Canada's only real avant-garde (as far as I can tell), and why

Duffy's dose of anti-Art in "radio deleuze"

The avant-garde in Canada is at the moment a class with only one member, at least by the definition that appears here: and he is Clifford Duffy. It's a claim I'm prepared to make even in our post-historical era. I've said recently, in regards to the topic of mainstream writing, that the intellectual is the toxin in the system but I meant that as a verbal warning. In the case of the avant-garde, properly conceived, it ought to be taken more literally and more seriously, viz. as the invisible slow-acting dose of anti-Art poison the mainstream ingests at its own risk because that's what Duffy's giving: text, images & sound of uniquely vital Dada work always hovering round risky liminal edges & entrance ways, always distinguishable by the familiar rattle. Poet Genesis p-Orridge says of Burroughs in the documentary William Burroughs: A Man Within what can also be said of Duffy: "People who are prepared to risk sacrificing their freedom and their physical safety because of an idea are always dangerous to a society."

I thought once I could write in his own rigorously deleuzian way, splicing language and stupidly hoping for the most fortuitously creative pattern of images to appear: as if I could, in a word, dice things up like a Rauschenbergian collagist & hope for a poem. But that came shortly after my introduction to the man & his mercurial temperament at the now defunct deleuze-guattari spoon collective: when both artist and work had made quite an impression. I had no more success with Dada at the time than with the Eastern writing I was also dabbling in, and I didn't because I had no real talent for either. Yes, the avant-garde is for the few. And if we look at just his radio deleuze site alone, it looks as if he can also foreground writing in pretty decent html code, making his blogwork a decidedly new type of media art. He may, in a word, actually be among the last of the historical avant-garde in the strictly Deleuzian sense of purposely evoking resistant & inhuman sensations. He does have a knack, in any event, for courting the obscurity that the blog as neo-Dadaist collage will most certainly assure him.

Duffy's "machinic" poetry

But it's not just neo-Dadaist collage work made possible by Internet technology he's after. There's no faking the aesthetics here because I don't believe there is one; Duffy genuinely hates the public and the public's taste for Art (perhaps Art itself as "info-economy") and the fame & publicity it is prepared to give the lucky scoundrel who profits from it all; and, in return, the public ought properly to hate him. He's threatening to rob it of culture itself! It's a little like trying to smash the urinal display as if it were the Pietà. Duffy's blog is that last little bit of gross anti-Duchamp violence converted into VR format: guerrilla tactics of the radical deleuzian wing aimed not so much at image-bashing —what's an image for anyways?— as garish interfaces, blog networks (even if only his own) &, as I've said, html code itself. These have been turned into "resistant sensations" aimed at subverting the still prevalent bourgeois art world. He plays in pure "machinic assemblages" meant to copy & represent not any one artistic style in particular since, after all, its all for him just a play of design and systems ready to hand, a purely processual aesthetics in which "We become Universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero." (What is Philosophy, 169)

Being tied to really one text & one thinker does have its advantages, & sets Duffy apart from the fake avant-gardists in Canada who lack a true conceptualist grounding. His is a thoroughgoing deleuzianism based on a view of 'virtuality' according to which "The elements, varieties of relations and singular points coexist in...the virtual part of the work or object" (Difference & Repetition, 209). The blog handles the virtual component rather nicely.The resultant artifact, one bolstered by its VR format, is the celebrated "Body without Organs", the object or work emptied of respectable empirical coordinates to tie it down to a particular genre, style, following: a place where intensities or the most liberatory artistic impulses imaginable can take physical work & convert it into any of several "monstrous" forms (from the hypochondriac to the schizo to masochist). The possibilities almost seem terrifying but always tempting.

At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs [BwO's], you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit." ( A Thousand Plateaus, 150)

It looks as though he's trying to make himself (via the many personas he often appears in, such as Jill and Mona, Jean Genet's Bastard Son, MutualMachineBook, etc) and his Art invisible by making the blog page into a pure IT display of schizo & masochist bodies. And it's always done with the quickness & ingenuity ("intensity") of e-mail, text messaging, laptops, etc. And as a result the poet-blogger leaves only dissident and unformed language clusters, only partial representations with rough jagged edges (collagist-style), fragments of music, image and contemporary headlines always about to give a complete narrative but never doing so. An almost total collapse of representation. Perhaps as a way to keep all of his work from breaking apart, Duffy's own site indexes and collects aspects of an overriding deleuzian methodology: in fact, each of his sites is a node in a fluid Dada mosaic. Otherwise it's all going to be just radical impulse, destructiveness and form for their own sake, which it isn't. In fact, artistic Form is the chronically unformed or unfinished; any story and meaning the writer sets out to deliver in the theatre of Web 2.0 is bound to lead to this techno-deleuzianism.

Schizo & masochist bodies

So how to tell the true from the fake Canadian avant-garde? Firstly, concept and digital image must coexist but not in any new faddish or intellectualist way designed to get people's attention (and certainly not at taxpayers' expense): the tone is always (& always ought to be) iconoclastic, rude, disembodying, the poet a spectral menace to established poetic practices. And Duffy certainly is. Secondly, media technology should never be considered the means for poetic expression: it must be every bit as subversive as were the materials of Tzara, Duchamp & Schwitters. Just so much stuff to be scissored and pasted. Poetry's not a pastime for academics. And Duffy's certainly isn't. Thirdly, the avant-garde must have a Web presence, visible & active primarily through blogs, listserves, wikis, etc. Even an iPhone will do. How else to see the face of the enemy of Art: the Duffy schizos and masochists who don't consider the media they appear in interactive at all, & who could care less, in fact, about you and any input of yours into their networks.

The poet here, Dadaist with political leanings, a thoroughgoing deleuzian, is no amateur with software at his disposal. Duffy's iconoclasm is not purposeless. The space he's made has been there for quite some time: a field of technical & artistic possibilities laid bare already by Tzara, Breton & Genet, fluid and metamorphosing, with no room for insititutionalized ideas & groupings (not even Dadaism itself). Ripe for a sort of return to the basics of avant-garde appreticeship & work. Only the materials have changed; the impetus is the same. radio deleuze is a multimedia site, a blog without an active comments stream, both portal & academic forum but, above all else, the domain of anti-Art. The site (or non-site) of a virtual poetics and the restless shiftings of its creator who'd like nothing better than to wrest Art from you and give it back to real writer-practitioners. And, at the moment, that means Clifford Duffy only.