Michael Cross
Prolegomena to (Any Future) Process Poetics

Michael Cross

Twenty Theses for (Any Future) Process Poetics

Postscript // Bibliography // Acknowledgments

The Valentinian Pleroma
The Valentinian Pleroma

T.1 The poem is ontologically dissevering: necessarily fragmenting and fragmentary.

T.2 Holding concretized, readymade “significance” and “value” in abeyance, the poem functions as a catch, an apparatus used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s). 

T.3 So as to render inoperative those ossified subject-configurations most exploitable by market vampirism, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (where flesh meets fluorescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

September 11, 2019

Pleroma

Pt. 12

Jordi Martoranno, “Pleroma-Uroboros”
Jordi Martoranno, “Pleroma-Uroboros”

In The Radicality of Love, Srećko Horvat calls the practice of revolution an expression of love — at least, he claims, “if it wants to be worthy of its name” — and this denomination grounds a crucial amendment: “The worst thing that can happen to love is habit,”  what with that worn patina of resignation — becoming-pedestrian, -routine. Rather than make love de novo, we endure it, suffer it, so that, to recognize oneself as numerous, to sublimate one’s solitude through the richness of shared experience means folding the Other into an abstraction (“the-Other-for-me”) — a “vision-in-one,” to borrow François Laruelle’s nomenclature, that cedes love-making for love-draining. 

August 29, 2019

Kharis

Pt. 11

“Pandora Attired,” engraving by William Blake after a drawing by John Flaxman.
“Pandora Attired,” engraving by William Blake after a drawing by John Flaxman.

In his impressively exhaustive study on gift exchange and market economy, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, Marcel Hénaff puts pressure on the gift (dosis) / countergift (antidosis) coupling by making the provocative claim that there’s no such thing as a “gift economy.” According to Hénaff the gift is built on “symbolic” rather than “market” exchange, and as a result, its purpose is “not to acquire or accumulate goods but to use them to establish bonds of recognition between persons or groups.”[1]

August 21, 2019

Umwelt

Pt. 10

Jakob von Uexküll’s Jackdaw
Jakob von Uexküll’s Jackdaw

A pioneer in the field of ethology and biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexküll’s work has fundamentally transformed the way we understand the animal’s spatiotemporal extension by razing anthropomorphic perspectivism in the sciences, complicating our relationship (or lack thereof) to our nonhuman animal compeers while forcing us to rethink deeply internalized notions of anthroexceptionalism. 

August 14, 2019

Abyss

Pt. 9

‘Vantablack’ (blackest ever black)
‘Vantablack’ (blackest ever black)

We are so deeply mired in our philosophies as to have evolved nothing better than a sordid version of the void: nothingness. Into it we have projected our uncertainties, all our ills and terrors, for what is nothingness, ultimately, but an abstract complement of hell, the performance of outcasts, the last-ditch effort at lucidity mustered by creatures unequipped for deliverance?  — E. M. Cioran[1]

August 7, 2019