OL’ CHANTY REVIEW OF WHITE FUNGUS
White Fungus, Issue 11
Most poetry magazines in Britain today have the feel of the ghetto about them. They are about poetry and not much besides. Even their critical practice is all about poetry. You wouldn’t think, reading many of them, that we live in a wider more volatile world which of necessity impacts on poets and poetry. It was not always the case. There were plenty of against the grain magazines in the 60s and 70s. One of the joys of browsing the New York bookshops in the late 70s and early 80s was the plethora of such magazines to be found there. In the mid-80s, Margin appeared in Britain edited by Robin Magowan and Walter Perrie, and did a pretty good job of making up for the shortfall at the time, but it died a death, I think, before the 90s were on us. And there hasn’t really been anything like it since. So I think we should welcome White Fungus as an arts, music and poetry magazine with a decidedly political drift.
Of course, one other great difference between now and the 60s, 70s and 80s is that, thanks to the internet, we live in a much more globalised world. We can no longer stick to our own tribal patch, but must start to take in what’s emerging in different parts of the world if we are not to find ourselves stuck in some cultural backwater. White Fungus is based in Taiwan, though it seems to have a strong New Zealand connection as well. So let’s just say that it covers what’s happening on ‘the other side of the world’ – in politics, the arts, music, poetry et cetera, and lifts the lid on things we rarely hear about here.
While reading through White Fungus, I tried to get a feel for the basic philosophy behind it. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I think I did discover a coherent position – ‘post-modernist’ to a certain extent— the word “hyperreality” crops up here and there— but with a lot more direction than one usually expects from ‘post-modernist’ discourse. The key perhaps lies in the piece by Walter Benjamin, On The Concept Of History, in which Benjamin discusses the difference between Historicism and Historical Materialism, concepts which might seem somewhat blurred, especially to readers of Popper. So here is how Benjamin sees it. Historicism is linear and is a philosophy adopted by vulgar Marxists who view ‘History’ in terms of linear progression from the past into the present and future. Historical Materialism, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the present, and with the past and the future only in as far as they directly feed into the present. There is no linear progression here. History is what we make it in the here and now, although, to paraphrase Marx, in circumstances not of our choosing. The main thing seems to be the importance of what’s happening today in both politics and the arts and the magazine certainly tries to live up to this ideal.
It opens with an editorial about “Brand Obama” and the reluctance of ‘liberals’ in America to criticise his continuation of Corporate America’s agenda – especially in terms of foreign policy. The Editorial gives us a very good idea of the magazines political stance, as does the very first essay about the Neo-Liberal economic policy pursued by New Zealand’s Labour Party since 1984, The Kind Of Socialism Millionaires Approve Of. While reading it, I thought to myself, “So this is where Blair got his ideas from.” We have so much to thank the New Zealand Finance Minister and former accountant, Roger Douglas for; he was clearly a ‘genius’. I just hope that he hasn’t bored the New Zealand public with talk of his ‘legacy’ – like his British disciple.
Most of the magazine however is devoted to the arts and music and features articles on, or interviews with, artists and musicians from China, Taiwan, Japan and New Zealand. The piece on the rock and avant-garde music scene in China is especially interesting. It is enthusiastic about developments taking place in China, but not uncritical, since it does recognise that the Cultural Revolution had a devastating impact on cultural life in China. The destruction, for example, of living traditions meant that artists and musicians had to start all over again, often at the expense of the quality of their own work. However, these things are beginning to sort themselves out and China now looks like a very exciting place for artists and musicians to work in.
The final two items by Juan Santos, For The Earth To Live, Capitalism Must Die and Celebrating Collapse are also worth the encounter, though I tend to be more critical about them. They appear to be excerpts from a longer work (or longer works) and are apocalyptic in nature. They make for very scary reading about the state of the planet and capitalist generated “ecocide”. For instance: “If he (James Lovelock) ’s right, most of us are going to die, about 95% of humanity, by 2100. The heartbreak that’s coming in unimaginable.” However, Santos draws rather different – less knee-jerk authoritarian – conclusions than Lovelock, who appears to advocate some kind of global dictatorship as a way of overcoming these problems. Santos, since he appears to recognise that the state is part of the problem, probably would not agree with Lovelock’s solution. His philosophy seems to be “bring it on”, we’re all going to die anyway. The collapse of city-based civilisation will be a good thing for nature and human community. What will emerge out of it will be a new culture and more authentic way of living. Well, I’m not so sure. Such a collapse might benefit the privileged more than anyone else and lead to a dog eat dog scramble for survival in which those more strategically placed will have the advantage, especially if we haven’t by then overcome our reflexive respect for power and ‘authority’. On the other hand, as Santos suggests in the case of hurricanes, the collapse of state-functions have in the past led to people coming together and creating alternative methods of administration and collective self-help. Volin in his book on the anarchists of the Russian Revolution, The Unknown Revolution, deals with just such forms of self-organisation arising out of the collapse of the Tsarist state. So I am not willing to dismiss Santos completely here. I also think he scapegoats the city rather too much by saying that the roots of the problem lie in the city and ‘civilisation’. There have been urban cultures and civilisations which have apparently done without states. The cities of the Indus Valley, for example, those of the Harappan culture, which came into being a few thousand years ago, were trading centres and little more. Their form of political organisation appears to have been a complex system of cheiftainship, not a militarised state. Moreover, they did not dominate the surrounding countryside, in the way Santos suggests cities must. They seemed to have emerged spontaneously to answer the needs of the countryside and dissolved themselves back into the surrounding countryside equally spontaneously once there was no further need for them. It therefore seems to be quite possible to make the case that cities can exist without such forms of domination and exploitation. For that reason I find Santos’s arguments just a little too pat and schematic. Nonetheless, he raises some very important questions and therefore can’t be too lightly dismissed.
In addition to the articles and interviews, there is some very good art tucked away in its pages, a comic titled The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Dr Tom Bollinger, an intriguing poem by the 7 year old Peggy Chang from Taiwan called Here is my circus, an experimental prose-poem in two parts called Global Blues by McArthur Gunter, plus a fascinating supplementary disk consisting of a compilation of avant-garde and experimental music off New York record label Pogus Productions. All this makes White Fungus an extremely interesting and worthwhile magazine – and very good value for money to boot. Now all we need is a magazine like it in this neck of the woods.
NB. White Fungus is distributed by Disticor in the US and Canada, MOTTO in Switzerland and Germany, and Mediabus in Korea. White Fungus is also in the collections of libraries around the world including: The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Wisconsin University Library, The Southbank Centre (London), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain), National Library of Australia and Te Papa (National Museum of New Zealand).