The New Prehistory:
Kevin Davies’ The Golden Age of Paraphernalia

by Jasper Bernes

The Golden Age of Paraphernalia by Kevin Davies
Aerial / Edge Books 2008
isbn: 978-1-890311-28-5 $18.00 us

The vaunted liquidity of the modern world — where money and information, people and warplanes circulate at ever-increasing speeds — rests upon bedrock that is as inert and refractory as the activities it supports are mercurial. Call it infrastructure or, as HBO’s series The Wire does, institutions: container ships that cross the oceans at a mere 30 miles per hour; machinery for oil extraction and refining that takes decades to build and billions of dollars to finance; suburbs arranged according to the logic of cheap and abundant oil. These structures contradict the impression we get from our keyboards and screens that the world is a fundamentally fluid and fungible thing. In Kevin Davies’ new book, The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge, 2008), the contours and textures of a world both immovable and fluxive stand forth. No poet has taken as clear a measure of our “unexpectedly / depressing millennium,” which now even the cheerleaders of the new economy agree, as they stuff their mattresses with cash, has been “a real letdown after the frisky ad campaign.” For letdown, read collapse. And in the collapse of the American empire’s deluded self-presentation (whatever the happy, hopeful face Obama applies) it’s easier to glimpse those solid foundations upon which the bread and circuses of the 00s have foundered, easier to read their weak points, the places where they might yield to human action, where they might be cleared away and society established on a new basis.

As the final installment of Davies’ “trilogy of error,” the new book follows the earlier Pause Button (Tsunami, 1992) and Comp. (Edge, 2000), careening through these transitional spaces where, to quote Antonio Gramsci’s justly famous characterization, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The sense of being between things — between people, between untenable political alternatives, historical periods, poetic modes — permeates the book, and indeed constitutes its basic formal principle. Of its five long poems, the first three “‘Floater,’” “Remnants of Wilma,” and “One-Eyed Seller of Garlic” form an English braid, their mutual interruptions announced by the different symbols — bullets for “‘Floater,’” numbers for “Remnants of Wilma” and vertical lines for “One-Eyed Seller of Garlic” — which Davies uses to connect individual strophes in the manner of mathematical operators. Here’s a sample page:

                                                                                                                                    collide
                                                           With protocurrency • [Only the skeletons
                                                                                                                          go to
                                                             heaven, youngster.] • Red, red, red,

                                                can be looked up
                                                      to | A fairy princess
                                             In-a-box, A + B
                                       cannot buy enough to propel the economy
                                             into a renaissance of Ruskinian objects appreciated on days
                                                   off

(Golden Age, 131)

Since the individual poems are themselves formed through accretion and interruption, it’s rather easy to read these three as a single work running from pages 1-36 and 110-142 of the book, a series of parenthesized parentheses themselves interrupted by the two stand-alone poems in the book — “Lateral Argument,” previously a chapbook from Barretta Books (2003), and “Duckwalking a Perimeter.” Every moment in the book thus comes wedged between two adjacent, and yet non-continuous, moments. Perimeters abound and the feeling that comes through these rhythms, these peri-meters, is that of being inserted into structures and matters the exact measure of which can’t be taken. In a way, the parenthetical composition of the book follows from his work in the middle section of Pause Button, in which words come together not only as parsable units of grammar but as members of a vast data set:

{reminiscent} {chronology} {response}
{in time for} {space}

{the}
{fiery}
{subway}
{silence}
{elliptical} {repression}
{rational} {tattoo breeze}

{gathered} {bourgeois} {wool}

(Pause Button, 37)

Unlike other visually conspicuous arrangements, the relations between these words, it seems, are less spatial than operational, dependent less on adjacency than relations of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, between and around, voiced by speakers who recall “coming of age between musical generations / waiting around outside the rink.”

It’s this liminal positioning that makes Davies so insightful about the world we live in now. Sometimes the people most capable of pointing out the salient features of a historical period are those who occupy a position slightly outside the centers where things are changing the fastest, close enough to observe the changes but far away enough to compare them with something else. This is the case with Karl Marx’s insights about British capitalism, and Theodor Adorno’s about the American culture industry, and it is why, according to Ronald Meek, the most cogent theoretical articulations of early capitalism were produced in Scotland, by people like Adam Smith, rather than in England. This concept of “uneven development” may also be why two of the most interesting poets of recent years hail from Vancouver. Obviously, Canada can’t be compared, in its relationship to the US, with the relationship of the Scottish Highlands to the Lowlands. But the neoliberal revolution that has swept the US since the early 80s — the great wave of privatization, deregulation, union-busting and hypertrophied financial institutions — must have stood in stark contrast to the comparatively welfarist Canadian state, even if the disease was, as Lisa Robertson makes clear in the preface to Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, written during the turn of the millennium, quickly spreading under the bloodied banner of NAFTA: “The Office for Soft Architecture came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money.”

Davies’ standpoint on the uneven ground of history has to be understood as both spatial — or geographical — and temporal. Davies stands not only both inside and outside of neoliberalism — in other words, on its edges — but both inside and outside the cultural moments of the baby boomer generation immediately preceding his, where the moves, procedures and perspectives we associate with, say, Language poetry, are present but at the same time superseded by a sensibility that seems other to this generation. Whereas writers like Silliman engage in what they imagine as a frontal negation of American society — Ron Silliman’s seminal book Tjanting begins with the phrase “Not this” — for Davies (and here I borrow from Chris Nealon’s characterization of his work) such a head-on attack is no longer an option. He has to go around, along the perimeters, resorting to sidelong, lateral critiques. As he writes in “Lateral Argument,” negating the negation of Silliman’s opening salvo: “Not not this.” All roads feed you onto the Roman beltway, around and around. Downtown is closed:

                         because
                                            they wanted
                                                                to | Because | it was there

                                                                     what I’ve watched • I AM THE
                                                                                             GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM,
                                                                                              ME • In
                                                                                                              the older days a big part
                         of the job involved speeding up and slowing down
                                                                     the machine in order to approximate
                                                                                    reality, but that is
                                                                                                            no longer necessary.

(34)

Late capitalism, then, is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It promises that everyone is the center of the universe. As Time Magazine announced in 2006, the Person of the Year is "You." Of course, Davies knows this is utter mystification, and part of the point of this book is to satirize such claims. In fact, despite his claims that an older mode of representation based upon the speeding up and slowing down of machinery has been displaced, those lines describe in rather excellent terms his (disavowed) writing strategy, where interpenetrating and syncopated forms of language articulate the spatial adjacency of successive historical periods, leaping from the Neolithic to the Information Age in the blink of a phrase:

                                                  This is a good cave — not much
                         to brag about at the reunion but it keeps our things
                                                  Dry and provides shelter from hungry beasts.
                         You’d laugh at the things we believed back then.
                                                  That our cats cared for us.
                         That Belgium existed.
                                                  That we couldn’t fight city hall
                         because it kept running off.
                                                  But we didn’t have your advantage of logarithmic
                         detachment and spunk. We in fact had little spunk —
                                                  It seemed to dry up even as it was squirting from our ears,
                         and food preparation was a lot more involved than subsequently.
                                                  Eye-recognition software was in its early stages
                         and we feared death horribly because it seemed so
                                                  trivial.

(56)

To be clear, there is no sense here that these successive periods — and the corresponding ways of living and working — constitute “progress.” Modernity in its full realization is nothing less than cave-dwelling with eye-recognition software in the place of stone tools. Or rather, it’s worse than cave dwelling. The world that he describes seems less a regression to some original Hobbesian state of nature than the production of such a state. In capitalism, technology and its violent manipulations make us into the animals that we never were:

Koko
      the gorilla expresses pain
Manufacturing a sense
      of healing and then
The sense in which
      your dreams are chosen
Doesn’t matter
      to the hegemon
This stapler
      in the same universe
The factories, intense heat
      needed to produce an adjective
            on any continent

(4)

I know that it is customary, a part of reviewing etiquette, to flag some objectionable moment or thought, some structural lapse, in the text under discussion. But I can’t do that here. The book is a flawless tour de force from start to finish. “Lateral Argument,” in particular, may be the finest long poem written in this century. If I have any reservations they must be referred not to Davies’ writing but to the world it circumscribes, a world that permits the critical imagination no way through, only a way around. As a testament to the feebleness of revolt in the face of the calculated madness that followed 9/11, it is without parallel: “This is our heritage, little bits / of burnt paper float over Brooklyn.” All of the properly apocalyptic elements are here — joblessness and dispossession, a toxic environment, increasingly brutal political domination:

                  The great privatization scam
Indentured workers making bricks, ages 3 to 70+

(42)

(. . .)

                  The clerks grown in vats near Johns Hopkins
A tectonic sense of the ends of banter

(45)

(. . .)

A wondrous feeling of emptiness engulfs the extras
                  Who are everyone not currently engaged in a real-estate transaction. . .

(50)

(. . .)

The young graphic artists and web designers stand on street corners
                  hoping for day labor, next to hookers slugging forties.
Most of the crops look bad, the reservoirs are severely
                  depleted, and a huge brown

cloud hangs over south Asia

(61)

But importantly, alongside these visions of catastrophe, Davies offers a savvy gloss of the technological mediation that comes to displace or ameliorate the above political crisis, that hawks, in place of this absolute exclusion

. . .the great work of a young-adult global
                  civilization, a metaliterate culture with time on its
prosthetic tentacles, at this point slightly more silicon
                  than carbon, blinking vulnerably in the light of its own
radiant connectedness.

(58)

Alongside the fluid and false connectedness that squeezes through the pores of a brutal exclusion, Davies’ continual shifts, swerves, syncopations and interruptions counterpose a parenthetical stance that refuses any determinate connectivity, that stands between, snipping the wires:

But all collapses before one’s bloodshot eye, the load-
                  bearing walls composed of particles
that prefer not to, who strike against the conditions,
                  who saw nothing and ain’t talking,
refuse even to sweep themselves up.

(46)

Like that perennial touchstone of resistance, Melville’s Bartleby, the collapsing walls here, in their active passivity, would prefer not to. Bartleby, let us remember, is a knowledge worker, someone who produces and reproduces the great flows of legal language that make 19th-century capitalism possible. Today’s scriveners have taken various stances with regard to the radiant connectivity of our hyper-mediated world, and much of the poetry of the 00s will no doubt be seen as fleshing out these positions — from those who celebrate these mediations, to those who make fun of them, to those who pretend they don’t exist. Davies’ Bartlebyan stance is one of the more promising, neither excepting himself from a world of fake relationality nor affirming it, neither pretending to the pure autonomy of the outsider nor, thankfully, greeting us with the unctuous alacrity of the knowing insider. This knight’s move will, I suspect, serve us well in the coming period.

© Jasper Bernes. All rights reserved.