1-Year Plan 
 Post 6: 10/30/04

Left Modernism
Social Articulation
Permanent Avant-Garde

Modernism, in ancient times, meant a univocal imperative toward autonomous aesthetic form guaranteed by a transcendental author, a hegemonic concept the new modernist studies, at least, has opened up through historical reflection and institutional critique. Ten years or so down the road of this revisionist history, the situation of modernism has achieved a moment of productive tension, between constructions of author and work as further augmented by contexts and renewed envisionments of modernism as a site for agency and praxis. I am drawn to calling these options “Right” and “Left” modernisms, on analogy to the split between Right and Left Hegelians—with Right modernists containing the instabilities of modernist negativity within the orders of author, canon, and narrative, and Left modernists opening horizons of construction, undermining the finality of author and work, and thereby renewing modernism as a site of agency and critique. Such a distinction goes beyond period affiliations with fascism and communism to propose two contrasting logics of modernism’s negotiations with modernity: in Right modernism, a hyper-realized, reconstituted authorship tries to equate political authority with the construction of a subject-centered formal order that fixes or stabilizes the aporias of modernity, while in Left modernism, an other-directed, self-reflexive authorship makes an intervention into situations or events occurring within and as modernity. If this analogy holds, modernism’s self-reflexive autonomy may turn out to be more a hypostatized ideal than a norm, only one among many along the way toward its further articulation—in which multiple, heteronomous modernisms “go to their encounter” with modernity.

The recent Zukofsky Centennial Conference in New York is a case in point. Despite his undeniable embrace of Left aesthetics, in which an evident Marxist conceptual framework is interpreted within the poetics of experimental form, a “Right” Zukofsky is in the process of being created, after Hugh Kenner and the like, as acceding to conventional authorship (Joyce, Pound, Stein) at the expense of a poetics that begins in an encounter with the politics of the 1930s—a “Left” Zukofsky. The historical break between “A”–9’s first and second halves, prefiguring the epistemological divide in the poem at “A”–12, becomes the key moment of historical succession, even religious conversion, for many Zukofskyans, with the Zukofsky of materialist history being transcended by the Zukofsky of the material text. This moment within Zukofsky’s oeuvre, at the same time, maps the succession of modernism itself as an epistemic transformation of a superceded worldview. It was precisely this moment that several revisionist papers attacked, in Ruth Jennison’s re-historicizing of the epochal divide between Marx and Spinoza in “A”–9, with the second half positioned after the Popular Front politics of “A”–10; in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s uncovering of a buried “Worker’s Anthology” under the hyper-realized formalism of A Test of Poetry; and in my own reading of Zukofsky’s major form, after Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, as a succession of moments in which historical referents, personal associations, and social logics are overwritten and thereby “autonomized” by an increasingly self-reflexive language. On analogy to the preservation of the ghost of communism in Derrida’s account, Zukofsky’s material text is haunted by a history he can never lose. This history returns in the millennial horizons of “A”–24, an instance of the retrospectively unfolding future anterior Derrida reads in Marx (providing a central example of the “horizon shifts” in modernism I have been concerned with for some time).

This logic of modernism as a site of epochal unfolding is the basis for its renewed importance in the work of Fredric Jameson—arguably a consequence of the historical closure of the postmodern, in his account, with the end of the Cold War in 1989. Where Jameson’s modernism had often seemed, given his indebtedness to Georg Lukàcs, as a kind of substitute totality or ultimate overwriting, it has gradually been transformed into an occasion of critique—from the last chapter of Postmodernism’s call for a renewal of modernist studies; to the epochal account of postmodernism in The Seeds of Time; and finally to what must be considered a thoroughly revisionist account in A Singular Modernity. Modernist epochality—initially, that which sets modernism apart from old orders and thereby leads to its own succession in the postmodern—may now be generalized as a form of social reproduction, reflecting the inner dynamics of the more encompassing era we are in, modernity, as founded in the “ego’s era” of subject-centered reason. In a series of “maxims of modernity,” Jameson places the question of epochality and periodization at the center of modernism, as a social logic and, with Zukofsky, a formal feature.

Modernity’s “new time” leads to two possibilities for form that are caught up in each other: a cyclical account of rupture and renewal (“an awareness of history invested in the feeling of a radical break”) and a typological repetition of modern epochs (as “somehow analogous to this or that period in the past”; 21). Just as break and epoch are intertwined in Zukofsky’s “A”–9, generating the logic of substitution and overwriting seen everywhere in his work, so Jameson’s modernity is caught in a dialectic of break and substitution—leading to his first maxim, “we cannot not periodize” (29). This maxim condenses two features of modernity for Jameson: its punctual atemporality, leading to eruptive decisionism as a politics, and its durational narrativity, as a result of its epochal structure, the “long waves” of capital and cultural reproduction that define the era we are in. Clearly Jameson would like to privilege the latter over the eruptions over the former, leading to the precedence of narrative over nonnarration everywhere in his work: “The [punctual] event [or decisive break] thus seems to contain within itself synchronically the very logic or dynamic of some diachronic unfolding over time. . . . This is also the very logic of storytelling itself, in which the teller of the tale can expand a given datum at great length, or compress it into a narrative fact or point; and in which the axis of selection is projected onto the axis of combination (as in Jakobson’s famous formula for poetry)” (34). “Modernity” will be the sign of the reflexiveness of one into the other: of atemporality and duration, condensation and displacements of a single narrative unfolding—often, for Jameson, at the moment of succession or co-presence of two competing systems. This reflexive overcoming, in turn, offers an explanation for the rewriting process in Zukofsky, allowing us to “restore the social and historical meaning of the rewriting operation by positing it as a trace and an abstraction from a real historical event and trauma” (39), in the shift from one mode to another. As a result, “all nonnarrative history is susceptible to translation into a properly narrative form” and we arrive at maxim 2: “modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category” (40). But it is important, here, to note that nonnarrative is not simply being overwritten by narration, but co-exists with it as that which allows for epochality in the first place.

Next, Jameson must account for the single most punctual event of modernity: the accession of subject-centered reason; we need “a name for this event which is the coming to consciousness” (43). The cogito as durationless moment and disembodied space is a placeholder only, “and this confronts us with a dialectical outcome in which the emergent subject is somehow generated out of the space of the object world, and becomes describable (pure location) only when the space of the latter has been reorganized into pure homogeneous extension” (44), the dimensionality of Cartesian space. In order to reconstruct a frame for this event, Jameson mobilizes Heidegger’s use of Vorstellung (representation) as an alternative to Descartes’s cogitare as that which brings the object before consciousness in, indeed, the original “constructivist moment”: “What Heidegger calls representation is a way of constructing the object in a specific way. . . . But what is the purpose of this construction? Nothing less, Heidegger tells us, than the construction of certainty; and, as every reader of Descartes knows, this can only be achieved by way of a preliminary construction of doubt. . . . It is only in this way of this newly achieved certainty that . . . something like ‘modernity can make its appearance” (47). This durationless event is thus epochal, the inauguration of the modern where “the construction of the object of representation as perceptible formally opens a place from which that perception is supposed to take place: it is this structural or formal place . . . which is the subject” (48). As a moment of liberation from the scholastic orders of the past, this overcoming, in turn, will allow Heidegger to construct “a pre-history of the mode of certainty,” which he does in “two modes of [his] narrative of modernity”: “In the first mode, a feature that had a specific function in the first historical system—in this case, certainty of salvation—is abstracted from that context . . . and transferred to a new system,” which leads to “the second mode of the narrative in question, namely that of the survival and persistence of residual elements belonging to the older system” (51). The process of substitution and overwriting, thus, is constitutive of the certainty of the modern, which cannot, for Jameson, be based only in consciousness. We arrive at maxim 3: “The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated” (57). The scene of coming to consciousness is one such situation, best understood in a series of epochal constructions from the pre-modern to the present, as Jameson shows in key examples of such shifts from Heidegger and Foucault. This is how self-reflexivity turns out not to be a punctual moment but a narrative, social construct. (One question to raise here, however, is whether Jameson is really talking about narrative per se, or some other kind of spatial framework, in his account of temporal duration.)

For Jameson, there can be many moments of epochal succession in the modern. Foucault, as is well known, constructs a series of such shifts, from the pre-modern to the Classical period, followed by the Victorian/Modern epoch “of the invention of modern history as such” and an obscure fourth period that anticipates the postmodern, “a shadowy and prophetic realm, a realm of language and death, which lives in the interstices of our own modernity and its negation and denial” (62). As the first and last are not properly framed or closed, they cannot be considered real periods, leading Jameson to characterize the inner logic of periodization as “necessarily construct[ing] a frame around itself, and build[ing] on the basis of a subtle interplay between two forms of negation, the contrary and contradictory, between differentiation and outright opposition, between the locally distinguished and the absolute negation, antagonistic and non-antagonistic, the non- and the anti-“ (62)—or what is outside the period frame versus what is within it. Aesthetic modernism, to make an abrupt move ahead, captures such a logic of internal differentiation and external negation: formalism and autonomy are the immediate result. We begin, here, to map modernism onto a narrative of modernity, with Jameson’s permission, in a logic that leads from temporal succession to spatial articulation via epochal boundaries. It is the continuing proliferation of epochs of the modern that permits this, as for example in Foucault’s final construction of “a zone of non-knowledge which we have characterized as something like a fourth historical moment, even though in another sense it coexists with our own daytime world of historicism and the human sciences as their photographic negative” (72), the realm of the great madmen of the avant-garde, from Sade to Hölderlin to Artaud and the locus, for Foucault, of modernist aesthetics.

From here, Jameson moves, as he might, to the next horizon of epochality that needs to be factored into his genealogy of modernity: the mode of production itself. As with his consistent refusal of autonomy to subject-centered reason, Jameson will likewise refuse the autonomy of the mode of production. Rather than creating an ever greater differentiation of functional relations, as in Niklas Luhmann or neoconservatism, modernity as the mode of production is articulated as a series of autonomous and semi-autonomous moments that embed their historicity in, precisely, the manner of substitution and overwriting: “Here what is stressed is not the moment of separation itself [in which capitalism overcomes previous modes of production], but what happens to the previous parts, now new entities and small-scale wholes and totalities in their own right” (91). Crucially, contra Luhmann, social reflexivity is a consequence not of systemic differentiation but of a dialogic relation between autonomous and semi-autonomous elements. While Jameson develops his account of modernism along the lines of this distinction, in the end he misses its fundamental payoff of his logic, proposing in his final maxim a succession of the modern by the postmodern that will eventually succeed, itself, to the utopian horizon congealed in modernism. Maxim 4, “No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it is able to come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern” (94) thus leads directly to Jameson’s ultimate horizon: “What we really need is a wholesale displacement of the thematics of modernity by the desire called Utopia” (215). While this continues the dynamics of epochality of the modern, it cannot account for its further articulation in real time and space, relying as it does on a superseded abstraction of wholeness that remains Jameson’s indebtedness to Lukàcs.

Epochal succession, we will see, is equally spatial articulation. In what follows, I trace a logic of epochal succession as spatial articulation in a series of three examples from the modern and postmodern. The first, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals (1932-33) in the Detroit Institute of Arts, rather than being seen as a kind of deficient, not fully realized, antiformalist, populist modernism, should be recognized as a locus classicus for the account of epochal modernity Jameson pursues. Indeed the entire effort of the murals is to identity the moment of construction, both literally and figurally the scene of automobile production at Ford’s River Rouge plant, whose spatial and temporal logics interpenetrate and create each other as a form of “coming to consciousness.” As a site-specific work, the murals re-present a process of negation (the abstraction of labor and materials, to begin with) as a condition of their relative autonomy, as they reassemble elements of the lifeworld of industrial Detroit at a new site of production, but also of differentiation, in the reflexive organization of semi-autonomous elements within the work. Rivera constructs an allegory of the aesthetic as production, but this is not simply an overlay of one form of artistic construction over another. Rather, it is informed by a logic of succession in both art and production, which makes the totality of the work a form of substitution and overwriting in two senses. As art, it supersedes the genre of easel painting by incorporating mass cultural address and folkloric decorative arts, interpreting them as co-extensive with the mode of production. As production, it exceeds, as does the assembly line itself, the modes of individual craft work that were still employed in the carriage trade and machine parts industry in Detroit through the end of the century. The form of the work, then, brings together epochal social and artistic logics, and its internal differentiation—of subthemes, perspectives, characters, mythic elements, and so on—is only made possible by these epochal breaks. Production is the aesthetic insofar as it creates a new space of relations; the assembly line’s transformation of the lifeworld is undertaken precisely in the world of the senses; its form of integrated organization produces not just transportation but a new experience of the aesthetic. As “cars burst into the light,” Rivera’s murals depict the epochal breaks of art and production just before their emergence.

The scale of the work, as anyone who has spent time in the Rivera courtyard knows, is stunning in its exactness of detail, the capaciousness of the entire project, and the logic of local articulation between and among its elements. Totality splits into faultlines of articulation that make production possible; here, the constructivist moment is the gap (of the courtyard where the viewer is standing) between the fabrication of the engine block, on one side, and the chassis (with the apocalyptic “body drop” in the background) on the other. From this fundamental dislocation, we may chart the articulation of all the elements in the assembly plant; the relation of the plant to the world outside (spectators viewing the line); to its own prehistory (Henry Ford explaining the principles of the engine to the workers); its future (the parking lot that was not built when the mural was painted but is depicted in it); its larger social contexts (war, death, and destruction, on the one hand; progress, health, and plenty on the other); its mobilization of human populations (the four races depicted above the assembly line, and the racialization of the line workers below); and finally the outer horizon of its relation to nature (minerals mined in the Upper Peninsula; geological strata producing oil and diamonds for drillbits). This logic is not confined to relations in the work but extends through its construction as site to other zones in Detroit, beginning with the River Rouge itself (which has just reinstated assembly line tours) to the entire social space of the city, seen as a site of production; it extends, as well, through its history, from its militant defense by 10,000 workers in 1933 when the Catholic Church attacked it as sacrilegious to the present, as a site of Detroit’s pre-history. An important aspect of the work is its public availability; everyone in Detroit has a personal history of viewing the work as a moment of social reflexivity.

One could proceed here through the Rivera murals as a site of modernism as aligned with the mode of production, and by epochally overcoming its site-specificity move toward the horizon of the utopian. One can even ask, Are the murals utopian? They seem to put forward a beneficent wish for the improvement of mankind, even as they posit the mode of production in the assembly line as equally destructive. Right here, however, Jameson misses a crucial point of the distinction between differentiation and autonomization: utopia would position the murals toward an ever-receding moment in time, but it would not account for their articulation in the actual social space of Detroit. In the first instance, they become either a symbol or ironic, and the promesse de bonheur of the assembly line is suspended and deferred; in the second, they are active in constructing social reality, even in their use of irony, displacement, and allegory. This is not to say that utopia may not be accounted for as a displaced element of an older social formation, a congealed history that expands into its millennial destiny. But as Jameson notes, “‘As differentiation’ descends into the smallest pores of the social substance, it may well no longer be accompanied by the production of ever more numerous autonomous or semi-autonomous levels or domains” (146). Rather than the social articulation of elements at various levels in Rivera’s murals, reified modernity might create a univocal technology,  Heidegger’s Gestell or “empty Utopian domain of language as non-existent” (147). On the way to utopia, then, reification tends to set in and render equivalent logics that articulate utopia as a semi-autonomous zone, one among many, that preserves but never fully surpasses the logic of differentiation that originally constructed it. (Let us remember that, as a nonplace, utopia has a lateral relation to modernity, not a narrative finality.)

Utopia has a tendency toward circularity—utopia in, utopia out—rather than as an effect of production. Here, Jameson might profit from Rita Felski’s discussion of the spatial articulation that cultural studies brings to modernism. In her account, “the culture of modernity is clearly indebted to two key ideas of cultural studies that are often ignored or misunderstood: an expanded notion of the aesthetic field and a theory of articulation” (504). Somewhat surprisingly, she claims that cultural studies “reveals not a rejection but an expansion and pluralization of the aesthetic field,” brought about by the inclusion of popular culture (506). Certainly Rivera’s murals expand the aesthetic field into a social logic, and they do so precisely by employing popular arts, comic strips, folk religion, movies, tourist guides, and advertising. Their drama of creation and destruction might even take part in popular entertainments such as melodrama, which in turn encode “the sensory overload, heightened stimulation, and unexpected dangers of modern urban life” (509) for Felski. This expansion of the aesthetic, in turn, becomes political through a process of articulation, as “a theory of social correspondences, non-correspondences, and contradictions [that is] how contexts are made, unmade, and remade,” a nonhierarchical and lateral series of “hookup[s], temporary bridge[s], forged connection[s] between two or more elements” (510-11). It is precisely such lateral processes that are at work in the extension of the aesthetic in Detroit Industry; as it ironically invokes a utopian future, it even more effectively makes possible the lived experience of social relations in Detroit. The move from the aesthetic to the political is precisely Rivera’s capacity for articulation.

My next example is a documentary installation by California artist Richard Bolton titled Subject: Male Violence, at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 1992. One of the most didactic art works I have seen, Bolton joins a tradition of socially conscious conceptual art that began with the Information show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, and that created a hybrid idiom of conceptual strategies for “nonaesthetic” ends, one that continues in the Shrinking Cities project in Detroit and elsewhere. Bolton mounted a plethora of documentary evidence of male violence on rudimentary display supports, creating a therapeutic scene in which visitors might be educated. His staged displays presented documentary evidence of this violence—in advertising images, commercial videos, self-help tapes, legal dossiers, newspaper clippings, domestic objects such as toasters, knives, and rolling pins, training manuals, and various “voice-over” messages—as reinforcements of disarticulation in which subject positions marked “male” are the source of dysfunctional behaviors that have as their objects subject positions marked “female.” The contexts for this aggression are the contiguous worlds of media and public institutions, supercharged with violent affects that the safe havens of home and family can only feed back. As a result, public and private worlds become sites of a reciprocal, reinforcing social pathology. Such obviously cultural-studies–influenced art is readable only on a faultline of aesthetic strategies: presenting nonaesthetic subject matter as a substitution for the aesthetic, and positing a politics precisely where the aesthetic is overwritten. Felski’s account, however, helps us to see his work as an extension of the aesthetic in a social logic of articulation. Even in its negativity, the work expands the compass of art as critique, as it brings male violence into a register of sensory apprehensions, some abstract and objectified and distanced but others visceral and direct. In its strategy of substitution and overwriting of previous art, the work in turn preserves Joseph Kosuth’s epochal break with the aesthetic in his 1969 article “Art After Philosophy,” where he famously declared, “Works of art are analytic propositions” (164) and “Aesthetic considerations are indeed always extraneous to an object’s function or ‘reason-to-be’” (159). What resulted from this anti-aesthetic declaration, however, could only be a re-aestheticization of whatever could be declared a work of art; the concept of art itself became an aesthetic positivity. Following Kosuth’s epochal moment, Bolton simply extends the nominalism of conceptual art into a form of social articulation. As with Rivera’s mural, the site-specificity of work thus links contiguous phenomenon, the various tables of forensic evidence, three-ring binders, diagnostic manuals, and the like; Bolton even reserves a special place for viewer responses on panels of butcher-block paper. I remember the memorable lines, “I was chased by 100 (approx.) Nazi skinheads in Leeds (U.K.)” and “anyone who advocates violence should have the shit beaten out of them.” As art and as critique, Bolton’s work is exemplary of the negation and reconfiguration of the aesthetic as articulatory practice, and his strategies were echoed in numerous examples in the succeeding period (roughly, from the watershed Whitney Biennial of 1992 to the recent Documenta XI in 2002).

[For a powerpoint slide show of Ron Allen's play, click here.]

My final example is the recent production of Detroit playwright Ron Allen’s avant-garde theater piece Entertainer Zero Machine, over a three-week run in Fall 2004. Allen’s work presents a series of nonnarrative tableaux for a group of nameless, outrageously costumed actors who erupt into hysterical or unmotivated speech, interact in dysfunctional dialogues, and congeal in random and disorganized, or hyperorganized but unmotivated, ensemble movement. A second group of actors, the “No Mind Guerillas,” appear at various points without clothing to interrupt them, culminating in an unclothed finale with all the actors at the end. The set comprises a backdrop of urban detritus, built along the lines of Detroit artist Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, and four nine-foot tall metal prison cages, under which are suspended two video monitors for nonstop media input. Each tableaux is separated by blackouts, loud techno music, and, occasionally, gunfire, which tends to register as noise until one listens more closely. The play opens with video for the universal product, “Magnum Pussy 25,” whose name and benefits will be repeated throughout the play. As a site for such Deleuze and Guattari-like “order words” or paranoid introjects, the media becomes a form of violent possession that structures the socious. A kind of “ontological scatology” characterizes the postmodern condition, with eruptions of high-impact, deformed power words standing for its lack of protension and retention. At various intervals, different characters take on the mask of being “the Entertainer,” the source of the paranoid introjects others can only repeat in their conditions. Numerous scenes invoke institutions such as prisons, psychiatric interviews, confessionals, bondage dungeons, minstrel shows, and TV studios. In Allen’s postmodern Detroit, race and gender turn inside out at moments of simultaneous transgression and denial: “there are no black people in this play / everybody’s hetero / everyone’s gay.” What is remarkable is that this abyss of media surface and social detritus is intended to be experienced, through the de-autonomization of the nonnarrative sets, as a kind of realism. Rather than articulating social space as in Rivera, or institutions of violence as in Bolton, Allen breaks with any conceivable positivity as his mode of social articulation:

Group (chanting): wet     wet     wet
Woman 4: I’m a man
Group: wet     wet     wet
Man 4: They call him machine
Woman 5: On the outskirts of the city
Man 1: beauty     beauty     beauty
Group: wet     wet     wet
Woman 2: He’s wanted in the universe for stealing wet
Man 1: I’m a man m-a-n I wet between two legs
Group: Pretty   pretty wet
Woman 1: He is wanted for stealing the wet from sweat
Man 4: He drank the wet and found it good/stolen labor I’m a man
Woman 1: He stole the wet from rain machines
Group: Wet   wet   wet
Woman 2: I stayed up all night playing with the wet . . . . teaching it . . . . submission
Woman 4: He had a modular life/ he could put a cell phone in his wet and be a talk show a loaded wet tongue for hire [MS]

In this passage, the play between “wet” and “sweat” draws out a series of unbounded gender positions (in the different ways wetness intersects with masculine and feminine) from the univocal world of labor and machine. Language leads to the unfixing of gender in Allen’s play, from the hypersexuality of the entertainer, commodity/whore, and Santa/ cowboy figures, locked in addictive behaviors to media, Viagra, and cocaine, to the cross-gender performance of a black male actor in bra and skirt. Sexuality is also introjected in realist moments, as when a 70-year-old man acts out in his care facility:

Man 1: I was 70 years old a black man living in a nursing home / I was a typical senior citizen they said I fit all the demographics and all the institutional profiles / [. . .] but there was one problem I had a strong vital sex drive / at 70 I would screw the 80 and 70 years old women at the home / and I was hung like a donkey they said [. . .] I would maintain an erection and fuck two or three times a week / the staff psychologist didn’t know what to do or how to control it / so they sent me to the psych ward at the hospital / they tried to medicate me I did not meet the statistics for an elderly 70 year old black man so I must be crazy [. . .] so they restrained me [MS]

This tension between language-centered devices, by which characters and situations are structured on the possibilities of depersonalized, decontextualized expressive acts, and realist references—to media, institutions, politics, sexuality, the street—is precisely where the social logic of Allen’s play is articulated. Its negativity is the moment of breakdown from context to language, and vice versa, as it creates new spaces of articulation that depart from the constructed frameworks of social production, yet return us to the lifeworld of Detroit. Allen’s play is a form of negative social comprehension founded on constructed orders of experience that pushes them to moments of disconnection as a social logic.

In this series of examples, from Rivera to Bolton and Allen, it is hard to tell where the epochal succession of modernism ends and postmodernism begins. As a form of the vernacular postmodern, Allen’s play redistributes the logic of the modern in a form of spatialized disconnection. Everything in Allen’s dystopia, however, is enacted within and as the mode of production that is Detroit; it is the direct consequence, and inverted image, of the aesthetics of spatial articulation in Rivera’s murals. Rivera makes the mode of production into a lived experience of sensory immediacy, as he constructs affective ties and ruptures between the components of Detroit industry, as destructive of previous lifeworlds as it may be. Allen, oppositely, creates autonomous, disconnected characters who erupt in pointless, affective immediacy as the condition of their sociality; the factory is everywhere and nowhere at once, spitting each out as deficient products who have failed inspection and will be consigned to the human rubbish heap. If Bolton’s social logic of violence still has an assured grip on its organization within an aesthetics of display and reflection; Allen’s characters are adrift in the black space between social positions. All institutional logics only further the mode of disconnection—and this is what keeps them in chains. Remarkably, then, the piece ends precisely where Jameson would predict—in the only conceivable alternative, a demonstration of utopian community, as the characters disrobe and perform an act of ritual sacrifice which, although unsettling, allows us to gauge the distance between the reality of our condition within absent orders, and the material condition of our “being real.” The play, as with Rivera’s murals and Bolton’s installation, creates a space for further reflection in the public domain, in a “focus group” between playwright, actors, and audience after the show, a nonutopian space of community that is itself a moment of succession. Indeed, each work creates both a form of bounded totality and a space for further articulation as a necessary component of its construction. By reflecting on social breakdowns within the play and by extending its reflection outward, Allen’s permanent avant-garde—a postmodern aesthetic practice if there ever was one—articulates, by negation, the social logics initiated by modernism’s epochal breaks. 

[Presented at Modernist Studies Association, Vancouver, 23 October 2004. Draft version for the purpose of discussion. Not to be cited or reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media. Photos and text copyright © Barrett Watten 2004.]

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