AVANTPOST

editedby

LOUISARMAND

LitterariaPragensia Prague2006

CopyrightLouisArmand,2006 Copyrightofindividualworksremainswiththeauthors Published2006byLitterariaPragensia FacultyofPhilosophy,CharlesUniversity NmstJanaPalacha2,11638Prague1 CzechRepublic www.litterariapragensia.com All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publication of this book has been supported by research grant MSM0021620824FoundationsoftheModernWorldasReflectedinLiterature and Philosophy awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague,bytheCzechMinistryofEducation. CataloguinginPublicationData AvantPost: The AvantGarde Under Post Conditions, edited by Louis Armand.1sted. p.cm. ISBN8073081237(pb) 1.Poetics.2.LiteraryTheory.3.CulturalStudies.4.Aesthetics. I.Armand,Louis.II.Title PrintedintheCzechRepublicbyPBTisk Typesetting&designbylazarus

Contents Introduction TheOrganGrindersMonkey RachelBlauDuPlessis PostAvant/AvantPost:AnImaginaryConversation InsideRealPractice R.M.Berry TheAvantGarde&theQuestionofLiterature RobertArchambeau TheDeathoftheCritic:TheCriticPasticheuras PostmodernAvantGardist JohannaDrucker NeonSigh::EpistemologicalRefamiliarisation BonitaRhoads&VadimErent AnAesthetesLostWar:Lyotard&theUnsublime ArtofNewEurope MairadByrne AvantGardePronouns

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AnnVickery FromBeingDraftedtoaDraftofBeing:RachelBlauDuPlessis andtheReconceptualisationoftheFeministAvantGarde 133 EstherMilne TheAffectiveandAestheticRelationsofEpistolaryPresence 160

ChristianBk UnacknowledgedLegislation LouisArmand AvantGardeMachines,ExperimentalSystems LaurentMilesi FromLogostoMuthos:ThePhilosophyof PoundsandOlsonsMythopetics KestonSutherland EthicaNullius LisaJarnot SanFranciscosBurning RobertSheppard ACarafe,aBlueGuitar,BeyondingArt:KrzysztofZiarek andtheAvantGarde TreyStrecker NarrativeEcologyandEncyclopaedicNarrative

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MichaelS.Begnal TheAncientsHaveReturnedAmongUs:Polaroids of21stCenturyIrishPoetry NotesonContributors

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Introduction

TheOrganGrindersMonkey Thedaywillcomewhenoneoriginalcarrotwillbeenoughto startarevolution.Czanne

Is an avantgarde viable under the conditions of post modernism? This question immediately gives rise to others, concerning the status of avantgardes historical or conjectural, and concerning the various cognates of postmodernism and thenumerousotherpostsandismsthathavepopulatedcritical discourseinliteratureandtheartsduringthelatterhalfofthe last century. Consequently our initial question may come to appearpurelydefinitional,whileanyendeavourtorespondto it programmatically will nevertheless remain ambiguous, eclectic, even contradictory. The reason for this has not to do simply with the diversity of possible positions visvis avant gardism and postmodernity, nor with the ambivalences of historicity or interpretation, but with what has been called (in deference to the poetic legacy of the Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov)thediscoveriesofforgottenbutnevercompletely lost archaic resources of construing, which lead to unexpected significationsofthelanguagestructure.1 Ithasbeenarguedthatallartworthyofthenameisinsome sense experimental, and that experimentation is inevitably bound to innovation by the same thread that binds the purportedlynewtotheideaofatradition.Suchaformulation 1 JanvanderEng,Introduction,AvantGarde5.6(1991)3.

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revealsaninherentreferentialindeterminacy,whereinwords like experimental, avantgarde and tradition come to approximateheterologoussigns,withoutindicatingwhether they should be read literally or metaphorically, while demanding that we nevertheless interrogate their meaning within an increasingly conventionalised discipline. This metacriticaldimensiontothequestionathandhasinvarious quarters been perceived as bringing about something of a renewal of the trope of the avantgarde, lending it a critical force which extends beyond the domain of aesthetics into the entirefieldofthought,signsystemsandtechnology. Whiletodayitmightbepossibletospeakofavantgardism with respect to cognitive science, for example, and quantum computing, this in itself may simply reflect that the history of avantgardism has always in some way be bound up with the question of consciousness, its transformation and reinvention. Its proper domain, we might say, has increasingly tended to encompass the encyclopaedic lifeworld of man and the prospect of what humanity might yet become by grasping its ownmost possibility in what it is and what it has been. This curious temporal conjunction of the avant and the post, mediated by the trope of experiment (or of experience), has a long historical genealogy that only in relatively recent timesacquiredtheselfconsciouslyaestheticisedcharacterthat, in the twentieth century, became institutionalised as the avantgarde,andwhichisoftensaidtohaveterminatedinthe discourse of postmodernism. At the beginning of the twenty first century, this account of the end of the avantgarde is onceagainundercontention,astheviabilityofacontinuation, renewal or reinvention of avantgardismin tandem with the end, exhaustion, death of postmodernismis raised by artists, critics, thinkers generally, unsatisfied with the premillennial wisdom that everything is permitted, hence nothing is any longerpossible. Thepromiseofliberationisalwaysaprecariousone,andif the advent of the global economy, equal opportunity, the new2

media and communications technologies, and the end of the Cold War suggestat the end of the twentieth centurya future world utopia, then this halfdecade of the twentyfirst century hasviolently dispelled that illusion. Beneath the guise of cultural pluralism and permissiveness, the hard edge of socioeconomicideologycontinuestogivepurchasetoacritical engagement that previously (under postmodernism) was said to no longer be viable. And with it, the critical necessity of something like an avantgarde, not simply as a reaction or counteraction to a present state of affairs, but as an active interventioninfuturity,intheverypossibilityofafuture. For these reasons, the title of this volumeAvantPost shouldnotbetakenassignallingamerelyhistoricalproject,or one of cultural pessimism, but rather something like a call to order and a call to address the situation, today, of those outposts(avantpostes)thatensureafutureforcriticalculture. 1 In his study of the New York school of poetsJohn Ashbery, KennethKoch,JamesSchuyler,andFrankOHaraimprobably entitled The Last AvantGarde (1999), American critic David Lehman (echoing Zygmunt Bauman, Jrgen Habermas, and others)2contendsthat:theargumentagainsttheviabilityofthe avantgardetodayrestsontheassumptionthatthereisnoreal resistance to the new, no stable norm from which the defiant artist may depart. The contradictions of the new, as a term largely inherited from Ezra Pounds injunction to Make it New! cedes here to the characteristic complaint that postmodernisminthe1970sandthereafterstolethecarpetout

2 DavidLehman,TheLastAvantGarde:TheMakingoftheNewYorkSchoolofPoets (New York: Anchor, 1999); Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Art, or the Impossibility of the AvantGarde, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (London: Polity, 1997) 95104; Jrgen Habermas, ModernityAn Incomplete Project, TheAnti-Aesthetic:EssaysinPost-ModernCulture,ed.HalFoster(NewYork:The NewPress,1983)315.

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from under critical experimentation. Moreover, having stolen thecarpet,postmodernismthenwentaboutstealingtherestof theavantgardistdcoraswell,whichhenceforthwasreduced toamereretrostyleorhistoricalfetish.ThusLehmanwrites, inthefirstpersonplural:Ifweareallpostmodernists,weare none of us avantgarde, for postmodernism is the institutionalisationoftheavantgarde.3 Followingthemajorideological,technologicalandeconomic upheavals in the postWWII American cultural landscape mediated, in those eminent domains of literature and the fine arts, by the scandalous figure of Pound and by the predominance of what Clement Greenberg in 1955 felicitously termed AmericanType4 paintingthe concept of the present as a moment of revelation (a time, according to Habermas, in which splinters of a messianic presence are enmeshed5) was sacrificed in the cause of a new historicism, from which avantgardism succeeds modernity in the form of massmedia culture, kitsch, neoliberalism, and compulsory global democratisation. This sacrifice of the tradition of modernitytowhatHaroldRosenbergtermedtheTradition oftheNewwasrepaidinthecurrencyofhistoricaltradition traded in a merely present time. Setting aside the problem of tradition and the present, or of a tradition of the present, Habermass remarks, coupled with those of Lehman, draw attention to the particularpolitics of the institutions of literary andarthistoryemergingfromthe1970s,accordingtowhichthe future of cultural production would for evermore assume the formofarepetitionoftheendofculture,representedbythe end of FlowerPower utopianism, the debacle of the Vietnam War,andtheWatergateaffair.

3 Lehman,TheLastAvantGarde,11. 4 ClementGreenberg,ArtandCulture:CriticalEssays(Boston:Beacon,1961)208 229. 5 Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence(Cambridge,Mass.:MITPress,1990)6.

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That this view of history could be described as specifically generational and localfor example, in terms of the post GreenberggenerationofartcriticslikeRosalindKraussandHal Foster, or in terms of American postCold War cultural arbitrationhas not been sufficiently commented upon. The widelyreporteddeathoftheavantgarde,onthecontrary,has cometobeattributed(withinculturalstudies,finearts,andthe literary critical media) a degree ofuniversalsocial significance that,inlife,it(theavantgarde)couldhardlyhaveaspiredto. Indeed,thedeathofoneculturesavantgardehasacquiredthe status of a veritable end of history, characterised by a universalsowearetolddisillusionmentof(primarilyleftist) ideologies, a radical pluralism of style, the eschewal of any mainstream,andanoverwhelmingtendencytoretrospection.It seems to matter little that this laissezfaire view of cultural historyfailstoaccountforthefactthatlargesectionsoftheso calledavantgardeweredominatedbyconservatismorradical rightwing ideology, or that pluralism is an idea bound from the start to the myth of bourgeois liberalism opposed by successive avantgardes; that its often revolutionary posture wasorientatedtowardstheestablishmentofamainstreaminits own image, and that even the least sociallyengaged of avant gardes were preoccupied with their own internal politico aestheticprogrammes. In this sense, both Lehman and the generation of 1968 appear to succeed primarily in elevating their particular discursiveparadigms,ofmodernityandpostmodernism,tothe uniquestatusofalastcallbeforehistoricalclosure,ideological futility, eternal repetition, selfparody, and the messianic promiseofnofuture.Thusweencounterthechiliasticechoes ofBaudelairesPainterofModernLife(1863)andNietzsches critiqueofCartesianmodernityinHuman,AlltooHuman(1878), underconditionsinwhichthedeathoftheavantgardeismade tostrangelyresembletheconditionsofitshistoricalbirth.

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2 Something like paternity of the historical avantgarde (as viewedthroughwesterneyes)couldarguablybesaidtobelong to the otherwise unlikely figure of the Compte de Nieuwerkerke, DirectorGeneral of the Imperial Museums in Pariswhoseinterventionsinthejuryproceduresforthe1863 Salon was the immediatecause of Napoleon IIIs inauguration of the Salon des Refuses, at which douard Manets notorious Djeunersurlherbewasfirstexhibited,thusindirectlyushering in Impressionism and the history of European avant gardism.6 Born of the institutions of Imperial French culture, the avantgarde has ever since maintained a type of parasitic relationshipwiththedominantapparatusesofofficialtasteand of moral and intellectual permissioneven if this relationship fashions itself as an adversary relation, by which (as Roger Shattuckhasargued)theavantgardegainsitsspecialstatus throughitscritiqueofthemainbodyoftheculturetowhichit isreacting.7PoundsselfpromotionfromtheLondondrawing room circuitas private lecturer on Provenal poetryto harbinger of the New, is indicative of the very character of the avantgardes origins. Pounds career finds an immediate antecedent somewhere between that of Fillipo Marinetti bourgeoismediasavantandsoleinauguratorofFuturismand that of Manetcovetous of success at the official Salons, yet driven by circumstance to assume the leadership of the first coherent, organic, and consciously avantgarde movement in the history of modern art.8 The curiosity is that it was the mechanisms of official culture itself that caused a significant

6 Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New: Seven Historical Exhibitions of Modern Art (London:WeidenfeldandNicolson,1972)1053. 7 RogerShattuck,TheInnocentEye:OnModernLiteratureandtheArts(NewYork: Farrar,Strauss,andGiroux,1984)74. 8 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York:Harper&Row,1971)132.

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numberofsuchotherwisehighlyindividualisticartists,writers, andthinkers(likePound),topurveyideasofcollectivisedaction and to gather around themselves consciously avantgarde movements. For Pound and Marinetti, such action arguably remained bound to personal prestige and, like Thophile Gautierbeforethem,toclaimsofculturalarbitration,education, andsocialtransformation. More curious, then, that the failure of collective action has, particularlysince1968,becametheprimarycriterioninjudging thesuccessorfailureofthesocalledavantgardeproject.Ale Debeljak,forexample,haswrittenthatthefailureoftheavant gardeefforttotranscendtheinstitutionofautonomousartand tointegrateartintoeverydaylifeinthenameofutopiansocial change, can be attributed to the fact that the avantgarde project ended in a collapse of the aesthetic and practical dimensions without liberating effect.9 This view remains incomplete in many respects, not least because its failure is accounted one of modalities. This is similarly the case with Habermass rejection of postmodernism on the grounds of an incomplete project of modernity, linked to a critique of Enlightenment rationalism. As Lautramont famously said: Plagiarismisnecessary;progressimpliesit.Andifthework of the avantgardewhatever, or whoever that is supposed to behas been historically directed at the revelation of this seeming contradiction in the logic of progress, then the collapse of the aesthetic and practical dimensions is not an endofavantgardehistory,butratheritsconditionasacritical counterpartoftheverybourgeoissystemofvaluestowhichit is said to be opposed (and whose illusion it has nonetheless alwaysfunctionedtosustain,astheveryraisondtreofavant gardism). In this way, progress retainsa satirical dimension:a dtournement of the very priniciple of origination and invention which has always been advertised as its summum bonum. 9 AleDebeljak,ReluctantModernity:TheInstitutionofArtandItsHistoricalForms NewYork:RowemanandLittlefield,1998)128.

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It seems to be no accident that the series of political, social andepistemologicalrupturesandrecursionsthathadledupto the installation of Napoleon III should have found themselves mirrored in the revolutionary discourses of avantgardism, in which the new has always, in some sense, affected itself by wayofadtournementofthereceivedtraditionbutaboveall of the revolutionary tradition itself, born alongside eighteenth centuryRomanticismandtheopenendedprogressivismofthe Enlightenmentproject.Likewisetheambivalentrelationshipof successive avantgardes to industrialisation and the status of themachineinmodernlife.Successivelyanobjectofsatireand utopianist praise, the machinefrom Jonathan Swift and Jeremy Bentham, to Marinetti and Marcel Duchamphas emblematised the inherent paradox of the avantgarde hypothesis. Moreover, in terms of a programme, whose success or failure is necessarily measured in progressivist and socially redemptive terms, avantgardism appears itself to be nothingmorethanaparticulardtournementoftheverysocial ideologiesthatgaverisetoit. 3 It is for this reason that the birth and presumed death of the avantgarde mirror one another in contemporary critical lamentations in such an uncanny way. After a centuryanda half, the avantgardes principle legacy, it seems, is its own disappearance: a vanishing act corresponding to a type of rectified perturbation in the system of western historical consciousness.Hence,Debeljakwrites:Whileliberalbourgeois individualism implied the provinces of privacy, self development,dignity,andautonomy,theemergingformofthe individual self in advanced capitalism is instead articulated in terms of fragmented and narcissistic consciousness.10 And all ofthisnotbecausetheavantgardewasdrivenfromthestreets,

10 Debeljak,ReluctantModernity,128.

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liketheonceubiquitousorgangrinder,butbecauseithadlong agolearnedtoconvertitsradicalcurrencyintoamixofpublic sinecure and private fund, and in the process turned from antitypeofsocialconformityintooneofconformitysverysafe guard. Moreover, given the uneasy association of revolutionary aesthetic practice with politicoeconomic idealism over the courseofthesecondhalfofthenineteenthcenturyandthefirst halfofthetwentieth,itishardlysurprisingthatdebateoverthe statusofavantgardismandofthevariousmodernismsshould come to mirror those about the necessary phases of Western industrial,liberaldemocratic,industrialevolution.According to such analogies, the history of avantgardism commences withthesecondphaseoftheIndustrialRevolutioninFrance and ends with the media revolution following WWII and the advent of globalisation (previously anticipated by Marx), signalledinGuyDebordsSocietyoftheSpectacleandelsewhere asadescentintopuresimulationismculminatingtoday(in the shadow of 11 September 2001) in a mode of politico economic avantism whose instrument is the affective contretemps of a globalised network of ethical inequivalence masked by a pseudo culturaluniformity and enforced by way of what Antonio Tabucchi has termed that which arrives before Time and against Time, exemplified at the turn of the 21stcenturybythetransformationandregulationofconflictasa socialfactbythespectreofpreemptivewar,desguerresfaites avant.11 In many respects the prospect of the spectacle of a perpetually reiterating state of affairs must always have held perverseappealtothesortofsolipsistic/nihilistictemperament thatviewsallofhistoryastendinginexorablytowardsitself,as though it were its natural apotheosis and endpoint whetherthisbetherevolutionofMarxoftheNewWorldOrder of the American neoconservatives, viewed through the prism11 Antonio Tabucchi, Au pas de loie: Chroniques de nos temps obscurs, trans. Judith Rosa(Paris:Seuil,2006).

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ofawesternculturalapparatusandmediathathasincreasingly come to be characterised by a functional ambiguity: an ambiguity which anticipates andincorporatesinadvance its owncritiqueandtherebyaffectsatypeofdiscursivelaw. 4 Antonin Artauds excursus on Heliogabalus, or the Anarchist Crowned (1934) provides a paradigm case in the unmasking of precisely this type of aestheticomoralistic ambiguity, one which always accompanied both judicial messianism and the counterhegemonic claims of political anarchism, as well as their aestheticisation by way of avantgardist theory and praxis. For Artaud, it is preciselyin the body of theLaw itself that the rule of order is overthrown, given over to the serial, almostmechanistic,iterationofitsothernessindevianceand perversion, and to the equating of these terms with the real politicsof,forexample,socialjustice.12 Like the analaggressive phase of infancy delineated by Freud, the historical avantgarde has acquired for itself something of the cach of the diminutive tyrant emblematised in Charles Fouriers little hordesthose anarchistic street urchins cum trash collectors in whom the work of social hygieneistransformedintoendlessplay.ItwasFouriersbasic contention that it was not man but civilisation that needed reforming. And like Jarrys Ubu, Fouriers social monstrum posed a challenge to the moral dictatorship of utopianists and utilitarians like Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham (just as it does to the present day ideologues of democratisation), exposing the fundamentalism ofand fundamentally normativedistinctionbetweentheroleofsocialengineerand thatofsocialrevolutionary. Fouriers legacy has more recently been taken up by Guy Debord,inwhomthenoworkethicfunctionsasanuncanny12 Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress,1998)31736.

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counterpart to the social fictions of consumer culture; and by Peter Brger, whose Theory of the AvantGarde (1974) yokes together the systemic disorder of Dada with the disordered systemofrevolutionarypraxiscalledSurrealism.Inbothcases, the logic of the new, and the counterlogic of its resistance, are merely available stereotypes in the round of laissezfaire deregulation and reappropriation. As Theodor Adorno says: Even where art insists on the greatest degree of dissonance and disharmony, its elements are those of unity.13 The dream of aesthetic social praxis has in this sense always served a homoeostatic function, in which the ruptures and discontinuities of avantgardism have served more as a deflection from the fact that the idea of linear progressivist history was itself never more than a political expedience. The enervationsofwhatiscalledpostmodernitywerethusforecast fromtheveryoutsetofthemodernistproject. Itispossible,KarlMannheimwroteinIdeologyandUtopia (1936), that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideological and utopian elements.14 Confronted with the redundancy of both traditional social taboos and the novelty of transgression, permissibility itself recedes from awareness as the sole universalactorinasocialtheatredevoidofastage.Theabsence ofideologyisperhaps,then,merelythelatestmanifestationofa hegemonic structure whose regulatory power seems to be everywhere visible, but nowhere verifiable. If such is the conditionofthepostmodern,thenthedecriedlackofapointof criticalresistanceofacriticalobjectassuchissimplyone

13 TheodorW.Adorno,sthetischeTheorie(Frankfurt:Suhrkramp,1970)235:cited in Peter Brger, Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: UniversityofMinnesotaPress,1984)56. 14 KarlMannheim,IdeologyandUtopia:AnIntroductiontotheSociologyofKnowledge, trans.LouisWirthandEdwardShils(NewYork:Harcourt,Brace&World,1968 [1936]).

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more ruse in the aestheticisation, and consequent anestheticisation,ofshockvalue. Inanycase,thenecessarybelatednessofpostmodernismas adiscoursecarrieswithitthesortofhistoricalstinkthatalways accompanies the resurrection of old corpses to adjudicate on mattersofsocialorculturalpermissiveness.Thetrickhasbeen for it to present itself as lacking any historical dimension at allasthoughitwere,inessence,atimelessmechanismarrived atthroughthetechnologisingofallcriticalorientationstowards apossiblefuturity.Apurelydisembodiedstink.Hence,forJean Franois Lyotard: Post modern would have to be understood accordingtotheparadoxofthefuture(post)anterior(modo).15 Itsstatus,asfutureanterior,linksittoaperpetualrecursionin which everything is made to look and smell more or less the samesincewhatisbeinglookedatorsmelledisnothingbut rather a kind of trope: the commodity relation according to which Coca Cola, the Mona Lisa and a sexagenarian Mick Jaggerachieveadiscursive,timelessequivalence. 5 The question that has consistently been raised over the last thirty years is: if the condition of criticism is continuous with thatofmodernity,ispostmodernismthuspredicatedonapost critical condition? Or, contrary to received wisdom, is the perceivedambivalenceofcriticalitytodayduenottoalackofa point of resistance, but rather to an oversubscription of antecedents; or else to the fact that criticism itself has become mimeticised, as it were? That the criticality of the historical avantgarde, founded upon a supposed relation to the otherwise unpresentable, has ceded to representation as criticism,thusconstitutingitselfasaposteffect?Andifsuchis the case, is it inevitable that criticism be left with no other15 JeanFranois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1991)81.

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optionthantoadoptastrategyofacceleration,inaneffortto regain at least a nominal vantage point in this evershifting, virtualised terrain? This has been one of the conclusions put forward by contemporary media theorists like Vilm Flusser, FriedrichKittler,JeanBaudrillard,PaulVirilio,DonnaHaraway andKatherineHayles,reechoingtheprescriptionsofMcLuhan thirty years earlier and Walter Benjamin thirty years before thatsuggesting that the technical, mass reproduction and circulation of images does not serve toconceal asocial reality, rather it reveals the inherently technological dimension of that reality. If Habermas, to the contrary, identifiesthe radical phase of modernity with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, thisisbecauseheperceivesinitssocialorientationacriticality without direct antecedence, without a model. Modernitys attempt to come to terms with the unpresentable, as Lyotard likewisecontends,isthustiedtoacertainconditionofcrisisin the accession to an experience of discourse removed from one ofepistemologicalfoundations.Hence,aconditionofcrisisvis vis the representable is taken as the condition of modernity as such. Nevertheless, as Brger and numerous other commentators have pointed out, when Duchamp puts his signature on massproduced, randomly chosen objects and sendthemtoartexhibits,thisprovocationofartpresupposesa concept of what art is,16 just as Tristan Tzaras cutups presuppose an idea of what literature is. And indeed, just as Bruce Naumans Fountain and John Ashberys Europe presupposeanideaofavantgardeartandavantgardeliterature. ToparaphraseMarx,theconventionsandclichsofallthedead avantgardesweighlikeanightmareonthebrainoftheliving. In these terms, the application of electronic computing in contemporary poetics, with its explorations of hypertext, hypermediaand other aleatory mechanisms ofinscription, has made only modest advances upon earlier forms of avant

16 Brger,TheoryoftheAvantGarde,56.

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garde writingsuch as the algorithmic constraintbased poetics of Raymond Queneau and the Oulipoother than in incorporating aleatory mechanisms directly into the work itself, wherein the aesthetics of probability and chance operationsbecomepartofthetextualedificewhiletheiractual mechanics remain invisible. This is perhaps a condition of all forms of technical supersession, yet the ubiquity of techno aesthetics accompanied by a toodiscrete dependency upon a sublimated technics (exemplified by such things as operating code, as Kittler has long observed),17 stands at odds with a certaincriticalityvestedintheappropriationsofanhistorical avantgardismthattodayfindsitselfmoreproperlyexpressed, we might say, by way of hacker subcultures than by the burgeoninginstitutionofdigitalart.18 Consider, for example, the textual interventions, dtournements and chance operations in now canonical work likeJohnCagesRoaratorio(1979),whereintheoperatingcode isitselfperformedalongsidetheworkssocalledcontent,andis endowed thereby with certain metatextual properties that assume for themselves the function of a conductor/composer, insofar as the rest of the performance (of which they assumes theroleofmetonymiccounterpart)takesitscuesfromthem:i.e. they produce instructions or recompose indexes of subsidiary operationsperformedbyotherinstrumentsandsoon.Whichis to say that such performances comprise a diagrammatic field, indeed a schematisable sign system. Much of the new media, meanwhile, has been employed in the arts in a primarily imitative mannereither to automatise the type of work pioneered by Cage and others, by way of computer programmes, or to redploy such things as analogue video art within the digital field, or else to surmount the perceived limitations of print medias fixed typo/graphic distribution by17 Friedrich Kittler, Protected Mode, Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. JohnJohnston(Amsterdam:OPA,1997)156ff. 18 Cf. Thomas Foster, The Rhetoric of Cyberspace: Ideology or Utopia? ContemporaryLiteratureXL.1(1999):144160.

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way of the mutlilinear schematics and visual kinaesthetics of electronicwriting. This,perhaps,remainstodaythepropertaskforanavant garde, in overcoming the traps of analogical thought in the conceptionandsupersessionoftheformerlynewbywayofa simple transition form one platform to anotherregardless of whichcriticaldomainwechoosetospeakof.GeneYoungblood, author of Expanded Cinema (1970), has made similar remarks concerning the status of new media within the discipline of the arts, arguing that video art, for example, can only have a formalist referencethe graphic properties of the image. For Youngblood, the new avantgarde is about creating autonomoussocialworldsthatpeoplecanlivein.Artiscentral to that, but the art is not whats avantgarde. Whats avant garde is metadesign, the creation of context.19 The notion of context as content is born of the very idea of communications technologies, from McLuhan to cyberculture, in the re appropriation of corporate media space, through public access cable TV, satellite, internet, GPS and WiFi.20 A critical, ecological mode of thoughtnetworked, transverse, topologicalhere assumes the practical function of avant gardismineffectingthestructureofhowthingscometomean, andhowmeaningislived. CODA We know that the history of experimentation did not commence with the avantgarde. Nor has social transformation always accompanied a project of aesthetic transformation,evenifthetermculture,forexample,implies19 GeneYoungblood,LifeinCounterculture,Umlec2(2006):13. 20 Cf.PrefiguringCyberspace:AnIntellectualHistory,eds.DarrenTofts,Annemarie Jonson,andAlessioCavallaro(Cambridge,Mass.:MITPress,2002);alsoVirtual Realities and their Discontents, ed. Robert Markley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of TechnologicalEmbodiment,eds.MikeFeatherstoneandRogerBurrows(London: SAGE,1995).

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it. The experimental viewpointfrom John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, Louis Pouzin and Ted Nelson to the contemporary technopoetics, codework and meta design of the likes of Metz, Stelarc, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitznecessarily holds that avantgardismisfirstandforemostanattitudetowardslifeifit istobeanythingatall.Thisraisesthequestionofwhetherthe longstanding debate over the avantgarde and its various manifestations is simply a contest over terminologies or whether it is tiedin to a broader aestheticisation of ideology andofideologicalpurchaseuponcriticalpraxisanduponthe real. LouisArmand Prague,May,2006

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RachelBlauDuPlessis

PostAvant/AvantPost:AnImaginary ConversationinsideRealPractice* A. Is the avantgarde viable under prevailing post conditions? P.TheAeffectconsistsinturningtheobjectofwhichoneisto be made aware, to which ones attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. What is obvious isinacertainsensemadeincomprehensible,butthisisonlyin order that it may then be made all the easier to comprehend. Before familiarity can be turned into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation.1 Even to choose the words the object is not enoughtoo bounded. I have always wanted to write a work called Provenanceinwhichtheintricateoriginsofeverymadething cangettracedtoitssocial,ethical,political,materialsources,a work constructed in order that we feel the networks of impingementandintricacy.Imsureitsbeendone

* PartsofthistextappearedinanessaypublishedinPORESonline(2002).Joan Retallackswordscontinuetheconversationinspiredtheform. 1 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre; The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. JohnWillett(NewYork:HillandWang,1964)1434.

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A.IstheAeffecttheAvanteffect?Itstruethatwhatyoujust citedabouttheAlienationEffectalsosoundslikeadefinitionof thegoalsoftheavantgarde.Thisisnotanunusualinsight,but itsacuriousone.DoesthatmakethePostAvantcreatetheA effect by using the avantgarde as ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible? Would that work? The alienation effectofPostAvantisadistancingandquestioningofavant gardeideas?Ordoesthatpointjustreaffirmtheendlesscycleof replacement fantasies and not change any assumptions whatsoever? This is the fake Hegelianism of avant, post, post postandsoforth.Stagypositiontakingandsabrerattling.The newandnewerandnewestnew.Notransformativesublation. Anyway,whathappensifwetalkaboutalienationeffectand notavantanythingforaminute? P.IliketoreturntothatBrechtcitationbecauseittalksaboutan art experience that does not resolve the contradictions (contradictory emotions and allegiances, crosshatched identificationsandinvestments),butinsiststhattheviewertake the contradictions beyond the experience of the artwork into thepinchmeitsreal,historicalworld.Thosecontradictionsare both intellectually and viscerally imbedded in the bodymind, theyunsettle,arouse,disturbanddisplace;thustheymaylead toactionandthentosocialsolutions.Realgardensprovokedby the imaginary toads in them? Anyway, in order for that to occur, all parties in the exchange need to resist normative, affirmativeart(beggingthequestionofjustwhatthismightbe and how these words can always be deployed as terms of accusation and contempt). The artist/maker thus must refuse the conventional desire and normladen aesthetic demand to provideconclusion(simply)orcatharsis(morecomplicatedly), thus making restlessness permanent. By producing restless artworks that do not settle, the artist somehow induces the viewer to become alert with the Eros of political arousal and enragedwiththestubbornnessofpoliticalrage.Andtheviewer must agree to enjoy or accept or endure being unsettled,18

indeed, to live within the nonescapist ethos, to enjoy the feelingofthecontestingcontradictionsandemotionalconflicts nowlayeredinsideher. A. Somehow induceswhat is the content of that somehow? And what if an unsettled viewer just walks out, walksaway,untouched? P. Its unproven whether walking out means you are untouched; it could mean you are shaken to the core. And boredom could be defensive. Its true, however, that walking out is an undesirable situation for this theory: the conventions of audience behaviour in theatre (and in other performance) are indeed pressure against walking out as they are also against throwing potato salad at the performers or joining the orchestra on stage with your violin or kazoo. (Funny, then, that this anormative theatre depends on certain social manners. Indeed, in David Antins performances, one hears him welcoming peopleand this is an allegorical invitationto walk in!) But one does graze and walk freely (touched or untouched) in a museum or gallery. And as for reading? No one prevents you from closing the book, from skippingorskimming.Howtopreventtheviewerfromfailing to be gripped? This suggests that the aesthetic negotiation of alienationeffect or unresolved contradictionspace of presentation, manner of frustration, the degree of pleasure or painatthis,senseofaddresstothewholesituationisactually central to continuing to engage the attention of readers/ viewers.Sothisstillinvolvesaestheticjudgmentandprecision aswellas,letssay,sociopoliticalacuityandprecision.Weare, here as always, tumbled back into the fundamental questions about making art as well as thoughts about makinga political interventionthroughart.Sometimeswethink(rigidly)ofthese as different realms, different claims. This rigidity is so curious, anyway, given that we live, are formed by, are temperedinthematerialandpoliticalparticularsthatmakethe19

self or its life. I want to see those particulars; I want to registerthem;Ithereforewanttoresisttheorisingthatseparates theaestheticandthematerial/sociopolitical.ButIdontwantto oversimplify,either. A.IthinkBrechtstheoryisbrave,andmaybethebestwecan do, but I think it also underestimates the degree of multi tasking and selfrepression any person does, how we swallow hard transitions down and just live with the comic, ironic, or ridiculous figure we cut moving fromlets say the stunning awe at the threat of a volcanic explosion to the fact that its time for lunch. I am thinking of the first section of WallaceStevenssEsthtiqueduMal: Hetriedtorememberthephrases:pain Audibleatnoon,paintorturingitself, Painkillingpainontheverypointofpain. Thevolcanotrembledinanotherether, Asthebodytremblesattheendoflife. Itwasalmosttimeforlunch.2

Really, the terms we want are more like Joan Retallacks poethical wager: that we do our utmost to understand our contemporary position and then act on the chance that our work may be atleastas effectiveas any otherinitial condition in the intertwining trajectories of pattern and chance.3 Act in life, act in art, act engaged is how I translate that, though Retallack is here defending the unpredictable impact of a complexartworksetonitsmerrywayintoareallifezone.But of course radical form does not mean anything about actual politicalagency;thoseprocessesmayintersectbuttheyarenot synonymous. 2 WallaceStevens,WallaceStevens:CollectedPoetryandProse,eds.FrankKermode andJoanRichardson(NewYork:TheLibraryofAmerica,1997)277. 3 Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)46.

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P.Radicalformdoesnotmakeanyonearadical.Butitissucha temptation to play hopefully along the edge of those two conceptsthatusethesameword. A.OrmaybeRolandBarthesonpleasureandblisswouldbea happier theory, a theory of extravagance, acknowledging the painfulnessofdesirefortheunknowable,theedgebeyond.He argues that bliss emerges in the sense of the unsettled, the unresolvable, the nonthetic, in negativity. Pleasure is affirmative, closural, but bliss is something beyond. One is aroused to a sublime awe at the intricate worlds whose rationales and meanings we can barely intuit.4 Like finding a whole ecology of lifeforms thriving in the hot vents in the Pacific. Or something to return to from Barrett Watten: The constructivist moment isan elusive transitionin the unfolding work of culture in which social negativitythe experience of rupture, and act of refusalinvokes a fantasmatic futurea horizonofpossibility,animaginationofparticipation.5 P.Thetermsofthisconversationarealreadyoverwhelming;we havebarelybegun,andImgettinghungry;itmightbetimefor lunch.But,nomatterthatnobleavantgardegoalofrupturing theaffirmative,stillIlookattheavantgardesortofcockeyed. MostavantgardesIknowaboutinthemodernperiodhavenot selfconsciously critiqued their own gender and racialised assumptions, although they are rife with these materials and often run on them, are fuelled by them. Avantgardes have worked overwhelmingly from male subject position(s) as Susan Rubin Suleiman says about Surrealism.6 Yet they rarely

4 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill andWang,1975)324. 5 BarrettWatten,TheConstructivistMoment:FromMaterialTexttoCulturalPoetics (Middletown,CT:WesleyanUniversityPress,2003)xxi;191. 6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and The AvantGarde (Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1990)26.

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examineorquestiontheissuesandmaterialsofmasculinityand manhood, whiteness and privilege, antieffeminacy, or the scintillating darkexoticisms created, but rather affirm them as part of the palette, unquestioned assumptions as usable as pigment squeezed straight from the tube. Indeed, when many avantgardeshaveproposedgenderandracialissuesaspartof theirarsenalofrepresentations,agooddealofevidenceshows thattheseconsiderationsofsociallocationandpowerreplicate toperfection,orevenexaggeratemelodramatically,thegender and racial relations of the bourgeois society that the avant gardeis,initsotherpresumptiveclaims,contesting.Sameold, same old. There has been at least a feminist epistemic shift in thepastyears,aswellasotherparallelshifts.SowhyshouldI get excited about the avantgarde? Perhaps it is simply the pastandatermfromthepast. A. Yesthinking as a feminist always confronts one with the ethical choice: do I overlook this specific problem in favour of greatersolidarities?OrdoIcritiqueandgooutonalimb,never to be seen again? I heard a piece by Sofia Gubaidulina, the FeastDuringaPlague(2005),performedbythePhiladelphia Orchestra and Simon Rattle in February 2006. The piece is a stunning, noble, monumental and risktaking orchestral work that ended in a nondialogue between the classical materials and a heavy rock set of stuff played over loudspeakers. That wascertainlyanapparentcontradictionbetweentwoartforms, but it was not a true contradiction; I felt the answer had already been set, made in the Adornoesque mode of resisting thebrazensoundofpopculture,orbarelybeginningtohavea dialoguewithit.Sosurelyifthereistobecontradiction,itmust bereal,notfaked,andnot,likeSocraticdialogue,skewedto favouroneside.Thisishardertodothanitseems,andhardto do without seeming wishywashy, noncommitted, soft, just fooling around, playing. But what I really liked was the takenoprisoners sublime of Gubaidulinas work; it made me awestruck, ennobled, uplifted. These are humanistic,22

confrontationalevocative qualities. And just look at those terms! Maybe what women artists have to do is begin culture alloverfromthebeginning! P. Welldo what you need to do. But dont just light up a zillionwattswithillusions!Illsayonethingaboutthispost moment, whatever it is, and whateverwe want to call itit is raising every single question we ever had about art, its terms, its functions, its mechanisms, its purposes, its histories; this momentcompelsustoproposeandreliveallthedebatesabout aesthetics and politics and social location again, and at a serious,necessarypitch. A. Postavant. So is this the same term as avantgarde or a differentterm?Whatdoesitmean?Iveseenpostavantused by Ron Silliman on his blog and elsewhere (including www.bostoncomment.com/debate.html),andIacceptit,sortof vaguely,asahelpfulgeneralisedrubric.Itsanumbrella/catch allcategoryforallofwhathasbeenthoughtofasoppositional poetics over the past fiftyplus yearsBlack Mountain, New York School, Language writing, and ethnopoetics, and, and, and.Ifithasaparticularity,itmightmeanwritingcomingafter the Vietnam Era experimental Language Poetries (and sometimes, indeed, its writing made by the people who actuallyparticipatedinthatformation),writingthatdoes,more and more, seem to collect itself in, into, and toward political commentfromTenneyNathanson,fromCAConrad,Deborah Richards,FrankSherlock,fromLauraElrick,RodrigoToscano, from Juliana Spahr, Redell Olsen, Erin Moure, Ed Roberson, Rob Fitterman, Erica Huntthere really are a lot of people doing this workmany more than that list of folks, which is mean to be suggestive only. Howeverand this is quite interesting to mein part because of the penetrating self consciousnessaboutgroupformationvisibleatleastintheNew YorkSchool(s),theLanguagegroups,andinthefreemasonryof ethnopoiesis,anyonecomingupnow(generationally)hasseen23

thesociologyofartgroupsupclose,actively,eagerlydigesting materials,hasseenthedebatesthatbuildandexcludeinpublic forums (like blogs). Thus I think some postavant thinking is selfconsciously trying actively to build a generation. Although I am not sure one builds a generational sense only from ones own acts and agencyI think it also happens, activates, congeals, from historical pressures external to the smallish formations of poetic groups. I can see why the term worldspiritseemssousefulanexplanation! P. So what you mean is postavant exists as a termnow we havetogiveitacontent.Thatlistofpeopleyoujustgaveisnot exactlygenerationalbutcrossgenerational. A. Well, its some people who are simply temporally after the avantgarde formations, doing experimental work. And its people drawing upon modernism, but resisting the universalising, triumphalist ethos of modernism. Plus its people who are selfconsciously using experimental tactics directly to confront politics and ideology and issues in their representation and critique. These are somewhat different emphases (like the difference between Kenny Goldsmith and Bruce AndrewsAndrews has more social bite in his combinatory urgencies, although Goldsmith represents the streaming of sensation and stimuli in our world with hyper realist goals), but they get simply all bundled together under therubricpostavant.Forreasonsofsuchflexibilityalone,itisa usefulenoughtermthat willprobablystick.Andit,likemany suchterms,willcontinuetohaveitsdefinitionsconstructedin processasvariousartistscontinuefunctionallytoparticipatein this formation. To me, postavant means artworks from the mideighties on. (In the US, thus with the neoconservative blockage of social democracy and then the 2000 coup taking over government functions.) This is art made under political andsocialconditionsthatcauseonetoreopenallthequestions aboutthemeaningandfunctionofart,givenoursenseof,and24

our objectively palpable political crisis. Which might be as simpleasalackofideologicalpoliticalpartiesandproportional voting (rather than what we havedysfunctional Big Tent parties and the Electoral College). That is, the US is a democracyinnameonly.Whichmightbeacrisisofouragency, powerlessness,andoursenseofoutofcontrolexploitationand despoilinghappeningveryclose,indeed,sometimeshappening in our names. But to generalise, to get off culturebound UnitedStatesness Id say that fundamentalism, wherever found,iswhatpostavantmuststakeitselfagainst. P. But postavant has a builtin rhetorical problem in its verbal closeness to avantgarde. The avantgarde, the vanguard party, the ones who claimed to be ahead in a necessary, teleologically crucial historical direction also implicitlyorexplicitlyclaimedleadershiprolesintheadvance. Thisisastructuralpartoftheideologyoftheavantgarde.This positionhassevereethicalproblems,castingothersasfollowers only,instrumentalisingthem,whiletheclaimantsbecomeSeers or Visionaries seeing the direction of history, and thus, while possibly acting in exploitive ways in their personal, sexual, economic and ethical life, being excused because of that visionary lan. This vangardist ethos, no matter where it appearedandforgoodreasonorbad,hasbeenadisaster.The separatistclaimofthelesbianvanguard,forinstance,wasacul desac for the womens movement, which does not mean dont misunderstandthat sexual preference and those particular aspects for social justice are not central issues, because they are. In any event PostAvant may be after that conceptualisation of the forerunners, the military scouts, but does it not still claim that same vanguardism of terminology and positionality? It did not get intellectually beyond that kind of vanguardism. Is it not, in its terms, a newnew, or the latestthing,orthething beyondthethingoutfront?Thusin terminology,andtakenatitsfacevalue,thetermpostavant participatesinthevanguardethositispresumablyresisting.25

A. Yes, There is plenty of semantic, not to say deconstructive, ironyinthetermpostavant.Postindicatesafterintime,later, andsubsequenttoandthusindicatesanewfirstness,infront of the former firstness. And in that, the term may simply be descriptive: we do come after, chronologically. Another definition of post is after in position, behind, posterior to. Saying postavant, or avantpost we still line up behind the avantgarde, those historical, noble, excited, beneficial, experimental, shocking, disgraceful groups and movements. Thisisgettingfunny:soarewebeforeorareweafter?Arewe behind or are we in front? Post, in another definition is something placed as a benchmark. We are a post placed near thehistoricalavantgarde,whichisstillabiggerpost.Thelines we string depend on them. Orits post a system for delivering mail, begun in the series of relays along a fixed route,forcouriers.Soavantpostisjustdeliveringtheletters of the avantgarde to another generation. We travel quickly, posthaste.Sowearepostage;theageofafter,thestampand ticket.Andthepriceoffirstclassmailhasrisenagain:39cents. So we can poston the internet. Anyway, Id rather not be post, meaning hasty and quick; shoot first; aim later is amusing(exceptifyoutaketheshot),butifyoudotheshoot firsttoomuch,youllregretit.AndthensupposeIdontwant tolineup,asyoudont,forgenderreasons,withorasanything like the historical, twentiethcentury avantgarde. I need a quieterterm:Experimental.Innovative. P. These terms are agreeable and accurate, but they have no particular historical edginess. Part of that edginess of post avant is precisely the flirtation with an avantgarde history that is also being critiqued. And partly experimental and innovative can be overgeneralised terms everyone is happy tohaveafriendlylittlepieceof,turningstrategiesintorhetoric only. Maybe postavant is this: it is the ethics of resisting the sheerly avantgarde. So its beyond the avantgarde while participating in some of its terms. Wellits a good cluster26

experimental,innovative,avant/postavant.Solongasedginess andcritiquearecentral. A. I say I want to torque things. The challenge, it seems to me,istowritepreciselyinsideonessocialhistoricity,notahead ofit.Andsoforwhateverreasons,Iambeginningtothinkthat Im preavant, although I am certainly living in certain post conditions.Iamnotafteranything;ratherImbefore,waiting still for modernism to happen, waiting for real modernity to happenthesenseofjusticeandsocialdemocracypromisedin theradicalmovementsofthelater19thandearlypartofthe20th century. Utopian desire, ethical hope, sickened astonishment, and intermittent despair are my present. Preavant is the Gramscianoptimismofthewill,pessimismoftheintellect. P. Poetry as a form of words can sometimes lead to political arousal and transformation. Songs can seem to sum up a generations urgencies. A poet/writer who has experienced having her/his words accomplish this (like Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, Allen Ginsberg, or Eliot Weinberger with WhatIHeardaboutIraq),apoetforwhomthisisadecisive desire(suchasAnneWaldman,EzraPound,orSoniaSanchez) can probably never let go of the tremendous feeling of having achieved words that change peoples minds, hearts, consciousness.Butdothesewordscausesomethingtohappen inthepoliticalsphere?Onlyaspartofthepoliticalconditions, as one contribution among many. There is not a direct correlation between writing and action. This is to the good. I would imagine there is a split among these artistsbetween thosewhoseekandaccepttheculturalresponsibilityofbeinga conduitforsomethingthattheyfeelneedstobesaidandthose whodiscussandexaminewhattheyseeisvital,whereupon,by a series of interesting accidents, their words accidentally become talismanic. Ginsberg did notwrite Howl in order to achieve the response he did; the response was an unintended

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consequence, one, however, that created a feedback loop that inducedhimtocontinuetospeakforhisgeneration. The bard, the spokesperson, the arouser, the one on whom ourinvestmentspour,theonewhoseemstobespeakingforus, the one whose rhetorics appear to have invented usthis is a generative cultural position, but it is not either an exclusive functionforpoetrynorisitthetopofanimaginedhierarchyof poetrys function. Poets might think oftheir wordsas bridges, reachingbetween,livinginbetweenness. A.Doyourealisewehaventreallysaidwhatpostconditions we are talking about? I mean, with all this invoking of historicity. Id say postVietnam (a big power loses to a guerrilla army), post9/11 in the USAthe shock of an attack thatshouldhavebeendeclaredacrimeagainsthumanitybut instead solidified a minority government and its calculated preemptivewarpoliciesbothinsideandoutsideitsborders; postFall of Berlin Wall in Europe; and postnational on the economic level (rabid companies and ministries of economics, global integration, exporting exploitation, despoilers otherwise called investorsin collusion with national governments against peoples). This is one mix, and its dates range from 1975 to 2006thirty years! But mainly it is about smallpowerlessness,thelackofagencyofthesmallasagainst the machineries of power: states, armies, global companies. So what I want to say in considering the postavant is: We have notmournedthefailureofmodernityenough. P.Tellmemore. A.Whatwentwrong?TorahinHell.AtlasofSlavery.Wehave not mourned and comprehended (taken the knowledge inside us)becauseitsfailuresarepocked,pebbled,irregular(unevenly developed). In our world sector or cadre, we have the more developed gains of modernity, although unequally distributed even inside our sector.(We, is definedhere, ina friendly way,28

asmadeupofpeoplewhohaveenougheducation,equipment, and access to participate in this discussion) Class, race, ethnicity, region, gender, religious culture are some of the filters that bar or inflect the dissemination of the benefits of modernity. But we have not mourned because we are often dazzled by the baubles modernity has given to us. We were thinkingthatthisunrollingcrisisisnotaboutus:globalisation, not about us. Possibility of nuclear war, not about us. Our standard of living, not about us. Ecological disaster, not about us (well, maybe about us). The militant claims to impose fundamentalist religious laws, not about us. Hence our consciousness has been pallid and apolitical; this has been goingonforyearsnow;itseemsourconsciousnessisparalyzed andhalfpoisoned.Willwewakeup?Wearestilllivinginsome amnesia and obliviousness. We are not enraged enough about injustice,aboutthelacksandlossesofothers,becausewedont seethesearepartofus.Livinginthelongtwentiethcentury (in modernity, whenever that beganlets say with African enslavement,accomplishedbyatoxiccoalitionofthewilling this is not white vs. black by any means!), we have also lived with unacceptable brutality and political malfeasance: genocide, rapine. We have gotten used to the tragedies we inflict on each other while invoking peculiar names: science, religion,nation,development.Wehavetobecomedesperatefor our values. These values involve sustainable development, liberaltolerance,andsocialjustice. P.PostGardesfromtheVolcano?TheajvarofDada,ajarofit, allred,isopenonthetable.Sometimespeoplepassingbywill take a spoonful and throw it in whatever they are doing. I shrug.Or,astudentpaperonapoem.Ithasarevolutionatthe end. We should be so lucky. She meant, probably, either resolution or revelation. These are notes in Shorthad. Rightnow,wevebeenshorthad.Thepowerofhandsonthe leversofpowerwhichareshameless,unchecked,andwillingto lie and never swerve is one of the more shockingand fast29

moving developments on the past (approximate) decadesix years of a callow, shameless, criminal clericalauthoritarian presidentoftheUnitedStatesfeelslikeforever. A.WhenCelanchangedhisname,makingapoetsnamefrom Antschel, his family name, I think what he did was cast out particulartaintedletters:theHforHitlerandtheSTforStalin. P.Postavantfeelsliketheknowledgeofnetworks.Wearenot one single thing. This may be because of the internet, information access and information saturation, instant communication.Itmaybebecauseoftheplaguesandillnesses that travel round the globe. It may be that we intuit or are shocked by ways various farflung economies interconnect; or we feel the butterfly wing of politics whose links and odd causationsshakeustothecore.Thebreeze(oftenonewehave created, financed, underhandedly encouraged even when it violatesourlawsorhumanrightsnorms)setsupatidalwave ofshattering. A. No Proof Children Were Told To Kill. Headline, 30 November1993.Thisheadlineistypicalofourtimes.Youcan hearitsweaselling,lyingtoneevenacrosstheyears. P. Im still unclear about whether we are participating in the postavant or critiquing the concept. But whichever, ideologiesthat is consciousness, assumptions, values, and modesreallyhaveplayedastrongrolebothintherealworld, as religious ideologies, mainly fundamentalist ones in the current world crisis. You can see why Mina Loy thought, in 1918,thatartistsshouldworktogethertouseacombinationof fashion,snobappeal,andhighculturetoabsolutelychangethe symbolic order.7 The symbolic order(which existsin literature

7 Mina Loy, International PsychoDemocracy (1918), The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed.RogerL.Conover(Highlands,N.C.;TheJargonSociety,1982)276282.

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andreligion,innationalideologyandsoon)ispreciselypartof whatwe,asartists,engage. A. Thats why there is a desperate necessity to act against fundamentalistthoughtwhereveritisfound.Itisoneenemyof art.Andthatisjustonereason!Rightnowitisfoundinfourof themajorworldreligions.Hindufundamentalisminakindof purgative violence. Israeli fundamentalism that wants to capture Judaism for Israel, as if these were synonymous. They are emphatically not. Christian fundamentalist denizens have capturedthegovernmentoftheUnitedStates.Thishasbeen achievedthroughaseriesofastonishingactsaroundthesevere tainting of the electoral process, acts with consequences of serious import. We are its hostages. Christian fundamentalism hasnotgoneunresisted,butitisstillpowerful,anditsmoralist millenarian thinking is grotesque and dangerous in a secular society. Militant, military Islamic fundamentalism, already active in national settings, has made startling claims for attentioninthistoxicsituation,creatingafourcornereddanger. Islamic fundamentalism has captured some of the ideological institutions of Islam, such as small schools and mosques. I wouldtakeseriouslyitsdesiretoimposearetrogrademoralism andantimodernsocialnormsonthesecularinstitutionsofthe world.AsIwouldtakethefulminationsoftheChristianRight in the United States, particularly, though not exclusively, their continuingsocialwaronthefemalegender,butalsoonsexual minorities and by their concerted justifications of suppurating socialinequality. P. It is probably not enough simply to say what we stand for. Ethical nuance, linguistic richness, forms that sustain interest, and a resistance to affirmation especially affirmation ledby thenose. Compassion, empathy, justice. The creation of, simultaneously, space for ones work and respect for the achievements of others. Heritage, transmission, transposition,

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regeneration. Resistance, articulation, hope. Poisis and curiosity. A. Go back to the beginning: Is the avantgarde viable under prevailingpostconditions?Whatisviable?Doesthismean whos listening? or does it mean having a realworld impact? Does viable mean capable of being actualised, or surviving, developing, practicable? To me, viable is a strange word.Really,anythingcanbedone;canbemade.Theissueis whatisworthdoing.IfIwanttowrapislandsinpinkcloth,is this worth doing? Should I not think about the birds, the shellfish, the tides? Is mastery, heroism, and imperial vantage the only model of ambition? This arta project of Christois hardly avantgarde; it parallels the ecological despoliation model of Big Corporations, and prettifies that mindset by drapingcolouredfabricaroundbigterritory.Further,themodel of sheer rupture is tiresome. It disallows the poise of an artwork, orsays to the reader/listener/consumer that the sense of achievement, peace, poise, pleasure, awe, sense of location, satisfaction at the end of an artwork is null, or is a coarse satisfaction,notpronetochangetheworld. P. You knowDavid Antin opens his what it means to be avantgarde with this antiChristo riff. And he also says practically every role classically attributed to the avantgarde hasbeenpreemptedbysomethingelselikeadvertising.8 A.Takemylittleriffasafootnotetohis P.IhatethePoetic. A.ForgetPoetic.Tryidiosyncretismatic.

8 DavidAntin,WhatitMeanstobeAvantGarde(NewYork:NewDirections,1993) 44.

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P. Stop making up ways, or words, to make me feel better. I wantartthatistheworkofthought.Nottheworkofcertainty ordullcraftrunningonempty.Iwantarttogetatthejoyofthe pain of being here. The pain of the joy in such an intractable world. A.Someartisimprovedbyleavingitbehind. P. I dreamed of seeing workmen and welldressed men throwing women. Just picking them up and throwing them, throwingandbreakingthem.Thisdreamwasin2002. A. Antins What it means to be avantgarde is an extended parable that hardly discusses the proposition of the title in any conventional fashion. However, there is an extended meditationonthetemporalityoftheavantgarde,asitlivesin the present and responds to the present humanely and with a situatedethics.Meaningifyouhavetoinventsomethingnew todotheworkathandyouwill,andthiswithoutworrying aboutmakingitneworshocking.9Articulatingthepresentto itself is a task, a work, a responsibility. This is why Antin spends some energy leafing through the [local San Diego] newspaper looking for the present,10 a corny, cunning positivismatwhichAntinisquiteadept,ashistacticishardly aleatory, but allegorical and holographic He also draws an intricate picture of a network of family history, of aging relatives and family loss. The sense of loss, gap, processes of losingit,indignitiesofage,pain,thebraveryoffacingwhatis withdignityandcompassioncentraltothiswork.Antinsfinal excursusinthepieceishisthreeweeksearchforUncleIrving, playing crosscountry telephone tag, and then his suddenly beinginformed,bythestunnedwidow,ofUncleIrvingsdeath afewhoursafterAntinhadlasttalkedtohim.Whereuponthe pieceends:anditseemstomethatifyoucantrespondtothat 9 Antin,WhatitMeanstobeAvantGarde,46. 10 Antin,WhatitMeanstobeAvantGarde,55.

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youre not inthe avantgarde.11 Thus the avantgarde isabout humane,ethical,frankresponsetothehumancondition.Itis,in a sense, humanism, but inflected with eccentric critiques, presentalertness,anattitudeofinvestigationanddiscernment, a temporally moving social dynamic, an articulation and exploration of the present. Its also a claim about scaleno moreworldhistoricalscope.Thelocal;theparticular;theethical as acting in the present as one faces that present. I suppose I couldgoforsomethingofthatasthepostavant. P. You know that famous title? Its not Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. People often quote that title wrong.OrtheysayReflectionsofaDamagedLife.Asifitwereall personal, all Adornos problem, his life, his problem. Heres the real title. Its Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Theresnoaaboutit. A. We are all damaged; our collective life, damaged, and deliberately with complicity and deliberation, especially by peoplewhowantedtodestroysocialfabricinthenameofprofit andpowerinordertomakemoreprofitandpower.Jeestun autre now has ethical and geopolitical meaning. ConsciousnessISnetwork.

11 Antin,WhatitMeanstobeAvantGarde,61.

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R.M.Berry

TheAvantGardeandtheQuestionof Literature If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.Wittgenstein,Tractatus(6.4311)

Itseemsincreasinglyapparenttomethatformallyexperimental writing is running counter to the main current of history. Whether we consider the global expanse of capitalism, the unrivalledpositionoftheUnitedStatesininternationalaffairs, the rise of the Republican party nationally, or the worldwide audienceforHollywoodfilmandAmericanpopularmusic,the general direction of the last three decades has been toward increasing consolidation of the dominant. My aim in acknowledging this bleak fact is not to minimise the real fissuresandcountercurrentsofrecenthistory.Itistomotivate aquestion:Whydoesformallyexperimentalwritingpersist,at least for some of us, in the face of what appears to be its growing marginalisation? In what follows I will not be providingahistoricalexplanationforthispersistence,norwillI be seeking a political or ethical justification, although its essential to the force of my remarks that, on occasion, they compete with such accounts. My background idea is that the continuation into the new millennium of literary experimentation, despite its widespread neglect, is forceful35

evidence that modernism was not a response to historically circumscribed conflicts and crises but, on the contrary, arose from necessities internal to literature itself. Ill try here to give concretenesstothisidea,toindicatehowthesenecessitiesarise, what they look like, why theyre not generally recognised, while attempting some rapprochement with the history Im bracketing. After all, what Ive situated internal to literature, countertohistory,issimplythenecessityforchange,thatis,for history.Saidanotherway,itsunclearwhetherImlookingfor thenecessityofformalexperimentationorperhapsforfreedom fromnecessityaltogether.Thesecouldbethesamething. For those of us who are committed to radical change in literature,therearegoodreasonswhywemightwanttoavoid using the term avantgarde. The philosopher Stanley Cavell, whosewritingsonmodernismhavebeeninfluentialforme,has noted three confusions endemic to the concept.1 First is its tendency to overemphasise arts future at the expense of its past, leaving present work ungrounded. The result of this lopsidedness is an impression that contemporary art bears no relation,oronlyanarbitraryone,tothosehistoricachievements that have given rise both to arts significance and to its problems. We could speak of this first confusion as the avant gardes misrepresenting possibility as indeterminacy, its misinterpretation of arts unforeclosable future as a hedge against its historical specificity, its present fix. A second confusion has to do with the avantgardes uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative, regardless of an innovations sterility, irrelevance, or just plain stupidity. Cavell speaks of this tendency as the avant gardespromiscuousattentiontonewness,aphraseintended tosuggestbothindiscriminatecouplingandinfidelity.Theidea is that the avantgarde habitually conflates novelty with change, imagining that artistic advance results from mere unconventionality, from difference as such. Call this the 1 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition(Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1979)2167.

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fartheroutthanthousyndrome.Andthethirdconfusionisa tendency, already implicit in the avantgardes military metaphor,torepresentartisticadvancesashistoricalorpolitical advances, as though significant changes in the forms of art could be validated by their political efficacy. Although Cavell wantstokeepopenthequestionofartsrelationtopolitics,not toimplythatthereisnorelation,hemeansheretocriticisethe habit, so characteristic of 20th century avantgardes, of underestimating the real differences between artistic practice and serious political action. How to characterise this last confusionisdifficult,sincewerestillinit,butithassomething to do with arts paradoxical autonomy, with the political significanceofartsirreducibilitytopoliticalsignificance.Taken together these confusions emphasise the avantgardes tendencytoturnonitself,torepresentthehistoricalconditions of art as mere obstacles, and thus to undermine those problematiccontinuitiesonwhich,notjustmainstreamart,but evenrevolutionaryart,depends. Inher1926lecture,CompositionasExplanationGertrude Steinoffersanaccountofhistoricalchangethat,whileinsisting on the necessity for advances in art, seems to avoid Cavells critique. Her originality stems from two ideas, both involving what she calls timesense.2 First is her idea that the goal of any advance is not the future but the present. That is, every generation lives instinctively and unselfconsciously several generations behind itself, in a kind of anachronistic hybridity, preoccupied with earlier emotions, reflexes, styles, and concepts, and discovering its own time only afterwards, in narrating it. Her paradigm of this belatedness is World War I, whichshesaysthegeneralsimaginedasanineteenthcentury war to be fought with twentieth century weapons,3 a time lag that suppressed modern warfare until too late, after the carnage had forced contemporaneity on it. Part of what Stein 2 Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein,ed.CarlVanVechten(NewYork:Vintage,1990)514. 3 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,513.

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wants from this example is the contrast between the academic and the modern, a contrast shell develop later as something prepared versus something that decides how it is to be when it is to be done. But more immediately she wants to deepentheproblemoftimeitself. For Stein, the present is never what the present naturally wants. On the contrary, wherever the present achieves expression, those living in it will find it confusing, irritating, unnatural, ugly. Consequently, art cannot be made present by accommodatingittopopularstylesordominantideas,andarts motivation to become present has nothing to do with striving after novelty. Instead, changes in art occur because in some befuddling but lifedetermining way, they already have occurred, are already present, inescapably so, even when repudiated. Steins idea is that what changes from one generation to the next is a form, not a content, what she calls composition, and although each generations composition controls its consciousness absolutely, i.e., makes what those whodescribeitmakeofit,4itdoesnotitselfreadilysubmitto consciousness, to description. Its as though everyone can feel howoutofsynchthingsare,canrecognisetheobsolescenceof what our leaders, parents, peers have to say, but as soon as anyone tries to say whats out of synch, he or she becomes obsolete too. Arts problem then is to acknowledge something as inescapable as an entrenched enemy but that resists our direct advance as forcefully as a machine gun. As Stein says, Nooneisaheadofhistime,5oneofseveralremarksmeantto dislodge our confidence that we already know what shes talking about. The avantgardein Steins senseis merely arts struggle for its time, for embodiment of those formative but unrepresentable conditions on which arts continued presence,andpossiblyeverythingelsestoo,depends. ButSteinssecondideaseemstocomplicate,ifnotundo,this first one. Her word composition is meant to set up an 4 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,513. 5 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,514.

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analogy between the action of history and the activity of painters, writers, and musicians, the point being that the modern work is one that incorporates this new timesense, the consciousness of the present, into itself. However, when Stein tries to explain what this change means concretely, she comes out with a stupefying series of redundancies: a thing madebybeingmadewhatisseenwhenitseemstobebeing seen,thethingseenbyeveryonelivinginthelivingtheyare doing, and most dizzyingly, the composing of the compositionthatatthetimetheyarelivingisthecomposition ofthetimeinwhichtheyareliving.6Despitetheircircularity, theseformulationsseemtomeuncommonlyprecise.Whatthey allshareisasuggestionofsomethingalreadyinexistencethat is the means by which it is itself brought into existence. The ideaseemstobethatwhathasalwaysexistedunrecognisedin arti.e., the creative power of presentnessis in the modern work, not just what is recognised, but what actually does the work of art, what makes art art specifically by being recognised. This is what her phrase, a thing made by being made,triestobringout.Butnoweverythinghasgottenturned around, since presentness no longer seems limited to the present.Itsasifmodernartwerentjustthelatestchangeinart, say, the form of Steins own generation, but were instead a change of a wholly different order, one that has revealed something about all art. That this is, in fact, Steins idea is indicated by her lectures first sentence, which insists on a historicalchangelessnessunderlyingchangesincomposition,as well as by her later, more paradoxical insistence that what resultsfromincorporatingthenewtimesenseisnotahistorical documentbutsomethingtimeless,aclassic.Itisasthoughwhat Steinsgenerationneededtodotomakeartwastofindoutfor thefirsttimewhatartwas.Inotherwords,thewholepointof acknowledging the present for Stein is to disclose what, once laidbare,seemsalwaystohaveexisted.Whenthishappens,art

6 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,5146.

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happens.Understoodinthissense,theavantgardeisntjustthe struggle for its time. Its the struggle in its time for something suppressed by time itself. Steins term, both for this struggle andforitsobject,isacontinuouspresent.7 Despite the difficulty of making these ideas clear, I think Steinsaccountofartisticadvanceisbasicallyright.Ifliterature istoexistinthepresent,thenitmustbediscoveredthere.Thisis, I believe, what the idea of an avantgarde meant for Steins generationandwhatIbelieveitstillmeans,evenifignored.To writeaftermodernism,notasthoughbefore,istoacknowledge modernisms discovery of this necessity of discovery as such. Initially, this implies that nothing known about forms of writing can count as a guide for producing novels and poems now. That is, we are to imagine an inadequacy of our current knowledgethatisnotovercomebynewerorbetterknowledge, aninadequacyintrinsictoknowingitself.Steinsideaseemsto bethatwhatneedsdiscoveringourtimehasthecharacterof obviousness, as though the new composition were too proximate, too present, for knowing. Understood in this way, the problem isnt so much that current knowledge is obsolete, as that its neurotic.Whatcan be taught in writingworkshops andliteraturecoursesi.e.,theversionofpoetryandfictionwe arepresentlypreparedtorecognisehasthesamestatusasthe version of his or her present life that the analysand enters psychoanalysis prepared to recount. One can say about such versionsthattheyrepresswhatneedsdiscoveringorthatthey incessantly reveal it, but either way, an unacknowledged presence controls all thats said. It is this paradox that Stein bringsoutbysaying,notthatnationsarebehindthetimes,but that they are behind themselves,8 as though our anachrony comprised an essential dividedness. The implication is simply thatdiscoveringwillnottaketheformofnarrating.Thatis,the present cannot be revealed as a new or further episode in any story we are prepared to recount, and being present does not 7 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,517. 8 Stein,CompositionasExplanation,515.

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meanrecountingit.Nothingobvioustousaboutmachineguns was unknown to WWI generals. This failure, even impertinence,ofcurrentknowledgeiswhatremainsrightabout modernismsinsistenceonnewness,innovation,experiment. At the same time, the impertinence of knowledge does not mean literature must be, or even can be, created directly from present experience. Nothing seems further from Steins idea than that changes in art are identical with changes in taste, sensibility,culturalstyle,orfashion,whichiswhatwerelikely to have in mind if we say every generations experience is unique. Quite the contrary, Steins idea is that present experience will be as anachronistic, as much a hybrid of past experience,aspoetryandfiction,andforthesamereasons.To insist that literature must be discovered means that, far from creating poems and fiction ex nihilo, from literatures absence, literature can only be createdas contradictory as this soundsfrom literature, that is, from something always already in existence, controlling in misunderstood and largely unrecognised ways every writing. This is what Steins continuouspresent tries to name. I takeit to be a version of what Heidegger had in mind when, in apparent defiance of logic,heinsistedthatartwasitsownorigin.9Thatis,whatthe present discovers is not just a new composition or form. It discovers literature, as though for the first time. Steins originality was in seeing that, where the present is at issue in this way, acknowledgment proves more radical than even the farthestfetched invention. In her account, the avantgarde writer undergoes, succumbs utterly to, what in other writing exists as frustrated, ignored, incomplete. In other words, the notoriousirritationanduglinessofavantgardeartcanbesaid to measure, not the presents distance from the past, but the presents distance from itself. It is a dividedness of the same kind, and with similar consequences, as the analysands dividedness from his or her own body. Between linguistic 9 MartinHeidegger,TheOriginoftheWorkofArt,Poetry,Language,Thought, trans.AlbertHofstadter(NewYork:Harper&Row,1971)178.

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materialityand literatures presence there persists thisgap. Or statedinasentence,aftermodernism,literatureceasestoexist ashistoryandmaterialisesasaquestion. Probably the best way to give tangibility to these remarks would be to examine Steins own writings, since her lectures were always meditations on her own literary practice, but because my interest is less in what the avantgarde was than what it is, I want to conclude with some reflections on Carole Masos novel AVA. Although the order of my paper suggests that I am using Masos novel to illustrate a theory developed independentlyandbeforehand,Ithinktheoppositechronology is more nearly the case. At any rate, if I had not come to understand what literature is by discovering from specific worksoffictionthatIdidntalreadyknow,thennoneofwhatI havesaidsofarwouldhavebeenformeofmorethanacademic interest. Which is another way of saying I wouldnt have writtenthis. AVA is my candidate for a present representative of the avantgarde in fiction, that is, for a novel that continues modernisms advance into the present. Ultimately, my commitment to AVA does not result from its mere difference fromothernovelsbut,asIlltrytoshow,fromitsrevelationof what novels are, what they have always been. However, Im highlighting it initially because its form seems a version of nothing that, before AVA, I was prepared to recognise as a narrative. Its originating predicament is that Ava Klein, professor of comparative literature and ardent lover of life, is dyingatage39,andMasostextpurportstobearecordofthe phrases, images, writings, and recollections that pass before Avasconsciousnessonthemorning,afternoon,andnightof15 August, 1990, the day Iraq invades Kuwait and Ava dies. The problem Ava faces on this day is how her life can be whole, complete, even while coming to such a premature end. She recalls a remark by Eva Hesse, Life doesnt last, art doesnt

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last,10 one of countless passages that imply something closer thanananalogy,morelikeanidentity,betweentheproblemin thenovelandtheproblemofthenovel.WhatAvathecharacter seeks,whatAVAthenovelseeks,issomethingthat,aslongas therewasGod,meaningprovided,callitlastingsignificanceor ahigherend,butsomethingthatatonedfortheshortcomingsof fleshandmatter.However,withoutrecoursetotheeverlasting, Avasdeathcannotberedeemedthroughanyspiritualallegory. Her salvation has to be literal: Here is my arm, she tells the chemo nurse. I want to live (49). Nothing not complete in itself,nothingthatstandsforsomethingelse,canmattertoAva now. All that will atone for life is life. The problem then, for bothnovelandcharacter,istime. AVAs pages seem a material realisation of Steins anachronistic hybridity, their lines comprising a congeries of timesandplaces,textsandexperiences,eachwithitsdistinctive mood,inflection,rhythmstillintact.Somelinesexpressregret, asthoughthepasthadpresenteditselftoolate(HowcouldI whydidIhesitate,givenallthatweknew,eventhen?[173]), while others acknowledge present longings that still look toward future consummation (Because decidedly, I do not wanttomissthegrandopeningscheduledforearlywinter,still somemonthsaway,ofthenewCaribbeanrestaurantdownthe block that will serve goat [11]). Several lines allude to events thatwerenevermorethanpartlypresent,evenontheiroriginal occurrence: Schuberts unfinished symphony, a deferred marriage proposal, a fragment of orchestral music heard on a carradio,amiscarriedpregnancy,Mosesdyingwithinsightof the promised land. Taken together, these lines epitomise a frustration that seems more than just accidental,an anachrony built into Avas very existence, as though to be mortal were simply to be balked. She recalls George Steiners remark, Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short, but because it is a human life (100). That is, deprived of10 Carole Maso, AVA (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1995) 185. Subsequent page referencesarecitedintext.

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paradise,humanfinitudeseemsitselfabrokenpromise.Itsas if Avas capacity to imagine a future without herself, or possibly just her ability to say the words, If we could live forever (102), projects a limitlessness by contrast with which every present, regardless how extraordinary, seems truncated. So many plans, she thinks, then adds, time permitting (162). Some lines attribute this frustration to language. Ava repeatedly recalls Hlne Cixouss wish to create a language that heals as much as it separates (52), a wish frequently juxtaposedwithAvashopeforcure,asthoughthetwoforms of brokeness, Avas body and Avas dying words, were each formsofasingledisruption.MorethanonceAvaflirtswiththe ideaofalost,primordialwholeness,asifarticulationwerenot hernaturalcondition,juxtaposingtheremark,Letmedescribe whatmylifeoncewashere,withthefragment,Homebefore itwasdivided(22),andwishingrepeatedlyforthefluencyof music. A recalled quote from Monique Wittig (37) attributes thislinguisticdisruptiontomaleness. InterpretingMasosmythoflostoriginsistricky,sinceitcan express either a wholly satisfactory solution to Avas problem oratemptationtorepeatit.Itstothistemptation,forexample, that Ava and her first husband yield, seeking ever younger lovers in an effort to make their love present again by replicating its inaugural moment: You were looking for the way I was once, Ava tells him, the age I was when we first met(167).Thatis,interpretedastheprojectionoffullnessinto a retreating past, Masos myth reinstitutes the temporal confinement Avas literally dying to escape. Although Maso means for her myth to recall us to a forgotten promise, she doesnt mean that Canaan could only be entered by going backwards. On the contrary, if Avas life is to be whole, its wholenessmustcome,notthroughareturntothepastbutofit, asoftherepressed,areturnidenticalwithAvasabsorptionin thepresent.Inotherwords,theincompletenessofAvaslifeis not its discontinuousness, or not if by that we mean lifes comings and goings, its punctuation by silence and questions,44

its parsing into discrete experiences, what Ava calls moments. If language is implicated in Avas problem, then thats not because it is articulatei.e., not because it is language. If anything, as Ava draws closer to AVAs end, she seems increasingly affirming of all that separates words, thoughts, feelings, people. Learn to love the questions themselves, she tells herself. The spaces between words. Between thoughts. The interval (171). No, the complicity of language in her lifes incompleteness must involve something withwhichthediscontinuousnessofwords,theirarticulations, can be readily confused, some capacity of a word to dislocate from its origin, from those moments in which its occurrence brings fulfilment or relief, and recur where its presence can createdivision.Ifwehavedifficultyseeingwhatthisis,thatis probablybecause,inreadingAVA,wearedoingittoo. What makes time problematic in AVA is narrative. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that Avas predicament, like the readers, is not that she lives in time but that,beingmortal,shemusttellit,recounteverymoment.The source of lifes incompleteness, then, is not its division into wordsbutitsdivisionintobeginning,middle,andend.Itisthis schism that Steins continuous present means to repair. When Avasconsciousness,whenMasospage,issplitintowhatStein calls the time of the composition and the time in the composition (516), even the fullest moments resemble forestalled actions (And what in the world were we waiting for? [24]), unfinished developments (I might have gone to China[241]),dashedhopes(Welostthebaby,Anatole[81]), orepiphaniesthatcametoolate(Everythinginmeissuddenly beginning to emerge clearly. Why not earlier? Why at such cost?Ihavesomanythousandsofthings,somenew,somefrom anearliertime,whichIwouldliketotellyou[241]).Itisthis representationofherlifeasneverwhollypresentthatperiodically risesupinAvaasaninsatiabledemandformoretime:Finda cureFindacureFindacure(221).Eitherthepastreturns asreminderofherlifesfullnessYouwereallIeverwanted45

(61),Yougavemetheworld(178),Itwasparadise(43)or it retreats eternally, trapping her in finitude: But I am only thirtynine, Dr Oppenheim (55). Everything can be narrated except what must be present for anything to be narrated. In other words, the solution to the problem of Ava Kleins life and therefore to the problem of representing itis not discovered by postponing death a few more years, for the problem is not lifes shortness. And the solution remains hopeless only so long as representing it substitutes for undergoingit,whichisroughlywhatWittgensteinmeantinthe Tractatus when he called aesthetics transcendental.11 Avas solution remains where Ava has always discovered it, in the livingoutofeverymomentinitscompleteness,fully,uptothe momentoflifescloseindeath.Thatis,whateverenableswords tocomeandgo,anythingtobeapreparationforanythingelse, eachmomenttobeaconclusion,acomplication,adenouement, abeginning,ortimeinitscontinuumtobepunctuatedbynow, now, nowwhatever permeates every present, making it count, that is what makes AVA, both novel and character, whole. Irealisethiswayofspeakingcanseemfrustrating,almostas frustrating as calling the deathbed question of Avas lover But what, after all, is wrong with now? (87)an answer. Eithernothingneedsexplaininghereornearlyeverything.Ifeel like saying: You simply have to hear the words! But the problemis,ifyoudidhearthewords,thensayingyouhaveto verges on an insult, and if you didnt hear the words, saying you have to is an insult. Were banging our heads against a limit.Whatcantbesaidcantbesaid.However,ifIweretotry to give concrete expression to this present I find so absorbing, Id turn my attention to the most immediately striking but readilyoverlookedfeatureofMasosnovel:thedelugeofwhite spaceoneverypage.Thiswhitespacerepresentssomethingno novel has ever existed without but whose precise significance11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness(London:Routledge,1978)6.421.

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fornovelswentlargelyuninvestigateduntilthelatterhalfofthe twentiethcentury.ItisintermsofMasosfurtherdiscoveryof thissignificancethatIwanttospeakbothofAVAscontinuous presentnessand,inretrospect,ofitshistoricaladvance. ToexplainwhatImean,itwillhelptocontrasttherelation of white space and text in AVA with that of two other earlier novels with which it seems to have some affinity: Raymond Federmans Take It or Leave It, and David Marksons WittgensteinsMistress.WhitespaceinTakeItorLeaveItisused, forthemostpart,asitwasbymodernistpoetryfrom,say,W.C. Williams through Charles Olson, primarily, as the spatial equivalent of a break in speech, a breath stop or syntactic division,andsecondarily,asawayofforegroundinglinguistic materiality, the print as a visual object. The opening lines of Federmans Pretext, despite their initial appearance of disorder, seem on closer examination arranged in near perfect accordwithspeechrhythms,syntax,andgrammar: inthebeginning wordsscattered bychance andinalldirections!

Similarverticalseriesofsyntacticallyorgrammaticallyparallel unitscanbeseenelsewhereonthenovelsopeningpages: ashysilhouette aprofile ashinysaxophone

orinthelowerrightcornerofthesecondpage; treees roads cars people rooms puppets 47

people.

However,thejumbledtextontherightmarginofthefirstpage, ucnrleeege notoldnris!

operates by another principle, providing something like a visual mimesis of its own sense or meaning. While arranging the text according to rhythm and syntax works to emphasise the spokenness of the narration, its saturation with voice, the visual mimesis seems to disrupt or compete with this voice, asserting the autonomous existence of page and print. But in bothinstancesFedermansrelationtothewhitespaceisthatof using it, that is, manipulating it for expressive ends or to actualise his narrators character. Despite the expanded signifying repertoire of Take It or Leave It, its white space remainsin some sense still to be articulatedpassive and inert, incidental to the action in the same way as commas and periods. Federmans artistic advance is to reveal his pages as white, not blank, not just lacking printing, but even if consideredadisclosureofmateriality,theultimateeffectofhis use of white space is to foreground, not the page, but the voluble FrancoAmerican whose selfrepresentation provides boththenovelsmatterandmanner,itsspeechanditswriting. WecouldcallTakeItorLeaveItagraphicperformanceorthe graphic