After Post-Avant

Ron Silliman's recent post declaring his intention to "get his head out of the eighties" by looking more skeptically at his Quietist/Post-Avant dichotomy was heartening. Silliman is right to recognize that this way of thinking about poetry is a relic of the anthology wars of the 1950s and early 1960s. His most persuasive evidence for looking beyond such a division is his own blog, which as he suggests, contains links to poets representing a wide array of aesthetic and political commitments. Indeed, the fact that I, a dyed-in-the-wool product of the American MFA system, default to his blog for poetry links is part of what makes his investment in labeling a diverse school of poets "quietist" so troubling. The whole idea of the anthology wars only makes sense when attention (readership and publication) exists in an economy of scarcity. Since the advent of the web, that hardly seems to be the case anymore, though of course one can argue about prizes and the like, as Silliman does, if one is so inclined. Still, the whole idea of a movement, as Raymond Williams argues, stems from the need to brand one's art to better achieve recognition and sponsorship. Achieving this identity through the centralizing gesture of movements, and particularly a few massive competing movements, seems better suited perhaps to Fordism of the last century than the distributed networks of this one.

Strangely, the same students who excoriated Michel de Certeau have just lapped up Baudrillard like cream. Either that stern talk I gave them about approaching complex texts with humility was more effective than I suspected, or Baudrillard just makes more intuitive sense to them. Maybe they're already used to living in hyperreality. I do think, as a matter of style, Baudrillard's use of extended examples distinguishes his writing from de Certeau's or Debord's. Those long sections on Disneyland and the Loud family give them something to hold on to through the desert of Baudrillad's more abstruse sections. I am looking forward to teaching Baudrillard as the Salahi and Heene stories unfold. In both cases, people wanted to be on reality TV and then suddenly, they were. Only the reality TV wasn't "Big Brother" or "American Idol," but reality itself. These stories seem to me the best examples I've encountered of what Baudrillard calls the "dissolution of TV in life, the dissolution of life in TV." "There is no longer a medium in the literal sense," Baudrillard writes, "it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real." Little wonder, then, that my students can't be exercised by the desert of the real.

Boomlay, Boom: Vachel Lindsay's Modernism

Al Filreis just released an excellent new podcast about Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” a poem I teach in my Modernism class. Just the recording of Lindsay reading his poem is worth the price of admission, or more really, since admission is free. Filreis stumbles badly out of the gate, though, by asking about how to “get beyond” the racism in “The Congo.” His interest is clearly in redeeming the poem as an early example of performance poetry, a poem as speech act rather than as text. In reading Lindsay this way, he looks forward poets like Olson and Duncan and tries to propose alternative Modernist roots that diverge from the textuality of poets like Eliot, Moore or Williams. The self-evident racism of Lindsay’s poem, then, presents Filreis with a problem, one to be “gotten beyond” so that Lindsay can be finally valorized. This desire to recuperate may also account for the discussion’s exclusive focus on the first section, with its anticolonial banishment of King Leopold to a hell where he will be forever maimed. Unmentioned is the poem’s final section, in which Mumbo-Jumbo, the African god is defeated by Christ and the Congo itself is “redeemed.”

Aldon Nielsen rightly brings Filreis up short by insisting that the racism of the poem isn’t something one can “get beyond.” Nielsen, along with the other panelists, argues that the poem be reintegrated into our understanding of Modernism, but Nielson understands that the poem’s racism is an integral part of its Modernism. In this, I think Nielsen demonstrates a more sophisticated grasp of the issue than either Filreis or Charles Bernstein, both incredibly smart guys who are usually the reason I listen to the podcast. Bernstein, for his part, presents Linday’s primitivism as if it were idiosyncratic. Lindsay, Bernstein argues, thinks white culture has lost touch with fundamental rhythms and connection to Yeatsian “song,” and that African-American culture offers a corrective to that alienation. “We typically think of racism as saying bad things about African-Americans,” Bernstein says, “but Lindsay is racist because he says, or intends to say, good things about African-Americans.” Perhaps Bernstein realizes that this is one of modernism’s central tropes, proposed in various ways by Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and eventually Norman Mailer, to say nothing of African-American’s like W.E.B. Dubois in “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” his contribution to Alain Locke’s The New Negro. In their own way, Eliot’s Upanishads and Hemingway’s Basques represent a similar gesture. If Bernstein does realize the centrality of this recourse to primitivism, though, he certainly makes no mention of it in the podcast.

It is, though, the very ubiquity of Modernist primitivism that makes Lindsay such a key figure. Filreis believes that Lindsay was excised from the canon because his performative style of poetry conflicted with dominant textually based narratives about Modernism. I find that hard to credit for a couple of reasons. First, Lindsay’s aural effects on the page don’t appear much different than those offered by other Modernists; “Boomlay, Boom” seems perfectly in keeping with, and maybe a little staid compared to, Stevens’ “hoobla hoobla hoobla how” or Williams “marrruu.” Filreis can insist that Lindsay’s performance of these nonsense syllables fundamentally differed from those of the solemn Stevens or the adenoidal Williams, but in the days before great internet archives like Penn Sound, very few readers could have been aware of these differences in performance. The page really was inescapable as a medium for the transmission of poetry, as Olson’s comments on the typewriter demonstrate. More importantly, though, Filreis’ own chronology has Lindsay disappearing from the canon during the 1970s and 1980s, the very period that witnesses the mainstreaming of bardic poets like Ginsberg, and the emergence from the workshops of a model of poetic creation centered on the metaphor of “voice,” as Mark McGurl discusses in his recent The Program Era. If Lindsay’s exclusion from the canon were motivated by his privileging of voice over text, wouldn’t that exclusion have occurred under the banner of New Critical irony? That it didn’t is testified to in part by my first exposure to “The Congo,” in Hayden Carruth’s The Voice that Is Great within Us. Though I can’t evoke the same kind of conspiracy that makes Filreis’ claim so interesting, I think the more obvious answer is the more likely one: As classroom’s became more diverse and the Black Arts movement made it harder to “get beyond” racism that had once been glossed over as impolite, it became harder to teach “A Study of the Negro Race” that opens with a section titled “Their Basic Savagery.”

Which is both good and bad. Good that the racism of the poem is recognized, neither ignored nor explained away, but bad that, as Bernstein points out in the podcast, many white writers who simply ignored African-American experience (sorry, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, but I am looking at you.) are given a free pass. Lindsay, a populist poet who walked from Illinois to New Mexico trading books of his poems for food, saw himself as Whitman’s heir, and in many ways he was. Lindsay, like Sandburg and Robinson, partakes of an American modernism that never had to make “A Pact” with Whitman, that never decamped for Paris or London. Restoring Lindsay to the Modernist canon isn’t just about finding a godfather for spoken word, but really about locating Modernism within the American culture of the early twentieth century. That’s what makes it essential not to get beyond the poem’s racism. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

The Flow of American Energy

"Thus did the artist point his life along the lines of the flow of American energy"-this sentence the seam that links two narratives in tE.L. Doctorow's Ragtime: the story of Tateh's disillusioned flight from the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of 1912 and his subsequent decision to sell "movie books" through a novelty company AND the story of Henry Ford's development of the assembly line, where the "men who built the products would be themselves interchangeable parts." "From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to perceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class." That Tateh, an ardent socialist at the beginning of the novel, adopts out of self-interest the tactics of mass production pioneered by Ford may be a tragedy. It's hard to say. For one thing, there's clearly no role for an artist in Lawrence. Tateh is told by the IWW organizers that his posters are too beautiful; they need to be simpler to provoke anger. So while it's tempting to read Tateh's "selling out" as an ironic capitulation to necessity, Doctorow's market economy turns out to be more open to aesthetic value than his worker's councils are. Representing Ford as the figure of the artist may not, finally, be ironic at all.

This point is complicated, however, by the role cars, the product of Ford's art, play in the novel. On the one hand, the car is a metonym of Coalhouse Walker's pride. It differentiates him not only from other African-Americans, but from poor whites like Willie Conklin, the volunteer fire chief as well. A heroic reading of Coalhouse, then, buttresses a heroic reading of Ford (and ultimately Tateh.) However, Coalhouse's car--confined to the road and defined by its fragile pantasote top--might also signify the fragility of Coalhouse's dignity. Perhaps Coalhouse must invest his identity in a commodity, because other avenues of meaning are foreclosed for him, but that doesn't mean it's not shocking that his car must bear the weight of his identity. (I think in the next class, I can discuss the novel's representation of leftist politics shifting from a focus on labor to a focus on race and identity politics.)

Whether Tateh's abandoning the strikers for the novelty shop, and eventually the movies, is truly the act of an artist attuned to "the flow of American energy" or whether it is simply a story of labor's capitulation to capital, his move is intimately connected to Doctorow's representation of the family. Tateh repudiates the working class explicitly to provide for his daughter, and he rightly intuits that a successful strike will mean "six dollars and change" rather than six dollars a week (130). A book like Ragtime already highlights the role of family by defining its central characters only by their family roles: Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother. Just as family will draw Tateh away from the pickets and into the movie houses, so will Tateh be able to reconstitute family at the end of the novel because of his material success. The bereft and beleaguered family he formed in the ghetto with his daughter and Evelyn Nesbit will become the successful California family made up of Mother, Sarah's son, his daughter and the boy. (They will also fittingly become the prototypes for The Little Rascals.) Even the least bourgeois character in the book (besides Emma Goldman), Mother's Younger Brother, concludes the book heading off into Mexico, a perfect foil for J.P. Morgan, similarly heading across Europe toward Egypt. Yet he never repudiates Mother nor gives us reason to doubt her positive assessment of Tateh.

Finally, though, Mother's Younger Brother seems to offer the final twist on this question of art, mass production and leftist politics. As he begins his career as a bombmaker, he is mistaken for a poet (165). Is there room for poetry on the left after all, or are we to note how little like a poet Younger Brother is, how vast the mistake made by the young actresses he seduces?

Hiking the Observatory Trail

As it happens, the title of this post is not a euphemism. Rather, it was an unseasonably beautiful day in Ohio, perfect for a walk in the woods. At the end of our cul-de-sac, the Miller Observatory Trail continues up into land maintained by the Brown Family Environmental Center. It's such a good trail that Google Maps thinks you can drive from Kokosing all the way through to Brooklyn Avenue. We didn't make it all the way to the Observatory this afternoon, but some of our crew obviously remain undaunted.

Guy Debord

Having had mixed success giving students Continental theory, I wonder what the response to Debord will be. My students tend to resist any essay that self-consciously deploys a style. It's part of their American Puritan heritage to believe that gauds of any kind reveal a fundamental lack of serious purpose. To write with style is ipso facto to bullshit. Thus, I suspect that Debord's fondness for chiasmus will be received much as they received Certeau's attraction to the aphorism. It will make Debord suspect.

I've been, though, having a great time researching unitary urbanism, with its practices of derive and detournement.sf0.org ought to be a great link for this class. I think next year I'll encourage students to do psychogeopgraphic maps of the college modeled on Debord's map of Paris. John Krygier has some interesting examples here.

Ultimately, I hope to leave time to discuss whether Web 2.0 alters Debord's analysis of the Society of Spectacle. He makes so much of the one-directional nature of the spectacle that it seems as if the reversal of that direction ought to be significant. True, it's hard to believe uploading videos of your cat drinking from the toilet will help liberate you from being mesmerized by the spectacle, but I suppose it makes almost as much sense as thinking that jumping from a roof to a parking garage will.