Artifact of Hope
2017
Kenning Editions
Artifact of Hope is an epistolary essay combined with the documentary remains of a post-Occupy project, one beginning in a wish to situate a collective dialogue in creative readings of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. The artifacts that comprise the majority of the essay take the form of daydreams, letters to students, a conference paper, citations, and various writings by those who attended Harryman’s workshops and seminars at the Oakland Public School in 2013 and, two-years later, at the Pratt Institute. Harryman views these venues as aspects of concrete utopias, however fragile and impermanent. Her essay resonates with but does not necessarily adhere to Bloch’s process-oriented Marxism. Key to Harryman’s ambivalent hope-thinking is Jackson Mac Low’s “Some Ways Philosophy Helped Shape My Work,” as his insights into the poet’s potential, or productive misreadings of philosophy, align with the author’s feminist poetics and skepticisms.
Artifact of Hope is the final installment of the Ordinance series of non-fiction writing in the areas of contemporary poetics, philosophy, politics, and technology. Ordinance as in coordination, ordinal points, and incendiary potential. Each chapbook in the series is handmade, perfect bound, and portable. Other titles are by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Cassandra Troyan, Daniel Spangler, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, Andrew Durbin and Brandon Brown.