Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence

Introduction Rethinking the Beats

1 “ Introduction Rethinking the Beats God is a parking meter. —Bob Kaufman Seize the moment.” “Be present.” “Live in the now.” This volume examines the ideological and cultural assumptions that underpin a supposedly natural return to the evanescent present in Beat Generation writings. For the Beats, capturing true immediacy involves focusing attention on desire and action as they spontaneously respond to the material conditions of each passing moment. This attention allows the Beats to establish an authentic connection to the world that forms the basis for a poetics of presence—a writing that transcribes the flux of experience as it wells up in each successive instant. In order to achieve this relationship to the moment, the Beats oftentimes challenged cultural norms, earning for themselves the title of rebels or outsiders. However, contextualizing the Beats within an early-postmodern rubric that reinscribes Beat writings within the divide between the modern and postmodern reveals that they were very much a product of their time. While the passing moment may appear to offer an unexplored territory awaiting discovery, the Beats arrive in each new present with a burden of history (both individual and social) that complicates the ways in which they attempt to utilize the present. This is not to claim that the Beat quest for the ephemeral moment is misguided. On the contrary, the Beats’ desire to “capture immediacy” offers valuable insights into how meaning is constantly produced. This book ultimately argues that the Beats’ relationship to the moment is a productive one; examining the motivations that the Beats necessarily bring to their project can produce better understanding of both the successes and failures of the Beat desire to live and write the present as it continually unfolds through space and time. The epigraph that heads this introduction, taken from Bob Kaufman’s broadside “Second April,” demonstrates the multiple forces at play in Beat writing. What makes Kaufman’s line so effective is that it forces a second Mortenson Intro.indd 1 9/9/10 2:35 PM I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 glance at two concepts normally taken for granted. The parking meter enacts a particular structural relationship to the world, and by equating this instrument with the concept of God, Kaufman pulls back the veil to expose a nexus of possible relationships. Placing two highly charged images alongside one another, Kaufman produces myriad meanings in the gap between. The term “God” connotes transcendental authority, a power higher than humankind who acts as arbiter and judge. The term “parking meter” is a device that distributes both time and space in a pecuniary manner. Much like a clock, the parking meter measures temporality. But unlike the ubiquity of clock time, the parking meter is situated in space. And as a rented space, Kaufman’s image becomes inextricably linked to capitalism—one must pay to leave one’s car there. Just how do these two images fit together? Kaufman is commenting on God itself—our metaphysical deity demarcates the space of our bodies and the time they may exist upon the earth, and we pay for this service in tithes, devotion, and supplication. Once our meter is up, we must vacate our spot, so another can take our place. Or perhaps we have turned our parking meters into God. Here Kaufman calls us to task for installing a regime of temporal and spatial surveillance that we must constantly feed in order to remain in place. In a burgeoning postwar consumer economy, everything is for sale, including time and space. But it is also the ambiguity between potential readings that Kaufman is capturing with his line. The inability to finally know which reading is “correct” is a reflection of the social condition that Americans found themselves in during the 1950s. Unable to accept a position wholesale after the atrocities of World War II, Americans nevertheless sought a comforting stability in an otherwise unstable world. Kaufman’s line offers an existential choice that jars the reader into understanding—choose a meaning or live in a world devoid of one. The choice of Kaufman here is not arbitrary. Kaufman’s position as a halfJewish , half–African American writer encapsulates the cultural tensions of the postwar era. In challenging the conformist paradigms of the time, the Beats often reproduced many of the social assumptions at work in the very culture they critiqued. This double-edged nature of Beat discourse makes it the perfect vehicle for exploring the tensions and...