Some further reflections on 'globalization': and how the avant-garde's been hit particularly hard

Revolutionary creativity does not shock or entertain the bourgeoisie, it destroys them.(from above poster)

There is a kind of collusion between capital and the avant-garde. (Jean-François Lyotard)

But the most typical artworks of so-called postmodernism - installations, pastiche, "language" poetry - when stripped of their critical theory scaffolding aren't all that different from those produced a hundred years ago. They have merely shifted out of the various facets of Modernism - irony - into a dominant mode. (Eliot Weinberger)

Yes, artists are free: they are free to exchange and exchange whatever, but only there where exchange takes place, in the market. They are also free to do whatever, but the violence of this freedom is no longer that of revolution, it is merely that of economic competition. (Thierry de Duve)

I've said in a recent post that Silliman's praises of Christian Bök’s Xenotext project disclose an avant-garde in crisis mode. It's time to be more specific. Capitalism and fringe art cultures are no longer (as they used to be) mutually hostile ideologies since the materials, methodology & presentation of work have been assimilated to the complex networks of global capital. And if they're not, the avant-garde longer have a right to that title. In my view, the complete homogenization of global capital characterizes artistic newness as much as it does the fashion industry & social media. In fact, the latter have taken almost the same trajectories as the experimentalist poetries, and it's worth looking at the reasons why.

I wouldn't say exactly, as Lyotard has, that capital and art conspire to say (and do) the same thing. It's just that traditional cultures have now been underwritten by global capitalism. Barriers and identities that served once to keep arts separate from competing disciplines have collapsed but if they've done so it hasn't been due to the success of any strong-armed postmodernist theory.Time was when a John Cage could decry the selling of Duchamp's ready-mades as a gross concession to vulgar bourgeois taste. I suppose there was a sense in Cage's day that art and business were borders becoming increasingly porous. In the face of globalization significant differences like these, however, fade into nothingness: ironically, Derridean differánce has turned into radical sameness. Now writing class instructors can pretend to be biogeneticists and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theorists, neon sign artists without really upsetting any established order of things.  
 
I can now safely equate the avant-garde with any successfully retailed market commodity, such as fashion and social media. Far from destroying the bourgeoisie, it works in their favour. Rob Horning's written an interesting blog article entitled "The Accidental Bricoleurs" that's brought home to me the saleability of avant-garde work in a particularly interesting way. In his N+1 piece he describes the  "protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation" as the standard-bearers of the retail world. Trendy clothing stores like Zara and Forever 2 offer fake outlets for personal creativity, & don't just sell newness but, as he says, allow congeries of buyers to "become involuntary bricoleurs", cultural memes of the day literally transformed into fashion accessories. 'Bricoleurs' and 'memes' are his own words.

The language of art & fashion are practically indistinguishable. The illusion of both individualism & choice don't try to disguise, as they used to, the real retail market forces that underlie their success: both buyer and store actually revel in them & have become one and the same "replicable" entity. Horning calls the new product lines 'post-brands' in probably the same spirit in which Silliman, wishing to get beyond a hopelessly outdated term like 'avant-garde', calls the newer experimentalists the 'post-avant''. In this "spectacle of pure novelty" fashion is like a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theory that's become handily manipulable. Horning:

If fashion functions like a language, then the fast-fashion firms are mainly interested controlling the underlying system and leave the meaning of the “words” to interchangeable designers and individual consumers. As long as customers are willing to speak fast fashion’s language, the companies aren’t particular about the specifics of the vocabulary. They are concerned only with the rate and volume of change.

As in fashion so in social media companies like Facebook. It's almost commonplace to decry the unscrupulous way they filch personal data and then repackage them as newer venues for personal expression, with users captured in what blog theorist Jodi Dean calls "circuits of desire". The free availability of "design ideology" (Facebook software itself) gives users a false sense of empowerment & creativity. An abject conformism to what Horning calls "well-worked surfaces" (interesting expression!) is mistaken for individualism. Like today's revolutionary artists social media designers bank on the illusoriness of originality &, of course, stand to profit greatly by it. "Social media," like contemporary avant-gardist productions," encourage us to appropriate whatever we want and claim it as our own without feeling derivative or slavishly imitative."

Art-makers have become enslaved to their 'brands' (flarf, conceptualist, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, mash-up, etc.) as much as users of social media and "fast fashion". Art's just one among a whole array of 'things' in a neoliberal world of global capitalism that exploits for profit "well-worked surfaces" of tradition, materials and technique. The very tradition of art's been turned into a sort of pastime by academics and writing class instructors. How things have changed over the past century! An avant-garde poster (such as the above) once dared to advertise the "revolutionary creativity" of art (and art-makers) bent on destroying the bourgeoisie "in the streets and everywhere". A nasty & generally disreputable bunch the first literary revolutionaries were, living on the fringes & giving the world art intended to maim. Radical Catalan artist Joan Miró sought to "assassinate paintings" of his rival Picasso while bad-mannered Rimbaud writing during the Russian Revolution— a thug, drug addict & scoundrel by most accounts—offended every aesthetic taste imaginable. And then there's William S. Burroughs who treated the world as so many cut ups, & even appeared in his own movies with "orgasm gun".

 Burroughs with gun

Now look at the contemporary avant-garde. Mostly cozy, well-heeled academics (like Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout ) who get top billing at poetry events and have become mainstream to the teeth: the successful venture capitalists of verse. Clamoring for top literary prizes and recognition is what drives them. The advertisement for the recent text art festival in Bury, England, for example, while boasting it's going to be one that "specialises in experiments, in new experiences, in performances and exhibitions that mix artforms in ground-breaking combinations", actually appeared more like a catalogue of the rehashed signifiers and techniques of old. The Bury festival was anything but "new". Silliman's own neon art display paid tribute (if anything in art could) to a universal & homogeneous global capitalist order now put to artistic uses. The radicals of old have become literary 'fat cats' emboldened enough to advertise their wares in big bright lights.

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.

A short reflection on poetry performance inspired by a recent John Latta post

I've always thought (and thank god the likes of John Latta seem to think so too) that contemporary poetry's gotten too brazen for its own good, unaware that talent will out wherever it is, and that all the self-exhibitionism in the world won't cover up talentless work. He's used a theatre analogy to good effect. Having "resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage", poetry's become what I think is an empty "theatre of cruelty": never to be taken in the uniquely Artaudian sense of theater as significant place of grotesque & violent passions where a living art form is so relevant it bites the spectator in the butt. It's rather a case here of the cruelty of unbridled production without any real thought for artistic sense or propriety or, more importantly, protest. I'd like to continue this poetry as theatre analogy a bit more.

The noise & fragmentariness, especially of the more self-aggrandizing poetry performance today, might be taken as poetry theatre but, as I've said, with none of the restorative powers of social commentary or, at the very least, a mastery of materials. Think of Bök's Cyborg Opera, on the one hand, as performance that (again, in Latta's words) merely "gushes", a conceptual poet's pastime, drawing more attention to performer than art, and Penn Kemp's "Poem for Peace In Two Voices", on the other, as one that "sucks up and absorbs", drawing artistic verve from the ground & the essential dark of wind, rain & animal processes:

One's imitative, a second-rate Schwitters impersonation while Penn's is the product of a lifelong devotion to sound poetry & artistic activism in general that traces its ancestry to The Four Horsemen. Latta's distinction is particularly instructive in the case of two contemporary Canadian poetry performers. And I just happen to be enough of a traditionalist, with a penchant still for rating work, to say that a well-directed analogy easily separates the real thing from all the dross swirling round it.

The "empire of illusion" and Canadian poetry

The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectual, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. (Hannah Arendt cited in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)

As I was reading Chris Hedges's very interesting book on the Orwellian or Huxleyan (or should I say Debordian) nightmare that is early twenty-first century life, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), I was struck by the way the spirit of its "triumph of spectacle" thesis could apply to the contemporary poetry scene in Canada provided I only transform the idea of democracy in America "as outgrowth of free markets" (185) and corporate power into the idea of literacy as the product of state-run Arts complex (of the kind we have here).

A simple substitution of 'corporatist' (America) for 'socialist' (Canada) would do the job. And so I make the same death of "complexity and nuanced language" thesis for much poetry written,  fêted and anthologized today. Socialist Canada seems to have created the same type of "end of literacy" scenario as corporatist America. And, interestingly enough, I can faithfully employ the same critical language as in Hedges's book without too much detriment to believability of my own position. Though Hedges doesn't address poetry directly he very well could have done so. What follows is a reflection on contemporary Canadian poetry along the lines of an "end of literacy" critique as developed in Empire of Illusion. I've kept the spirit and impetus of Hedges's book but steered them towards a more uniquely Canadian poetry experience.

The literacy illusion can be traceable to the same socio-political and cultural causes of the narcissism, entertainment fetish, sense of entitlement and addiction to "commercial commodities" (whatever form they take) that characterize the post-millennial world. That is the general claim. I strongly commend Hedges's book for its well-rounded exposition of the scope & origins of what he aptly terms the empire of illusion. Applying its basic premises (& insights) to literacy alone seems to work just as well: in fact, I'd have to say a society of spectacle has snared even poetry in its net, its traditional (mostly lyrical) voice reduced to more entertaining "concrete, sound, list, translation, performance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, narrative, conceptual and long poems" varieties (as the Toronto New School of Writing advertisement goes).

The Word (as much as the World) has been fragmented beyond repair into a myriad of faux copies of some original ideal from which we've strayed. It's my contention that digitalized, visual, video and poetry slam spectacles performed  today in Vegas-like fashion offer the only available venues for hordes of poet-graduates who've been encouraged to mix artistic genres like literary libertines: making the cultural present into a sort of ahistorical arena for a collage of  modes of expression that are an extension of the personal narcissism and techno-fetishism of its chief exponents today. Only the semblance (simulacra) of poetry has been kept because illusion is all that's remained and all that is now necessary. Perhaps the most devastating indictment of contemporary poetry is its reduction to what I regard as its "commodity fetishism": an array of spectacularly commoditized "pseudo-poetries".

Spectacle, once set in any socio-political or cultural arena, brooks no opposition. Look at the sense of outrage at a recent Canadian Heritage Department proposal to cut back funding to small magazines . In an age of declining readership in general and of traditional hardcover books in particular, coupled with the growth and dominance of e-books technology, the whining of the traditional mainstream mags (Arc, Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, etc.) over their share of taxpayer dollars is almost unpardonable. There's a sense of entitlement to funding and fierce resistance to any idea of having to prove their mags through established readership.

Large-circulation magazines continue to receive current funding levels while small mags get no more than a proposed allotment of 1.5 million dollars. Their charge of subsidy cutbacks to the Arts as an assault on the country's cultural viability is ludicrous in the face of the normal financial assistance most magazines up to now have been eligible to get from no less than three governmental agencies: a Canadian Magazine Fund, a Publications Assistance Program and a Canada-Council literary-and-arts magazine fund. The arts-funding controversy adopts the language (to which we've recently been accustomed) of bailouts and the need to keep a literary "corporate" model of institutionalized writing in place: one that (the proponents of state-run Arts claim) can't be left to the forces of a market economy alone.

The debate on publicly-funded arts in Canada is virtually a non-issue, so used have we become to the idea of state-run culture: consequently the capacity for independent thought and, more importantly, self-criticism go by the wayside just when it's most needed. Open-ended debate, a sense of social responsibility, and indeed anything that curbs self-will in the interests of a greater good take a back-seat to the demands of spectacle. To dare to question this "culture of illusion" is to risk being seen as a malcontent or, worst of all, an anti-Arts ogre bent on ruining free artistic expression. With criticism of Canada Council practically non-existent in mainstream media, the fairest discussion seems to be reserved for the blogs, the only sites available for "otherstream" discussion.

How did this "empire of illusion" ever come about in Canada? Internet technology and the poet seemed to have morphed into a creature of pure spectacle, but it's something that was a long time in the making.The hordes of writing students, for example, spilling into the writers' market today have been sold a bill of goods in the classroom & in the  world of real writing: the 'mainstream'  marketplace, funded by taxpayers' money, create an illusion of standards, literary opportunity and vibrant cultural tradition. It's the illusion of Arts Canada, one orchestrated by legislative fiat (Canada Council, Canadian Heritage and all the provincial arts council bureaucracies), and enforced by academics and the mainstream publishers they control. And of the above-mentioned three I'd say academic institutions have done the most to create the illusion of literacy. It goes something like this.

Financial support for the academy always has both curriculum and administrative implications for the Arts. Teaching style and content chase after money and connections, with ever rising student enrolment becoming a lucrative publishers market. Rather than a place of inquiry and ongoing critique of the economic, social and political conditions of all institutional structures, the university is a micro corporatist entity: in particular, a bastion of blinkered specialization & technical expertise in every subject area. Even in the humanities students must decide on a very narrow thesis-friendly subject area if they're to be received into academic practice, restricted as they must be at a very early age to a world of coded (almost masonic) language and writing ritual. In the minds of young student-writers success is bound to be equated with commercial viability: they feel necessarily entitled to reap the rewards of patiently jumping through all the prescribed academic hoops. Literary bang for their buck!


Acceptance into the profession creates a sense of wanting more of the same even long after graduation. If universities have become corporate institutions among others, vying with the marketplace for student tuition dollars and government research loans, then academic standards of excellence in general usually subserve a wider corporate & bureaucratic ideal of "good governance". And that ideal of "good governance" means in Canada a commitment to a means of literary production that is both taxpayer-based and run by bureaucrats in Ottawa.

Even liberal arts grads (say creative writing students) cannot be any less aware of the necessity for bringing 'marketable' skills into a very specialized work world than doctors and engineers: the bohemian campus Arts crowd having died a long time ago with the Beats (if they ever really existed). But as Mark Bauerlein says in his The Dumbest Generation students have turned into a "Creative Class" looking to find in the world of work outlets for creative expression. In Canada "good governance" usually means a  policy of multiculturalism designed to be a both theoretical and achievable reality. Even humanities grads, students of wide ethno-cultural diversity who are reared in a fake university and student-worker "harmony", have already been groomed for the rigidly legislated and administered social welfare system of governance that Canada's become in order to serve the needs of its multicultural citizenry. What Hedges says in regard to the American government can be almost inversely applied to our own subsidized arts regime: "It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception." (169)

Even the poets that popular writing classes create by the thousands will thrive only under the academic-corporatist conditions of the university that profits from a lucrative student textbook market and the warming ideals of state-sponsored Art to which they've been encouraged by their teachers to aspire once they leave campus. Which means that rather than fending for themselves, with the marketplace dictating literary taste, poet-graduates will turn naturally to the only agent of state-sponsored literacy directly suited to their writerly needs and aspirations: Canada Council or Canadian Heritage, new surrogate university departments with office hours, application forms and rigid administrative guidelines of their own.

The state becomes an academic playground where graduates expect to find the same classroom spirit of creative 'specialization' and literary production work: paper and/or electronic application being the usual first step to writing projects of any kind. The classes never end nor the call for papers. Here's an academic-government (bureaucratic) isomorphism intended to facilitate the poet-grad's transition into a potentially rewarding writing vocation. But when reality frustrates (as it inevitably will) the academicized expectations of budding poets, and a Malthusian imbalance between writers and publishing resources looms on their personal horizons (with its attendant dysphoria), poets turn to spectacle instead.

A sense of entitlement fostered by the faux excellence of literary work in the creative writing lab, coupled with the ubiquity of Internet technology, stirs contemporary poets on to a hope of instant universal acclaim and acceptance in a virtually endless, unfettered e-market. The switch-over is easy once traditional ("old school") literacy's been redefined as e-literacy. Poetry as "celebrity culture" with all the tricks of "mass entertainment" now at its disposal.

An egregious example of literacy illusion at the level of poetic discussion took the form of a recent Bök-Starnino poetry "cage match" first viewed by many on Vimeo or YouTube. More bombastic and self-serving than informative, with its own WWE stage design, the poetry debate was really poetry theatre, the main event crassly served up as choice of two poetry styles rather than as the complex multi-layered discussion it ought to have been:namely, whether Canada is better served by  avant-gardism or a more traditional poetry. A type of sophomoric presentation (highlighted by Bök's comical gestures & expressions and Starnino's equally comical dead pan delivery)  rather than any advancement of ideas seemed to result from this. The whole had the look of a "frosh week" prank: true spectacle framed by image, poetry peddled as brand-names (amounting to a "junk poetics") and a type of literary sloganeering that resulted in little more than claims by both poet-debaters that his poetry is more popular than the other.

And if a World Wrestling Entertainment format grows stale (and performance novelty always does), there's always the more  ingenious cyborg poetics of Christian Bök alone who's lately partnered with ALICE, acronym for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity,  a sexy "chatbot", more technically a“natural language processing chatterbot” to whom/which Bök posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's post-avant work Sunset Debris (itself a series of questions). Poet as talking cyborg-head reminiscent of the 80s Max Headroom.

 And if he isn't dialoguing with a robot he's usually using Power-Point to read poetry as more silent graphic (letter-glyph) fusions. It's hard sometimes in this emerging age of "Vispo" to separate graphics from language; poetry from techno-poetries. In fact, a growing trend towards digitizing even more traditional flesh-and-blood poets from the past, like Fred Wah and bpNichol, Internet sites comprising mostly of "uploaded scanned images" of poet and their writings, is the extent to which traditional poetics chases after cyber spectacle.

If "fun and fantasy", augmented by Internet media, are preferred to traditional literary expression, the result is a rampant bibliophobia among the young (as Mark Bauerlein argues in The Dumbest Generation): a disdain for reading and the patient and thoughtful inquiry it entails. And if the young aren't reading books, that means poetry as well. But the young are also the largest consumers of Internet social networking, iPod, and video technologies, and the most likely to be drawn to "spectacle" of e-literacy &  Bökian techno-tricks rather than the substance of the Word.

"Close writing': or some transcendental properties of the poetry blog

"La poésie est science, déconstruction des évidences mortes...celle du coeur, de l'âme de la patrie et de l'homme." ("Les Dix Propositions", La Presse 4 April 1970, cited in Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism )

But communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him (sic). (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence )

One of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language...[H]ere "transcendental" must instead indicate an experience which is undergone within language. (Giorgio Agamben, cited in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser)

Blogs? If it's neo-Formalist discourse you want, marked by very well-informed and astute commentary, there's Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, or if you'd like to see perhaps Canada's most prolific avant-gardist at work, Clifford Duffy, visit his radio deleuze, a singularly dadaist site with spectacular graphics & audio- and visual- montages for the works of a single author.

 Or if a more openly (& brazenly) non- or counter-or anti-syntactic visual poetry is your thing, see dbqp: visualizing poetics, both cutting-edge & multi-composite to the teeth, or if you subscribe rather to the grand ol' narratives of current LANGUAGE poetics, Ron Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's WEB LOG are for you. A style for just about everyone. Serialist, collage or 'old school' representationalist; minimal, concretist or 'New Sentence'. But what have genres and poetic manifesto really amounted to these days? What have they really to do with the blog? And where's the room for development and responsible critique in the Internet's crowded synchrony?

 As if the bewildering array of styles weren't enough, there's the very important question of writing that goes on in (and for) them. I don't mean writing in the technical sense that servers, website and design & editing features act as its primary means of production. Search technology is not the same as academic research. And nor is it writing in the traditional chirographic sense for it's impossible to write for the blog; a deep abiding sense of whatever it is literacy means has been usurped by that grotesquerie of indelible Internet ink and e-readership, always radically mixed-mode, ethereal and impolitic. I'm looking at writing as the most critical project imaginable.

 It's sort of Lacan's point about the text writing the reader except that there's no real writing going on at all. With nothing to experiment on anymore, we're not the tabula rasa of old. Texts without borders cannot be useful analogues anymore for Lacanian or Kristevian subconscious undercurrents since 'digital only' takes up virtually no space or soul at all. Writing for the blog is as counter-intuitive a notion as driving for the road. So what exactly is it? 

The phonetic alphabet gives sounds a shape and textual 'look' on the page that are instantly transmissible: messages codified, stored and easy to be registered made writing about look unconfoundingly natural. Books, headings, table of contents, citations, etc are the traditional paraphernalia of intelligibility and loci for discussion. In phonetic writing the Word has a mind of its own, wound tight and ready to mean anything under the right conditions. But those typographical spaces (even in the best avant-garde work), the domain or extract of the roving "thinking eye" (as Silliman puts it) have been transgressed for good. Read good visual/concrete poetry today, such as you see in Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, and try telling the artifact from the separate visual-syntactic& hypergraphical elements from which it arises. The poem is the "writing eye" that stares back at you, authorial intention and design reduced to subsets of its own easily reproducible technics.


The weblog's become the deconstructed site everyone's been hankering after for the past three decades: the Internet's delivered the goods, handily removing all the typographical, semantic, and authorial barriers that ever stood in the way between you and the signifiant. Not pre- or anti- but perhaps simulverbal communication; a simultaneity of act and product desperate enough for attention to pierce through the babble of multiple sites.The life-world, 'old school' aesthetics, and real author-reader symbiosis have been sacrificed to an impersonal but ubiquitous binary beast. As requested. It's not, in Iser's way of speaking, "an aesthetic object that will reveal the thought system of the social world" (The Act of Reading, 101): the Internet's too asocial, too voluptuously self-absorbed for that.

The problem is that to step beyond some threshold of minimal reading competency is to sense not a text (the d'hors text paradigm permanently displaced by a stiff-necked regimen of 'on/off' coding) but an ominous graphomania. The reader doesn't, in radio deleuze, for example, read poststructuralist deleuze at all; s/he wades rather into the intercellular deep of Clifford Duffy's dream, waging the same anti-Language war. It's interesting that in two of the blogs listed above (Duffy's and Bernstein's) reader comments are not allowed, perhaps as a way of averting the visitor to the very real danger of being trapped not in cyberspace but headspace where there's only room for one. Writing is the only enter- and exit- strategy we have and yet here it cannot really be about anything nor intended for any particular audience nor even designed to give a point of view. Cannot be a writing at all that's unconfoundingly tied (as it once hoped to be) to signs, referents or whatnot.

And so what's all the fuss about close 'reading', close 'listening' then? After a while Bernstein's Pennsound becomes a bore, poets droning on about reading; Silliman's "Alphabet", just downright self-mystifying. If Walter J. Ong's thesis about orality irretrievably assimilated to technical literacy (in Orality and Literacy) has any merit, it's because we sense that after writing there's no going back to a privileged preverbal place. Orality isn't an option (for all of the resemblances of e-reading to preliterate ages). Poetries that have been wound this tight can do nothing but put on displays of themselves, glaringly technical and scenographic: they are a sadly atrophied version of an old school artes virorum. 

 And by writing I don't mean écriture (or what Canadian theorist Caroline Bayard calls écouture in the case of radical performance): it's old hat by now and we've gone beyond that. I mean with all this promiscuous heterogeneity in the blogosphere, who needs to bother about codes and hidden discourses anymore? They're all around you. Most internet sites are pretty up-front about those sorts of things: ironic and playful, allegorical and irreverent to the teeth. So how useful will it be for writing to do duty for anything that's pretty much unraveled itself to this extent, bare textual presences audited, texted and 'tweeted' ad nauseum?

 I mean if poetry can be envisaged (as in Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment ) literally "subsist[ing], like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form", what's the point of it all?  I fear that poetry sites whose signature layouts, content and textual panache are signs of a blogging self really have nothing to say. With authorial comes scriptural death. But we write !And if authors & their sites become morose or stupidly overconfident (and surprisingly most of them do at times, as I've discovered), how can a reader be expected to fill in those empty "ciphers" robbed of aesthetic content, and avoid the fall at the same time into kitschy discourse? The blog is testimony, if ever there was one, to the hegelian "dark night in which all cows are black", the deadpan face of the Internet's empty Absolute. To communicate through the blog seems to me about as absurd as Bök's hope to encode poetry for posterity. Gone is the notion of an "implied reader"who as part of textual structure (Iser) engages in ongoing discussion about literary meaning,

Death of the author: no kidding!Everything's dead except the will to admit it's finally died & like concerned artists perhaps prevent cases of this kind of self-immolation from recurring. Adorno's point about the death of poetry post-Auschwitz is well taken. It's perhaps in that sense that Canada's bp Nichol and bill bissett talked about the logotherapy of poetry. Perhaps writing is essentially therapy but I think they got it the other way around: poetry causes the therapy. Its healing properties have evaporated; and if we allow the Word into our souls it won't hover above vocables like Spirit (as bill bissett & Ron Silliman hope it will) but just stare back at us (like an unblinking Masonic eye), incapable of changing anything, empty pre-emptive bluster at best. The concretists, dadaists, surrealists, etc wanted to smash language & scatter the bits over the white screen: well, they've got it now. "La désintegration du langage est accomplie." (Raoul Duguay)

The result is weblogs have also grown a curiously thick skin to compensate for this spirit deficit. How? When spelling changes into graphics, representation into hypertext, and linear thinking into 'clouds' ("ephemeral electromagnetic traces"), the type of traditional literacy the blog tried to rely on, scoping out the world for meaning, turns into a pod that's hard to penetrate. Far from the playful & ironic creatures we thought the Internet would make us, we've actually turned out to be ornery monads (not nomads)who live under retractable roofs, looking out at the world through a single glazed Eye. We prefer depth but like sea otters sleep tied to seaweed,  bobbing near the shoreline.Spending too much time in any one blog gives the living sensorium a distinctly oneiric rather than fleshy feel for the world, the other, self. Reader-response is what blogs do but only unintentionally, and only if the tides sway them close enough to dry land.

 Consequently I've never really encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as the poet's weblog: in fact, I've never encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as e-writing itself or the blogger. But the urge to write persists despite the poststructuralist gutting of language, with opinions stubbornly locked into place, countless counter-discourses on the ready. I can think of only one way out of this impasse (or  'aporia'), however. And that's through what I call 'close' writing, one modeled on the Levinasian conception of "responsibility for the other" ( in Otherwise Than Being ) but I will have to be content with only a general outline for now. There's a lot at stake.

I define 'close writing' as a type of  'close watching' (not reading) to avoid the fatal deflection off text (dévier de text) in which the glaring You switches place with content and observer and observed invariably collapse into each other's arms. Reflection is neither participatory nor autonomous enough a description for the type of essential role-reversal that must take place for e-communication to thrive. I suggest we use "transcendence" instead of reflection or authorial intention or referentiality. Preferring to drop the baggage of poststructuralist experimentation altogether & begin to view writing as rather an ontological leap into text, since without the linguistic innards to keep it going  it can be nothing but that. Communication with the other (that the weblog primarily showcases)  is transcendent and as such always inherently dangerous, risky (Levinas). We're ultimately responsible for the blog "spectacle" we've created.

Denuded poststructuralist language cannot read the labile, processual world fully without also unwittingly becoming the carrier of every type of intolerable dogmatism. Perhaps bissett and Silliman have been inching in their works, maybe without meaning to be, towards just this sense of the 'transcendental' to keep the reader from being swallowed whole. I think, for example, of Silliman's description of the prose poem in The New Sentence as a"discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81), a language of teleology in-laying phrases like "upward falling", "integrate up"into a discussion of contemporary literary theory . The blog as the site of the encapsulation of thought and creativity may have to come in for a virtual ethics, e-writers having to become linguistics watchdogs at the same time. In a future blog article I'd like to show how this innate self-regulating impulse of writers to become responsible for each other's writings actually works, using the weblogs cited at the beginning.