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.

"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.