The insanity of the avant-garde today: or why "Christian Bök gives great simulacra"

Art should hit, slap in the face, go straight through all interference, and not question. It should present itself as an object of desire, a tangible commodity, and not see itself as a prototype. It should be instantly ready for consumption. (Geert Lovink)

...works that we appreciate and would classify as avant-garde constitute negotiated and compromised artistic expressions that avoid extreme theoretical positions in favor of a self-conscious critical acknowledgment of the world of commercial technoscience. (Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello)

Is it the “necropastoral” minnesinger or the “flarf” honker who most succinctly fits the anti-humanism-contaminated-with-bestiality prong? Is it the power-accommodating conceptualist “typist” or the mock-geneticist encoder of bacterial DNA whom “we” ought crown with virtuous alienation’s unsign’d “writerly” hat, or bat? Is the post-takeover lockdown of “J2” the prime contemporary example of cynicism and “mimetic camouflage,” or is it the Poetry Foundation’s move to become a kind of literary Disney World?) (John Latta)

Silliman's recent reflections on Christian Bök’s Xenotext poetry experiment add to my suspicion that the repetitiveness of contemporary avant-garde creation is a type of clinical insanity that results (as Einstein famously quipped) from doing the same thing over & over and yet expecting a different result each time. Bök’s genetically modified poem is one case only of a fairly typical tendency in popular contemporary 'writing class' avant-gardism to imitate, appropriate or take directly from the labour & resources of outside disciplines. (I suspect the active participation of any bona fide biogeneticists in Xenotext may be attributable solely to a Canada Council grant). How else, in the case of Xenotext, do you expect to implant a lyrical poem into the genome of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans and hope for an immortal poetry attributable to one person?

I don't, of course, really think Bök et al are clinically nuts any more than that a poem can be chemically reconfigured to tell its host genome to reproduce itself ad infinitum. But why does he talk this way, lost in a language of unmastered notions? (He's recently said in Silliman's blog that"I am now the first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry...")  Well, because he can and the conditions for an egregious poetry of spectacle are just right these days. Silliman in his post on Bök has sagaciously asked the one question that puts paid to the validity of any type of Xenotext project aimed at taking minimalism to its extremist form: how do we know? How do we know, in fact, whether it hasn't been done before, here or in distant galaxies? "Yet the very god-like scale," as Silliman says," that Bök proposes in the project seems to me to invoke the likelihood that this has, seriously, been done before elsewhere." Meant more as flattery than damaging criticism Silliman's comment does unearth the essential will-to-copy that's at the heart of contemporary avant-garde work. Internet researcher & academic Geert Lovink, however, doesn't mince his words, saying that "The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood."

Everything about the avant-garde (or post-avant) has been done before: Silliman's right. Contemporary 'futurists', 'fluxists' or crude Schwitters imitators bank on the illusion of originality: again Silliman, "Christian Bök gives great simulacra." He pretty much reiterates the quintessential showmanship quality of the author of Eunoia in his Monday, May 09 blog post. Constraint-based work like this is a "pseudo-event" in the sense first espoused by Daniel J. Boorstin: the same cookie-cutter mould repeatedly pressed on fresh dough. The first avant-gardists (Schwitters, Arp, Ball, Tzara, etc), on the other hand, were to a man a fringe presence, living in very trying socio-economic conditions, even imprisoned or otherwise openly reviled for their work. The Russian avant-gardists are an even better case in point. A far cry from the current fashionable 'academic' playground radical poetries have become where Dr.Bök can hold his writing students hostage to his ideas & books. A far cry from the neon sign art that even the author of the Alphabet, perhaps realizing that the young don't read thick books anymore, has recently dabbled in.

Ron Silliman at the Text Festival in Bury

There's nothing at stake anymore for the contemporary experimentalist, neither resources nor reputation nor even the very materials of life: and work that always resorts, in the end, to wholesale mimicry & appropriation even disrespects its forebears. But, as I've said, the conditions for art by imitation are optimal, and have a lot to do with the forces of globalization. In fact, the fashionable 'otherness' of traditional avant-gardism has been expropriated by global capital, making the notion itself obsolete. Even Silliman's acknowledges the outdatedness of the notion of the avant-garde, opting for something that takes it beyond the indebtedness to past models in which it's mired. His recent neon art, Bök's poem in a genome & Geof Huth's 'pwoermd' as art forms have all been ironically expropriated by a global capital dynamics as hungry as post-avants for garish display & marketability. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their celebrated Empire, "it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value or a practice that is 'outside'" (385). And one of the outsiders devoured by the totality of global capitalism is, of course, the avant-garde.

And so what about the claim (or suspicion) that contemporary experimentalists—and the names for what they do are legion: mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, etc.—are insane? Well, it's more a ruse than anything else & as far as posturing goes, it's a pretty lame one. Again, it's insane to think Christian Bök is the "first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry". (Of course, the claim's not even factually true: biogeneticist Craig Venter has already performed a similar type of genome trick when he "inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe.") But the pseudo-scientism of a writing class instructor has been permanently assimilated to a new unitary dictatorship of capital & its global networks so that the avant-gardists have nowhere to go but backwards. And so the crazy repetitiveness. Moving forward in the traditional sense only makes the merger with capitalism more secure. The avant-garde is in crisis mode. Bök's Xenotext is probably the best example there is of how science,the subjectivities of art and language experimentation have all turned into so many garish displays of a cultural consumerism that academia promotes and government bureaucracies fund. Of how predictably mainstream they've all have become.

If the avant-garde is in crisis, do I have an alternative vision of artistic work with the potential to be foreward-looking again & significantly alter the conditions of life itself? Yes. I've lately rethought poetry, and its cultural signifiers, even going so far as to equate the avant-garde with social-political activism of the Muhammad Bouazizi type. In other words, I'm beginning to see poetry (the act of'making') in a purely material way as activity affecting the commons and every aspect of life in a globalized world. I reserve the avant-garde for activity that sometimes must amount to acts of self-immolation or imprisonment or execution by fascist firing squads. A radical form of "self-valorization" never amounting to theory alone and silly academic games. An other- rather than ego-centric Art. I've become virulently anti-avant in the Sillimanesque sense, tired of the academicization of something that ought to mean 'life-and-death' to us. Now, of course, in comfortable North America the very ideal of poetry I'm suggesting is almost inconceivable. And that's precisely the problem.