practiced at ever-finer levels of experience, in the everyday life of subjects like us. Perhaps all books do something like this, only, Tan Lin has tried to hyperarticulate and understand (or assume an understandability) in the process – your third option is to view, not 7CV itself, but yourself, your own nestledness within its full phenomenal domain, as the true object of noble inquiry.

4. The Extremely Worried Humanist Dissident Approach

It’s a testament, like so much of the uncommitted avant-garde poetry we find chique today, to the deplorable condition of the contemporary artist: someone who has given up on the possibility of real, down to earth interaction between folks who might, through art, foster a shared heritage that will serve as a reminder of our common needs and problems. Instead they treat poems like paper dolls to snip and collage the outfits of. Here’s an old story. It used to be that the Western Tradition’s utopianisms were hinted at through satire: intellectuals and artists would point our the hypocrisies inherent to a system of belief or an idea of the world, they’d criticize them, demand the abandonment of these elements, but would still position their documentation (via whatever medium) within the presumed logic of those beliefs, those worlds. This tendency can broadly be called Enlightened and optimistic. (Think Luther, Voltaire.) Then, the sketching-out of utopia moved toward parody: in this move we found dystopia to be a more palatable tool for our utopian aspirations, because in pastiche the hyperbolic portrayal of, say, the State, in a recognizable but exaggerated form, allows critics tell a story that, in its brutally sarcastic honesty-of-a-too-intimate-imitiation, aims to induce in the reader a loathing for the de-exaggerated and tacit existence of those ‘bad things’ it attributes to the State (in this example) – which the reader is presumed to be “hitherto aware of, but unable to describe” beyond the parodic. This tendency can broadly be called Ideological and optimistic. (Think Huxley, Orwell.) But now! Oh, now, unlike the good old days, we are being corrupted by a millennial tendency that is nothing but pessimistic. We don’t have words for it yet, but people like Tan Lin, Ray Brassier, Lars von Trier and others are basking in it! The movement overall has steadily distanced the critique from the critic, and now, since no human being could rightly call into question the foundations that human life as we know it rests upon (in Tan Lin’s case, a unified self, a mind with choosable tastes, undetermined, at least fully, by the external workings of what it consumes…) their critique has to be made to appear inhuman. Apolitical in its unreliability, joyful in how it dwells amid oh-my-god-is-it-still-late-capitalism’s way of ‘life’, it shows us nothing more than how we already see or don’t see, the world, and it doesn’t even deign to upset this vantage point, which Tan Lin probably thinks is already irretrievably obscured anyway. Choices like 7CV (the choice to read it, the choice to write it) want to make us feel safe enough or doomed enough to snuggle further into this posthuman horror; they want to treat our twilight situations as fascination, rather than enemy. This is your fourth option – to think about this book as a symptom that must be cured, or a limb we need to amputate.

5. My Approach

“Is not hell, I have reflected, the swarm of everything indistinct that human beings make of their language-powers? And is not the distinct, only the distinct, in the shape of words brought out of thought into generous community of mind, the only Friend?”…“On what I count as saving surety, in my sense of spreading pandemonium, for the prevailing of an unfailing Distinct over a ruinous Indistinct (a continuous lexicon of novelties in meaninglessness), this book has a central position. It presents the scene of the human mind of now as a place of choice, still, between a hellish ease of speech-making thought as easy as no-thought and heaven-like difficulty of thought executed with an earthly sense of speech the mind can love.”

(Click-through for the ‘full’ image.)

There are problems with all these approaches. In 1, there is too much reliance on interrelatedness as a principle of meaning. If you explore 7CV you’ll find quickly that the fad of interrelation, the trend of treating everything ecologically, holds very little credit in its anti-ecological pages. Empty pages, disjunction that is ameliorated before it can open meaning (where a paragraph cuts off, only to resume later in the book)…any version you get of 7CV will be too closed to beg a further version. Yet, there are versions. In 2, the problem is that of the solipsist reader, and it shouldn’t have even been an option for you. If one were to take route 3, they would, clearly, be taking Tan Lin too seriously. Someone who wrote/assembled a book about the overnight SMS response to Heath Ledger’s death isn’t truly curious about shit like that. Maybe they’re curious about why they’re curious about it, or curious about why it’s so pointless to be curious about it, these banalities that are so public and popular and durationless. There’s the option 4…but I hope you knew I was joking about that one. The most obvious gap in applying a narrative of Western decline to 7CV is that Tan Lin purposefully makes it ambiguous just how “Western” his poetic inheritances are. It seems the philosophical inheritances are more Eastern than anything – Confucian in proclamation, nondualist in the treatment of homogeneity. Is there a West anymore? Should Tan Lin be talked about as a contemporary Chinese poet, as a poet of the diaspora? Finally, my personal choice, number 5, that of helpless sharing, a passing around (over) of pages, in silence. Well, not total silence. This attempt doesn’t succeed either. By its structure it should be carried out to the whole book, and suffers from abetting that attitude of “argh I can’t explain what I think exactly, but just read the book and I’m sure we’ll agree”. It’s also important to note that a lot of the minutiae I’m not even remembering to mention – things like the phrasal mutuations that you notice very slowly over the course of 7CV, the recognizable paragraphic structures and dead-ends of a paragraph’s emotionality (only paragraphs are emotional according to Stein), things like the metadata accumulation, the bevvy of acronyms and tags and labels that are distorted in their very connection to the ‘poem’, the multiple drafts of preface statements listed by year, 1986 (before its author had even started writing) to 2004, let alone the preface stolen from Laura Riding Jackson that so interestingly and disinterestedly complicates the book’s own self-critique – these can only be noticed in the realm past hope of paraphrase. Remember that realm? That’s the one we’re trying to figure out how to enter.

No matter who you are as a poet, no matter what kind of shit you’re writing, 7CV will matter to you. I put it right up there with the richness of Stephen Ratcliffe’s practice, which has also been getting a lot of attention – in fact, I would place it in antagonism to him. Tan Lin is transparent to the point of retraction. You know how Ratcliffe’s poems often describe the temporal change seen in a single window of his home? Tan Lin wants to make that window. Then he wants to break it. Over your head. On camera. Ok?

(Official Soundtrack to 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 the Joy of Cooking; For Maximum Effect, Play on Repeat)