Zombie poetry

I want to feel what I feel. —[1] Toni Morrison, The Guardian (2012)

Let us consider a poetry of the apostrophe. That is to say, an exclamatory poetry, a poetry addressed to no one in particular, a poetry of broken and abstracted personification, of possession and emotion in the extreme. To put it another way, a poetry of a sign used “to indicate the omission of one or more letters in a word … to indicate the possessive case … to indicate plurals of abbreviations and symbols.”[2] In other words, “O death, where is thy sting? O graue, where is thy victorie?”[3]

I have been accused of, and voluntarily confessed to, killing poetry. If the problem of prior murders was what to do with the body, the problem of the moment is the corpse will not stay dead. Or rather, it will stay dead, but will not shut up. It rots and rises, and opens its maw to state the obvious: “I am dead.” Now Derrida said to say “I am dead” is “the condition for the true act of language.” “True” because the sentence follows the rules of pure grammaticality — it signifies despite its lack of significant object. Because it is obviously false and yet intelligible, “I am dead” is “the very condition for the living person to speak.”[4] It is the matter of fact of the doubling of the je, which was not, for Derrida as for Barthes, a matter of distinction between énonciateur and énonciation, the latter being the Barthean point of discursive origin,[5] but which was latent in temporalization itself. There is no “pure present,” for “historical time is already implied in the discursive time of the énonciation.” Furthermore, for Derrida, “I am dead” is possible because “I am always already absent from my language,” from my singularity, which is reanimated each time, for the first time, when I say “I.”[6] This, to me, is a given of what has constituted poetry, an énonciation of je that is a matter of form over matter, mass over mind. Like the “I” that “likes” on Facebook. To my mind, some of the newest forms of conceptual poetry enact various forms of communion between the I that was poetry and the I that is the state of post-conceptual poetics. In which post is less a temporal or historical marker than a matter of assignment, such that “to post” is derived from the Latin pōnere, “to place.” It is not for nothing that I am where I am placed, the site/non-site specificity of avant-garde poetry.

In Robert Smithson’s provisional theory of the site, abstract logical representation represents an actual, that is to say, literal site. The space between the aestheticized and the real is the “space of metaphoric significance,”[7] which is the space where Bourdieu locates the field of cultural production, and where I would place allegory as a purely prepositional matter. And as I am cognizant of my occasional role as poetic arbiter, “arbiter,” which does not appear to derive from the German arbeiten, but should, especially in this context, especially as the latter implicates expansion and shrinkage, especially when applied to wood. This specialized cognition should not get in the way of a more specialized cognition, which is the coincident of my function and my desire to confirm the undead of poetry, to serve, in a word, our disinterred poetic interests. Such as manifest in the following three exhibits, each of which exhibits a particular desire to animate conceptualism, that is to say, to give it an animus — historically, psychoanalytically, paternally, communally, literally.

I confess as well that I find a certain a mezzanine quality to all this, a notable backstitch, in which the pleasures of animation coexist (perhaps forcibly) with the pitch of thing-ness, one not sacrificed for another, save in the (libidinal) manner of the Eucharist. That is to say, the saving grace of the promise of life after life, of Zombie poetries. In which, for example, the quite historical formal dictates of a historical group such as the Oulipo may be considered the considered equivalent to the idiosyncratic, ahistorical peregrinations of “n/oulipo,” a set of no one’s design but the claimant’s — in this case, critic Katie Price.[8] And I would argue that this kind of maneuver is a magic trick, that the real work being done in such new criticism has nothing to do with the work being considered, which is the hand that moves, but the work right in front of you, the steady hand of the critic. For Katie Price’s essay equating choate and inchoate coteries[9] is above all a piece of conceptualist criticism, akin to Marjorie Perloff’s essay on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project in Unoriginal Genius, in which Perloff pretends not only that there is something entitled The Arcades Project (or Passagenwerk) that was a book by Walter Benjamin, but that such a book is a book of literature, a harbinger of conceptual writing.[10] A similar move enables Price to consider n/oulipo as a form of constraint-based or procedural writing akin to its antecedent. One that exists in no one’s mind but the critic’s. Though that is more than good enough. Because the stake at stake in any (and every) community is that of the cartoon creature who builds the footbridge across the chasm one step ahead of its crossing the footbridge across the chasm.

An effort more directly evidenced in broader genre-establishing maneuvers, such as those of Russian videopoetry. As described by poet/critic Natalia Fedorova, Russian videopoetry defines itself as “a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of images with text and sound. In the measured blending of these three elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic experience,”[11] and the mark of poetry evidenced in the genre-constraint that “the text of the poem should be displayed on screen or voiced.” According to Fedorova, Russian videopoetry explicitly “legitimizes itself through creating a number of expertise institutions like “festivals,” and, one would assume, university conferences and occasional essays such as this. Or, better still, definitional rules.[12] And to go even further towards what passes for my point, there is the self-proclaimed narcissism of second-generation American conceptualists, who rail against their chosen parents, as is inevitable, by embracing their grandparents. A new New York School about which Trisha Low, for one, girlishly cracks wise, casts heterophilic asides, names the names of her contemporaries several times,[13] and altogether admirably performs the function of those whom Bourdieu terms the “youngest,” who must, again according to Bourdieu, “assert their difference, get it known and recognized, get themselves known and recognized (‘make a name for themselves’), by endeavoring to impose new modes of thought and expression … bound to disconcert the orthodox by their ‘obscurity’ and ‘pointlessness.’”[14] So far, so good.

I should note parenthetically that I am of course opposed to the very idea of community, particularly an aesthetic community, which may or may not be something different than being opposed to its concept. This is a structural position, related to the Kantian notion of community, which has to do with a presumptive schema of cause and effect, or the reciprocity of action and reaction, that is to say, succession subjected to a general rule. Logic being one such rule. And one of the rules of logic is that a thing cannot both be and not be. A rule belied by Hamlet, who is and is not mad, and here, where I can say confidently that I am dead. Not as proof of my humanity, but as proof of a scandal.

I say that to say “I am dead” is a scandal as it reveals the impossibilities of the structure: true and not true, as language is neither site-specific nor non-site-specific, but is rather site-contingent. Geography, as we all now know, being history and vice versa. Or rather, not: simultaneity being the new atemporal temporality. The good news is that ahistoricity is upon us; the bad news (depending on one’s desires) is that it is purely immanent. Much in the way that the law can only proscribe evil and not prescribe good, in the Wittgensteinian sense of not speaking about that which one cannot know, I can only accurately speak of my death in the present tense. To say “I was dead” is incorrect, to say “I will be dead” is hopeful, but inaccurate. Derrida’s “I am dead” was predicated on the ever-rejuvenating je, which itself was based on an I that was the I of the master: I know that I am not-I, therefore, as I announce my I, I belie I. Contrapuntally, my I is that of the slave: I echo I. For inasmuch as I am is to be an I, that is to say an extant cause on account of which there is an articulable effect, I am dead. Stopped and not in my self-perpetuating tracks.[15] The thing that masks the thing itself.[16] Similarly, to say that poetry is dead in the context of poetics is a scandal because it lays too-bare the game at hand, which I should like to bare further, in true community spirit.

What I am getting at is the difference between acting for the purpose of something and acting with the purpose of something, the difference between the efficient cause (the latter) and the final cause (the former). Going back to my three examples, each acts with the efficient avant-garde cause, operating as an avant-garde category, serving the final avant-garde cause, operating topographically and categorically, that is to say, as aesthetics itself, and as aesthetics itself operates. Thus, conceptualist criticism engages with chance, second generation conceptualism with joke, Russian videopoetry with situation. To be even more reductive, chance as it operates as a traumatic shift within the work, chance as described by Bataille as naked, “definitive” — “obscene and disgusting, in short, divine.”[17] Joke as a way of affirmatively asserting affect into conceptualism, born of an institutional/cultural fear and refusal of affectlessness on the one hand and desire for “secondary failure” (failure as avant goal) on the other.[18] Situation as that which has become site, as site has become procedural, and therefore, allegorical.[19] For Hegel, as described by Žižek, the passage from tragedy to comedy was the move from the individual to the universal;[20] if this is so, then the radical move of conceptualism is the passage from the universal to the radically, the irredeemably, particular.[21] First as farce, then as tragedy.[22] There is no textual bid even for immanence. Not that it matters. Because the case for the apostrophe is being made, will be made, what does not exist taken as omission, or, more properly, as elision. For Rosalind Krauss, video was the medium of narcissism because video could not be about its own materiality or formalism, could not be reflection, but only reflexive.[23] Thus, we return as zombies, to the possessive case, to an I for an I. The hand that turns the tables, or reinscribes poetics as the signification of text, as the I witness, as the unrelenting humanity of cruelty and chance.

“The sting of death is sinne, and the strength of sinne is the law.”[24] It should be noted that the law we all follow is the law of the institution, and here we all are. Like the law, at least in the United States, this is an adversarial proceeding. For my part, I have two choices, two roles to play. I can either approve these new avant-gardes, solidifying my position as elder, their position as heir, our position as a forum, always communal, in which such positions not only may be taken, but must be taken. As I have taken myself. Or I can disapprove this particular trinity or parts thereof, and perform the exact same function. It should be noted that my position, as theirs, as yours, is site-contingent. When my hotel is paid for, I am elder. When my hotel is not paid for, I play the part of upstart. When my hotel is paid for as a residency, that makes me a worker. When my hotel is paid for as a matter of course and convenience, that makes me master. Within, it does not need to be said, a certain discourse, primarily that of the university. As I wait, as we all wait, to be archived, collected, confused. For it should not be forgotten that the I who is dead is the I that eats, that “likes” the I of which it may grammatically be said, “What does I provide?” Which is another way of saying, “Are you being served?”

As an aside, there are two Lazaruses in the New Testament: the first is the subject of one of Jesus’s miracles, as reported in the Gospel of John. For those unfamiliar, Lazarus is a follower of Jesus; when word reaches Jesus that Lazarus is ill, Jesus waits two days before departing, arriving in Bethany to find Lazarus dead, four days in the grave. Pithily, “Jesus wept.” Jesus then goes graveside, is assured of belief by the assembled believers, calls to Lazarus, and Lazarus rises, wrapped in his grave clothes. The second is a leper, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. Full of sores, Lazarus the beggar died at the gate of a rich man, who also died, and who saw, from the pits of Hades, Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Abraham rejects the rich man’s pleas for mercy, and refuses to send the leper to warn the rich man’s kin about the heretocome, noting that if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, they will not hear, “though one rose from the dead.” The name “Lazarus” is an English derivation from the Latin, derived from the Greek, taken from the Aramaic, adapted from the Hebrew, meaning, “God has helped.” The take-away point, the point of con-fusion, is that compound past tense, for the object of the resurrection is not Lazarus but God, who has helped Himself to Lazarus, subjecting him to a miracle, to the will, that is to say, of God, of one greater than oneself, that is to say, has forcibly subjected Lazarus to what can only be described as God’s erection. And yet, there is impotence. The speech act of the resurrection is predicated on belief, belief before transfiguration.[25] Put another way, the repressed can only return. Just as conceptualism is dead insofar as poetry is sans heartbeat, and as much as I would very much like to kill poetry, it rises because of our belief, because, in a word, I am, we are, this is, paid. And so we are left with our Zombie poetries and the fitted happiness of our revival poetics. My institutional critique being perhaps, in the end, less of a critique of institutions — for without them, where would we be — and more a critique of the desire animating the animating desire. The animus here being the vestigial I, the language of the unsubjected self, the linguistic thing that is, in the end, the singular fundament of any community.[26] And, as indicated above, the thing that I want to do without.

Here is a joke, circa 3 or 4 BCE: a Roman meets another Roman in the street. First Roman: Hang on, I thought you were dead. Second Roman: Well, as you can see, I’m very much alive. First Roman: Ah, but the person who told me you were dead is more reliable than you. Thus, my question: am I reliable enough for you?

Put another way: There is no ‘I’ in team. But there is a ‘me,’ bitches.

1. Emma Brockes, “Toni Morrison: ‘I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness,” The Guardian, April 13, 2012. The word “feel” is used eighteen times in the article, fifteen of which appear in quotes by Morrison.

2. “Apostrophe,” dictionary.com.

3. 1 Corinthians 15:55, King James Bible.

4. Jacques Derrida, “Barthes-Todorov Discussion,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 155–156.

5. Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?,” in The Structuralist Controversy, 136–139, 143–144.

6. Derrida, “Barthes-Todorov Discussion,” 155.

7. Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites.”

8. Katie Price, “The Clinimatic Poetics of the Noulipo,” unpublished. In the piece, Price argues the “n/oulipo,” which was, insofar as such things ontologically “are,” a 2005 conference at CalArts which considered the effect of the Oulipo on non-Oulipian constraint- or procedure- based writing, and The /n/oulipian Analects, the anthology based on the conference, which includes work by Oulipians such as Paul Fournel and Ian Monk alongside “n/oulipians” like Christian Bök and Harryette Mullen: The /n/oulipian Analects, ed. Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2007).

9. Borrowing from an idea presented at the “Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing” conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (May 4–5, 2012) by poet and critic Wendy Walters, there may be an argument to be made that conferences and anthologies produce a “durational community,” a temporal or project-bound association, a community both affined and finite.

10. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 76–98.

11. Fedorova here quotes from poet Tom Konyves’s “Videopoetry: A Manifesto,” September 6, 2011.

12. To which I would add my own thesis, which may or may not be contra the genre-self-definition of Russian video-poetics, that all poetry is that which operates as poetry within the institution of poetry.

13. Trisha Low, “4 REAL: On authenticity, influence and post-conceptual narcissism,” unpublished.

14. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58.

15. Consider here the four Aristotelian causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. It is a mark of aestheticism that cause moves from final to material rather than the usual way.

16. My analysis here is based on the discourse of the slave and consideration of the operation of “I am dead” within that schema. “I am” being apostrophized “I’m.” Or as unwittingly put in an April 27, 2012, Guardian article on the response to another article asking why Arab men hate Arab women: “‘I agree with most of what she said but I think that the one thing that she might be reluctant to admit is that it’s not about men hating women, it’s about monotheistic religions hating women,’ says Joumana Haddad, a Lebanese author and journalist”: Martin Chulov, Eileen Byrne, and Abdel-Rahman Hussein, “After the Arab Spring, the Sexual Revolution?,” The Guardian, April 27, 2012.

17. Georges Bataille, “Chance,” in Chance, ed. Margaret Iversen (Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2010), 30.

18. Alex Farquharson, “ Sean Landers: Art and Language,” in The Artist’s Joke, ed. Jennifer Higgie (Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2007), 194. In this, New York second generation conceptualists follow second generation Conceptualists such as Mike Kelley and Martin Kippenberger, who also constructed “mocking and self-depreciating” personas. In his essay, Farquharson argues that the question of identity posited by these personas had “more to do with ambivalent and nuanced relations between the self and society, than issues of visibility and representation” (194–195). I would argue that the matter of identity in New York second generation conceptualism is more concerned with self and institutional relations, though there is a shared sense of latent sincerity, or what Rob Fitterman called, in a recent conversation, sentimentality.

19. James Meyer, “The Functional Site, or The Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Situation, ed. Claire Doherty (Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2009). Site as process and/or operation “occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them” (38).

20. Slavoj Žižek, “The Christian-Hegelian Comedy,” Cabinet 17 (Spring 2005). The individual described therein being the individual as personae, not the individual as subject.

21. From what I recall of a 2012 talk given by Steve Zultanski at the Poetry Project, he critiqued this position as being “too Real.” Whether my recollection is accurate or not, this stance also inheres in his statement that “the role of the avant-garde is not to present the brute materiality of the world but to take an aesthetic position that can then be negated,” qtd. in Low. It is perhaps this perfunctory institutional performance I would like to, in turn, naively negate. Put another way, Zultanski’s position is the same as that of a recent Facebook meme-post: “Art is a way to say fuck you to reality.” My own institutional interest lies in reversing the paradigm within, of course, the institution. (An interest crystallized in a February 2012 discussion with Renee Gladman, who noted about my poem, What what nigger, “It hurts.”)

22. A brilliant example of this was the video-poem presented by Anna Tolkacheva Fedorova’s Freedom, in which a small mouse runs inside a wheel upon which the words “Freedom” and “Is” are fixed, the mouse’s movements creating the poem: “Freedom Is Freedom …” Again, I = I.

23. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64. According to Krauss, “Reflection, when it is a case of mirroring, is a move toward an external symmetry …. the agency of reflection is a mode of appropriation, of illuionistically erasing the difference between subject and object” (56–57). Within the medium of video, the object is “merely an appurtenance” as the real medium is “a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object — an Other — and invest it in the Self” (57). The question here is whether poetry has ever been a medium of anything else, at least since Romanticism and excepting (though I could argue both sides) conceptualism.

24. 1 Corinthians 15:56, King James Bible.

25. “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever believeth in me shall never die.” This should be set alongside Freud’s aside that “every individual is, in virtual terms, an enemy of culture” and his attendant warning that “Culture, in other words, needs to be defended against the individual …” Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” in Mass Psychology and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 110. Put another way, we may soon want to choose which to exhume, culture or individual. There is an interesting side question concerning the relationship between the individual as proposition and the individual as subjectivity, the former substance, the latter accident, which may be nothing more than a pure copula, such that I = I. Culture should rightly fear both.

26. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).