Sunday 29 January 2012
Monday 2 August 2010
Avant-Garde Temporality
Here's the essay that I've been working on this summer. It is for a seminar, but I've been thinking about this topic for some time now, and wanted to share my thoughts. Please do comment if you are so moved. I am definitely going to keep thinking about this.
The term avant-garde has had a long and contestual life dating back to the 19th century, with its military use going as far back as the Middle Ages. Today, the term is used to refer to everything from elite, expensive art and decorative objects to experimental writing that uses language to create sound and texture rather than meaning. Of course the term also desribes art and literary works that challenge and question certain current social, political, and economic trends and practices. In fact, avant-garde has come to mean so many things, that contemporary literary critics either use the term sparingly, refering mainly to those artists and writers of the early 20th century, or, like Mark Wallace and Steven Marks in their introduction to Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, they stress the “multiplicity of methods, techniques, lineages, and influences that bear on the production of present-day poetry,” which makes “the interplay of form and content equally multiple” (4). Wallace and Marks even recognize that “the sales of various types of non-‘mainstream’ poetries, if taken together, likely exceed the ‘mainstream’ center whose shadow they supposedly occupy” (1). So what is avant-garde art? what is avant-garde writing? One of the more problematic definitions of avant-garde makes it synonymous with experimental, and although there may be historical reasons for such a synonymy, the troubles it causes are very much current. There is an underlying meaning to the term that positions it not only as an opposition to “mainstream” culture and writing, but as a quest for newness and novelty in the service of moving forward, of progress. There are two issues with equating avant-garde and experimental. The first is that experiment has literally nothing to do with opposition or progress; most experiments fail, they lead to nothing, and they are conducted, not to oppose anything, but to discover something new, to prove something. The other trouble with this is that novelty and newness do not necessarily relate to progress or moving forward. In fact, the conflict between capitalism’s obsession with the new, which is based on novelty being valuable, a high level of product replacement, and increased revenue, and the avant-garde’s obsession with the new, while professing to be opposed to capitalism and consumerism, has not been explored enough.
Through all of this ambiguity, confusion, and conflict, there have been very few attempts by contemporary scholars and critics to define, or redefine, the term avant-gard. One such attempt has been made, however, by Krzytsztof Ziarek in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Although the redefinition I am interested in goes beyond what Ziarek has done, I lean heavily on this book as a way to explain the type of temporality that is necessary to get to the redefinition I am after. Historically speaking, in its move from military terminology to artistic and literary metaphor, the implication of the “front” changes, losing its spatial referent in the art and literary worlds, while taking up the temporal referent. According to the OED, vant-guard means “to defend in front,” and avant-garde’s military definition is “the foremost part of an army.” Why then, has the term, specifically within literary criticism and theory, not only taken on the breaking of tradition as one of its many qualities, but is also sometimes used to refer to just that one quality? This, according to Matei Calinescu, has to do with the term’s political connections and the fact that war concerns “the struggle of light, life, and knowledge against darkness and evil” (100). War is inextricably tied to revolution, which aims toward ideas of a utopia and therefore, necessarily, a future. The current and historical tensions related to the term avant-garde, between notions of tradition and anti-tradition and within practices and theories of experimentation, innovation, and the future, all stem from the temporal implications historically associated with the term. In what follows, I explore these tensions and propose a different temporality that opens avant-garde to a more useful, critical, and distinctive concept.
The most famous paradox of the avant-garde is, to use the words of Barrett Watten, that “it cannot survive its reentry into history, as a form of representation, without losing either creative potential or critical force” (582). This paradox, or problem, of the avant-garde, aside from being one that has crept alongside the term’s evolution from the beginning, is directly tied to notions of past and future, new and old. In the 1860s, not long after the term’s first purported metaphorical use, Baudelaire declared his distaste for it. Matei Calinescu tells us that “Baudelaire’s profound intelligence was struck by the paradox of the avant-garde (as understood at the time): nonconformism reduced to a kind of military discipline or, worse, to herdlike conformity” (110 original emphasis). Baudelaire himself wrote that “this weakness for military metaphors is a sign of natures that are not themselves militarist, but are made for discipline—that is to say, for conformity” (qtd. in Calinescu 111). Although the militaristic aspects of the term have, supposedly, lost much weight in today’s use, Baudelaire was nonetheless able to recognize what, 100 years later, Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde” (Calinescu 111). It is this paradox (or these paradoxes) that brought about concepts of the end of the avant-garde, or as Paul Mann, and many others, would have it, the death of the avant-garde. Mann writes that “the avant-garde, we know, is dead: nothing could appear more exhausted than its theory, its history, its works” (3). The story goes that at some point in the 1960s, towards the later half of the decade, a crisis occurred and the avant-garde was its (somewhat suspected) casualty. In fact, Mann dates the publication of a number of ‘obituaries’ of the avant-garde as occurring from 1967-1969 (117). This echoes David Lehman’s statement that “postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde,” which, according to Louis Armand, was “the characteristic complaint ... in the 1970s” (3-4).
The most common critical approaches to the avant-garde, including the conviction that it was a failure, that it’s dead and over (though it may survive in theory and discourse), and that it keeps renewing and recuperating itself (which invites confusion between new, innovative, experimental, and avant-garde), all rely on ideas of temporality, chronology, and the movement and passing of time. Two of Stanley Cavell’s “three confusions endemic to the concept,” as described by R.M. Berry, also come out of this temporality. According to Berry, these two confusions are the avant-garde’s “tendency to overemphasize art’s future at the expense of its past, leaving present work ungrounded,” which misrepresents “possibility as indeterminacy,” and its “uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative;” he calls this the “‘farther out than thou’ syndrome” (36-7). The sense of the temporal that I want to remove from the avant-garde is that sense that constructs a linear, clean, time-line that moves from past to present to future; it’s the temporal sense that underlies our culture’s obsession with, and reliance on, progress. It is also the sense of time that allows there to be anything new, and conversely, is the condition under which things become old. This has been the main cause, not only of the tensions around possible definitions of the avant-garde, but also the paradox mentioned above, and the contestation around whether or not there can be a current/contemporary avant-garde. The problems within the concept of the avant-garde that center around the brief life of that which shocks, the move from innovative to traditional, and the troublesome relationship between experimentation and a kind of novelty that will lead us to an attractive future, are only possible within a strictly linear and singular perspective of time. It is the rejection of such a formulation that allows for useful distinctions to emerge between these terms, and others.
It is not from the ‘life’ of the term that I want to remove this temporal sense, for there is of course the history of the term’s use and its definitional evolution in both the political and artistic/literary worlds. The term’s existence in time is not disputable; it’s the sense of linear time that has become wedded to the meaning and application of the term that is being contested. Louis Armand writes, in the introduction to Avant-Post, that “experimentation is inevitably tied to innovation by the same thread that binds the purportedly new to the idea of a tradition. Such a formulation reveals an inherent ‘referential indeterminacy,’ wherein words like experimental, avant-garde, and tradition come to approximate ‘heterologous signs’” (2). It is precisely these ties and bindings that unravel and loosen when one relieves the definition of avant-garde from having to contain the cyclical aspect of time, of things arising and passing away.
One of the problems that comes from the past to future model of the avant-garde is the potentiality, and often actuality, of rejecting the past, of refusing what has come to be considered tradition, convention, and accepted modes of practice and representation, simply because it has already been done, because it is not new. As Calinescu observed, “the avant-gardist often ends up forgetting about the future. The future, he [sic] seems to imply, can take care of itself when the demons of the past are exorcised” (96). Although I disagree with Calinescu that this “shows that ultimately they are committed to an all-encompassing nihilism,” there are three main areas of trouble that this attitude, and action, towards the past engenders (96). The first, and perhaps most obvious, has to do with what is considered past, and how quickly the ‘new’ thing one is doing to reject the past becomes the past itself. Embedded within this issue is also the fact that what is ‘new’ and ‘old’ may not actually be a matter of time passing, but of exposure and knowledge; what is old and established to one person may be new and never before encountered to another. The second issue that rejecting the past creates is what to do when rejecting the past, itself, becomes the ‘old’ thing to do. If the goal of this approach towards the past is to break with tradition, what happens to the avant-garde when it, itself, becomes a tradition? Finally, there is the matter of the new thing itself. According to the OED, our word new comes from the roots of the word now, and has, as one of its first definitions, “not previously existing; now made or brought into existence for the first time.” “Not previously existing” means that it was also not previously known. The trick, then, is how to make or bring something into existence that was in the realm of the unknown previous to its existence, while still rejecting the past. Put another way, it is impossible to make or create something, either visual or literary, without relying on something known, which, in this model, means something past.
Another very important aspect of the avant-garde, that is ultimately tied to the temporal sense I have been discussing, but which stretches beyond it, has to do with artists and writers objecting to the demand to follow certain social and capitalistic customs within the intention, production and distribution of their work. This objection stems from the understanding that customs set a tradition, both customs and tradition are from the past, in order to secure a better future one must reject the past, and rejecting the past means creating and embracing the new, i.e., anti-traditional. A large part of this objection in the literary/art world coincides with the political application of the term, and has to do with a belief and conviction that dates back to the early 19th century. According to Matei Calinescu, Henri de Saint-Simon, a socialist theorist active around the turn of the 19th century, was convinced that “the artist is the ‘man [sic] of imagination’ and, as such, he is capable not only of foreseeing the future but also of creating it. His grandiose task is to take the ‘Golden Age’ of the past and project its magic glow into the future” (102). Written around the same time, but published 20 years later, posthumously, was Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he writes that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry” as well as his more famous line, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Although this part of what avant-garde refers to has shifted its particulars since then, one of the more recent (1970s) and perhaps most obvious examples being the socio-economic platform of the so-called Language School, the sense of revolution, carried from the military associations of the term through the political and into the artistic/literary world, continues to run into the problem of cyclical time and the notion that revolution is simply a turning around of things, and not actually a movement into newness.
One of the most problematic results, especially in the literary world, which falls under the banner of the avant-garde, is the call for newness, constant invention, innovation, and experimentation. In fact, in more recent years, the term avant-garde has become, for some people, synonymous with experimental. Some of the issues that arise out of this are displayed in the following statement, by Charles Altieri: “contemporary experimental writing proves difficult to approach unless we conceive of it as continuous with an avant-garde tradition” (629). Here we have the paradox of an avant-garde tradition, the assumption that one needs to approach experimental writing in a specific way to create more ease for the reader, for the critic (I question here whether or not ‘ease’ should have priority), and the notion that there is a continuity within the avant-garde. Altieri though, for all the difficulties in this one statement, also makes the observation that “some ways of looking back may be necessary if we are also to see beyond the present into the future” (129). In fact, the only time there actually is, is the present, and any notions we have of past and/or future are only possible in, and dependent on, the present, though they do reflect off each other. The trouble with equating experimental with an avant-garde that pushes forward into the future and purports to lead the rest of us into this ideal future is based, at least partly, on the etymology of the word experiment. According to the OED, experiment means “the action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, trial,” “a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose,” and “an action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown.” Tentative procedures, uncertainty, and the possibility of something new, however, does not translate into the ability to create an attractive future. More often than not, experiments fail, the test fails to attain a proof, the method fails to answer the purpose, and/or the procedure fails to discover something new. This is not always the case, certainly, but unless we redefine avant-garde to simply mean different and new, erasing all connections to the notions of foreseeing, producing, and leading others into an attractive future, experimental art and writing can not be equated with the avant-garde.
The most useful thing that the term experiment provides us is its etymological connection to the word experience. One of the obsolete definitions of experiment that the OED gives is “to have experience of; to experience,” and both words come from the Latin root experiri, which means “to try, put to the test” (Perseus). Breaking down the word even more, we find the Latin word periri: “to pass away, come to nothing, vanish, disappear, be lost,” which is paralleled in the English peril (Perseus). This etymology is important because it brings to the forefront the sense of danger in both experiment and experience. Taking his cue from Heidegger and Benjamin, Krzysztof Ziarek notes the “‘literal’ inscription of danger in the matrix of experience.” He goes on to say that “danger exists both on the ontic level ... and on the ontological level—as the very modality of experiencing, as the manner or the way in which one undergoes an experience” (43). Danger here is meant in the sense of being put to a test, of undergoing a trial, and of risking disappearance. The kind of experience that is being brought to light here is specifically not the type or mode that we normally perceive, rather, it is one that is structurally kept open and that goes beyond the bounds of representative language. If by experiment, we mean this kind of risk and this kind of danger, perhaps we can reconnect the bridge between avant-garde and experimental. In fact, this may help us to redefine the entire area, scope, and application of the term avant-garde itself.
The redefinition of avant-garde we are concerned with here, not only rejects the past to future model, it shifts the focus away from the more conventional understanding of experiment towards the ideas of experience mentioned above. Krzysztof Ziarek, in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, presents a redefinition of the term avant-garde that rids us of the multiple contradictions and confusions generally associated with the term that I have discussed here, utilizes an understanding of experience as event through Heidegger and Benjamin, and allows for a sense of time that expands the present to include both the past and the future. One of the ways Ziarek avoids the problems caused by the past to future model of the avant-garde is by focusing his own critique on Peter Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as a failed project because it did not succeed in collapsing the gap between art and life.[1] Aware of the temporal issues surrounding ideas of the avant-garde, Ziarek argues “that as long as it is caught in this futural dialectics, the understanding of the avant-garde as proleptic or visionary cancels the more complex radicality of its art” (19). He goes on to say, quite correctly, that the “proleptic reading” of the avant-garde sees it “as a revolution in the aesthetic structures and categories of knowledge, with which a future will catch up,” that “as a result, history is read in terms of a linearly conceived progression,” and makes the optimistic observation that “the fact that we have become comfortable with the avant-garde is, then, not necessarily a sign that it has turned itself into a “tradition” or that it has failed to produce the future it promised, but that, perhaps, we still do not read the avant-garde” (19-20 original emphasis). For Ziarek, the importance of the avant-garde “lies in its radical refiguration of experience and temporality as an event” (4).
The refiguration of experience that Ziarek is calling for critiques what he refers to as “modern experience.” What he means by this is that the modern technologicalization of experience has reduced it to being measurable, calculable, and completely representable in language. Beginning with both Heidegger and Benjamin, he develops “the conception of experience as event,” event being “a dynamic and open-ended field of forces, whose historicity prevents experience from closing into representational constructs, psychic spaces, or lived instants” (14). Important to this concept of event, of experience as event, is the notion of technology that Ziarek borrows and expands from Heidegger. According to Ziarek, Heidegger’s idea is that “technology as manufacturing and processing into information becomes possible only because the actual in modernity is always already revealed as a standing-reserve of, in principle, calculable and measurable resources” (15). Also important here is Heidegger’s definition of art, which Ziarek tells us is “the temporal event of unconcealment” (4). This connects to Heidegger’s ideas of presence and presencing, of a revealing (an existence, a being), an unconcealment, that simultaneously withholds full presence. It is crucial here that this withholding is understood, not in the sense of hiding or secrecy, but as a necessary result of experience understood as event, of experience as never fully present, never fully able to be translatable into representability. Ziarek refers to this as a “certain ‘non-comprehensibility’ of the event as experience.” He goes on to say that “this form of incomprehensibility is the result precisely of the inessentiality of experience (that is, its withdrawal from essence and presence), or its irrecuperable (never made fully present or representable) historicity” (20).
Historicity, for Ziarek, “acts as a force of temporal dislocation: It (de)organizes the dynamic field of the event in such a way that its coming into presence never coincides with what is made present or opened up by it” (14). This means that the coming into presence, of whatever it might be, is not the same as that which, whatever it might be, becomes present; thus, “historicity both lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it, keeping the event disjointed and incomplete” (14). It is this disjointedness and incompleteness, in other words, historicity, that is suppressed, rejected, when it “becomes measurable and representable” through a solid and fixed structure of linguistic referentiality (13). The connection between historicity, experience, and language is critical for Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde because of his notion that “avant-garde art activates and reinvents the interval between experience and language” (10). Historicity, then, could be understood as the limit, or perhaps the result of the limit between language and experience. In his book, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben also explores the “interval between experience and language.” For Agamben, it is infancy, literally the inability to speak, that “finds its logical place in a presentation of the relationship between language and experience” (4). This is because, as he writes, “the singularity which language must signify is not something ineffable but something superlatively sayable: the thing of language” (4 original emphasis). In other words, since language can only refer to itself, it is unable to fully disclose experience, which, in this way, remains somewhat removed from language, removed from the ability to be signified in language; it remains in infancy, or as Ziarek would have it, it is incomprehensible.
The reason any sense of history enters the discussion at all is because of the distance between the human and language. According to Agamben, the human, “by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I.” This means that, whereas “animals do not enter language” because “ they are already inside it,” the human must enter language in order to speak. It is because of this entering, this split within the speaking human, and as Agamben says, “because language is not the same as the human,” that we are able to conceive of a life, our life, as separate from our sense of self (52). It is this break, according to Agamben, that produces history and the condition of historicity. It is important here that we understand infancy, not as a chronological pre-condition of speech, but rather as the simultaneous and continuous origin and limit of our ability to speak. In fact, for Agamben, it is experience itself that is infancy, and it is the fact that the human is “always in the act of falling from [it] into language and into speech,” that is historicity, that is the condition and character of history (53). It is the sense of experience as event that Ziarek writes of, and the historicity of the event, tied as it is to the difference between the human and language, which “lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it,” that, as Ziarek writes, “both open up the spaces of experience, thought, and representation, and ... makes their closure impossible (14).
The conception of the event that Ziarek uses weighs heavily, as Ziarek himself tells us, on Heidegger’s “concept of the event as poiēsis” (13). Rather than taking poiēsis simply as creation or production, as its Greek etymology would have it, Heidegger explores and defines the term in relation to technē, understood as technology, not in the sense of “manufacturing or production,” but as “a modality of the revealing of the actual which underlies modern techno-scientific reality” (Ziarek 15). According to Ziarek, “Heidegger critiques the instrumental notion of technology” in order to bring attention to “how the laws of science and the patterns of technological development emerge from the much older practices through which the power imbedded in modern technology historically has come to decide the shape of experience and thought” (101). It is this notion of technological experience, of experience as “regulated, ordered, and compressed into information,” that Ziarek’s concept of the avant-garde critiques and rejects. It is poiēsis, for Ziarek, that “retains the event in its historicity, underscoring its irreducibility to the order of representation” (14). What this also means for him, is that avant-garde art must be postaesthetic, understanding aesthetics to mean the theory of art that makes it an aesthetic object. The term postaesthetic describes a work of art “as an active, quasi-performative event” that is able to “recover poiēsis and bring it to bear upon the denial of the temporality of experience” (Ziarek 26, 15). Otherwise put, poiēsis, as a form of revealing set against the technological mode of revealing, which encloses experience within representability, making it final and measurable, allows for the historicity of experience, breaking the confines of representability. Because Ziarek understands “art as always already ‘integral’ to experience, reworking it, as it were, from within, because of art’s ‘figuring’ of the event structure of being,” avant-garde art moves beyond just the aesthetic, as it must, in order to figure the event as poiēsis (16). As the event as poiēsis retains its historicity, so avant-garde art that is postaesthetic retains the ecstatic temporality of experience that is not reducible (translatable) to representation.
The concept of aesthetic that Ziarek is opposing here, “is not a term for a neutral, ‘objective,’ reflection upon art; rather, aesthetic reflection is already implied in the larger philosophical and cultural framework” (35). Understood as “an offspring of metaphysics,” this notion of aesthetics is one that not only supports “the metaphysical models of presence and subjectivity,” but is conceived in that model (39). The critique of experience that Ziarek calls for questions exactly that structure of presence and subjectivity and sets those two categories off into a maze of the constant possibility of lack of presence and an explosion of subjectivity, opening the “metaphysical categorizations of experience” (39). What he is interested in doing with the terms postaesthetic and nonaesthetic, is to emphasize “the necessity of circumventing the series of exclusions—of the aesthetic from the cognitive and the practical—on which aesthetics is founded” (36). Another term that Ziarek uses is paraesthetic. The post- and para- aesthetic are important, not only because of the ecstatic temporality of the event, but also because it shifts the notion of a work of art, where the term work actually refers to the static object of art, to that of the piece of art working, literally acting upon, our senses of experience, temporality, understanding, openness, and yes, cognition and practicality. As Ziarek himself writes, taking his cue from Heidegger, art is “a certain work ... precisely because it ‘works’ experience and history, that is, renders them legible as such” (35). It is within this notion of work that art figures experience because “art works by unworking its own articulations;” “the line between working and unworking becomes increasingly fine, like the corresponding play between concealment and unconcealment” (35).
While I do agree with how Ziarek lays this out and what his understanding of aesthetic and postaesthetic are in this context, I want to go back to a definition and understanding of the term aesthetic that rids us of the confusing prefix “post,” which means after, subsequent, or later, while opening up the meaning of the word to include an active working on that allows for the incomprehensibility of the event/experience as poiēsis. The etymology of the term aesthetic, according to the OED, is the Greek word aisthētikos, meaning “of sense perception,” which comes from aisthanesthai, to perceive.” Certainly every work of art, avant-garde or not, is aesthetic in the sense that it is perceivable by our senses. I mean sense here in terms of the physical senses, not in terms of making sense mentally, through language, or fitting within previously established aesthetic frameworks. What I’m interested in here is a concept of aesthetic that goes back to that original Greek meaning, leaving behind ideas of the static art object and of the more general understanding of aesthetics as the study of that which is beautiful. It’s the notion of sense, specifically of our physical senses and those sensations, or perceptions, that I want to put against the kind of sense that requires linguistic representation. This understanding situates our sensual perception as the kind of experience that Ziarek is arguing for. In my understanding of aesthetics, then, the sense that is connected to our physical senses is in opposition to the sense that accompanies reducing that sensual experience into full representability, into the kind of sense that is comprehendible to us. In fact, I would say that without the kind of aesthetics that I am arguing for, avant-garde art and literature would not be able to criticize modern experience in the way that Ziarek wants it to; it is the working and reworking of perception, through these works of art, through their aesthetics, that does the work that makes Ziarek want to move to terms such as postaesthetic.
The final aspect of Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde that I will discuss, which is perhaps most important for my purposes, is the temporal aspect of the avant-garde. He wants to make sure that “the event’s historicity is never simply equivalent to avant-garde utopianism,” and stresses that “the vital question for understanding the critique of experience is how one reads” the avant-garde’s rupture within time, its apparent push for the future, for some revolution that has yet to happen (18-9). For Ziarek, this rupture or “futurist moment,” is “itself a refiguration of temporality” (19). This refiguration removes the avant-garde from the past to future model and any sense of linear time, instead creating a present that can contain not only this futurist moment, but also the past. According to Ziarek, “the avant-garde’s time is always within the present, but as a specific noncoincidence of its works with the presence of meaning, as a ‘future anterior’” (19). He gets the term future anterior from Julia Kristeva, who uses it to describe her sense of time that is embodied by poetic language (32). Kristeva’s concept of poetic language is that it brings the semiotic mode of language to the surface as opposed to ordinary or symbolic language, which although it has traces of the semiotic, attempts to suppress the semiotic. The semiotic, as proposed by Kristeva, is that mode of language that begins before a young child actually acquires speech but is present in every utterance thereafter.[2] Because the semiotic goes back to a prelingistic stage of development, it also goes back to a time before the subject is formed, an anterior, which means that bringing the semiotic to the forefront of language creates ruptures in the subject.[3] It is these ruptures in the subject, in the “I” of linguistic utterances, that open up, or reopen, the space between experience and language, and thus the time of history; these ruptures in the subject allow for the historicity that Ziarek calls for.
These ruptures, situated as they are at the cusp of experience and language, not only create a “futural inscription within the present,” they also open up history to its own historicity. Kristeva writes, of the future anterior that “anteriority and future join together to open that historical axis in relation to which concrete history will always be wrong” (33). It is this open “historical axis” that creates the possibility for the time of the future anterior, a time “that will never take place, never come about,” a time that is “an impossible time-to-come” (32-3). The only manner in which the time of the avant-garde art or literary work does exist in the present, is through “an upheaval of present place and meaning” (32). This is what Ziarek means when he says that the “avant-garde rupture dislocates the present” (19). Another possible way to talk about this rupture, about the specific temporality I am after, is to look at Gertrude Stein’s concept of the continuous present. According to R.M. Berry, for Stein, as opposed to Ziarek, the present is already dislocated, and the avant-garde is simply trying to get there (41). In her 1926 essay, and lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” Stein writes, of “every one” that “they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.” One of the things that this means for Berry, is that the avant-garde, understood through Stein’s notions of time, “isn’t just the struggle for it’s time. It’s the struggle in it’s time for something suppressed by time itself” (40 original emphasis). This “something suppressed by time itself,” is the historicity of experience, of the event, of poiēsis, and of the working that art can do, if “time” here is understood to mean past to future, linearity, and history. Stein’s notion of the “continuous present” can, as Berry says, be considered the term “both for this struggle and for its object” (40).
Whereas Ziarek and Kristeva’s notion of the future anterior brings the future into the present, Stein’s continuous present opens the possibility for the past to also be included in the present. In her introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections, which she edited, Joan Retallack notes “the subtle temporal development Stein is writing into her description by acquaintance with the continuous immediacy of the experience of presentness” (45). This “continuous immediacy” is only available through an exploration of the relation, the gap, between language and experience; there can be no continuous immediacy if one reduces experience to representation. Annette Rubery, in “The Mother of Postmodernism? Gertrude Stein On-line,” writes that “to avoid the corrupting influence of time on her writing, Stein devised the ‘continuous present’; a state in which each moment has its own emphasis.” It is the “corrupting influence of time,” that I want to remove from the temporality of the avant-garde, and it is this sense of time that obscures historicity and relies on history. Retallack, considering Stein’s concept, writes that “each moment in the writing is a new take in a process of revision as continuous permutation. This is her “continuous present”—successive words or phrases reconfiguring what precedes them through repetition and variation” (44). An important point to add about these “successive words or phrases,” is that, according Ulla E. Dydo, Stein’s continuous present “emerges from her struggle with methods of telling stories by experimenting with sentences stripped of dependent clauses and cast into a total present filled with ‘its own life’” (617). These words and phrases, then, are never made still, never rest, and are never static, but instead, continuously fold and refold their previous figurations into their current and continuous variations, making past and present coincide in a single moment.
Combining the continuous present and the future anterior gets us to the kind of temporality that I am interested in, that I want to assign to the concept of the avant-garde. It allows for a sense of time, for a temporality, that opens the present moment to both the past and the future. It is a concept of time that is born specifically from Ziarek’s call to historicity; it is neither dependent on the past to justify its existence, nor does it rely on the future as its claim to legitimacy. And although it is present, it is present in the Heideggerian sense of “simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal” (Ziarek 13). This unfixed temporality, this vibrating moment, folds history back into itself, revealing historicity, revealing the past and the future as synchronous with the present, and it explodes the present to reveal the past and future that are a part of it. It is this temporality, this complex present, if you will, that makes it possible to conceive an understanding of avant-garde that no longer runs into the troubles, conflicts, and tensions discussed earlier. The drive towards innovation and newness becomes obsolete within a complex present because the goal becomes to be now rather than to be new. As Berry writes, “art’s motivation to become present has nothing to do with striving after novelty,” and “avant-garde art can be said to measure ... the present’s distance from itself” (38, 41). It is not about experimenting to discovering something no one else has, but experimenting for the sake of experience, experimenting to explore that gap between experience and language. The paradox of an avant-garde tradition and the trouble with the brief shelf-life of shock also disappear when considering the complex moment of the avant-garde, for both of these issues can only exist when one operates within the past to present model of temporality. In this sense, the cyclical nature of time, and of revolution, cease to cause conflicts within the concept of an avant-garde, and instead become condensed into what I am calling the complex moment.
Ultimately, I want to redefine the avant-garde and radicalize it even further by attempting to reintroduce the spatial referent that accompanies the term’s military application. My idea is that the temporality of the avant-garde that permits the simultaneity of past, present, and future opens up a space, both theoretically and practically, that, when divorced from its military associations and focused on the work of critiquing the modern technological formation of experience, allows artists and writers to develop avant-garde practices, art, and writing that not only reopen experience to its incomprehensibility and erratic temporality, but reject the project of prophecy or any claim towards the “future,” understood here to mean the chronological one that we will apparently catch up with at some point. This space would cancel the drive to constantly create new things. It is the opening up of this possibility, of this space, and the rejection of the call to the new, the constant need for innovation, and the privileging of experimental art and writing, that creates the possibility for an ethical relationship, not only towards and between multiple practices, multiple avant-gardes, if you will, welcoming the plurality inherent in the alterity of the other, or in this case, the others, it also allows for an ethical relation between the artist and/or writer and his/her experience and language. It is in this way that I hope, eventually, to be able to make the claim for an understanding, and useful applicability, of avant-garde that is necessarily poethic, poethic not simply as a combination of poetic and ethic, but as an understanding that poiēsis, as Ziarek understands it, is intrinsically ethical.
“Aesthetic.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 23 July 2010.
Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London:
Verso, 1993. Print.
Altieri, Charles. “Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry.” Poetics Today. 20.4
(1999): 629-653. Project Muse. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.
Armand, Louis. Introduction. Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under “Post-“ Conditions. Ed. Louis
Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 1-16. Print.
“Avant-Garde.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 7 July
2010.
Berry, R.M. “The Avant-Garde & the Question of Literature.” Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under
“Post-“ Conditions. Ed. Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 35-56. Print.
Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1977. Print.
Dydo, Ulla E. with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934.
Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2003. Print.
“Experiment.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 23 July
2010.
“Experiri.” Perseus Digital Library: Latin Word Study Tool. Ed. Gregory R. Cane. Tufts University.
n.d. Web. 9 July 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez.
Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Print.
Mann, Paul. The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print.
“New.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 3 July 2010.
“Periri.” Perseus Digital Library: Latin Word Study Tool. Ed. Gregory R. Cane. Tufts University. n.d.
Web. 9 July 2010.
Retallack, Joan. Introduction. Gertrude Stein: Selections. Ed. Joan Retallack. Berkeley: UC Press,
2008. 3-84. Print.
Rubery, Annette. “The Mother of Postmodernism? Gertrude Stein On-line.” time-sense
an electronic quarterly on the art of Gertrude Stein. 1.1 (1998): n. pag. Web. 23 July
2010.
“Vant-Guard.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 7 July 2010.
Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks. Introduction. Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s.
Eds. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 1-8. Print.
Watten, Barrett. “The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse
and Text.” Poetics Today. 20.4 (1999): 581-627. Project Muse. Web. 24 May 2010.
Ziarek, Krzysztof. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Illinois:
Northwestern UP, 2001. Print.
Notes
[1] See Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. U of Minnesota P, Minneapolis: 1984, chapter 3, section 3 and chapter 4, section 1.
[2] See Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Columbia UP, New York: 1984, chapter 1, sections 1 & 2.
[3] Kristeva’s term for these ruptures is the “subject in process/on trial” (Revolution 58).
Avant-Garde Temporality
The term avant-garde has had a long and contestual life dating back to the 19th century, with its military use going as far back as the Middle Ages. Today, the term is used to refer to everything from elite, expensive art and decorative objects to experimental writing that uses language to create sound and texture rather than meaning. Of course the term also desribes art and literary works that challenge and question certain current social, political, and economic trends and practices. In fact, avant-garde has come to mean so many things, that contemporary literary critics either use the term sparingly, refering mainly to those artists and writers of the early 20th century, or, like Mark Wallace and Steven Marks in their introduction to Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, they stress the “multiplicity of methods, techniques, lineages, and influences that bear on the production of present-day poetry,” which makes “the interplay of form and content equally multiple” (4). Wallace and Marks even recognize that “the sales of various types of non-‘mainstream’ poetries, if taken together, likely exceed the ‘mainstream’ center whose shadow they supposedly occupy” (1). So what is avant-garde art? what is avant-garde writing? One of the more problematic definitions of avant-garde makes it synonymous with experimental, and although there may be historical reasons for such a synonymy, the troubles it causes are very much current. There is an underlying meaning to the term that positions it not only as an opposition to “mainstream” culture and writing, but as a quest for newness and novelty in the service of moving forward, of progress. There are two issues with equating avant-garde and experimental. The first is that experiment has literally nothing to do with opposition or progress; most experiments fail, they lead to nothing, and they are conducted, not to oppose anything, but to discover something new, to prove something. The other trouble with this is that novelty and newness do not necessarily relate to progress or moving forward. In fact, the conflict between capitalism’s obsession with the new, which is based on novelty being valuable, a high level of product replacement, and increased revenue, and the avant-garde’s obsession with the new, while professing to be opposed to capitalism and consumerism, has not been explored enough.
Through all of this ambiguity, confusion, and conflict, there have been very few attempts by contemporary scholars and critics to define, or redefine, the term avant-gard. One such attempt has been made, however, by Krzytsztof Ziarek in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Although the redefinition I am interested in goes beyond what Ziarek has done, I lean heavily on this book as a way to explain the type of temporality that is necessary to get to the redefinition I am after. Historically speaking, in its move from military terminology to artistic and literary metaphor, the implication of the “front” changes, losing its spatial referent in the art and literary worlds, while taking up the temporal referent. According to the OED, vant-guard means “to defend in front,” and avant-garde’s military definition is “the foremost part of an army.” Why then, has the term, specifically within literary criticism and theory, not only taken on the breaking of tradition as one of its many qualities, but is also sometimes used to refer to just that one quality? This, according to Matei Calinescu, has to do with the term’s political connections and the fact that war concerns “the struggle of light, life, and knowledge against darkness and evil” (100). War is inextricably tied to revolution, which aims toward ideas of a utopia and therefore, necessarily, a future. The current and historical tensions related to the term avant-garde, between notions of tradition and anti-tradition and within practices and theories of experimentation, innovation, and the future, all stem from the temporal implications historically associated with the term. In what follows, I explore these tensions and propose a different temporality that opens avant-garde to a more useful, critical, and distinctive concept.
The most famous paradox of the avant-garde is, to use the words of Barrett Watten, that “it cannot survive its reentry into history, as a form of representation, without losing either creative potential or critical force” (582). This paradox, or problem, of the avant-garde, aside from being one that has crept alongside the term’s evolution from the beginning, is directly tied to notions of past and future, new and old. In the 1860s, not long after the term’s first purported metaphorical use, Baudelaire declared his distaste for it. Matei Calinescu tells us that “Baudelaire’s profound intelligence was struck by the paradox of the avant-garde (as understood at the time): nonconformism reduced to a kind of military discipline or, worse, to herdlike conformity” (110 original emphasis). Baudelaire himself wrote that “this weakness for military metaphors is a sign of natures that are not themselves militarist, but are made for discipline—that is to say, for conformity” (qtd. in Calinescu 111). Although the militaristic aspects of the term have, supposedly, lost much weight in today’s use, Baudelaire was nonetheless able to recognize what, 100 years later, Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde” (Calinescu 111). It is this paradox (or these paradoxes) that brought about concepts of the end of the avant-garde, or as Paul Mann, and many others, would have it, the death of the avant-garde. Mann writes that “the avant-garde, we know, is dead: nothing could appear more exhausted than its theory, its history, its works” (3). The story goes that at some point in the 1960s, towards the later half of the decade, a crisis occurred and the avant-garde was its (somewhat suspected) casualty. In fact, Mann dates the publication of a number of ‘obituaries’ of the avant-garde as occurring from 1967-1969 (117). This echoes David Lehman’s statement that “postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde,” which, according to Louis Armand, was “the characteristic complaint ... in the 1970s” (3-4).
The most common critical approaches to the avant-garde, including the conviction that it was a failure, that it’s dead and over (though it may survive in theory and discourse), and that it keeps renewing and recuperating itself (which invites confusion between new, innovative, experimental, and avant-garde), all rely on ideas of temporality, chronology, and the movement and passing of time. Two of Stanley Cavell’s “three confusions endemic to the concept,” as described by R.M. Berry, also come out of this temporality. According to Berry, these two confusions are the avant-garde’s “tendency to overemphasize art’s future at the expense of its past, leaving present work ungrounded,” which misrepresents “possibility as indeterminacy,” and its “uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative;” he calls this the “‘farther out than thou’ syndrome” (36-7). The sense of the temporal that I want to remove from the avant-garde is that sense that constructs a linear, clean, time-line that moves from past to present to future; it’s the temporal sense that underlies our culture’s obsession with, and reliance on, progress. It is also the sense of time that allows there to be anything new, and conversely, is the condition under which things become old. This has been the main cause, not only of the tensions around possible definitions of the avant-garde, but also the paradox mentioned above, and the contestation around whether or not there can be a current/contemporary avant-garde. The problems within the concept of the avant-garde that center around the brief life of that which shocks, the move from innovative to traditional, and the troublesome relationship between experimentation and a kind of novelty that will lead us to an attractive future, are only possible within a strictly linear and singular perspective of time. It is the rejection of such a formulation that allows for useful distinctions to emerge between these terms, and others.
It is not from the ‘life’ of the term that I want to remove this temporal sense, for there is of course the history of the term’s use and its definitional evolution in both the political and artistic/literary worlds. The term’s existence in time is not disputable; it’s the sense of linear time that has become wedded to the meaning and application of the term that is being contested. Louis Armand writes, in the introduction to Avant-Post, that “experimentation is inevitably tied to innovation by the same thread that binds the purportedly new to the idea of a tradition. Such a formulation reveals an inherent ‘referential indeterminacy,’ wherein words like experimental, avant-garde, and tradition come to approximate ‘heterologous signs’” (2). It is precisely these ties and bindings that unravel and loosen when one relieves the definition of avant-garde from having to contain the cyclical aspect of time, of things arising and passing away.
One of the problems that comes from the past to future model of the avant-garde is the potentiality, and often actuality, of rejecting the past, of refusing what has come to be considered tradition, convention, and accepted modes of practice and representation, simply because it has already been done, because it is not new. As Calinescu observed, “the avant-gardist often ends up forgetting about the future. The future, he [sic] seems to imply, can take care of itself when the demons of the past are exorcised” (96). Although I disagree with Calinescu that this “shows that ultimately they are committed to an all-encompassing nihilism,” there are three main areas of trouble that this attitude, and action, towards the past engenders (96). The first, and perhaps most obvious, has to do with what is considered past, and how quickly the ‘new’ thing one is doing to reject the past becomes the past itself. Embedded within this issue is also the fact that what is ‘new’ and ‘old’ may not actually be a matter of time passing, but of exposure and knowledge; what is old and established to one person may be new and never before encountered to another. The second issue that rejecting the past creates is what to do when rejecting the past, itself, becomes the ‘old’ thing to do. If the goal of this approach towards the past is to break with tradition, what happens to the avant-garde when it, itself, becomes a tradition? Finally, there is the matter of the new thing itself. According to the OED, our word new comes from the roots of the word now, and has, as one of its first definitions, “not previously existing; now made or brought into existence for the first time.” “Not previously existing” means that it was also not previously known. The trick, then, is how to make or bring something into existence that was in the realm of the unknown previous to its existence, while still rejecting the past. Put another way, it is impossible to make or create something, either visual or literary, without relying on something known, which, in this model, means something past.
Another very important aspect of the avant-garde, that is ultimately tied to the temporal sense I have been discussing, but which stretches beyond it, has to do with artists and writers objecting to the demand to follow certain social and capitalistic customs within the intention, production and distribution of their work. This objection stems from the understanding that customs set a tradition, both customs and tradition are from the past, in order to secure a better future one must reject the past, and rejecting the past means creating and embracing the new, i.e., anti-traditional. A large part of this objection in the literary/art world coincides with the political application of the term, and has to do with a belief and conviction that dates back to the early 19th century. According to Matei Calinescu, Henri de Saint-Simon, a socialist theorist active around the turn of the 19th century, was convinced that “the artist is the ‘man [sic] of imagination’ and, as such, he is capable not only of foreseeing the future but also of creating it. His grandiose task is to take the ‘Golden Age’ of the past and project its magic glow into the future” (102). Written around the same time, but published 20 years later, posthumously, was Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he writes that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry” as well as his more famous line, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Although this part of what avant-garde refers to has shifted its particulars since then, one of the more recent (1970s) and perhaps most obvious examples being the socio-economic platform of the so-called Language School, the sense of revolution, carried from the military associations of the term through the political and into the artistic/literary world, continues to run into the problem of cyclical time and the notion that revolution is simply a turning around of things, and not actually a movement into newness.
One of the most problematic results, especially in the literary world, which falls under the banner of the avant-garde, is the call for newness, constant invention, innovation, and experimentation. In fact, in more recent years, the term avant-garde has become, for some people, synonymous with experimental. Some of the issues that arise out of this are displayed in the following statement, by Charles Altieri: “contemporary experimental writing proves difficult to approach unless we conceive of it as continuous with an avant-garde tradition” (629). Here we have the paradox of an avant-garde tradition, the assumption that one needs to approach experimental writing in a specific way to create more ease for the reader, for the critic (I question here whether or not ‘ease’ should have priority), and the notion that there is a continuity within the avant-garde. Altieri though, for all the difficulties in this one statement, also makes the observation that “some ways of looking back may be necessary if we are also to see beyond the present into the future” (129). In fact, the only time there actually is, is the present, and any notions we have of past and/or future are only possible in, and dependent on, the present, though they do reflect off each other. The trouble with equating experimental with an avant-garde that pushes forward into the future and purports to lead the rest of us into this ideal future is based, at least partly, on the etymology of the word experiment. According to the OED, experiment means “the action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, trial,” “a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose,” and “an action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown.” Tentative procedures, uncertainty, and the possibility of something new, however, does not translate into the ability to create an attractive future. More often than not, experiments fail, the test fails to attain a proof, the method fails to answer the purpose, and/or the procedure fails to discover something new. This is not always the case, certainly, but unless we redefine avant-garde to simply mean different and new, erasing all connections to the notions of foreseeing, producing, and leading others into an attractive future, experimental art and writing can not be equated with the avant-garde.
The most useful thing that the term experiment provides us is its etymological connection to the word experience. One of the obsolete definitions of experiment that the OED gives is “to have experience of; to experience,” and both words come from the Latin root experiri, which means “to try, put to the test” (Perseus). Breaking down the word even more, we find the Latin word periri: “to pass away, come to nothing, vanish, disappear, be lost,” which is paralleled in the English peril (Perseus). This etymology is important because it brings to the forefront the sense of danger in both experiment and experience. Taking his cue from Heidegger and Benjamin, Krzysztof Ziarek notes the “‘literal’ inscription of danger in the matrix of experience.” He goes on to say that “danger exists both on the ontic level ... and on the ontological level—as the very modality of experiencing, as the manner or the way in which one undergoes an experience” (43). Danger here is meant in the sense of being put to a test, of undergoing a trial, and of risking disappearance. The kind of experience that is being brought to light here is specifically not the type or mode that we normally perceive, rather, it is one that is structurally kept open and that goes beyond the bounds of representative language. If by experiment, we mean this kind of risk and this kind of danger, perhaps we can reconnect the bridge between avant-garde and experimental. In fact, this may help us to redefine the entire area, scope, and application of the term avant-garde itself.
The redefinition of avant-garde we are concerned with here, not only rejects the past to future model, it shifts the focus away from the more conventional understanding of experiment towards the ideas of experience mentioned above. Krzysztof Ziarek, in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, presents a redefinition of the term avant-garde that rids us of the multiple contradictions and confusions generally associated with the term that I have discussed here, utilizes an understanding of experience as event through Heidegger and Benjamin, and allows for a sense of time that expands the present to include both the past and the future. One of the ways Ziarek avoids the problems caused by the past to future model of the avant-garde is by focusing his own critique on Peter Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as a failed project because it did not succeed in collapsing the gap between art and life.[1] Aware of the temporal issues surrounding ideas of the avant-garde, Ziarek argues “that as long as it is caught in this futural dialectics, the understanding of the avant-garde as proleptic or visionary cancels the more complex radicality of its art” (19). He goes on to say, quite correctly, that the “proleptic reading” of the avant-garde sees it “as a revolution in the aesthetic structures and categories of knowledge, with which a future will catch up,” that “as a result, history is read in terms of a linearly conceived progression,” and makes the optimistic observation that “the fact that we have become comfortable with the avant-garde is, then, not necessarily a sign that it has turned itself into a “tradition” or that it has failed to produce the future it promised, but that, perhaps, we still do not read the avant-garde” (19-20 original emphasis). For Ziarek, the importance of the avant-garde “lies in its radical refiguration of experience and temporality as an event” (4).
The refiguration of experience that Ziarek is calling for critiques what he refers to as “modern experience.” What he means by this is that the modern technologicalization of experience has reduced it to being measurable, calculable, and completely representable in language. Beginning with both Heidegger and Benjamin, he develops “the conception of experience as event,” event being “a dynamic and open-ended field of forces, whose historicity prevents experience from closing into representational constructs, psychic spaces, or lived instants” (14). Important to this concept of event, of experience as event, is the notion of technology that Ziarek borrows and expands from Heidegger. According to Ziarek, Heidegger’s idea is that “technology as manufacturing and processing into information becomes possible only because the actual in modernity is always already revealed as a standing-reserve of, in principle, calculable and measurable resources” (15). Also important here is Heidegger’s definition of art, which Ziarek tells us is “the temporal event of unconcealment” (4). This connects to Heidegger’s ideas of presence and presencing, of a revealing (an existence, a being), an unconcealment, that simultaneously withholds full presence. It is crucial here that this withholding is understood, not in the sense of hiding or secrecy, but as a necessary result of experience understood as event, of experience as never fully present, never fully able to be translatable into representability. Ziarek refers to this as a “certain ‘non-comprehensibility’ of the event as experience.” He goes on to say that “this form of incomprehensibility is the result precisely of the inessentiality of experience (that is, its withdrawal from essence and presence), or its irrecuperable (never made fully present or representable) historicity” (20).
Historicity, for Ziarek, “acts as a force of temporal dislocation: It (de)organizes the dynamic field of the event in such a way that its coming into presence never coincides with what is made present or opened up by it” (14). This means that the coming into presence, of whatever it might be, is not the same as that which, whatever it might be, becomes present; thus, “historicity both lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it, keeping the event disjointed and incomplete” (14). It is this disjointedness and incompleteness, in other words, historicity, that is suppressed, rejected, when it “becomes measurable and representable” through a solid and fixed structure of linguistic referentiality (13). The connection between historicity, experience, and language is critical for Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde because of his notion that “avant-garde art activates and reinvents the interval between experience and language” (10). Historicity, then, could be understood as the limit, or perhaps the result of the limit between language and experience. In his book, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben also explores the “interval between experience and language.” For Agamben, it is infancy, literally the inability to speak, that “finds its logical place in a presentation of the relationship between language and experience” (4). This is because, as he writes, “the singularity which language must signify is not something ineffable but something superlatively sayable: the thing of language” (4 original emphasis). In other words, since language can only refer to itself, it is unable to fully disclose experience, which, in this way, remains somewhat removed from language, removed from the ability to be signified in language; it remains in infancy, or as Ziarek would have it, it is incomprehensible.
The reason any sense of history enters the discussion at all is because of the distance between the human and language. According to Agamben, the human, “by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I.” This means that, whereas “animals do not enter language” because “ they are already inside it,” the human must enter language in order to speak. It is because of this entering, this split within the speaking human, and as Agamben says, “because language is not the same as the human,” that we are able to conceive of a life, our life, as separate from our sense of self (52). It is this break, according to Agamben, that produces history and the condition of historicity. It is important here that we understand infancy, not as a chronological pre-condition of speech, but rather as the simultaneous and continuous origin and limit of our ability to speak. In fact, for Agamben, it is experience itself that is infancy, and it is the fact that the human is “always in the act of falling from [it] into language and into speech,” that is historicity, that is the condition and character of history (53). It is the sense of experience as event that Ziarek writes of, and the historicity of the event, tied as it is to the difference between the human and language, which “lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it,” that, as Ziarek writes, “both open up the spaces of experience, thought, and representation, and ... makes their closure impossible (14).
The conception of the event that Ziarek uses weighs heavily, as Ziarek himself tells us, on Heidegger’s “concept of the event as poiēsis” (13). Rather than taking poiēsis simply as creation or production, as its Greek etymology would have it, Heidegger explores and defines the term in relation to technē, understood as technology, not in the sense of “manufacturing or production,” but as “a modality of the revealing of the actual which underlies modern techno-scientific reality” (Ziarek 15). According to Ziarek, “Heidegger critiques the instrumental notion of technology” in order to bring attention to “how the laws of science and the patterns of technological development emerge from the much older practices through which the power imbedded in modern technology historically has come to decide the shape of experience and thought” (101). It is this notion of technological experience, of experience as “regulated, ordered, and compressed into information,” that Ziarek’s concept of the avant-garde critiques and rejects. It is poiēsis, for Ziarek, that “retains the event in its historicity, underscoring its irreducibility to the order of representation” (14). What this also means for him, is that avant-garde art must be postaesthetic, understanding aesthetics to mean the theory of art that makes it an aesthetic object. The term postaesthetic describes a work of art “as an active, quasi-performative event” that is able to “recover poiēsis and bring it to bear upon the denial of the temporality of experience” (Ziarek 26, 15). Otherwise put, poiēsis, as a form of revealing set against the technological mode of revealing, which encloses experience within representability, making it final and measurable, allows for the historicity of experience, breaking the confines of representability. Because Ziarek understands “art as always already ‘integral’ to experience, reworking it, as it were, from within, because of art’s ‘figuring’ of the event structure of being,” avant-garde art moves beyond just the aesthetic, as it must, in order to figure the event as poiēsis (16). As the event as poiēsis retains its historicity, so avant-garde art that is postaesthetic retains the ecstatic temporality of experience that is not reducible (translatable) to representation.
The concept of aesthetic that Ziarek is opposing here, “is not a term for a neutral, ‘objective,’ reflection upon art; rather, aesthetic reflection is already implied in the larger philosophical and cultural framework” (35). Understood as “an offspring of metaphysics,” this notion of aesthetics is one that not only supports “the metaphysical models of presence and subjectivity,” but is conceived in that model (39). The critique of experience that Ziarek calls for questions exactly that structure of presence and subjectivity and sets those two categories off into a maze of the constant possibility of lack of presence and an explosion of subjectivity, opening the “metaphysical categorizations of experience” (39). What he is interested in doing with the terms postaesthetic and nonaesthetic, is to emphasize “the necessity of circumventing the series of exclusions—of the aesthetic from the cognitive and the practical—on which aesthetics is founded” (36). Another term that Ziarek uses is paraesthetic. The post- and para- aesthetic are important, not only because of the ecstatic temporality of the event, but also because it shifts the notion of a work of art, where the term work actually refers to the static object of art, to that of the piece of art working, literally acting upon, our senses of experience, temporality, understanding, openness, and yes, cognition and practicality. As Ziarek himself writes, taking his cue from Heidegger, art is “a certain work ... precisely because it ‘works’ experience and history, that is, renders them legible as such” (35). It is within this notion of work that art figures experience because “art works by unworking its own articulations;” “the line between working and unworking becomes increasingly fine, like the corresponding play between concealment and unconcealment” (35).
While I do agree with how Ziarek lays this out and what his understanding of aesthetic and postaesthetic are in this context, I want to go back to a definition and understanding of the term aesthetic that rids us of the confusing prefix “post,” which means after, subsequent, or later, while opening up the meaning of the word to include an active working on that allows for the incomprehensibility of the event/experience as poiēsis. The etymology of the term aesthetic, according to the OED, is the Greek word aisthētikos, meaning “of sense perception,” which comes from aisthanesthai, to perceive.” Certainly every work of art, avant-garde or not, is aesthetic in the sense that it is perceivable by our senses. I mean sense here in terms of the physical senses, not in terms of making sense mentally, through language, or fitting within previously established aesthetic frameworks. What I’m interested in here is a concept of aesthetic that goes back to that original Greek meaning, leaving behind ideas of the static art object and of the more general understanding of aesthetics as the study of that which is beautiful. It’s the notion of sense, specifically of our physical senses and those sensations, or perceptions, that I want to put against the kind of sense that requires linguistic representation. This understanding situates our sensual perception as the kind of experience that Ziarek is arguing for. In my understanding of aesthetics, then, the sense that is connected to our physical senses is in opposition to the sense that accompanies reducing that sensual experience into full representability, into the kind of sense that is comprehendible to us. In fact, I would say that without the kind of aesthetics that I am arguing for, avant-garde art and literature would not be able to criticize modern experience in the way that Ziarek wants it to; it is the working and reworking of perception, through these works of art, through their aesthetics, that does the work that makes Ziarek want to move to terms such as postaesthetic.
The final aspect of Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde that I will discuss, which is perhaps most important for my purposes, is the temporal aspect of the avant-garde. He wants to make sure that “the event’s historicity is never simply equivalent to avant-garde utopianism,” and stresses that “the vital question for understanding the critique of experience is how one reads” the avant-garde’s rupture within time, its apparent push for the future, for some revolution that has yet to happen (18-9). For Ziarek, this rupture or “futurist moment,” is “itself a refiguration of temporality” (19). This refiguration removes the avant-garde from the past to future model and any sense of linear time, instead creating a present that can contain not only this futurist moment, but also the past. According to Ziarek, “the avant-garde’s time is always within the present, but as a specific noncoincidence of its works with the presence of meaning, as a ‘future anterior’” (19). He gets the term future anterior from Julia Kristeva, who uses it to describe her sense of time that is embodied by poetic language (32). Kristeva’s concept of poetic language is that it brings the semiotic mode of language to the surface as opposed to ordinary or symbolic language, which although it has traces of the semiotic, attempts to suppress the semiotic. The semiotic, as proposed by Kristeva, is that mode of language that begins before a young child actually acquires speech but is present in every utterance thereafter.[2] Because the semiotic goes back to a prelingistic stage of development, it also goes back to a time before the subject is formed, an anterior, which means that bringing the semiotic to the forefront of language creates ruptures in the subject.[3] It is these ruptures in the subject, in the “I” of linguistic utterances, that open up, or reopen, the space between experience and language, and thus the time of history; these ruptures in the subject allow for the historicity that Ziarek calls for.
These ruptures, situated as they are at the cusp of experience and language, not only create a “futural inscription within the present,” they also open up history to its own historicity. Kristeva writes, of the future anterior that “anteriority and future join together to open that historical axis in relation to which concrete history will always be wrong” (33). It is this open “historical axis” that creates the possibility for the time of the future anterior, a time “that will never take place, never come about,” a time that is “an impossible time-to-come” (32-3). The only manner in which the time of the avant-garde art or literary work does exist in the present, is through “an upheaval of present place and meaning” (32). This is what Ziarek means when he says that the “avant-garde rupture dislocates the present” (19). Another possible way to talk about this rupture, about the specific temporality I am after, is to look at Gertrude Stein’s concept of the continuous present. According to R.M. Berry, for Stein, as opposed to Ziarek, the present is already dislocated, and the avant-garde is simply trying to get there (41). In her 1926 essay, and lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” Stein writes, of “every one” that “they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.” One of the things that this means for Berry, is that the avant-garde, understood through Stein’s notions of time, “isn’t just the struggle for it’s time. It’s the struggle in it’s time for something suppressed by time itself” (40 original emphasis). This “something suppressed by time itself,” is the historicity of experience, of the event, of poiēsis, and of the working that art can do, if “time” here is understood to mean past to future, linearity, and history. Stein’s notion of the “continuous present” can, as Berry says, be considered the term “both for this struggle and for its object” (40).
Whereas Ziarek and Kristeva’s notion of the future anterior brings the future into the present, Stein’s continuous present opens the possibility for the past to also be included in the present. In her introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections, which she edited, Joan Retallack notes “the subtle temporal development Stein is writing into her description by acquaintance with the continuous immediacy of the experience of presentness” (45). This “continuous immediacy” is only available through an exploration of the relation, the gap, between language and experience; there can be no continuous immediacy if one reduces experience to representation. Annette Rubery, in “The Mother of Postmodernism? Gertrude Stein On-line,” writes that “to avoid the corrupting influence of time on her writing, Stein devised the ‘continuous present’; a state in which each moment has its own emphasis.” It is the “corrupting influence of time,” that I want to remove from the temporality of the avant-garde, and it is this sense of time that obscures historicity and relies on history. Retallack, considering Stein’s concept, writes that “each moment in the writing is a new take in a process of revision as continuous permutation. This is her “continuous present”—successive words or phrases reconfiguring what precedes them through repetition and variation” (44). An important point to add about these “successive words or phrases,” is that, according Ulla E. Dydo, Stein’s continuous present “emerges from her struggle with methods of telling stories by experimenting with sentences stripped of dependent clauses and cast into a total present filled with ‘its own life’” (617). These words and phrases, then, are never made still, never rest, and are never static, but instead, continuously fold and refold their previous figurations into their current and continuous variations, making past and present coincide in a single moment.
Combining the continuous present and the future anterior gets us to the kind of temporality that I am interested in, that I want to assign to the concept of the avant-garde. It allows for a sense of time, for a temporality, that opens the present moment to both the past and the future. It is a concept of time that is born specifically from Ziarek’s call to historicity; it is neither dependent on the past to justify its existence, nor does it rely on the future as its claim to legitimacy. And although it is present, it is present in the Heideggerian sense of “simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal” (Ziarek 13). This unfixed temporality, this vibrating moment, folds history back into itself, revealing historicity, revealing the past and the future as synchronous with the present, and it explodes the present to reveal the past and future that are a part of it. It is this temporality, this complex present, if you will, that makes it possible to conceive an understanding of avant-garde that no longer runs into the troubles, conflicts, and tensions discussed earlier. The drive towards innovation and newness becomes obsolete within a complex present because the goal becomes to be now rather than to be new. As Berry writes, “art’s motivation to become present has nothing to do with striving after novelty,” and “avant-garde art can be said to measure ... the present’s distance from itself” (38, 41). It is not about experimenting to discovering something no one else has, but experimenting for the sake of experience, experimenting to explore that gap between experience and language. The paradox of an avant-garde tradition and the trouble with the brief shelf-life of shock also disappear when considering the complex moment of the avant-garde, for both of these issues can only exist when one operates within the past to present model of temporality. In this sense, the cyclical nature of time, and of revolution, cease to cause conflicts within the concept of an avant-garde, and instead become condensed into what I am calling the complex moment.
Ultimately, I want to redefine the avant-garde and radicalize it even further by attempting to reintroduce the spatial referent that accompanies the term’s military application. My idea is that the temporality of the avant-garde that permits the simultaneity of past, present, and future opens up a space, both theoretically and practically, that, when divorced from its military associations and focused on the work of critiquing the modern technological formation of experience, allows artists and writers to develop avant-garde practices, art, and writing that not only reopen experience to its incomprehensibility and erratic temporality, but reject the project of prophecy or any claim towards the “future,” understood here to mean the chronological one that we will apparently catch up with at some point. This space would cancel the drive to constantly create new things. It is the opening up of this possibility, of this space, and the rejection of the call to the new, the constant need for innovation, and the privileging of experimental art and writing, that creates the possibility for an ethical relationship, not only towards and between multiple practices, multiple avant-gardes, if you will, welcoming the plurality inherent in the alterity of the other, or in this case, the others, it also allows for an ethical relation between the artist and/or writer and his/her experience and language. It is in this way that I hope, eventually, to be able to make the claim for an understanding, and useful applicability, of avant-garde that is necessarily poethic, poethic not simply as a combination of poetic and ethic, but as an understanding that poiēsis, as Ziarek understands it, is intrinsically ethical.
Works Cited
“Aesthetic.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 23 July 2010.
Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London:
Verso, 1993. Print.
Altieri, Charles. “Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry.” Poetics Today. 20.4
(1999): 629-653. Project Muse. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.
Armand, Louis. Introduction. Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under “Post-“ Conditions. Ed. Louis
Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 1-16. Print.
“Avant-Garde.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 7 July
2010.
Berry, R.M. “The Avant-Garde & the Question of Literature.” Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under
“Post-“ Conditions. Ed. Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 35-56. Print.
Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1977. Print.
Dydo, Ulla E. with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934.
Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2003. Print.
“Experiment.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 23 July
2010.
“Experiri.” Perseus Digital Library: Latin Word Study Tool. Ed. Gregory R. Cane. Tufts University.
n.d. Web. 9 July 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez.
Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Print.
Mann, Paul. The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print.
“New.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 3 July 2010.
“Periri.” Perseus Digital Library: Latin Word Study Tool. Ed. Gregory R. Cane. Tufts University. n.d.
Web. 9 July 2010.
Retallack, Joan. Introduction. Gertrude Stein: Selections. Ed. Joan Retallack. Berkeley: UC Press,
2008. 3-84. Print.
Rubery, Annette. “The Mother of Postmodernism? Gertrude Stein On-line.” time-sense
an electronic quarterly on the art of Gertrude Stein. 1.1 (1998): n. pag. Web. 23 July
2010.
“Vant-Guard.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford English Dictionary, 2010. Web. 7 July 2010.
Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks. Introduction. Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s.
Eds. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 1-8. Print.
Watten, Barrett. “The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse
and Text.” Poetics Today. 20.4 (1999): 581-627. Project Muse. Web. 24 May 2010.
Ziarek, Krzysztof. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Illinois:
Northwestern UP, 2001. Print.
Notes
[1] See Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. U of Minnesota P, Minneapolis: 1984, chapter 3, section 3 and chapter 4, section 1.
[2] See Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Columbia UP, New York: 1984, chapter 1, sections 1 & 2.
[3] Kristeva’s term for these ruptures is the “subject in process/on trial” (Revolution 58).
Thursday 1 July 2010
Help Support the Jack Kerouac School!
Below, I've copied the students' letter to the general and larger community. Below that, I've copied some information received recently from Joe Richey.
In Solidarity,
Soma Feldmar
Naropa class of 2000 (BA) and 2005 (MFA)
Dear Beloved Community,
In the last year, students have watched the legacy of Naropa deteriorate. As of June 15, twenty-three beloved staff, who have devoted several years to Naropa University, were laid off. Included in these layoffs were administrative directors for each department as well as the sole diversity coordinator at the University.
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics fears for the heart and soul of our beloved institution. The school was founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Its mission as a private, non-sectarian liberal arts college is inspired by a unique heritage which honors contemplative thought, critical and creative practice and freedom, and academic integrity. Naropa is more than a school; it is a community that has always been a place of honesty and visionary leadership. Unfortunately, we, the current students of the Jack Kerouac School, fear the current administration may not be aligned with the core values of Naropa.
Naropa is in dire straits. As a result of the recent review of the University by the accreditation board, we are now required to fulfill the following directives within the next two years:
First, the entire school is going through a budget reduction and academic reorganization. A committee called the Faculty Executive Working Group (FEWG) has been formed for the purpose of creating plans to restructure the University in order to accommodate the budget cuts. The five model plan, which would likely be the least compromising for the Jack Kerouac School and the Writing and Poetics Department, would incorporate The Jack Kerouac School as part of the Writing and Poetics Department. The four model plan would dissolve the Writing and Poetics Department into an overarching creative arts program. This would mean that the Jack Kerouac School would no longer have its own budget and as a result would be subject to complete control by a “general” dean of the entire arts department.
Students have not being informed of the above changes or consulted as to what would best serve the student body and sustain the vibrant legacy of Naropa University. We have the right to transparency. We have the right to be involved. Why is Naropa leaving us in the dark? Without answers from the University, we are left with rumors and questions. Those who do not know what truly makes Naropa the place we love are flagrantly dismissing and excluding us from the information and decision-making processes.
Thus, We Who Love Naropa demand the following:
1) That the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics retains all ideals and values that the
student body wishes to preserve, many of which appear on the official website.
“Our programs emphasize traditional and experimental approaches to creative writing in Poetry, Prose and Translation within a variety of genres. Literature courses and the thesis requirement of a final manuscript also emphasize the development of critical writing.
All classes are taught by active, published writers, giving a practitioner's insight into literary art. Our curriculum includes opportunities for students to learn how to teach their craft, exercise performance skills, and develop as practicing writers in the world.
The Kerouac School educates students as skilled practitioners of the literary arts. Its objectives include embracing a disciplined practice of writing, and cultivating a historical and cultural awareness of literary studies.
The Kerouac School is distinct among academic writing programs because of the lively and diverse community of writers who trace their genesis and inspiration from a wide range of aesthetic and social movements, including postmodernism, Buddhist and contemplative teachings, the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e school of poetry, the New York schools of poetry, the Black Mountain school of poetry, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Beat movement, Surrealism, Dada and the Harlem Renaissance. One tradition that is emphasized is the Outrider lineage—a heritage of counter-poetics operating outside the academic mainstream.” (www.naropa.edu/academic/graduate/writingpoetics/)
If budget constraints require a consolidation of the Writing and Poetics department and the Jack Kerouac School, the legacy and spirit of the Jack Kerouac School (which was an important part of the Foundation of Naropa University) must be retained without changes.
2) Increased transparency of school finances, including but not limited to the following documents:
a) Budgetary plans for recent, past, and future goals.
b) The FEWG Faculty Committee Report detailing what changes would be the least drastic alternatives.
3) Access to all ideological restructuring plans. (For instance, are Stuart Lord, Naropa President, and all other administrators aligned with the mission and spiritual values of Naropa?)
4) A voice in all decisions surrounding the restructuring process.
5) That the Diversity Advocate position to be reinstated.
6) Increased student participation in the University’s operation, including but not limited to the presence of a student-run committee at all faculty and administrative meetings pertaining to any major departmental, university, administrative, faculty, financial and academic decisions. Included in this demand is the formation of a Student Finance Board.
As we descend into a realm of Transformation, from language to social and environmental structures, Naropa has been iconic in the metamorphosis of some of the most brilliant and cultivating minds in academic history. The Jack Kerouac School has molded and trained many successful writers in a close-knit community retaining a love for language and the written word. We owe this school our support and love and it is our duty to see it stand, strong and stoic, for our school’s future. We refuse to continue being pushed to the sidelines, forced to watch this deterioration unfold.
Our Voices will be heard on Friday!
Stay tuned...
The Committee Thecommittee1974@gmail.com
And from Joe Richey:
Unhappy Fiscal New Year!
Boulder, July 1, 2010
On Thursday afternoon, Anne Waldman’s Socratic Rap was overtaken by a discussion of the budgets cuts at the Jack Kerouac School, the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and Naropa University in general. On Wednesday evening about thirty or so students, faculty, alumni gathered in a large circle on the grass south of Naropa. Major grievances were aired: unfair cuts of essential jobs and services, the timing of the cuts (at the outset of the Summer Writing Program), stonewalling, withholding on the part of top administrators. Students question whether Naropa will be able to deliver what was originally sold to them
Anne Waldman, Director Emeritus of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, clarified a lot about new academic models being proposed. Only two weeks ago did she and others in Writing & Poetics become aware of the proposals.
At this writing, what form the Kerouac School and the Writing Program at Naropa will take is still being decided. Key stakeholders, students, workers, and alumni have inserted themselves into the structural adjustment process. Naropa President Stuart Lord is expected to appear at a meeting by Thursday, July 8th at 8:30 AM.
A public hearing of poets, writers, and community members will also be held on campus 2130 Arapahoe at 6 PM, Friday, July 2, 2010.
Tuesday, July 5th there is an all day sit-in, teach-in at Naropa under the sycamore tree 2130 Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder.
Joe Richey
Naropa Class of 1983
In Solidarity,
Soma Feldmar
Naropa class of 2000 (BA) and 2005 (MFA)
Dear Beloved Community,
In the last year, students have watched the legacy of Naropa deteriorate. As of June 15, twenty-three beloved staff, who have devoted several years to Naropa University, were laid off. Included in these layoffs were administrative directors for each department as well as the sole diversity coordinator at the University.
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics fears for the heart and soul of our beloved institution. The school was founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Its mission as a private, non-sectarian liberal arts college is inspired by a unique heritage which honors contemplative thought, critical and creative practice and freedom, and academic integrity. Naropa is more than a school; it is a community that has always been a place of honesty and visionary leadership. Unfortunately, we, the current students of the Jack Kerouac School, fear the current administration may not be aligned with the core values of Naropa.
Naropa is in dire straits. As a result of the recent review of the University by the accreditation board, we are now required to fulfill the following directives within the next two years:
First, the entire school is going through a budget reduction and academic reorganization. A committee called the Faculty Executive Working Group (FEWG) has been formed for the purpose of creating plans to restructure the University in order to accommodate the budget cuts. The five model plan, which would likely be the least compromising for the Jack Kerouac School and the Writing and Poetics Department, would incorporate The Jack Kerouac School as part of the Writing and Poetics Department. The four model plan would dissolve the Writing and Poetics Department into an overarching creative arts program. This would mean that the Jack Kerouac School would no longer have its own budget and as a result would be subject to complete control by a “general” dean of the entire arts department.
Students have not being informed of the above changes or consulted as to what would best serve the student body and sustain the vibrant legacy of Naropa University. We have the right to transparency. We have the right to be involved. Why is Naropa leaving us in the dark? Without answers from the University, we are left with rumors and questions. Those who do not know what truly makes Naropa the place we love are flagrantly dismissing and excluding us from the information and decision-making processes.
Thus, We Who Love Naropa demand the following:
1) That the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics retains all ideals and values that the
student body wishes to preserve, many of which appear on the official website.
“Our programs emphasize traditional and experimental approaches to creative writing in Poetry, Prose and Translation within a variety of genres. Literature courses and the thesis requirement of a final manuscript also emphasize the development of critical writing.
All classes are taught by active, published writers, giving a practitioner's insight into literary art. Our curriculum includes opportunities for students to learn how to teach their craft, exercise performance skills, and develop as practicing writers in the world.
The Kerouac School educates students as skilled practitioners of the literary arts. Its objectives include embracing a disciplined practice of writing, and cultivating a historical and cultural awareness of literary studies.
The Kerouac School is distinct among academic writing programs because of the lively and diverse community of writers who trace their genesis and inspiration from a wide range of aesthetic and social movements, including postmodernism, Buddhist and contemplative teachings, the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e school of poetry, the New York schools of poetry, the Black Mountain school of poetry, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Beat movement, Surrealism, Dada and the Harlem Renaissance. One tradition that is emphasized is the Outrider lineage—a heritage of counter-poetics operating outside the academic mainstream.” (www.naropa.edu/academic/graduate/writingpoetics/)
If budget constraints require a consolidation of the Writing and Poetics department and the Jack Kerouac School, the legacy and spirit of the Jack Kerouac School (which was an important part of the Foundation of Naropa University) must be retained without changes.
2) Increased transparency of school finances, including but not limited to the following documents:
a) Budgetary plans for recent, past, and future goals.
b) The FEWG Faculty Committee Report detailing what changes would be the least drastic alternatives.
3) Access to all ideological restructuring plans. (For instance, are Stuart Lord, Naropa President, and all other administrators aligned with the mission and spiritual values of Naropa?)
4) A voice in all decisions surrounding the restructuring process.
5) That the Diversity Advocate position to be reinstated.
6) Increased student participation in the University’s operation, including but not limited to the presence of a student-run committee at all faculty and administrative meetings pertaining to any major departmental, university, administrative, faculty, financial and academic decisions. Included in this demand is the formation of a Student Finance Board.
As we descend into a realm of Transformation, from language to social and environmental structures, Naropa has been iconic in the metamorphosis of some of the most brilliant and cultivating minds in academic history. The Jack Kerouac School has molded and trained many successful writers in a close-knit community retaining a love for language and the written word. We owe this school our support and love and it is our duty to see it stand, strong and stoic, for our school’s future. We refuse to continue being pushed to the sidelines, forced to watch this deterioration unfold.
Our Voices will be heard on Friday!
Stay tuned...
The Committee Thecommittee1974@gmail.com
And from Joe Richey:
Unhappy Fiscal New Year!
Boulder, July 1, 2010
On Thursday afternoon, Anne Waldman’s Socratic Rap was overtaken by a discussion of the budgets cuts at the Jack Kerouac School, the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and Naropa University in general. On Wednesday evening about thirty or so students, faculty, alumni gathered in a large circle on the grass south of Naropa. Major grievances were aired: unfair cuts of essential jobs and services, the timing of the cuts (at the outset of the Summer Writing Program), stonewalling, withholding on the part of top administrators. Students question whether Naropa will be able to deliver what was originally sold to them
Anne Waldman, Director Emeritus of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, clarified a lot about new academic models being proposed. Only two weeks ago did she and others in Writing & Poetics become aware of the proposals.
At this writing, what form the Kerouac School and the Writing Program at Naropa will take is still being decided. Key stakeholders, students, workers, and alumni have inserted themselves into the structural adjustment process. Naropa President Stuart Lord is expected to appear at a meeting by Thursday, July 8th at 8:30 AM.
A public hearing of poets, writers, and community members will also be held on campus 2130 Arapahoe at 6 PM, Friday, July 2, 2010.
Tuesday, July 5th there is an all day sit-in, teach-in at Naropa under the sycamore tree 2130 Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder.
Joe Richey
Naropa Class of 1983
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Perloff's Re-Po statement
I want to suggest, tenderly and respectfully, an option for how to interpret Marjorie Perloff's statement regarding the victim and rapist, in such a crime, when she was talking about V. Place's work, Statement of Fact, at the Rethinking Poetics conference held recently at Columbia.
Here we go:
Last semester, the Spring one, Vanessa Place came to SUNY Buffalo, and the seminar I was in with Steve McCaffery. One evening while in town, she gave a reading, and it was out of Statement of Fact. Not only the way she read it, but also the language of it, betrayed no favoring of victim or rapist, no less description of one than the other, and eerily placed them on a level playing field. It was a very disturbing experience to hear it read because, in fact, the victim easily could sound as bad as the rapist.
I think there was something in the language used in the transcripts, which, combined with my decades long media training (just part of living in Western Culture) created a very slippery yet concise line dividing my judgment. It was next to impossible to listen without forming, even if only for a second, a thought about the victim and/or perpetrator. Add to this an almost invisible yet sharp dividing line between judgments, and one can flip from side to side at staggering rates. Quite an amazing experience, and certainly, as I said, disturbing.
I want to softly suggest that perhaps this is what Marjorie Perloff was referring to.
I realize I could be way way off, and that this could just be a testament to how much I did not want Perloff's comment to mean what it could possibly mean. I'm completely willing to live with that. But I did want to share my experience of hearing some of this piece read, and also suggest that Perloff's comment was very precisely about the work of text, not the act of sexual assault itself.
Tuesday 22 June 2010
Re-Po Notes : NYC 6/11 – 6/13 2010
Bob Perelman / Michael Golston
- Omnicognition
- 56ths of a second in brain before gestalt
________________________________________
Panel #1 : Poetic Composition: Tools and Materials
Erica Hunt
- before then, that’s the time for writing
- want/need more documented risks
- assume the mind is shapely
Jen Scappettone
- perforated poetic form / field
- infrastructure of tragedy, etc.
Brent Edwards
- practice of outside
- music / sound
- raw / cooked
- the shell of form
- proliferation of parallels
Charles Bernstein
- concretion – from Brent Edwards
- poetic concretion
- ontology of pluralism
- “could also be otherwise”
- human is a crisis – what would be the poetics of this?
- Scappettone – “bruise and channel its invisibility”
- advocate mental fright
- pataqueerical – adverse poetics
- vocabulary: charm, derangement, swerve, artifice, estrangement, zaum, homophonic, etc
- poetry groups necessary but simultaneously problematic
- hybrid / lowbrid
- pataqueerical terminology: odd, weird, curious, strange, funny, oblique, off-key
Discussion
- many minds, one world: ontological pluralism
- patacriticism
- is poetics a limiting frame?
B.W:
- are we rethinking poetics?
- what does rethinking poetics mean?
- what is rethinking?
C.B:
- pataqueero-normative
- invention over innovation
- invention always going to be inadequate to someone else
- rhapsody of bruising
- place of poetics in public
poetic / rhapsodic
- innovation / transformation
J. Scappettone:
- place disturbing words inside the bodies of people who are performing in public
- the inhuman - ? - does this mean some kind of Other?
J.R:
- nitty-gritty poetics
- “puncturing the page” - more?
other that’s not premeditated : puncturing the page?
- collectivity / collaboration
R.B. DuPlessis:
- 3 things
1 - looking for verbs
- hearing nouns and adjectives
2 - choral crowds
- genres of possibility
- on an individual level
3 - ways to intervene
- The archive - rethinking
- activating the archive
B.E:
- rhapsodizing is necessary
- sparks - not fire
- small can be important
- pleasure: not to be dismissed -
- sparks : glint / glimmer
- what is this “archive” thing everyone’s into?
- temporality - present is immediately archived
- structure for thinking through disaster
________________________________________
Panel #2 : History / Tradition / Relation
Liz Willis: Intro
Ben Friedlander
- the archive again
- tradition / anti-tradition
Tanya Foster
- contingency
- Reggie Watts - comedian -
- scatting as stand in for forgetting
- individual interpretation rather than tradition
- how to approach what one does not know
- form is occurrence: Retallack on Scalapino
K. Silem Mohammad
- critical tradition of poetics
- what are we rethinking?
- historical modes of criticism
Abrams / Jakobson
1. mimetic / referential : representational
2. pragmatic / connotative : 2nd person imperatives
3. expressive / emotive : 1st person utterance
4. objective / (poetic?) : emphasis on work itself [this pair is no good]
are not necessarily tied
Liz Willis
- tradition
- relation : puissant
trans
trans
trans
- but a counter tradition is simply a tradition
- poetry and non-fiction
- all you can do is suddenly listen
Discussion
- who is the “we” of tradition? : B. Friedlander
- excrementalized -
- we are “talking shit”
- a new act of creation
- live in the discomfort / don’t make it comfortable
- Perloff: review on Cage, Perf. of Cage work
in NYTimes: nonsensical ravings of an old man
B. Perelman:
- tradition & innovation is one and the same
- memory as basis of language
B.W:
- Flarf - poetics - metalinguistic, phatic
- opposition to tradition actually preserves it
- it is tradition to keep opposing tradition
- spaces where metalingual and phatic
touch & overlap - rethinking poetics -
- a scanned text is not culture
- you can’t make culture available - you can make
texts available
- what is “our” poetics
- the estrangement model
________________________________________
Lunch Break #1
- if we are rethinking poetics, are we rethinking all poetics? Just “ours”? Are we in search of a possible future poetics? For who? For us? Who’s us?
- to put poetics in the public world / may do no more than putting poetry in public, and what do we mean by public? People who don’t already think about these things? Is the conference public? Is it the non-poets? Is it outside academia?
- important to remember that counter-tradition is very much a tradition
- Mainstream and A.G. are no longer in opposition, they are dimply different types, kinds of, genres of, poetry
- I want us to be particularly critical of our own criticism and what it is we are doing here. Do we really want to be so narcissistic as to only consider “our” poetics? What are the drawbacks to collectivity? Is it inclusive or exclusive?
- what about all the poetics that are not practiced by people in this room?
- if we rethink poetics, what does that mean for our actions, for out writing of poems? Is there a difference / what is the difference between poetics and poetry?
- it’s not about thinking ourselves out of poetics to some other field or career, but of thinking a poetics that is more complete, and by complete, I mean complex, indeterminate, uncertain, changing, ranging, and not pin-downable.
________________________________________
Panel #3 : Globalism and Hybridity
Barrett Watten
- radical particularity
- grid of difference grasses planted in front of building
unused and unfunctional
- critical regionism
- sites of the a.g.
- Horizon of language: spaceless space
- discrepant forms of a.g.
- radical particularity & critical regionism
Poetry / not-poetry
poetics / not-poetics
- production of differential global poetics
Monica de la Torre
- 1: Rehearser
- 2:
- 3:
Josh Clover
- complain about, oh I mean rethink
- what do we lose with nuances
- “the attack of being ignored”
- antagonism, foundational / oppositions / binaries
Astrid Lorange
- one thinks and thinks again
- & Stein - not re-thinking
- contact zones
Discussion
- antagonism - undoes me
- can hybridity have an essential character?
- art’s impossibility to deal with complex
otherness:
it’s the artist/writer that may not be able to deal with
complex otherness
- OR
- any language us could be hybridity if it now means multiple
- antagonism and nuance
- editor of Fence calls Josh Clover “Fuck Face”
- antagonisms as productive
- productive of new forms
________________________________________
Panel #4 : Social Location / Ethics
Rodrigo Toscano
- re-imagined self
- strings of failed “now”
- presence cant actually sink to the background
- Art as revolutionary ghost work
Jena Osman via Juliana Spahr
- biological models for poetry / writing
- connects with Retallack
- echo poetics
Joan Retallack
- took “rethinking seriously
- what are the places of poetry / poetries
in the conversations of human kind?
1. a) report of system failure
- values poei-diversity as much as
bio-diversity
- “I’m an essayist not a critic” *
- what about poetics demands continuity
- poetry as a form of courage
- ethos of poetry resembles ethos of poet
- ones choices can’t be about being afraid
- Lyn Stewart - lawyer who got in trouble
- it is important to remember the archive
is “us” : us as dangerous, problematic
- poetics of courage: reciprocal alterity
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
- the ofness / betweeness
ethics of “of”
- writing is political by nature of nature of politics
- helix -
dialectic connection
swirl
- intelligent and sometimes enraged -
- we don’t have enough pronouns to cover
how we are going to evolve
plurality, sociality
- we don’t have enough pronouns for what we need
- pay more attention to between (both both)
- secular structure of feeling
- no taboo writing practices
Discussion
J.R:
- concern that antagonism becomes what
drives what we do
- antagonism has been the default
- be different, and argue, but without
antagonism: leads to defense and attack
- radical (roots) is not the same as innovative (new)
________________________________________
Panel #5 : Poetics and the Academy
(missed this one; needed sleep)
________________________________________
Panel #6 : Ecologies of Poetry
Andrew Schelling
- bio-regional
- acorn as archive of oak tree -
* go back to P.L.W. Ploughing the Clouds
Jonathan Skinner
- critical edges
- journal / Ecopoetics as site not journal
- Mary Oliver -- Bruce Andrews
- Marcella Durand - oil investigation
- poetry animals
- return to amateurism
Sherwin Bitsui
- interconnectedness
- indigenous poetics
- dust cloud with bits of rain / confused / and
- Navajo poetics, prayer, ceremonial
- relationship between person and nature
- I stand in nature, nature stands in me
- Navajo though - language is already imbued
Susan Howe
- the older she gets the more astounding
E. Dickinson is to her
- in NYC Dickinson’s garden was constructed
- rdgs. there in connection
- no doctorate, no college
(biggest mistake)
- landscapes change, shift
* - but words too
- S. Howe, child, in Zoo in Buffalo, Polar Bears
acting crazy, dad said they know something
bad is happening - happened to be the day
of Pearl Harbour bombing
- return to a meadow
- return phone calls from a meadow
- Spiral Jetty as poem
Discussion
B.W:
- “Genre trumps form” - commenting on
this - was misheard
- positive content / not-me / identity
non-identity
- poetics change as rhythms of body change
- metabolism affecting ability to memorize
- body as primary site
“I am a wet land”
- A. Lingis - writings on the body, on bodies
- CA Conrad: soma poetics
: somatics
- attend to what we can’t say, won’t say
won’t write
- Navajo language full of verbs
Panel #7 : “Poetics” as a Category
Craig Dworkin
- Category of poetry
- “that’s not poetry”
- response of a.g. itself: what is poetry
Alan Golding
- look up poetics in OED
- think about possible future for poetics
- pedagogy as site of possible culture
- David Antin: Avant-Garde - look up
- thought as music
- collaborative reader / reading
- poetry and theory, or poetics
- Spring and All - poet/critic
- legitimacy of poetry - are we still arguing
Matthew Hofer
- spareness in America
- problem of it
- is poetry being reduced to function?
- microtonal organizations
Marjorie Perloff
- Poetry
-public reception of poetry
- V. Place: Statement of Fact:
- court testaments
- hard to publish books - but will be published
by a small pres - Perloff was asked to blurb
book
- is it poetry?
- is it poetic?
- what’s so great about being poet?
- K. Goldsmith’s Traffic is poetry
- what McCaffery said about nominalism being
the new/contemporary a.g.
- poetic / poeisis
- conceptual poetry anthology published later
this year by North Western.
- “flarf wants to put poetry out of its misery” - V. Place
Discussion
Perelman:
- on a.g. - yes, and the urinal as both old
hat and shocking depending on
exposure
- talk more w/ Perelman on a.g.
- poetry as read - Perloff
- Ma’s book
- purpose is important / and/or intent
Rachel B.D.P:
- poetry - not anything said so far
- rhythmic segmentivity
_______________________________________
Panel #8 : Affective Economies and Prosodies
Rachel Zolf
- affective economies
Chris Nealon
- role of affect in/on queer theory
in the 90s
- feelings around queer theory not
the feelings within queer theory
- body as rhetorical - Butler
- rhetorically rather than linguistics / language
- utterances that change structures
- humanity as possibility of being tender
Jeff Derksen
- structure of feeling: R. Williams
& affect
- living through structures
- no internal crisis in poetry
- the affective risk
- sincerity poetics
McCaffery essay - poetics of sincerity
- crit. neo-liberalism?
- rethinking poetics =
rethinking relations
Rachel Zolf
- witness
- subject
- mad affects
Lisa Robertson
- Henri Meschonnic : Benveniste-teacher
- idea of rhyme as social force
- rhythm & meter not the same for him
- erasure of rhythm in translations of old testament
- rhythm is a subject shape
- poem as moment of listening
- the archive ethic that is this ... ?
- reject poetry to talk about the poem
- moves language
- what does this do to poetics? is it one?
- poem is the critique of sign
- subjectivity can keep on making
- poem
- affect / concept
- poetry as work of poem
not of institution
- ethics : poetics
________________________________________
Panel #9 : The End of Authentic Time
Lytle Shaw
- lack of familiarity
no one knows what’s really happening
- reading of new American Poetry temporally
- very contemporary poetics
- microtemporality
- philosophies of time
- Eigner
- phenomenological immediacy
- a new kind of temporality that stands
against great big monumental time / history
-- minute elapse of time
Paul Stephens
- authentic time - is it possible?
- lived time, duration
- time, sprawl - urban sprawl, linguistic sprawl,
- literary criticism -- book keeping
- Book - Adjunct
- Adjunct travesty generator
- Adjunct time
- Zeno time
- Zeno text - C. Bök
Rob Fitterman
- why I can’t look out the window and
write a poem about what I see
- I can’t look out the poem and write
a window about what I see
[I want to look out of a poem]
- I can not look out the window and write
a poem about what I see because
there are squirrels mating on the
tree behind Rob Fitterman
John Melillo
- temporality / poetry
sound
- writing as 1st phonograph
- radical mimesis :is this a way to describe
Lytle Shaw
- work of writers
time to write
- annihilated time: ability to shape time by
our own desires
- how does this all connect to Agamben’s history in terms of language - and that the split of
infancy and language is what makes history possible
- the connection between time / temporality and the then existence of language, the use of
language
- unbinding measure / meter
- other history of poetry
- Authentic / Author
Authorial time
- Monumentality / monument : time remembered
Discussion
B.W:
- cultural production /
/ regional cultures
- service industry
- poets working in offices - temporality
produce service
service production
- is there really anything essential in terms of poetics? - maybe if there is, it would be useless as
some essential aspect of the human
- there is some idea of poetics that is
happening here that is troubling to me
- duration
- Deleuze, Bergson -
- flow, duration, object
- poetics seems to be becoming the
philosophy of poets - it’s so weird - but I
want to keep the possibility of this trouble
being generative open.
- landscape of temporality
space of time
R. F:
- reading, readership, challenge reading / readers
- is regionalism becoming a fetish - due to
the technology that allows globalism?
- temporality : agency of.
R.F:
- V. Place - the project
(sex abuse court transcripts) is not
about content - Spahr - content is
very important
- content, context - ah, the frame
- I have a strange desire to create
lyric flarf
- proliferation - yes
authentic a.g.
- we need to be careful, I want us to be careful, about proliferation to the point of total dispersion
and dilution, in opposition to sharp discrimination that separates and essentializes to the point
of alienation
________________________________________
Panel #10 : Reading Radicalism: A Conversation Across the Disciplines
Bruce Andrews
- reader coming to grips with radicalism
- patience / impatience
Jeff Nealon
- job given to poetics by post-structuralism
- worlds structured like language if nothing
is outside language
- historical newness
- jack-hammer - ag writing
of fragmentation
- fragmentation put as binary with totalization
- new tools for engagement / agency
- Contemporary AG - around reading
Jim Livingston
- revolutionary - what about evolution
- radicalism confused with revolution
- but radical is the roots - if radicals deny the
past, there are no roots for the radicals
which then makes them not radical
- “Marxoid”
Richard Doyle
- experience of being alive moving out of fashion
- history of psychedelic science
- “this is your brain on plants”
- rhetoric of psychedelic experience
- T. Leary / Ginsburg / Burroughs
- poetry was called forth as articulation
of psychedelic experiences
- ecodelic
- manifestation of eco-systems in which we
live
- attention gathering technology
- plant kingdom as inventor of poetry
- the nosphere
Bruce Andrews
- art and science of making poetry
- presupposed reader
- miss out on differentiation
- innovation vs. transformation
- reader - repo / session
- incompletely intimate
- poetics of reading
Discussion
- periodizing
- rethinking
- immersion / interruption
- I don’t think there’s any outside
- so resistance is already everywhere
- consumption as way to end capitalism
- consumption as healthy for soul
- psychedelic on panel
- poetry as forms of research
** Note: I've inserted my own thoughts, responses,
comments, alongside words from panelists
and 'participants' without differentiation.
Bob Perelman / Michael Golston
- Omnicognition
- 56ths of a second in brain before gestalt
________________________________________
Panel #1 : Poetic Composition: Tools and Materials
Erica Hunt
- before then, that’s the time for writing
- want/need more documented risks
- assume the mind is shapely
Jen Scappettone
- perforated poetic form / field
- infrastructure of tragedy, etc.
- what has infrastructure
- choral space / chorus: public/ delusional space (Robertson)
- ambient citizenship- I need my own
poetic vocabulary
- enormity in particulate
- pucker the realist page Brent Edwards
- practice of outside
- music / sound
translation
across mediums
raw / spoiled
- the shell of form
- proliferation of parallels
“- poetic innovation -”
- speech melody / tonal / sentence has music, music has sentence, songCharles Bernstein
- concretion – from Brent Edwards
- poetic concretion
- ontology of pluralism
- “could also be otherwise”
- human is a crisis – what would be the poetics of this?
- poetics of crisis
- Scappettone – “bruise and channel its invisibility”
- not make invisible visible
(“bruise” or “peruse,” oddly, they sound close)
- advocate mental fright
- pataqueerical – adverse poetics
- re-group/re-sort
- poetics of adversity- vocabulary: charm, derangement, swerve, artifice, estrangement, zaum, homophonic, etc
- poetry groups necessary but simultaneously problematic
- hybrid / lowbrid
- pataqueerical terminology: odd, weird, curious, strange, funny, oblique, off-key
Discussion
- many minds, one world: ontological pluralism
- but isn’t this always the case, necessarily? why bring it up?
- it is the case, whether we want it to be or not
- patacriticism
- is poetics a limiting frame?
- it depends on what one means by “poetics” and “frame” -
B.W:
- are we rethinking poetics?
- what does rethinking poetics mean?
- what is rethinking?
C.B:
- pataqueero-normative
- invention over innovation
- invention always going to be inadequate to someone else
- (but so will innovation, be inadequate)
- poetry as response to inadequacy- rhapsody of bruising
- place of poetics in public
poetic / rhapsodic
- create and
share sparks
- clinamen / swerveshare sparks
- collision - maybe creates spark
- innovation / transformation
- in our words and how
we use them
J. Scappettone:
- place disturbing words inside the bodies of people who are performing in public
- the inhuman - ? - does this mean some kind of Other?
J.R:
- nitty-gritty poetics
- “puncturing the page” - more?
- infrastructural page
revision / puncture
feeds streamed
into poetic page / field / space
- opening selves up to another that’s not premeditated : puncturing the page?
- collectivity / collaboration
R.B. DuPlessis:
- 3 things
1 - looking for verbs
- hearing nouns and adjectives
2 - choral crowds
- genres of possibility
- on an individual level
3 - ways to intervene
- spark -
- The archive - rethinking
- activating the archive
- is it still an archive if it’s
been activated?
- what’s the difference between data / data stream and an activated archive?B.E:
- rhapsodizing is necessary
- sparks - not fire
- small can be important
- pleasure: not to be dismissed -
- sparks : glint / glimmer
- what is this “archive” thing everyone’s into?
- temporality - present is immediately archived
- structure for thinking through disaster
- from the past
- what about re-acting poetics- action -
- thinking and rethinking is all well and good, but useless without action________________________________________
Panel #2 : History / Tradition / Relation
Liz Willis: Intro
Ben Friedlander
- the archive again
- tradition / anti-tradition
- doesn’t like tradition, feels obligated
- not my kind of tradition
- if we rethink tradition
it can become what we
want it to – useful
- relation to the pastTanya Foster
- contingency
- Reggie Watts - comedian -
- scatting as stand in for forgetting
(tradition)
- refuse lineage that confers legitimacy- individual interpretation rather than tradition
: what is inside language?
- everything is not language- is outside language
- how to approach what one does not know
- form is occurrence: Retallack on Scalapino
K. Silem Mohammad
- critical tradition of poetics
- what are we rethinking?
- historical modes of criticism
Abrams / Jakobson
1. mimetic / referential : representational
2. pragmatic / connotative : 2nd person imperatives
3. expressive / emotive : 1st person utterance
4. objective / (poetic?) : emphasis on work itself [this pair is no good]
5. metalingual
6. phatic function
- state of contemporary poetic criticism
fatic - stuttering,
stalling, filling
- do we want a coherent poetics? : that just means it sticks together
- coherence and developmentare not necessarily tied
Liz Willis
- tradition
- action of handing over
- transfer / transmit
- poets as tradition mongers- relation : puissant
trans
trans
trans
- but a counter tradition is simply a tradition
- poetry and non-fiction
- all you can do is suddenly listen
Discussion
- who is the “we” of tradition? : B. Friedlander
- excrementalized -
- we are “talking shit”
- a new act of creation
- ok but what’s an old act of creation?
- how close is the phatic to the semiotic- live in the discomfort / don’t make it comfortable
- Perloff: review on Cage, Perf. of Cage work
in NYTimes: nonsensical ravings of an old man
B. Perelman:
- tradition & innovation is one and the same
- memory as basis of language
B.W:
- Flarf - poetics - metalinguistic, phatic
- but isn’t flarf just an updated “cut-up”?
- opposition to tradition actually preserves it
- it is tradition to keep opposing tradition
- spaces where metalingual and phatic
touch & overlap - rethinking poetics -
: yes - that’s the lyric and the lang Po joining forces
- a scanned text is not culture
- you can’t make culture available - you can make
texts available
- what is “our” poetics
- the estrangement model
- model for what?
- but then it becomes not estrangement
if we get used to it,
- if we expect it.________________________________________
Lunch Break #1
- if we are rethinking poetics, are we rethinking all poetics? Just “ours”? Are we in search of a possible future poetics? For who? For us? Who’s us?
- to put poetics in the public world / may do no more than putting poetry in public, and what do we mean by public? People who don’t already think about these things? Is the conference public? Is it the non-poets? Is it outside academia?
- important to remember that counter-tradition is very much a tradition
- Mainstream and A.G. are no longer in opposition, they are dimply different types, kinds of, genres of, poetry
- I want us to be particularly critical of our own criticism and what it is we are doing here. Do we really want to be so narcissistic as to only consider “our” poetics? What are the drawbacks to collectivity? Is it inclusive or exclusive?
- what about all the poetics that are not practiced by people in this room?
- if we rethink poetics, what does that mean for our actions, for out writing of poems? Is there a difference / what is the difference between poetics and poetry?
- it’s not about thinking ourselves out of poetics to some other field or career, but of thinking a poetics that is more complete, and by complete, I mean complex, indeterminate, uncertain, changing, ranging, and not pin-downable.
________________________________________
Panel #3 : Globalism and Hybridity
Barrett Watten
- radical particularity
- grid of difference grasses planted in front of building
unused and unfunctional
- critical regionism
- sites of the a.g.
- Horizon of language: spaceless space
- lang. itself is a spaceless space
- discrepant forms of a.g.
- radical particularity & critical regionism
- emerging new genres
- poetics as genre : not-poetry, not-language (linguistics)Genre trumps form
Global / not-global Poetry / not-poetry
poetics / not-poetics
- production of differential global poetics
Monica de la Torre
- 1: Rehearser
- 2:
- 3:
I already forget the other two. Damn.
Josh Clover
- complain about, oh I mean rethink
- what do we lose with nuances
- “the attack of being ignored”
- antagonism, foundational / oppositions / binaries
fundamental
- 3rd wave poetics? (what, like 3rd wave feminism?)Astrid Lorange
- one thinks and thinks again
- & Stein - not re-thinking
- contact zones
Discussion
- antagonism - undoes me
- not just negative,
but detotalizing
- can hybridity have an essential character?
- art’s impossibility to deal with complex
otherness:
as meaning of hybridity
(not for me)
- art can deal with anything and everything,it’s the artist/writer that may not be able to deal with
complex otherness
- OR
- any language us could be hybridity if it now means multiple
- antagonism and nuance
- wants to guard against the disappearance
of antagonism through nuance (Clover)
- editor of Fence calls Josh Clover “Fuck Face”
- antagonisms as productive
- productive of new forms
________________________________________
Panel #4 : Social Location / Ethics
Rodrigo Toscano
- re-imagined self
- de-imagined world
- strings of failed “now”
- presence cant actually sink to the background
- I guess it can theoretically, or mentally, but
not actually
- Art as revolutionary ghost work
Jena Osman via Juliana Spahr
- biological models for poetry / writing
- connects with Retallack
- echo poetics
Joan Retallack
- took “rethinking seriously
- what are the places of poetry / poetries
in the conversations of human kind?
1. a) report of system failure
- values poei-diversity as much as
bio-diversity
- “I’m an essayist not a critic” *
- what about poetics demands continuity
demands return
- poetry as a form of courage
- doing something one is frightened of
ethically neutral
- do what I THINK needs to be done- ethos of poetry resembles ethos of poet
- ones choices can’t be about being afraid
- Lyn Stewart - lawyer who got in trouble
- it is important to remember the archive
is “us” : us as dangerous, problematic
- poetics of courage: reciprocal alterity
performative and
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
- the ofness / betweeness
ethics of “of”
- writing is political by nature of nature of politics
and writing
- helix -
dialectic connection
swirl
- intelligent and sometimes enraged -
- we don’t have enough pronouns to cover
how we are going to evolve
how the I is
pushed
- subjectivity, soul,plurality, sociality
- we don’t have enough pronouns for what we need
- what about prepositions
- recognition of the other- pay more attention to between (both both)
- secular structure of feeling
- no taboo writing practices
Discussion
J.R:
- concern that antagonism becomes what
drives what we do
- antagonism has been the default
- be different, and argue, but without
antagonism: leads to defense and attack
- radical (roots) is not the same as innovative (new)
________________________________________
Panel #5 : Poetics and the Academy
(missed this one; needed sleep)
________________________________________
Panel #6 : Ecologies of Poetry
Andrew Schelling
- bio-regional
bioversity
- archive / vault: conserve past for sake of future
- a seed as an archive- acorn as archive of oak tree -
* go back to P.L.W. Ploughing the Clouds
- soma connection w/ poetry as
divine word
- ecology - logic of home
Jonathan Skinner
- critical edges
- journal / Ecopoetics as site not journal
- Mary Oliver -- Bruce Andrews
[saw flier on light on bdwy for
volunteers for an "experiment
on memory"]
- eco-location - poems of place- Marcella Durand - oil investigation
- poetry animals
- return to amateurism
Sherwin Bitsui
- interconnectedness
- indigenous poetics
ethno
eco
- eco-tone- dust cloud with bits of rain / confused / and
land in process of moving
- Navajo poetics, prayer, ceremonial
- relationship between person and nature
- I stand in nature, nature stands in me
- Navajo though - language is already imbued
with sacredness
- poetics tied to coming into existenceSusan Howe
- the older she gets the more astounding
E. Dickinson is to her
- in NYC Dickinson’s garden was constructed
- rdgs. there in connection
- no doctorate, no college
(biggest mistake)
- landscapes change, shift
* - but words too
- language landscape
- Duncan’s “field”- S. Howe, child, in Zoo in Buffalo, Polar Bears
acting crazy, dad said they know something
bad is happening - happened to be the day
of Pearl Harbour bombing
- return to a meadow
- return phone calls from a meadow
- Spiral Jetty as poem
Discussion
B.W:
- “Genre trumps form” - commenting on
this - was misheard
- positive content / not-me / identity
non-identity
- poetics change as rhythms of body change
- metabolism affecting ability to memorize
- body as primary site
“I am a wet land”
- A. Lingis - writings on the body, on bodies
- CA Conrad: soma poetics
: somatics
- attend to what we can’t say, won’t say
won’t write
- Robin not writing after 9/11
- certain experiences
- materiality of language / of words- Navajo language full of verbs
- always in motion
_______________________________________Panel #7 : “Poetics” as a Category
Craig Dworkin
- Category of poetry
: or poetics
- language operating in financial loss- “that’s not poetry”
- response of a.g. itself: what is poetry
K. Goldsmith, Vanessa Place
Alan Golding
- look up poetics in OED
- think about possible future for poetics
- pedagogy as site of possible culture
- David Antin: Avant-Garde - look up
- ask Alan
- thought as music
- collaborative reader / reading
- poetry and theory, or poetics
- Spring and All - poet/critic
- legitimacy of poetry - are we still arguing
about this? -
Matthew Hofer
- spareness in America
- problem of it
- is poetry being reduced to function?
- microtonal organizations
Marjorie Perloff
- Poetry
-public reception of poetry
- V. Place: Statement of Fact:
- court testaments
- hard to publish books - but will be published
by a small pres - Perloff was asked to blurb
book
- is it poetry?
- is it poetic?
Conceptual fiction
____”____writer - choice
____“____ poetry
- K. Goldsmith’s Traffic is poetry
- what McCaffery said about nominalism being
the new/contemporary a.g.
- poetic / poeisis
- conceptual poetry anthology published later
this year by North Western.
- “flarf wants to put poetry out of its misery” - V. Place
Discussion
Perelman:
- on a.g. - yes, and the urinal as both old
hat and shocking depending on
exposure
- talk more w/ Perelman on a.g.
- poetry as read - Perloff
- Ma’s book
- purpose is important / and/or intent
(is intent & purpose synonymous)
Rachel B.D.P:
- poetry - not anything said so far
- chosen segmentivity / rhythm, meter,
rhyme
- selection - rhythmic segmentivity
_______________________________________
Panel #8 : Affective Economies and Prosodies
Rachel Zolf
- affective economies
Chris Nealon
- role of affect in/on queer theory
in the 90s
- feelings around queer theory not
the feelings within queer theory
- body as rhetorical - Butler
- rhetorically rather than linguistics / language
- utterances that change structures
- humanity as possibility of being tender
Jeff Derksen
- structure of feeling: R. Williams
& affect
- living through structures
- no internal crisis in poetry
- the affective risk
- sincerity poetics
McCaffery essay - poetics of sincerity
- crit. neo-liberalism?
- rethinking poetics =
rethinking relations
sincerity
as a kind
of software
Rachel Zolf
- witness
- subject
Agamben
Homo Sacer speech
- catastrophe- mad affects
Lisa Robertson
- Henri Meschonnic : Benveniste-teacher
- idea of rhyme as social force
- rhythm & meter not the same for him
- erasure of rhythm in translations of old testament
- rhythm is a subject shape
renovates meanings of things
shape of/in history
- poem as moment of listening
- the archive ethic that is this ... ?
- reject poetry to talk about the poem
- moves language
constitutes subjects - what poems do
- what does this do to poetics? is it one?
poetic / poem
- poem is the critique of sign
- subjectivity can keep on making
- poem
that form of life that
turns language into everything
(or everything into language)
- affect / concept
no differentiation, for Meschonnic
- poetry as work of poem
not of institution
- ethics : poetics
________________________________________
Panel #9 : The End of Authentic Time
Lytle Shaw
- lack of familiarity
no one knows what’s really happening
- reading of new American Poetry temporally
- very contemporary poetics
- microtemporality
- philosophies of time
- chairos,
or kairos
- Eigner
- phenomenological immediacy
- a new kind of temporality that stands
against great big monumental time / history
-- minute elapse of time
Paul Stephens
- authentic time - is it possible?
- lived time, duration
- time, sprawl - urban sprawl, linguistic sprawl,
temporal sprawl
- a moment extended - in one perspective
this is impossible: an extended moment
simply becomes another moment
- literary criticism -- book keeping
- Book - Adjunct
- Adjunct travesty generator
- Adjunct time
- Zeno time
- Zeno text - C. Bök
Rob Fitterman
- why I can’t look out the window and
write a poem about what I see
- I can’t look out the poem and write
a window about what I see
[I want to look out of a poem]
- I can not look out the window and write
a poem about what I see because
there are squirrels mating on the
tree behind Rob Fitterman
John Melillo
- temporality / poetry
sound
- writing as 1st phonograph
- radical mimesis :is this a way to describe
conceptual writing?
Lytle Shaw
- work of writers
time to write
- annihilated time: ability to shape time by
our own desires
- how does this connect to
the archive - does the archive speed up
or slow down time?
- how does this all connect to Agamben’s history in terms of language - and that the split of
infancy and language is what makes history possible
- the connection between time / temporality and the then existence of language, the use of
language
- unbinding measure / meter
- other history of poetry
- Authentic / Author
Authorial time
- Monumentality / monument : time remembered
Discussion
B.W:
- cultural production /
/ regional cultures
- service industry
- assembly line
- slow time
- surface economy
- poets working in offices - temporality
- then also
space
- production / serviceproduce service
service production
- is there really anything essential in terms of poetics? - maybe if there is, it would be useless as
some essential aspect of the human
- there is some idea of poetics that is
happening here that is troubling to me
- like it’s turning into some kind of
stuck philosophy - but again ...
whose, what poetics are we rethinking
- duration
- Deleuze, Bergson -
- flow, duration, object
- poetics seems to be becoming the
philosophy of poets - it’s so weird - but I
want to keep the possibility of this trouble
being generative open.
- landscape of temporality
space of time
R. F:
- reading, readership, challenge reading / readers
- is regionalism becoming a fetish - due to
the technology that allows globalism?
- temporality : agency of.
R.F:
- V. Place - the project
(sex abuse court transcripts) is not
about content - Spahr - content is
very important
- working through
- context / attitude - content, context - ah, the frame
- I have a strange desire to create
lyric flarf
- conceptualism
- proliferation - yes
authentic a.g.
- we need to be careful, I want us to be careful, about proliferation to the point of total dispersion
and dilution, in opposition to sharp discrimination that separates and essentializes to the point
of alienation
________________________________________
Panel #10 : Reading Radicalism: A Conversation Across the Disciplines
Bruce Andrews
- reader coming to grips with radicalism
- patience / impatience
Jeff Nealon
- job given to poetics by post-structuralism
- worlds structured like language if nothing
is outside language
- historical newness
- jack-hammer - ag writing
of fragmentation
- fragmentation put as binary with totalization
- I’m not sure I agree that’s a binary
- new tools for engagement / agency
- Contemporary AG - around reading
Jim Livingston
- revolutionary - what about evolution
- radicalism confused with revolution
- but radical is the roots - if radicals deny the
past, there are no roots for the radicals
which then makes them not radical
- “Marxoid”
Richard Doyle
- experience of being alive moving out of fashion
- history of psychedelic science
- “this is your brain on plants”
- rhetoric of psychedelic experience
- T. Leary / Ginsburg / Burroughs
- poetry was called forth as articulation
of psychedelic experiences
- ecodelic
- manifestation of eco-systems in which we
live
- attention gathering technology
- plant kingdom as inventor of poetry
- the nosphere
say yes to the nosphere
Bruce Andrews
- art and science of making poetry
- presupposed reader
- miss out on differentiation
- innovation vs. transformation
- reader - repo / session
- incompletely intimate
- poetics of reading
Discussion
- periodizing
- rethinking
- immersion / interruption
- I don’t think there’s any outside
- so resistance is already everywhere
- consumption as way to end capitalism
- consumption as healthy for soul
- psychedelic on panel
distinction between
Pynchon - paranoid
& Burroughs - more “whole”
- cut-up invented through
psychedelic experiences
- poetry as forms of research
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