The Inner Truth and Greatness of Flarf...

...is the inner truth and greatness of Fascism, namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity. It has not the least, of course, to do with what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of these movements. Fascism, meanwhile, is the inner truth and greatness of Facebook, of MySpace, of YouTube, of Wikipedia, of Google (extending the inner truth and greatness of ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, MTV ... ).

Hemingway may have been overstating things, but Fascism is at best, let us say, the environment that is least hospitable to literature. But one must work within that environment, with the materials as they are given to one. This is kulchural studies.

To experience the world as though "a lie told by a bully" has "an inner truth and greatness", as though a flame war is worth fighting. To try to understand the current, the reigning, "restriction of being", to fish the troubled waters of "values" and "totalities" ... for kids (cf. again Heidegger's Introduction, p. 152).

The actual things that produce the emotion you experience. (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, p. 10)

To experience history as though Ezra Pound was not just (or wholly) wrong about Mussolini. To try to get at the machinery of "the process now going on" (GK).

There are obvious objections to this. But then there are obvious objections to Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google. Kulchural Studies, like Flarf, proceeds in the light of the obviousness of these objections. Into the danger where the saving power grows ... where the saving power must dang blast it! grow.