AVANT‐POST edited by LOUIS ARMAND þ Litteraria Pragensia Prague 2006 Copyright © Louis Armand, 2006 Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors Published 2006 by Litteraria Pragensia Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Prague 1 Czech Republic 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 MSM0021620824 “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education. Cataloguing in Publication Data Avant‐Post: The Avant‐Garde Under “Post‐” Conditions, edited by Louis Armand.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 80‐7308‐123‐7 (pb) 1. Poetics. 2. Literary Theory. 3. Cultural Studies. 4. Aesthetics. I. Armand, Louis. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Typesetting & design by lazarus Contents Introduction The Organ Grinder’s Monkey 1 Rachel Blau DuPlessis Post‐Avant / Avant‐Post: An Imaginary Conversation Inside Real Practice 17 R.M. Berry The Avant‐Garde & the Question of Literature 35 Robert Archambeau The Death of the Critic: The Critic‐Pasticheur as Postmodern Avant‐Gardist 57 Johanna Drucker Neon Sigh :: Epistemological Refamiliarisation 71 Bonita Rhoads & Vadim Erent An Aesthete’s Lost War: Lyotard & the Unsublime Art of New Europe 85 Mairéad Byrne Avant‐Garde Pronouns 114 Ann Vickery From Being Drafted to a Draft of Being: Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the Reconceptualisation of the Feminist Avant‐Garde 133 Esther Milne The Affective and Aesthetic Relations of Epistolary Presence 160 Christian Bök Unacknowledged Legislation 178 Louis Armand Avant‐Garde Machines, Experimental Systems 194 Laurent Milesi From Logos to Muthos : The Philosophy of Pound’s and Olson’s Mythopetics 215 Keston Sutherland Ethica Nullius 239 Lisa Jarnot San Francisco’s Burning 256 Robert Sheppard A Carafe, a Blue Guitar, Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek and the Avant‐Garde 264 Trey Strecker Narrative Ecology and Encyclopaedic Narrative 281 Michael S. Begnal The Ancients Have Returned Among Us: Polaroids of 21st Century Irish Poetry 299 Notes on Contributors 325 Introduction The Organ‐Grinder’s Monkey The day will come when one original carrot will be enough to start a revolution. —Cézanne Is an avant‐garde viable under the conditions of post‐ modernism? This question immediately gives rise to others, concerning the status of avant‐gardes historical or conjectural, and concerning the various cognates of post‐modernism and the numerous other post‐s and isms that have populated critical discourse in literature and the arts during the latter half of the last century. Consequently our initial question may come to appear purely definitional, while any endeavour to respond to it programmatically will nevertheless remain ambiguous, eclectic, even contradictory. The reason for this has not to do simply with the diversity of possible positions vis‐à‐vis avant‐ gardism and post‐modernity, 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) “the discoveries of forgotten but never completely lost archaic resources of construing, which lead to unexpected significations of the language structure.”1 It has been argued that all art worthy of the name is in some sense experimental, and that experimentation is inevitably bound to innovation by the same thread that binds the purportedly new to the idea of a tradition. Such a formulation 1 Jan van der Eng, “Introduction,” Avant Garde 5.6 (1991) 3. 1 reveals an inherent “referential indeterminacy,” wherein words like experimental, avant‐garde and tradition come to approximate “heterologous signs,” without indicating whether they should be read literally or metaphorically, while demanding that we nevertheless interrogate their meaning within an increasingly conventionalised discipline. This “metacritical” dimension to the question at hand has in various quarters been perceived as bringing about something of a renewal of the trope of the “avant‐garde,” lending it a critical force which extends beyond the domain of aesthetics into the entire field of thought, sign systems and technology. While today it might be possible to speak of avant‐gardism with respect to cognitive science, for example, and quantum computing, this in itself may simply reflect that the history of avant‐gardism has always in some way be bound up with the question of consciousness, its transformation and re‐invention. 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 own‐most 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 times acquired the self‐consciously aestheticised character that, in the twentieth century, became institutionalised as “the” avant‐garde, and which is often said to have terminated in the discourse of post‐modernism. At the beginning of the twenty‐ first century, this account of the “end of the avant‐garde” is once again under contention, as the viability of a continuation, renewal or reinvention of avant‐gardism—in tandem with the end, exhaustion, death of postmodernism—is raised by artists, critics, thinkers generally, unsatisfied with the pre‐millennial wisdom that everything is permitted, hence nothing is any longer possible. The promise of liberation is always a precarious one, and if the advent of the global economy, equal opportunity, the new 2 media and communications technologies, and the end of the Cold War suggest—at the end of the twentieth century—a future world utopia, then this half‐decade of the twenty‐first century has violently dispelled that illusion. Beneath the guise of cultural pluralism and permissiveness, the hard edge of socio‐economic ideology continues to give purchase to a critical engagement that previously (under post‐modernism) was said to no longer be viable. And with it, the critical necessity of something “like” an avant‐garde, not simply as a reaction or counter‐action to a present state of affairs, but as an active intervention in futurity, in the very possibility of a future. For these reasons, the title of this volume—Avant‐Post— should not be taken as signalling a merely historical project, or one of cultural pessimism, but rather something like a call to order and a call to address the situation, today, of those outposts (avant‐postes) that ensure a future for critical culture. 1 In his study of the New York school of poets—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara—improbably entitled The Last Avant‐Garde (1999), American critic David Lehman (echoing Zygmunt Bauman, Jürgen Habermas, and others)2 contends that: “the argument against the viability of the avant‐garde today rests on the assumption that there is no real 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 Pound’s injunction to “Make it New!” cedes here to the characteristic complaint that postmodernism in the 1970s and thereafter stole the carpet out 2 David Lehman, The Last Avant‐Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor, 1999); Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodern Art, or the Impossibility of the Avant‐Garde,” Postmodernity and Its Discontents (London: Polity, 1997) 95‐104; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1983) 3‐15. 3 from under critical experimentation. Moreover, having stolen the carpet, postmodernism then went about stealing the rest of the avant‐gardist décor as well, which henceforth was reduced to a mere retro “style” or historical fetish. Thus Lehman writes, in the first person plural: “If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant‐garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalisation of the avant‐garde.”3 Following the major ideological, technological and economic upheavals in the post‐WWII 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 “American‐Type”4 painting—the concept of the “present as a moment of revelation” (a time, according to Habermas, “in which splinters of a messianic presence are enmeshed”5) was sacrificed in the cause of a new historicism, from which avant‐gardism succeeds modernity in the form of mass‐media culture, “kitsch,” neo‐liberalism, and compulsory global democratisation. This sacrifice of “the tradition of modernity”—to what Harold Rosenberg termed the “Tradition of the New”—was repaid in the currency of historical tradition traded in a merely present time. Setting aside the problem of tradition and the present, or of a tradition of the present, Habermas’s remarks, coupled with those of Lehman, draw attention to the particular politics of the institutions of literary and art history emerging from the 1970s, according to which the future of cultural production would for evermore assume the form of a repetition of the “end of culture,” represented by the end of Flower‐Power utopianism, the debacle of the Vietnam War, and the Watergate affair. 3 Lehman, The Last Avant Garde, 11. 4 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961) 208‐ 229. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans.