1-Year Plan
Post 21: 9/11/05
1-Year Plan Continues
On 31 August 2005, the originally planned duration of 1-Year Plan came to its end. Carla Harryman and I had just arrived in Tübingen, Germany, from where we would travel on to Berlin and return to Tübingen in October to begin work on a series of seminars, lectures, and a conference sponsored by the Fulbright Commission and the university. That was a part of the original plan; I had also thought that, during the year, it would be possible to post at a frequency of about once a week, and thus would have produced about fifty posts of varying lengths over the duration. In the actual process of writing, however, I tended to opt for longer posts, both critical and creative, involving substantial preparation and often revision. The result has been twenty posts to date, some completed, some in need of further work, some not yet launched. When all anticipated work has been done on them, there will have been twenty posts produced during the year. The posts address a range of topics, none of which were anticipated in advance.
While the project was intended to be time-based and site-specific, and to unfold in a series of aesthetic and critical horizons, it was not intended to mimic real time. Thus, it should be distinguished from the more diaristic format of the poetry/poetics weblog or blog, where the virtual time of writing is an important feature of its construction of meaning(s). Given the associations of the word blog, I want to clearly distinguish my project from a blog, even as there are a number of poetry, politics, and media blogs I read and like. But given the at-times un-self-critical presentation of blogs, as well as what I often see as limits to their claims of reciprocity and thus open form, it has seemed necessary to me to try to construct an alternative. In this project, then, a series of posts on specific topics takes the place of the more continuous time of the blog. While the immediate response function of the blog is missing, my hope is that the content developed here will take its place among a range of positions. That is a form of response I want to encourage.
The results of the first year of writing are in, in the sense that a certain amount of work was accomplished if only partly completed. In the larger sense, however, the results are not in, and many never entirely be. That, too, was part of the original plan—to write in an address to an open horizon of meaning. Such a horizon, being open, is often diametrically opposed to the kinds of discursive frames that the construction of authorship entails, even as I would never suggest that my writing, or any writing, is not in dialogue with such processes of construction. It is indeed a question of value—perhaps the most immediate register of value I can think of—that one's work not be seamlessly absorbed into a second-order construction of discourse. The work must do its work, which in fact may be to alter or augment these discourses. It is the writing that most actively engages such a form of (re-)construction that I value most. And certainly no writer, artist, intellectual, or political actor is ever only concerned with such a retrospective construction in its available forms, from autobiography to canon formation. The risk is always of the futurity of the present work or act.
The question, then, is how to pursue one's writing, thinking, acting such that values are not prefigured in advance, even as an engagement with preexisting values is always necessary. There is no work of value I know of that does not take this question up.