Witness for the Persecution

More wild blogstyle (alterna versioning) on the concept of relational aesthetics:

I.

Agamben:

If we now return to testimony, we may say that to bear witness is to place oneself in one's own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living [...] Poets -- witnesses -- found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking.

Complexity, problematized, allows for the poet to see each work as nothing more than its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. The philosophical element, if it is to be found, is in the attempt.

For the poet as witness who is, say, watching TV, what is the attempt that further ignites a philosophical move into the theory as performance?

The poet-philosopher cum performance artist will ask: is life really a work of art without an author?

Who speaks these words?

Who gives testimony to such assurances and how has their subjectivity been stagecrafted into this theater of cruelty?

And yet, with the blurring of the boundaries between public and private, how does the biopoliticized, authorless body become "a form-of-life" i.e. "a life that can never be separated from its form"?

II.

Pound:

And before hell mouth; dry plain
And two mountains;
On the one mountain, a running form,
And another
In the turn of the hill; in hard steel
The road like a slow screw’s thread,
The angle almost imperceptible
So the circuit seemed hardly to rise;
And the running form, naked, Blake,
Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs,
Howling against the evil,
His eyes rolling,
Whirling like flaming cart-wheels,
And his head held backward to gaze on the evil
As he ran from it,
To be hid by the steel mountain,
And when he showed again from the north side;
His eyes blazing toward hell mouth [...]

A direct treatment of the thing, conveying use-value as techne bliss, a slow screw's head prompting one to charge language to the utmost possible degree.

III.

Scatternote:

Evoke the poet, producing, 
among the beasts, within the ruins, 
a cartoon character of sincerity.

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Metadata: philosophy, poetics, literature, art, relational aesthetics, Agamben, Pound