Post 42: Critical Regionalism

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Post 42: 11/17/07

Radical Particularity, Critical Regionalism,
and the Resistance to Globalization

Presented at a panel on "Marxism, Poetics, and Spatial Formation," organized by Barrett Watten and Ruth Jennison (U Massachusetts), with Michael Davidson (UCSD), chair, and Carrie Noland (UC Irvine); Modernist Studies Association, Long Beach, 1 November 2007 (note: only the first six sections are presented here)

In this essay, I argue that there is an emerging transnational style among postmodern, postnational, avant-garde, and diasporic poets that relies on the accretion of what I term "radical particulars." Language poetry is just one of the range of these styles. As with the earlier model of surrealist internationalism, it has been suggested that a poetics of radical particularity as anti-national and anti-identitarian offers a standard for comparability among these traditions, even better the possibility of solidarity. In The Constructivist Moment, I raised a polemic against any such easy transfer from one context, literature, or region to another. To develop this claim I will apply a refunctioned, pluralist concept of "critical regionalism" to new poetic genres in the avant-garde that re-map spaces of the global by means of the negative relation between particular and universal. Here, I present a series of eight critical "regions" as differential re-mappings of theory and history, poetics and region.

Manufactured Landscapes (Edward Burtynsky, dir., 2006) opens its visual essay on the spatial logics of globalization with perhaps the longest tracking shot ever made: roughly five minutes of a slow leftward scan of row after row of fifty-yard-long workbench assembly stations, each of which is equipped for timed delivery and pick up of materials and partly assembled goods; each manned by an individual worker or a small group of workers; each involved in exactly one stage of a complex manufacturing process whose final product cannot be determined; each equipped with requisite power tools, conveyor belts, part bins, and lighting. As the camera inexorably pulls left, each row discloses a new vista of human labor as reified particulars: a woman worker, in uniform, brushes back her hair as she focuses through safety glasses on the part she is drilling; a team of men in orange t-shirts, a bit more relaxed, review the day's work orders before setting to work; a woman puts her head down on the table, exhausted; men roll dollies of partly made goods to the next station. The partly assembled products are particulars too, caught between stages of assembly between delivery bins and the next assembly routine. The camera itself substitutes for the total form of the assembly line within the sublime horizon of the factory complex, disclosing an otherwise invisible global economy within a spatial terrain it has staked out and delimited as the "mode of production." The walls of the factory complex in this sense are the utmost irony: a dimensionless place that exists everywhere and nowhere at once. This is China, where the mode of production is both ubiquitous and nonexistent. What we see, what we get, what is made, what have become are—just particulars.

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (Henry Ferrini, dir., 2007) tells its tale of placeless place with an entirely different visual rhetoric: a series of palimpsestic maps—from the moment of discovery of Cape Ann to the Coast and Geodetic Survey—that dissolve into a sequence of rapidly moving aerial shots that pull back onto dramatic views of the coast. The juxtaposition of the partial and dissolving intersecting the comprehensive and retrospective serves the overarching narrative of Ferrini's documentary: to reconstruct Olson's sense of Gloucester as place by means of unlinking and recombining the strands of his unfinished Maximus Poems. Olson's epic, which foundered midway in its global re-mapping and is presented as always fragmentary and incomplete, is re-mapped onto Gloucester as a layered, historical site; both together produce a redemptive space of imagined polis that is anywhere and nowhere at once. This remapped poetics is equated with the local mode of production before its undoing on the global market: the fishing fleets and processing plants for frozen fish and pet food that defined Gloucester's economy in terms of its location: west of the Grand Banks, northeast of the Boston market.

Fish drawn out of the sea becomes a synecdoche for the global economy, which under pressure from capital "elsewhere" saturating the market and lowering prices, erodes the local industry. Olson seeks out this inevitable destruction as a central figure for his work: for the lure of the Grand Banks in rough weather, read the risks of profit and loss that are continuously allegorized, through the tragic loss of the prior organic community, into the terms of the poem. As allegorical displacement, however, the poem in turn creates, through its valorization of the local as the only knowable experience, a possibility for resistance to its encroachments. Globalization—symbolized by the "mole" of Route 128 bringing truck traffic and later NAFTA to the single-item economy of Gloucester—is countered, not by Olson's negativity in his "going sideways, going smash," but by a radical particularity derived from the broken allegory of its "materials." Having gone down with the ship of globalization, Olson's epic salvages what remains in an attempt to return to the world before globalization, before place was sold on the market of placelessness.

III

Nothing could be farther from the ephemeral concept of a "world car"—one that could be made in all regions of the global economy, with resources and labor equivalent in all of them, and that would satisfy every regulatory requirement—than the merger of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler in 1998. "Zusammen mit Motown"—an advertising campaign for ThyssenKrupp often seen along highways in Detroit—is an optimistic slogan for German-American manufacturing ties in stark opposition to the reality of German corporate culture, union relations, and state structures that turned out to be incommensurate with their American counterparts. From the outset of the Daimler-Chrysler merger, German management style, with its top-down control of decision-making, found little in common with a board-centered, socially connected, self-protecting American managerial class that knew each other from the golf course. Jürgen Schrempp's preemptive managerial style led to in a series of translation problems, management inefficiencies, executive firings, and a rapid decline of stock prices that peaked with a 1993 suit by investor Kirk Kerkorian over whether the merger had been one "among equals" or a misleading corporate takeover. German labor unions, more entrenched in state and corporate power structures than possible in the U.S., balked at American standards of equal opportunity, while at the same time, lawsuits brought by American Jewish groups demanded recognition of and compensation for slave labor used by Daimler during the Nazi era. Finally, the German state welfare system had freed Daimler from health-care costs that were dragging American automakers into unprofitability; rather than being leaner and more flexible because of their greater leverage over capital and unions, U.S. companies were mired in fixed costs of pensions and health plans.

Within two years, the world market sensed a wounded animal and closed for the kill. With deer-in-headlights prescience, Daimler-Chrysler developed a market for only one convincing new design, the PT Cruiser, while its other product developments fizzled. It was as if two incompatible operating programs had been superimposed over each other; as one journalist wrote, "The two cultures don't even intersect. . . . They are not even on the same planet. They have merged, but it doesn't mean they are making each other's cars or designing or marketing or selling each other" ("Importance of Being Persuasive"). The up-market luxury cars made for Daimler-Benz did not benefit from the larger U.S. market, and cheaper American parts were not utilized in German cars. Meanwhile, in the American division, "the phenomenal market share growth of sport utility vehicles, the wellspring of Chrysler's profits in the mid-1990's, [began] to slow, putting pressure on prices[, while its] minivans and pickup trucks [came] under attack from high-performance models like the Honda Odyssey minivan and Toyota Tundra pickup truck" ("This 1998 Model Is Looking More like a Lemon").

Global capital's quest to level the differences between two regions of the world economy only exacerbated them. A critical regionalism begins at this point: while capitalism creates increasing distinctions between profitable and unprofitable sectors in order to maximize profits, the specific geographies, histories, and cultures of these regions become less likely to be rendered equivalent in exchange. The world car is an ephemeral fantasy that will never be built, an allegory for the regional differences in material terms that can never made equivalent by market factors. By 2005, Jürgen Schrempp was gone, having lost the confidence of investors, to be replaced by handle-bar-mustached Dieter Zetschke (the Dr. Z of recent advertising campaigns), who assessed the company's liabilities and sold to a union-busting holding company in two years. The new CEO, a former head of Home Depot, now speaks of the automobile as a mobile living room complete with cupholders and upholstery, not about getting from point A to point B. (On the day I delivered this paper in Long Beach, 13,000 job cuts were announced as a direct result of the new UAW contract.) A critical regionalism may be founded on the untotalizable negativity that led to that result.

Radical particularity has been a hallmark of the avant-garde since Lautréamont observed a corpse floating down a Parisian canal and equated it with radical evil. If history is what hurts, a corpse would be its material substrate, the Real that interpellates the fantasmatic unfolding of an alternative reality in what I have called "the constructivist moment." Less theorized has been Lautréamont's spatial mapping of South American wars of national liberation onto the topography of Paris as a site of deathward fantasy, ending with the uncanny parallel between the siege of Montevideo, Uruguay, the poet experienced at age five and the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War when he died. Using Lautréamont as an early exemplar of the avant-garde's spatial politics allows me to theorize its deployment of radical particularity as the material residue of discrepant topographies, where regions of the global do not come into easy conformity in a center/periphery or metropolitan/regional model. It is for this reason that sites of the avant-garde have been various, and infrequently identical to sites of political or economic power in the nation state. Raymond Williams's example of the social formation of the historical avant-garde, the spatial politics of displacement of Zürich Dada, links its discrepant re-mapping directly to its foregrounding of language.

Let me, then, apply this insight to the spatial formation of the avant-garde I know best, and am currently writing on: the San Francisco Language school as it emerged in the late 1970s. I want to make three claims about the spatial politics of our group, in its historical moment, in relation to its privileging of radical particularity and material language in innovative form. First, the dynamics of the group—in both personal and aesthetic terms—took place as a spatially articulated and never completed set of exchanges: the Grand Piano (the coffee house in the Haight Ashbury where readings were held) becomes a site of exchange, for both the rivalrous competitiveness of formal invention and our communal acceptance of the results. Second, due to San Francisco's relatively provincial horizon as a region of art in the 1970s, there was an aversion to specific identification with California or the West Coast as a site; I have suggested that the horizon of "Language" may be considered a "placeless place" informed by a series of open-ended re-mappings of cultural location onto an as-yet unrealized location that would be identified with the form of the work in its obdurate materiality. Finally, in the writing of The Grand Piano we have undertaken yet another re-mapping, of the physical site of our coming together as a group in the 1970s and from which we are now dispersed, via internet conference sites and listservs where the work was originally composed, onto the serial form of the ten volumes of the project (now approaching the halfway mark).

The implications for my present argument are these: that radical particularity as a formal device depends on the discrepant superimposition of culturally saturated spaces, and that it re-presents, often in the spatial form of disjunct "bits" of language that we visually identify as a "Language poem" (or variant), a way of concretizing and comprehending such disjunctions. As a cultural form, language-centered writing, as it re-presents the radical particularity of disjunct experience that cannot be totalized, is relative to its negotiations with cultural space. The following pay-offs follow from this claim: 1) there is no universalizing cultural politics possible in the forms of radical particularity or the "turn to language." Rather, the discrepant forms of the avant-garde may depend on the re-mapping of territorial forms that are bounded and named, such as the nation state, as well as those that are nonidentical and open, such as "Language writing." Insofar as identity and nonidentity depend on identification with spatial form at such sites, there is no privilege for nonidentity as a cultural politics. 2) Thus, the center/periphery model of metropolitan modernity is only one of many spatial configurations for the kinds of spatial re-mappings that lead to new cultural forms. The history of "regions" of modernity needs to be rethought in ways that contest the center/ periphery model and focus on spatial re-mappings whose negativity ends not in the material particularity of radical form but in the specific discrepancies of language and culture it enacts.

Critical regionalism is a site of uneven development among critical terrains. For Kenneth Frampton, whose "Toward a Critical Regionalism" popularized it for postmodern theory (in Hal Foster's anthology The Anti-Aesthetic), "The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place" ("Some Reflections"). Frampton sees the avant-garde as complicit with universalization, with the International School and Clement Greenberg, but misses its embeddedness in specific cultural locations. What is interesting, however, is his sense that region, in order to be critical, must be presented within the postmodern work "indirectly," in order to distinguish its use from uncritical versions of the "local" that the modernist movement sought to overturn. Heidegger had earlier objected even to the grammatical forms of copula and predication as mere "regions" of being; for him, regions are phenomenological obstacles to truth. While Frampton's use returns "regions" to a critique of universals, and has its place in the development of urban and global theory, I want to develop an alternative sense of "critical regionalism" that involves not the dismantling of the universal/particular or center/periphery hierarchy but a horizontal re-mapping of cultural forms that depends on cross-regional structures of displacement and desire.

I have found Cheryl Herr's Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies (1996) a useful beginning toward this end, if one that has been scarcely followed up on. For Herr, cross-regional identifications are sites of deterritorializing desire (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) and negative critique (after Adorno) that locate negativity in the structure of identification itself. How this works in practice is something like this: inhabitants of the Midwest (say, Iowa) with Irish forebears might, in some form of belated positivity, identify with Ireland as "original" homeland that precedes immigration, while contemporary Irish might identify with their American cousins in the New World as an alternative polity or economy. But in a critical regionalism, a more open formation of communities comes into play, in their displacements of desire for and nonidentity with each other. Twentieth-century Ireland turns out to be a more plural and strange place than its imagined ideality; this would likewise be true of the Midwest. What is unveiled of a region is a particularity that is not subsumed under idealizing identifications (the nation state, but also "old school" regional identity): this particularity is critical. It is what Ron Silliman saw looking out the window writing down details of the BART or MARTA transit systems as a form of re-mapping terrains. This moment of desiring differentiation as cross-regional criticality allowed me to use Herr's work in thinking through the poetics of postmodern nonidentity in Detroit, seen as a region of modernity.

Under globalization, a third term intervenes: a denying imposition of pseudo-universal standards onto regional differences to be brought into the world market. The fact that a "world car" will never be built—there will never even be a world Coca-Cola—renders opaque, not transparent, such attacks on particularity in the name of standardization. But the converse valorization of the regional particular takes on, as well, the specious generality of the "world car"—this is Fredric Jameson's critique of Frampton's architectural "style" of critical regionalism, which as a form of "global postmodernism" is an aesthetics of radical particularity in its use of untotalizable detail, but which (shades of the Language school!) also risks one-size-fits-all oppositionality where all regional differences are "other" just as all Fords are black. What Jameson does not account for is the difference between a region and a nation state (or linkages of nation states like NATO or the Warsaw Pact); the global is still mired in the wreckage of the Cold War. Alberto Moreiras, in The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), takes Jameson one step further in mobilizing "regions" for global critique via a "negative globality" that results from the failure of modernization narratives, what he terms "narrative fissures" in discourses of legitimation: "If critical regionalism refers to the very possibility of simultaneously thinking through the contradictory totality of global integration and fragmentation, then negative globality is to be understood as the structural ground of critical regionalism; within that ground, narrative fissure is the figure of its negativity" (75).

Critical regionalism conveys a systematic impossibility to constitute difference in positive terms. While it is hard to see what politics might follow from this impossibility, except through a refusal of the closure of the global after Laclau and Mouffe, the point is that "narrative fissure," in its intersection with spatial practice, pluralizes narratives and spaces, thus resulting in the genealogy of "region." Radicality is emphasized in "radical particularity," as it works to produce the pluralizing of narratives within a horizon of global narrative failure. Rather than occupying a privileged site of difference, it is situated at the point where location becomes region through its refusal of subordination. Radical particularity leads to a re-mapping of spaces it has released from the failure of the global; this re-mapping occurs within a horizon in which closure is constitutively denied.

Political economy may help account for the stakes of avant-garde's use of radical particularity in the expanding/denying context of globalization. For poetics, the unassimilable materiality at the heart of Maldoror's deathward fantasies set up the move to its opposite in the positivity and open form of Poésies, locating the poem as object in a matrix of theoretical exchange. A series of Anglo-American modernist moments, from Imagism by way of the Fugitives and Laura Riding to Objectivism, extended the negative moment of the poem as object into a discourse of poetics that contextualized it theoretically. The dialectic of poetry (object) and prose (theory) in Williams's Spring & All, for example, operates as a dialectical bridge between the naturalizing/psychologizing theory of Imagism and its Marxist revision with the objectivist poets. Alex Marsh charts, in the correspondence between Pound and Zukofsky, a debate over the exchangeability of labor that makes an important distinction between two accounts of the poem as object. For Pound, labor could never be abstracted from human agency; the poem can only imitate the status of a natural object, not one placed in exchange. For Zukofsky, the mediation of labor under conditions of exchange was the basis of poem's transformation of material in an act of mimesis. The abstraction of labor, however, can only be perceived when it is returned, in a redemptive moment, to the form of the poem as object itself.

A reflexive relation between poem as object and subject of labor results that informed the optimistic Marxist horizons of Zukofsky's poetry up to "A"–9, and in my account persists "under erasure" after that: it is possible to comprehend totality, condense one's understanding in the form of the poem, and by one's labor return to consciousness and the capacity to act. In the postwar period, subject and object as coextensive with the mediation of labor comes undone with the expansion of consumer society to the working class after the terms of the Treaty of Detroit (the 1948 UAW/Big Three agreement that raised workers' wages so that they could be a part of the market for what they made, the origins of 1950s consumerism). With the 1970s, however, that compact came undone, partly as a result of the support of big unions for the conduct of the Vietnam War, initiating a flight of capital to the Pacific Rim and bartering high employment for the destruction of the goods produced as war materiel. The emergence of the Language school took place precisely at the moment when the "class peace" of consumer society came undone and the export of capital to modernize the Pacific Rim began. Following this historical/spatial dissociation, cultural practices foundered between oppositional agency and an absent site for intervention—sound like the 1970s? This was experienced—though we couldn't "know it"—as a contradiction in the criticality of poetics and aesthetics.

George Hartley describes, in Textual Politics and the Language Poets, a moment where the critique of reification by means of radical particularity could not convincingly imagine a redeemed form of labor, and thus class consciousness, while ideological interpellation positioned subjects in relation to delegitimized narratives and denying institutions. This is the moment of Ernest Mandel's The Second Slump, when industrial democracies realized that postwar consumer societies could not keep up with the falling rate of return, and capital began its relentless movement outward to find new zones of profitability, with the Vietnam War as the first wave of the many crises of legitimacy and agency to come. The Language school, in its attempts at self-understanding, tried early on to theorize poetry after Zukofsky's materialist critique, but it could not connect language with political agency while the subject of interpellation, abandoned as it was in the ruins of a consumer society whose meanings were either illegitimate or elsewhere. The spatial turn in political economy makes comprehensible the dynamics of expansion and profitability that take place somewhere else, experienced primarily in the evacuation of meaning that results. A poetics that re-maps radical particularity between discontinuous zones of production, it follows, may be able to comprehend the lived experience of spatial discontinuity through its forms of reflexive example.

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