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El imperio de la neomemoria (Estuario)
Heriberto Yépez propone en estas páginas una forma de hacer ensayo poco vista en el panorama literario en español. La figura central de este libro es el polémico escritor Charles Olson, especialista de Melville, padre de los poetas beats y el primero en emplear el concepto ahora tan manido de post-modernidad.
Su historia bien podría sintetizar la del imperio que lo vio nacer: Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. Desde la perspectiva privilegiada que le confiere el observatorio fronterizo de Tijuana, Yépez disecciona el sistema de recuerdos colectivos que le permite a una nación de migrantes mantener la ilusión de unidad. Si algo distingue la obra de Yépez es la soltura y agilidad de su prosa, por no hablar de la irreverencia y la originalidad de su voz. Estamos frente a la deslumbrante nueva entrega entrega de un autor que se vuelve imprescindible. Leerlo en estos tiempos representa un nocaut urgente y necesario para nuestras certezas.
Su historia bien podría sintetizar la del imperio que lo vio nacer: Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. Desde la perspectiva privilegiada que le confiere el observatorio fronterizo de Tijuana, Yépez disecciona el sistema de recuerdos colectivos que le permite a una nación de migrantes mantener la ilusión de unidad. Si algo distingue la obra de Yépez es la soltura y agilidad de su prosa, por no hablar de la irreverencia y la originalidad de su voz. Estamos frente a la deslumbrante nueva entrega entrega de un autor que se vuelve imprescindible. Leerlo en estos tiempos representa un nocaut urgente y necesario para nuestras certezas.
- GenresPoetry
126 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2007
5 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
Heriberto Yépez
39 books33 followersNació en Tijuana, Baja California, el 2 de septiembre de 1974. Ensayista, novelista, poeta y traductor. Estudió Filosofía en la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, en donde se ha desempeñado como profesor de teoría crítica en la Escuela de Artes y la de Humanidades.
Traductor de Jerome Rothenberg. Ha colaborado en publicaciones mexicanas y estadounidenses como Alforja, Cross Cultural Poetics, El Ángel del Reforma, Generación, La Jornada Semanal, La Tempestad, Rattapallax, Replicante, Shark, y Tripwire. Becario del FOECA-Baja California, como creador con trayectoria, 2002, y del FONCA, 2003-2004. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Regional de Poesía del Noroeste. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Literario del Noroeste de Ensayo. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Estatal de Ensayo 2000. Premio Nacional de Ensayo Abigael Bohórquez 2001. Premio Estatal de Periodismo Cultural 2004. Mención Honorífica en el Concurso Binacional Bilingüe de Poesía Pellicer-Fros/Frontera-Ford, de la Fundación Ford, 1998. Premio Nacional de Ensayo Literario Malcom Lowry 2009 por Sin ninguna palabra entre nosotros. Viajes, vestigios y visiones mexicanas de Jerome Rothenberg.
Source: http://www.elem.mx/autor/datos/1718
Traductor de Jerome Rothenberg. Ha colaborado en publicaciones mexicanas y estadounidenses como Alforja, Cross Cultural Poetics, El Ángel del Reforma, Generación, La Jornada Semanal, La Tempestad, Rattapallax, Replicante, Shark, y Tripwire. Becario del FOECA-Baja California, como creador con trayectoria, 2002, y del FONCA, 2003-2004. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Regional de Poesía del Noroeste. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Literario del Noroeste de Ensayo. Primer Lugar en el Concurso Estatal de Ensayo 2000. Premio Nacional de Ensayo Abigael Bohórquez 2001. Premio Estatal de Periodismo Cultural 2004. Mención Honorífica en el Concurso Binacional Bilingüe de Poesía Pellicer-Fros/Frontera-Ford, de la Fundación Ford, 1998. Premio Nacional de Ensayo Literario Malcom Lowry 2009 por Sin ninguna palabra entre nosotros. Viajes, vestigios y visiones mexicanas de Jerome Rothenberg.
Source: http://www.elem.mx/autor/datos/1718
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 10, 2014
Four passages from The Empire of Neomemory:
...
A good portion of that enormous distance that Olson always maintained with respect to his body, he learned from his mother, for whom all corporeality was risk. We cannot understand Olson if we do not understand the abyss his mother sowed between him and his body, early on, to the point of his conceiving of it as his lugubrious satellite or golden cloud. When he got to Mexico, many years later, Olson was mostly surprised at the manner in which the descendants of the Mayans—as he said in “The Human Universe” (1951)—took pleasure in one another, in the natural closeness of their bodies.
It was as if the distance between Olson and his body could only be restored by a complicated postal system. Something similar was the case with women. Olson always maintained distance—like his father, who his mother had chosen precisely for his being a firm man, who became, at a certain moment, an alcoholic. (The firmness of a man is directly proportional to his averted vertigo.) Through his whole life Olson had a fear of the feminine body. Olson knew that to come close to a woman was not only to come close to the open body he had learned to fear through his mother, but also, above all, to come close to a woman, as he knew very well, was to come close to his own body. (Why does woman signify body, psycho-historically? Because the parallel fantasy indicates that male signifies mind. Genders were put in place in order to survive dualisms.) “Woman” is that which the “male” unknows of himself. And vice versa.
In order to not come close, Olson, very early on, became a devoted student. From a very early age he sought to become cultured. And it is to have another body, to make it possible to flee from the real body, that our civilization teaches us to construct a fantasy body, the body of requested information, the imaginary body that one constructs, we might say, by reading, by selection of others’ memories, cybermnemic editing. And for those of us who continue on the path of the imaginary co-body, the body of the poem, the story, the essay, the body, the text—the body is transformed into the replacement-body. I do not want to live here. I want to live in language. The word is the island where I am moving to. The text will become the history of the loss of our body. The text is both the balm and the poison.
...
All story has closure as its theme. Reduction. Sudden limits. Born in Poe as an oppressive genre, the story is a capsule of claustrophobia in which time pretends to be trapped in a quick space. The story—temporal narration turned spatial limit—attempts to store away the All thanks to the perfect synthesis and linear time. What genre is more linear than that of the story?—if Europe invented the novel, the neo-Oxident invented the short story, and in this mutation we can see the shift that occurred between these Co-Oxidents. In comparison with the long novelistic reign of Europe, that of the United States will be succinct. The North American empire will be brief, as brief, technical, and fantastic as the best science fiction stories.
...
Burnout is the perfect crime. Be it Bartleby, Funes, or the dandy, let’s not ignore the fact that the fed up man, within the vociferous yawn of his dissipation, hides the fact that he has appropriated All. Burnout is theft. Weariness is a strategy for appropriating the world. “I am weary of Everything” means I possess everything. Which will always be false. Not only because the All does not exist properly but because to appropriate it is the pantopic and the pantopic is the illusory.
This is the first great trick of weariness: the trick of its appropriation, the trick of its looting. This theft will be hidden beneath the giant complaint, beneath the shouted apathy or the ironic gesture. Boredom is a theft that denies its own agency, its own action, depreciating what it has stolen. The burnt out man appears to get away with what’s his, because it can be argued that he possesses it ALL! —and he is satiated with this, Same as Always—he continues arguing that “in truth...I don’t want it.” Because the All which the burnt out man has appropriated is an All-Undesired, the burnout pretends to reject it, however, as we see, the rejection of the possessed All is the same trick by which he retains it. The burnout is not responsible for his illusion of having it all. The burnout is no more than an involuntary comedian. It is not an accident that excess forms the basis of imperial life.
...
Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-Clock World, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves. The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past.
.
...
A good portion of that enormous distance that Olson always maintained with respect to his body, he learned from his mother, for whom all corporeality was risk. We cannot understand Olson if we do not understand the abyss his mother sowed between him and his body, early on, to the point of his conceiving of it as his lugubrious satellite or golden cloud. When he got to Mexico, many years later, Olson was mostly surprised at the manner in which the descendants of the Mayans—as he said in “The Human Universe” (1951)—took pleasure in one another, in the natural closeness of their bodies.
It was as if the distance between Olson and his body could only be restored by a complicated postal system. Something similar was the case with women. Olson always maintained distance—like his father, who his mother had chosen precisely for his being a firm man, who became, at a certain moment, an alcoholic. (The firmness of a man is directly proportional to his averted vertigo.) Through his whole life Olson had a fear of the feminine body. Olson knew that to come close to a woman was not only to come close to the open body he had learned to fear through his mother, but also, above all, to come close to a woman, as he knew very well, was to come close to his own body. (Why does woman signify body, psycho-historically? Because the parallel fantasy indicates that male signifies mind. Genders were put in place in order to survive dualisms.) “Woman” is that which the “male” unknows of himself. And vice versa.
In order to not come close, Olson, very early on, became a devoted student. From a very early age he sought to become cultured. And it is to have another body, to make it possible to flee from the real body, that our civilization teaches us to construct a fantasy body, the body of requested information, the imaginary body that one constructs, we might say, by reading, by selection of others’ memories, cybermnemic editing. And for those of us who continue on the path of the imaginary co-body, the body of the poem, the story, the essay, the body, the text—the body is transformed into the replacement-body. I do not want to live here. I want to live in language. The word is the island where I am moving to. The text will become the history of the loss of our body. The text is both the balm and the poison.
...
All story has closure as its theme. Reduction. Sudden limits. Born in Poe as an oppressive genre, the story is a capsule of claustrophobia in which time pretends to be trapped in a quick space. The story—temporal narration turned spatial limit—attempts to store away the All thanks to the perfect synthesis and linear time. What genre is more linear than that of the story?—if Europe invented the novel, the neo-Oxident invented the short story, and in this mutation we can see the shift that occurred between these Co-Oxidents. In comparison with the long novelistic reign of Europe, that of the United States will be succinct. The North American empire will be brief, as brief, technical, and fantastic as the best science fiction stories.
...
Burnout is the perfect crime. Be it Bartleby, Funes, or the dandy, let’s not ignore the fact that the fed up man, within the vociferous yawn of his dissipation, hides the fact that he has appropriated All. Burnout is theft. Weariness is a strategy for appropriating the world. “I am weary of Everything” means I possess everything. Which will always be false. Not only because the All does not exist properly but because to appropriate it is the pantopic and the pantopic is the illusory.
This is the first great trick of weariness: the trick of its appropriation, the trick of its looting. This theft will be hidden beneath the giant complaint, beneath the shouted apathy or the ironic gesture. Boredom is a theft that denies its own agency, its own action, depreciating what it has stolen. The burnt out man appears to get away with what’s his, because it can be argued that he possesses it ALL! —and he is satiated with this, Same as Always—he continues arguing that “in truth...I don’t want it.” Because the All which the burnt out man has appropriated is an All-Undesired, the burnout pretends to reject it, however, as we see, the rejection of the possessed All is the same trick by which he retains it. The burnout is not responsible for his illusion of having it all. The burnout is no more than an involuntary comedian. It is not an accident that excess forms the basis of imperial life.
...
Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-Clock World, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves. The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past.
.
January 23, 2017
I loved Yépez's critique of Olsonian pantopia, but I wasn't comfortable with his highly atomistic/individualistic alternative (or non-alternative), which seems to deny molecular forms of relation, group, region, etc. Regardless, this is exciting and luminous critical writing - the very best kind.
August 5, 2023
Muchísimo pasa en este libro. A partir de Charles Olson, un escritor que yo no conocía, pero que fue importante en el Black Mountain College (de donde salieron un montón de artistas de los 50, entre ellos mi adorado Cage), Yepez habla sobre la relación entre Estados Unidos y su memoria, el modernismo, (y post modernismo) la historia. Estoy super mega simplificando, porque pasa por un montón de lugares, desde Olson, Melville, Artaud, Marx, Hegel, Quetzalcoatl, John Cage, bueno, lo menciona: "(El músico y poeta John Cage solía decir que hay poesía cuando nos percatamos que no poseemos nada)" imperialismo, conquista, capitalismo, Bartelby, Edipo, medios masivos, etc etc. Es como ver a alguien haciendo equilibrismo y y llegando siempre a lugares buenísimos.
Me parece super original y me gusta mucho su voz. Me deja con un montón de líneas abiertas, pensando en la diversidad como la mejor manera de pensar en nuestra experiencia. Y bueno aprendí unos cuantos conceptos nuevos, como el quincunce, ("El quincunce se trata primordialmente de un modelo de explicación de cómo se germinan bio-psíquicamente los fenómenos- desde la gestación humana hasta los procesos mentales que hacen posible la renovación espiritual interna o la creación intelectual- y a la vez, el quincunce es una descripción metafórica de cuál es el proceso que tiene que devenir-del-ser.")
Tuve este libro en la biblioteca esperando años, porque me intimidaba y pensaba que sería algo más que nada político. Pero abarca temas de identidad y de historia, de conquista, de literatura, arte, psicología, y no se diga memoria, que me dejan pensando un montón. Me gusta mucho la diversidad, y este libro que cuestiona mucho cosas que se dan por aceptadas, y es ahí en donde me parece más atractivo.
"La memoria es miedo, la memoria es evasión del ahora. La memoria es estructura, sistema, régimen. La memoria es amo. La memoria es inventario. Terrateniente, la memoria es el principio mismo de la economía general de Oxidente.(La Historia es su avatar colectivo). La sabiduría implica el desapego a la ilusión de tener memoria. La sabiduría no memoriza. La sabiduría olvida."
Y bueno este super final:
"La noción de de un 'Universo' es la de un detestable omnisistema absolutista, cuyas leyes todo lo encadenarían a través de la eternidad. Autoengaño y engullimiento, abandonar la idea de la existencia de una totalidad, puesto que la caótica es la prueba definitiva de la existencia de la libertad. Para que yo sea Soberano deben dejar de existir todas las Leyes Generales. Sé que negar la existencia del Universo es un absurdo; por ser absurdo, lo asevero. El Universo jamás ocurrirá."
Creo que es muy saludable que desde la academia alguien desde lo teórico cuestione todo lo establecido, y a mi en lo personal que soy más de la poética, me gusta mucho su tirar todo por los aires y desacomodar, no caer en la pereza intelectual de dar todo por sentado, y hacerlo de una manera tan brillante y entretenida.
Me parece super original y me gusta mucho su voz. Me deja con un montón de líneas abiertas, pensando en la diversidad como la mejor manera de pensar en nuestra experiencia. Y bueno aprendí unos cuantos conceptos nuevos, como el quincunce, ("El quincunce se trata primordialmente de un modelo de explicación de cómo se germinan bio-psíquicamente los fenómenos- desde la gestación humana hasta los procesos mentales que hacen posible la renovación espiritual interna o la creación intelectual- y a la vez, el quincunce es una descripción metafórica de cuál es el proceso que tiene que devenir-del-ser.")
Tuve este libro en la biblioteca esperando años, porque me intimidaba y pensaba que sería algo más que nada político. Pero abarca temas de identidad y de historia, de conquista, de literatura, arte, psicología, y no se diga memoria, que me dejan pensando un montón. Me gusta mucho la diversidad, y este libro que cuestiona mucho cosas que se dan por aceptadas, y es ahí en donde me parece más atractivo.
"La memoria es miedo, la memoria es evasión del ahora. La memoria es estructura, sistema, régimen. La memoria es amo. La memoria es inventario. Terrateniente, la memoria es el principio mismo de la economía general de Oxidente.(La Historia es su avatar colectivo). La sabiduría implica el desapego a la ilusión de tener memoria. La sabiduría no memoriza. La sabiduría olvida."
Y bueno este super final:
"La noción de de un 'Universo' es la de un detestable omnisistema absolutista, cuyas leyes todo lo encadenarían a través de la eternidad. Autoengaño y engullimiento, abandonar la idea de la existencia de una totalidad, puesto que la caótica es la prueba definitiva de la existencia de la libertad. Para que yo sea Soberano deben dejar de existir todas las Leyes Generales. Sé que negar la existencia del Universo es un absurdo; por ser absurdo, lo asevero. El Universo jamás ocurrirá."
Creo que es muy saludable que desde la academia alguien desde lo teórico cuestione todo lo establecido, y a mi en lo personal que soy más de la poética, me gusta mucho su tirar todo por los aires y desacomodar, no caer en la pereza intelectual de dar todo por sentado, y hacerlo de una manera tan brillante y entretenida.
January 19, 2021
The author criticizes his biographical subject, an approach I have fondness for. He was looking at the 20th-century poet Charles Olson. I wrote for Books Are Our Superpower. Also, not mentioned in my BAOS article: Empire of Neomemory analyzes the quincunce [quincunx] symbol. I read the English translation (ChainLinks, 2013).
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January 14, 2014Summarizing w/caution--there's a lot here: Using a psychoanalytic approach, Yepez uses Olson as a way of critiquing the USAmerican Avant-garde at large. The charges. Olson, in ushering in the term Post-Modern, creates the illusion that we are done with modernism, when, in fact the primary strategy of cultural production has been and remains the creation of neomemories via recovery, remix, re-edit, re-etc of fragments: “The “American” dream is a dream of a new memory." Against revolutionary aspirations of art to fragment history: “History cannot be fragmented once and for all, as “History” is the result of fragmentation” (223).
Yepez asserts that the problem of thinking about telling histories spatially is that is spatializes not just history but time itself. This process has been so ubiquitous that it has created a cultural landscape shifted out of its own time and into a no time in which all these histories have been made accessible, turned into monuments—what he call a pantopia (or uchronia?). In pantopia are images of difference but it is itself the annihilation of difference in times, cultural tempos, biochronia, rhythms of exchange. And its the emphasis on time (& the psychoanalytic approach) which distinguishes this from similar critiques.
The image looms large in Yepez' thinking, and he asserts that linguistic difference is a defense against spectacular images: “In the passage from one language to another—in the impossibility of translation—supposedly common notions, shared images are destroyed, undone” (248).
Came away moved by RE: key props of Yepez’s argument (even though there are curious omissions in his evidence) and the following questions: If the problem is a constant recovery work, what would an ethics of forgetting look like? A poetics of forgetting? Instead of flattening time, how would a poem alert one to differences in times? Much more there. Just a first beat.
Yepez asserts that the problem of thinking about telling histories spatially is that is spatializes not just history but time itself. This process has been so ubiquitous that it has created a cultural landscape shifted out of its own time and into a no time in which all these histories have been made accessible, turned into monuments—what he call a pantopia (or uchronia?). In pantopia are images of difference but it is itself the annihilation of difference in times, cultural tempos, biochronia, rhythms of exchange. And its the emphasis on time (& the psychoanalytic approach) which distinguishes this from similar critiques.
The image looms large in Yepez' thinking, and he asserts that linguistic difference is a defense against spectacular images: “In the passage from one language to another—in the impossibility of translation—supposedly common notions, shared images are destroyed, undone” (248).
Came away moved by RE: key props of Yepez’s argument (even though there are curious omissions in his evidence) and the following questions: If the problem is a constant recovery work, what would an ethics of forgetting look like? A poetics of forgetting? Instead of flattening time, how would a poem alert one to differences in times? Much more there. Just a first beat.
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June 5, 2015So much.
Want to read
July 13, 2009this person is such a good writer and also nice and a fawesome activist
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews