Introductory remarks at Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, University of California, Irvine, 19 November 2004. For the preliminary program, click here.
1-Year Plan
Post 9: 11/25/04
Diasporic Avant-Gardes
Introductory remarks at Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, University of California, Irvine, 19 November 2004. For the preliminary program, click here.
If
there was an originating thought that gave rise to organizing a conference
under the rubric of Diasporic Avant-Gardes, it was to promote the work
and implications of the "avant-garde" in our current conditions of
cultural dislocation, and in so doing bring the work of avant-gardes with
differing assumptions and communities into contact, as an act of both creative
possibility and aesthetic redefinition. Immediately, questions arise on all
sides: What do you mean by the "avant-garde," and is it still a useful
term? Isn’t it tied to Eurocentric notions of progress and the metropolis
that, even in the act of innovation, continue the cultural politics of the
imperial states against which they are in revolt? And hasn’t it now led to career strategies of formal experiment that are divorced from their original
motives, reproducing their by-now habituated assumptions in the long march
toward normalizing their earlier provocations and winning a seat at the table of the
great conversation, the museum and gallery roster, the literary canon?
It
is precisely to call out assumptions embedded in communities of practice
that we wanted to bring poets and critics with differing assumptions and history
together. Not to level the playing field, no. Not to get over the persistent
implications of differences of history and perspective that are so conditioned
we will never get rid of them, and which may be sources of innovation. Not to
touch each and all with a magic wand so that “differences can make a
community” and, in our regard for each other’s art, overcome the profound
scale of cultural contradictions that engender us. To explore a poetics of
difference is not to make it a neutral term; it is to understand that difference
is a condition we live, thrive on, suffer with, and reproduce in our work.
If
the “avant-garde” of our assumption is not the historical avant-garde
of metropolitan exile, that international assembly at a signal diasporic moment
in the Café Voltaire, nor the proliferation of formal innovations that
foreground signification, materiality, support, ideology in transforming the
practices of the art, what is it? In my own writing on the avant-garde, I have
spoken of its horizon of “systemic de-totalization,” one that takes an
immanently negative position in relation to the machine-like processes of
rationalization that makes McWorld the ever-more homogenous and violent place it
is. The avant-garde, in my account, works at the limits or borders of its
assumptions, and, following cultural studies' emphasis on cultures as
articulated at their borders, questions its limits and produces its work in
social space. Through its logics of spatialization, rather than any progressive
history, the avant-garde becomes many.
Sites
of spatial articulation of my own collectivity, the Language School of poetry,
have been many, though seldom sufficiently thought through. To begin with, didn’t we
come together in two, three, four urban environments (San Francisco, New York,
Washington, D.C., Toronto)? There was never a single metropolis á la Paris,
Berlin, London, Rome in which we produced our writing; rather, we saw ourselves in a more
encompassing space of “language”—potentially the Ur-diaspora. The five
writers of Legend, published in 1980, wrote from New York, San Francisco,
and Toronto—here the multinational as well as the multi-authorial character of
the movement is in evidence. Through the 1980s, there were definitive contacts with French, Soviet, and U.K. language-centered writings,
as evidenced in the issue of Poetics Journal titled Elsewhere
(1989) and later the multi-authored
collaboration of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991).
But our internationalism was never in the "all for one, one for all"
spirit of French surrealism, which often saw its community of desire as
transparent to a monolingual politics of culture. If surrealism has at times been a
point of comparison to the Language School, we may continue by outlining some of
the problems with a language-centered avant-garde in its cultural assumptions.
The opacity of the sign is one way to overcome cultural limitations, but
often only a preliminary move.
Diasporas
are many; let us say we inhabited one. It is important to know that. There are
others. Increasingly, one is in contact with their difference, but not in any
universaling logic. The internet, here, has been transformative—in its
rapid redefining of dislocation as access, the internet has made it newly
possible to enter into the assumptions of other cultures. In my work on Detroit
techno and Afro-pop music, I have been able to enter into articulate and
detailed contexts that otherwise would have been inaccessible to me. Leading
to this this conference—as a real-time version of access and contact between
communities of practice, never forgetting that we don’t always get everything
each other is saying, where we are coming from, what the real point is.
I
want to leave, as my hope for this conference as a productive space, a sense of
how completely out there this event could be. Really, such a thing has rarely been attempted—at least in our benighted land of cultural
homogeneity. In Europe and the rest of the world, international arts conferences
are well understood as part of human possibility. Working out of the culturally
limited space of metropolitan American arts assumptions, Robert Smithson, an
early proponent of the diasporic avant-garde, in his definitive
manifesto of cultural displacement “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the
Yucatan,” offered the following redefinition of social space and artistic practice in
1970:
On this site the third
upside-down tree was planted. The first is in Alfred, New York State, the second
is in Captiva Island, Florida; lines drawn on a map will connect them. Are they
totems of rootlessness that relate to one another? Is this a mode of travel that
does not in the least try to establish a coherent coming and going between the
here and the there? Perhaps they are dislocated "North and South
poles" marking peripheral places, polar regions of the mind fixed in
mundane matter—poles that have slipped from the geographical moorings of the
world's axis. Central points that evade being central. Are they dead roots that
haplessly hang off inverted trunks in a vast "no man's land" that
drifts toward vacancy? In the riddling zone, nothing is for sure. [129]
[Quote from Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Text copyright © Barrett Watten 2004. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]