EPC Digital Library with the permission of the author ([email protected]) Dissensual Operations Bruce Andrews and the Problem of Political Subjectivity in Post-Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics and Praxis Dissertation Zur Erlangung der Würde des Doktors der Philosphie Fachbereiche Sprache, Literatur, Medien I & II Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften der Universität Hamburg vorgelegt von Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich aus Detmold Hamburg, 2016 Hauptgutachter: Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Rodenberg Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Leonard Berkman Datum der Disputation: 18.04.2012 Angenommen von der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften der Universität Hamburg am 23.05.2012. Veröffentlicht mit Genehmigung der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften der Universität Hamburg am 15.09.2015 Dissensual Operations: Bruce Andrews and the Problem of Political Subjectivity in Post- Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics and Praxis ABSTRACT The following dissertation is the first full-length study of contemporary post-avant-garde poet and critical theorist Bruce Andrews and brings to bear a decidedly post-Marxist framework on one of the most rigorously politicized and prolific bodies of North American avant-garde poetry and performance to have emerged from (and since) the Language Poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. Highlighting the singularity of Andrews’s aesthetico-political stance and poetic practice (vis-à-vis other Language Poets), the dissertation offers a theoretically-inclined and broadly Rancièrean reading of key texts and performances from the 1970s to the present to demonstrate what ties Andrews’s post-vanguardism to emancipatory politics. Engaging the decidedly post-Althusserian thought of Rancière, it argues that Andrews’s radical rethinking and appropriation of Brechtian, Adornian, Debordian, Barthesian, and Althusserian paradigms is well suited to contest a post-political social formation that presents itself as both non- ideological and non-antagonistic. The dissertation amply demonstrates how Andrews seeks to critique and render perceptible the totality of late capitalist social relations and the disavowed historical contingency of today’s neoliberal consensus by soliciting a ‘dissensual’ mode of reading/listening to the social that would capacitate the subject of that experience in such a way as to facilitate a process of political subjectivization. Continuing the radical tradition of politicized avant-gardism, while significantly departing from both the meta-political (Hegelian-Marxist) paradigm of the historical avant-garde, as defined by Peter Bürger, and what Jacques Rancière has shown to be ‘entropies’ of certain postwar conceptualizations of the avant-garde, Andrews’s aesthetic politics and cultural praxis instead centers on a radicalized (post-Althusserian) notion of critical reader-response and discourse theory turned poetic practice. Ironically, while Language Poetry’s continued institutionalization and canonization in the 1990s and 2000s has secured a non-marginal place for Andrews’s work and his role as co-editor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the specificity of both his aesthetico-political stance and poetic practice have often been sidelined or ignored, which the dissertation seeks to correct. It thus combines and, at times, oscillates between critical-theoretical reflection, or conceptual labor, and symptomatic readings of key Andrews texts and performances, including such works as Edge (1973), Give Em Enough Rope (1987), I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992), Divestiture—A (1994), Ex Why Zee (1995), Blood, Full Tank (2007) and You Can’t Have Everything … Where Would You Put It! (2011). In light of the formalist cliché of and critical focus on ‘difficulty,’ the dissertation demonstrates Andrews’s montage-based work to be, in fact, dissonant rather than difficult, and to be well suited to contest a post-political social formation that presents itself as both non-ideological and non-antagonistic, where ‘consensus’ has come to mean the ideological eclipse of an identity constituted through polemicizing over the common. Acknowledgements My gratitude belongs to Peter Rodenberg and Len Berkman for their intellectual tutelage, overall support and immense confidence in supervising my dissertation project; to the German Academic Exchange Service and the European Associations for American Studies for financial support and enabling my research trip in September 2010; to Bruce Andrews for making possible my research stay at Fordham University, for introducing me to beautiful people in New York City, for destroying my sense of syntax, for top-notch questions (and Martinis), and for channeling Marx through noise; to Sally Silvers, whose work I relish; to Michael “THE MAN” Golston; to Ulli Geister, Aycheng Warambo, and Tabo Geister for welcoming me to their New Jersey home and putting up with me in the most wonderful way imaginable, and for schlepping me around Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx; to Len and Joyce Berkman for being Len and Joyce Berkman; to Alenka Barber-Kersovan for supporting my undergraduate research in musicology and being a real Mensch; to compañera Rebekka Rohleder, comrade Claudia Heuer and poeta-doctus Bryan Sentes for keeping me sane and offering invaluable support and critique, to my dear friends and academic encounters for sharing coffee and ideas; to the Phil 109 commune at U Hamburg and (the spirit of) Johann Schmidt; to Susanne Rohr for her kind support, to Ute Berns for lively debating Rancière; to Philipp Günzel and Simone Kornappel for publishing my Andrews translations; to Amina & Amiri Baraka for stRAWberries&rEVOLlution, to my awesome parents; and most importantly, to my wife Mechthild and our children Yuri, Luis, and Meri to whom I dedicate this book, which owes its existence to their love and care. 4 CONTENTS Introduction 7 I AESTHETICS AND POLITICS AS FORMS OF DISSENSUS: JACQUES RANCIÈRE, WESTERN MARXISM, AND AVANT-GARDE STUDIES 1. Rancière’s Critical Genealogy of Art and Politics 22 2. Dissensus versus Consensus, or, “Politics” versus “Police” 30 3. Political Subjectivity and the Avant-Garde: 36 Between Archi- and Metapolitics 4. Sublation or Entropy? Vicissitudes of Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics 40 5. The Post-Avant Problem 44 6. New Genealogies and Concepts – in lieu of politics? 48 7. Politicized Art: Adjusting Heterogenous Logics 59 8. Rancière and Western Marxism: Implications for Avant-Garde Studies 64 9. Who’s Afraid of a Critique of Subjectivity? A Marxist Corrective 77 10. Methodological Considerations: Rancière, Language, and Poetics 94 II BRUCE ANDREWS AND THE DISSENSUAL OPERATIONS OF AVANT-GARDE POETRY: “TO FACILITATE RADICAL PRAXIS” 1. Defying Reification’s Gravity: Radical Reaestheticization of Language in the Early Writing 1.1 Aesthetic Politics and Language-Centered Poetics: 101 Edge, Acapella, Love Songs, and “Swaps Ego” 1.2 Andrews and the Politics of ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’: 113 A Critical-Theoretical Discussion 2. The Poet as Editor as Reader: Andrews’s ‘Discursive Turn’ and the Aesthetic-Semiotic Politics of Montage and Critical Defamiliarization 2.1 Montage, Reading/Writing, and Althusserian Articulation: 120 Centrifugal Writing and the Challenge of Political Rearticulation 2.2 “‘Reagan-Era Word Bombing’ to Stir the Beehive” 128 Dissensus and Neo-Brechtian Method in I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) 2.3 Ideologiekritik, Praxis, and Political Subjectivity: 142 “Confidence Trick” 2.4 More Editing, Rereading, and the Politics of Noise: 148 Divestiture—A 3. Noise, Informalism, and the V-Effect in Performance: “Constructivist Contextualizing of the Subject” 3.1 Free Improv: Andrews’s Politics of Sound and Performance 152 3.2 Critical Aesthetics of Music and Compositon in Politicized 157 Writing: Adornian Informalism and Brechtian V-Effect? 3.3 Four Performance Texts: “While the People Slept” (1982), 164 “Improvisation” (1991), “Mistaken Identity” (1998), “Blood, Full Tank” (2008) 4. “Reader Repo”: The Politics of Affect and Dialectical Shock 4.1 Affect Theory, Kantian Aesthetics, and Cognitive Mapping 176 4.2 Defying Liberal Pluralism’s Repressive Tolerance: A Poetics 180 of Disgust? I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism), Designated Hartbeat, and Impatient 4.3 “Frame Break Punishable by Death”: Dialectical Shock, or, 187 Dissensuality and Historical Contingency Conclusion and Discussion 191 Appendix “Bruce Andrews: A Scholarly Interview” (NYC, 09-27-2010) 200 Bibliography 241 Introduction This dissertation engages the work of contemporary post-avant-garde poet and critical theorist Bruce Andrews and brings to bear a decidedly post-Marxist framework on one of the most rigorously politicized and prolific bodies of North American avant-garde poetry and performance to have emerged from and since the Language Poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. Highlighting the singularity of Andrews’s aesthetico-political stance and poetic practice (vis- à-vis other Language Poets), the dissertation offers a theoretically-inclined and broadly Rancièrean reading of key texts and performances from the 1970s to the present to demonstrate what ties Andrews’s post-avant-gardism to emancipatory politics. Engaging the decidedly post-Althusserian thought of Rancière, it argues that Andrews’s radical rethinking and appropriation of Brechtian, Adornian, Debordian, Barthesian, and Althusserian paradigms is well suited to contest a post-political social formation that presents itself as both non- ideological and non-antagonistic. The dissertation amply demonstrates how Andrews