The other day I took an hour out of my afternoon to have a talk with a professor from the university where I was an undergraduate. I was hoping to discuss my chances, or lack thereof, of doing a research degree sometime in the near future, and one of the pieces of advice she gave took me a little by surprise. I realised later that it shouldn’t have. What she said was that I needed to frame my proposal around the type of academia that I want to associate with. In essence, I need a community of likeminded scholars. Am I a Foucoultian , or a Barthesian? A Hobbesenite or a Wittgenstinian? A post-modernist (heaven forefend) or a neo-liberal-post-Keynesian-macro-pseudo-noirian ...i’m sure if I was I would know. None the less, it took me a little by surprise. Sure, I’ve studied these people, but I’ve always taken a pick and mix approach when it came to using them. I’ve certainly never self identified with them, and I wouldn’t call myself a modernist, for example, any more than I’d call myself a post-industrial capitalist.
It seems, however, that if you want to find a place in an academic institution that you need to couch yourself in those terms in order to let others know where they can put you. This led me to thinking about the more modern theorists that I like, and what they might identify themselves as. I figured that if I wanted to write in the same vein that they do, then that would be a good place to start. This all led me to my favourite poetry critic and theorist, Marjory Perloff.
There are a lot of things to write about Perloff. She’s still living, which gives one hope. And she writes about the behaviour of language almost independent of the author’s intent, or at least this is what it seemed to me as an undergraduate. But that’s not quite what I mean. What I mean is that the author is there, heavily scrutinised in their intent and in their outcomes, but the work is there as well, and it is examined intimately for itself as well as for how it relates to the person and the time that created it.
In the entry about her in the Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, Written by Peter Barry, Edited by Chris Murray. (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999) from the Buffalo University website it says:
Her book on the New York poet Frank O’Hara sees his work as part of a matrix of related cultural and artistic activity, rather than isolating it, in the New Critical fashion, as a uniquely supercharged variety known as "literature." Placing poetry within a cultural continuum in this way quickly becomes the keynote of her approach. Instead of reading the "words on the page" she reads the words (as she has said) off the page and into the immensely active urban and technological cultures from which innovative poetries invariably arise. As she says in the Preface to Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), "There is today no landscape uncontaminated by sound bytes or computer blips, no mountain peak or lonely valley beyond the reach of the cellular phone and the microcassette player. Increasingly, then, the poet’s arena is the electronic world."
This is the approach I want to take. What would you call it then? I certainly don’t think this is unique, but I do think that examining texts as objects within a ‘continuum’ of changing cultural context is important. My better teachers at university were able to show me how the great works of art that still weigh down bookshelves all over the globe are products of not just a mind, but a mind in a time and a place and in engagement with the creative flow of a community. There are, of course, exceptions, but these are exceptions rather than rules. Most great writers come standing on the shoulders of giants... but I get sidetracked. What do we call it then?
This critical approach responded to the well-known pronouncement of Theodor Adorno that "After Auschwitz . . . to a write a poem is barbaric." Such notions of silence, randomness, and openness seemed to posit the possibility of a "post-aesthetic" kind of writing which acknowledged the failure of the century’s high culture to prevent a return to barbarism. "Postmodernism" in this sense represented a literature which recognized the failure of "high culture," even that of the great modernists like Pound, Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Thomas Mann, so that the anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism, and anarchism of this kind of postmodernism had what Perloff calls a "cutting edge" — it was polemical and political, and had not yet been formulated primarily as "play." But 1967 was also the year of the three books which brought Jacques Derrida to fame, and marked the beginning of the rise of poststucturalism in the United States. Derrida’s seminal essay "Structure, Sign, and Play" had first appeared in 1966, and very quickly the notion of "semantic instability" became dominant in the humanities, not as the specific quality of the postmodern "open text," but as the necessary linguistic condition of all texts. Thus, in its later phase, postmodernism becomes "play" rather than "anarchy," celebrating what Jameson called "a new depthlessness," and "a waning of affect." Perloff sees the shift in emphasis from "openness" to "depthlessness," in discussions of postmodernism between the 1970s and the 1980s, as symptomatic. The "dissolution of the subject," favored by 1980s postmodernism and poststructuralism, far from being something to celebrate, is actually the state of mind that engendered Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima. Perloff, of course, offers no neat solution to this contradiction, but she points out that many of the classic modernists had already lost faith in those "metanarratives" before their demise was proclaimed in the 1980s.
What then? The author here seems to be suggesting that Perloff’s writing was a gesture towards a new modernism on the far side of post-modernism. A return to the sincerity of early post-modernism. Or perhaps is that what I am seeking...? I’m not sure. I know that however idealistically post-modernism began it was tortured quite beyond its legitimacy by self indulgent and substance-less art far before the humanities had the good sense to seek, perhaps, a more grounded version of the self. Perhaps I am a post-post-structuralist, or a neo-modern-post-modernist...? I just think that poetry exists and is written somewhere in the battle between instinct and culture, and comes best out of rebellion. I think the modernists were partly right when they talked of cutting themselves away from the old traditions of art and literature, of questioning beliefs. I think Perloff does too, that’s why her writing is so often about the avante garde. But I dislike where modernism led us politically, and I dislike where it eventually ended up in post-modernism, not quite sure who we were, or where to turn.
That’s it, I’m sleepy now, and this is all becoming so much wank. I’m willing to take suggestions. Where should I be looking now?
I would normally include some more links and references, but my internet is acting painfully slowly right now, and I have to be awake again in 6 hours.
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
titsay
kaledo-art
areudirty
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
janainaart