The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History 9781628921878, 9781501322662, 9781501326882, 9781628921892

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction Witnessing History: Th e Voice of Postmodern Poetry
Part 1: Post-Communist Traumas, Postmodernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism
1. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism
1. The origins and meanings of Russian conceptualism
2. The striptease of totalitarian concepts: De-referencing the communist idiom
3. Life on the threshold: Ideological manipulations of the 1980s
4. Witnessing a catastrophe: The sudden breakdown of communism
5. The unforeseen arrival of the future. Displacements in a post-futurity modus vivendi
6. Traumatizing the mind: Psychological death of the subject
7. Conceptualism, corpora, and history. The body-aggregate and the disarticulated body
8. Referring to the loss of reference
2. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude
1. Denuding and revoking the clichés of communism
2. Surviving a changeover: Testimonies to the out breakof post-communist trauma
3. Attaining the impending. Temporal and psychological displacements of the post-totalitarian subject
4. Witnessing and testimony. Th e lethal imagery of post-totalitarian poetry
5. Corpora and history: The mutilated and dismembered body
3. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: Reference Genesis in Russian Metarealist Poetry
1. Russian metarealism: The expansion of realism and referentiality
2. Viktor Krivulin’s Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert) 4 and Novoe zrenie (New Vision)
3. A poetry of the threshold: Ol’ga Sedakova’s Vrata, Okna, Arki (Gateways, Windows, Arches)
4. Deterritorializing into new realities: Elena Shvarts’s Lotsiya nochi (Sailing Directions of the Night)
5. Conclusion
Part 2: Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in Postmodern American Poetry: Th e Testimonies of Language Writing
4. The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry
1. The meanings of Language poetry
2. The rapprochement between Language writing and Russian postmodern poetry
3. The self-referentiality of Language poetry
4. Debunking the referent as linguistic equivalent of commodity fetishism. The project of de-referencing language
5. Rebelling against Poetic Standards: Th e Defi ant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry
1. The commodifi cation of poetry
2. Undermining the instrumental discourse of reification: Alternate linguistic discourses in Language poetry
3. Implosive referentiality. The new sentence
4. Linguistic experimentation. “Ludism” as the unlimited play of signification
5. The revolutionary charge of morphemic and phonetic disruption
6. Becoming meaningful: Re-narrativizing Language poetry
7. The semantics of sound
8. The referential potential of silence
6. The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information Saturated Environments
1. Introduction
2. The wedding of Language poetry and media technology
3. Resisting the instrumental discourse of information technology: The production of linguistic noise in Charles Bernstein’s “Azoot D’Puund”
4. The unavoidability of reference. Replicating the language of technology. Code as the “unconscious of language”
5. Reference, meaning, and information
6. Complicating the vectors of reference: The multivalent referentiality of Language poetry
7. Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma
1. Cognitive overstimulation and information overload: The traumatic impacts of mass media technology on the mind
2. The spasms of Language poetry: Parataxis as recording cognitive disruptions and the impacts of trauma
3. Poetic testimonies to the genesis of technological trauma
4. David Melnick’s “apocalypse of fragmentation.” Pcoet : a “conscious creation” or a “protosemantic delirium”?
5. Coping with the wrong tomorrow: Testimonies to the trauma of temporal dislocation in the age of media saturation
6. “Play It Again, Pac-Man”: The referential power ofre-enactment and “traumatic repetition”
8. The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma
1. “Traumas of Code”:1 The affinities of codework and Language poetry
2. Salvaging the body from the structures of information: Mez’s the data][h!][bleeding texts
3. “fleshwords by Ms Post Modemism ”: The therapeutic function of code
4. The experiential impact of technological trauma: Retooling Freud’s notion of the dead cortical layer
5. Reconceptualizing the notions of cognition and experience
9. Conclusion: Trauma and History
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry

The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry Reference, Trauma, and History Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Permission to quote from the essays and poems of Charles Bernstein given by the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lutzkanova-Vassileva, Albena, author. The testimonies of Russian and American postmodern poetry : reference, trauma, and history / Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva. pages cm ISBN 978-1-62892-187-8 (hardback) 1. Russian poetry–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism (Literature)–Russia. 3. Language poetry–History and criticism. 4. Poetry, Modern– History and criticism. 5. Psychic trauma in literature. 6. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)–Russia. 7. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)–United States. 8. Postmodernism (Literature)–United States. 9. American poetry–20th century–History and criticism. I. Title. PG3056.L88 2014 891.71’4409–dc23 2014019997 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2187-8 PB: 978-1-5013-2266-2 ePub: 978-1-6289-2188-5 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2189-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

To the memory of my father who never finished his book, but firmly planted in me the love of the word, To my mother, who nurtured it with self-effacing love, To my love and best friend in life, who guarded it devotedly in testing times, And to my girls, who inspire my every word and stride, and who will one day surpass them by far

Contents Introduction Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry

1

Part 1 Post-Communist Traumas, Postmodernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism 1 2 3

The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: Reference Genesis in Russian Metarealist Poetry

9 61 75

Part 2 Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in Postmodern American Poetry: The Testimonies of Language Writing 4 5 6 7 8 9

The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in InformationSaturated Environments Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma Conclusion: Trauma and History

Notes Bibliography Index

97 109 135 157 191 207 209 275 291

Introduction Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry

“What is the reality this poem represents? Does it relate to any external reality, or is it merely a self-reflexive game of language that tells us nothing of the world around? Are postmodern poems nothing more than interplaying signifiers that lead to no specific signified, defy semantic depth, and bear links to no reality except the textual, poetic one?” It may be said that the inspiration for this book derived from these and other similar inquiries (the most overt questioning the rationale for reading poetry that “makes no sense”) that my students have posed in our discussions of postmodernism. Indeed, the disbelief in the power of language to refer to the “real” world and the conviction that “[r]eading cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it … or toward a signified outside the text”1 are core premises of deconstruction. “[A]s regards the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified,” “[t]here is nothing outside the text,”2 Derrida famously claimed in “the axial proposition”3 of his argument and in a gesture that situates the project of dereferencing language at the heart of postmodernism and deconstruction. Reference, to the poststructuralists, has been closely aligned with the metaphysics of presence and the prestige of the transcendental signified defining for too long Europe’s logocentric tradition. The attack on reference is thus an attack on the belief in preestablished, self-authenticating truths4—a refusal to abide by the dogmas of selfpresent speech,5 but also by the laws of any instrumental discourse whose transparent referentiality shackles the subject to the fixed meanings of dictatorial (be it ideological or technological) realities. As Rey Chow comments on the “rejection of referentiality that lies at the origins of poststructuralism”: The exercise of bracketing referentiality is crucial because adherence to referentiality has often led to a conservative clinging to a “reality” which is presumed to exist, in some unchanging manner, independently of language and signification. This a priori “real world” is, moreover, often given the authority of what authenticates, of what bestows the value of transcendental truth upon language and signification…. By intensifying our awareness of (linguistic) signification as first and foremost self-referential, poststructuralist theory has opened up ways for the ingrained ideological presuppositions behind such practices of knowledge production to be rethought.6

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry

It is this urgency to strip language of any formerly invested meanings and view it, instead, as a self-reflexive structural system that has made postmodernism synonymous with the split of literary discourse and reality, with the obstruction and invalidation of our access to history. It has often resulted in a kind of extreme textualism that posits all reality as linguistic in nature. The study of postmodern literary texts is thus invariably accompanied by a peculiar uneasiness about what postmodernism termed the loss of reality, by the uncanny sensation of letting reality slip through our fingers without being able to arrest its flow.7 My book undertakes to challenge the belief in the self-referential nature of postmodern writing by executing a cross-cultural analysis of Russian and American postmodern poetry. It focuses on Conceptualism, the leading school of Russian postmodernism, and its American counterpart—Language poetry.8 It also studies Russian Metarealism and offers numerous examples of video and installation art that visually represent the theoretical material. An interlude on Bulgarian postmodern poetry provides a glimpse into some parallel developments in East European postcommunist literature. Belonging to different cultural traditions and seemingly unrelated in nature, Conceptualism, Metarealism, and Language poetry have never been the subject of a comparative analysis. Under the rubric of postmodernism or critical theory, however, they have all been subsumed as part of a tendency attacking self, reference, and history. The original charge of this book resides in the endeavor to revise the received critical paradigm of postmodernism as self-referential and reconceptualize the often incoherent production of the Language and Russian poets as testimony to a psychologically traumatic post-industrial (technological) or posttotalitarian (ideological) reality. Through registering the unspeakable realities of trauma, postmodernism, I seek to reveal, does not deny reference but solely rejects the reduction of reference to a world that is perceptible and cognitively masterable. It is the recourse to psychological trauma as a means of establishing the schools’ referentiality that makes this study particularly innovative.9 I examine trauma as an epistemological disruption—an event that, due to its sudden and unanticipated nature, has failed to be integrated in the structures of the mind, thus remaining unspeakable (at best, pictorially representable). As Cathy Caruth, however, contends, “it may indeed be in those moments that are least assimilable to understanding that a referential dimension can be said to emerge.”10 This realignment of reference with what is not fully masterable by cognition reveals the uncanny power of “history [to] arise where immediate understanding may not.”11 Recent work in trauma studies by Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Robert Jay Lifton, Dominick LaCapra, and Geoffrey Hartman has indeed revealed the importance of trauma for our understanding of the nature of history genesis, knowledge, and experience. The comparative study of the models of trauma representation in Russian postmodernism and Language poetry is a similar attempt to interpret the ways in which the structuring of traumatic experience reflects the cultural peculiarities and socio-historical specifics of the two ideologically opposed (formerly communist and late capitalist) paradigms. This “not-knowing knowledge” (as Geoffrey Hartman refers to it, differentiating it from the “literary ways of knowing”),12 relays key information about the historical particularities of the

Introduction

3

postmodern condition, thus alerting us to the fact that writing history is often nothing less than a dauntless act of writing trauma.13 What the reader is summoned to do in this grave act of transmission is embrace the imperative of historical listening. As I bring together and examine the concurrent emergence and course of development of a media-impacted literature, thriving on the production and proliferation of simulacra (U.S./West), and an ideologically proselytized culture of writing that has only recently cast off the long inviolable thralldom of mummacra14 (Russia/East), I delineate postmodernism as a phenomenon that is multinational and altogether irreducible to the Western cultural experience. The abundant parallels and points of convergence between the Russian and American postmodern paradigms affirm that postmodernism is a much broader cultural development that has emerged both on the basis of total technologies and total ideologies.15 The first part of my book approaches the problem of reference in postmodern writing by focusing on the schools of Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism, and inquiring into some parallel developments in Bulgarian post-communist literature. Represented by the poets Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Timur Kibirov, and others, and artists such as Ilya Kabakov and Grisha Bruskin, Russian Conceptualism has been largely theorized as a poetry of names with nothing behind them, a play with empty language amidst the debris of previously operative ideological signs. Challenging the idea of Conceptualism as self-referential, I seek to establish that in the disruption of poetic language, in the demise of its capacity to refer to phenomenal reality and endow it with meaning, the truth of another, so far suppressed reality emerges. I suggest that this is the reality of trauma and catastrophe, the reality of minds on the brink of disintegration, of both historical and personal invalidation. Conceptualism, I argue, documents the eschatological displacement of the Russian subject beyond his/her already possessed and consummated future—a displacement caused by the sudden annulment of a system, largely seen as impending and endless, and its overnight substitution by an unfathomable post-totalitarian order. In testifying to the psychically traumatic dislocations, accompanying the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society, Russian postmodernism, I propose, does not mark the end of our dialogue with history, but demonstrates a new and exceptionally powerful way of establishing reference. Baffled by the disruptions in their immediate social realities, Russian poets have often sought refuge in more perfect, empyreal, and metaphysical worlds. In Metarealism, the enticing otherworldly realities have been exquisitely drawn by writers such as Ol’ga Sedakova, Elena Shvarts, Ivan Zhdanov, Aleksei Parshchikov, Alexander Eremenko, and Viktor Krivulin. A poetry of “multi-realism,” as Helena Goscilo defines it, Metarealism does not contrast, like the symbolist school, the mundane reality here to the eternal spiritual world beyond, but practices, instead, an optimistic monism, interconnecting our everyday reality to levels of existence in a metaphysical beyond. My book studies the ways in which the metarealist poem enacts a process of incessant transmutation between transcendent and perceptual realities—a metamorphic deterritorialization, resulting in continuous engendering of novel and unrivalled worlds. Contrary to the general reading of Metarealism as severed from reality, such

4

The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry

active fostering of rhizomatic links with multiplicities of “other,” alternative worlds calls for expanding the notion of realism and recognizing its inclusion of realms beyond the phenomenal and observable one. Revealing the “metabolic”16 quality of metarealist poetry and the multifaceted modes of reality’s manifestation within it, I proclaim as unjustified the fear of losing our grip on reality. Metarealism, I propose, restores the pristine polyphony of our multidimensional universe and vindicates the prestige formerly allotted to referentiality. The second part of my book redirects the focus from the ideologically defined changeover, producing mass-scale trauma in post-communist society, to the technologically engendered traumas of post-industrial reality. It studies Language writing, as presented in the work of Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, Bruce Andrews, David Melnick, Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, and others. Much has been written about the ways in which Language poetry defies referentiality. After all, this is the main agenda of the school—we need not look further than its name, selected to proclaim an emphasis on language and a divorce of the linguistic and empirical realities. My book, however, seeks to probe beyond the purposeful refusal of the Language poets to represent late capitalist reality (revealed in their masterful designing of an alternate system of language) and focuses, instead, on the involuntary ways, in which the poets rewrite the effects of media in late twentieth-century Information society. I argue that, in our Information Age, apart from staging a resistance to the discourse of reification, Language poetry has been inevitably shaped as a response to a newly formed instrumental discourse—that of media technology and information. This discourse has been generated by a world of instant messaging and digital technology, of streaming media and mass communications landscapes—a world of mesmerizing technological developments that has defined every aspect of our lives, including poetic production. In this technologically advanced reality of Western postmodern society, it has become impossible to extricate poetry from the complex information networks that determine it. It thus appears imperative, as Marjorie Perloff proposes, “to consider, more closely than we usually do, what really happens on the video screen, at the computer terminal, or in the advertising media, and then to see how poetic or art discourse positions itself vis-à-vis these powerful new environments.”17 To explore this provocative question, my book examines the ways in which Language verses are linked to the regime of media and digital technologies, and inquires into the impacts that this regime exerts on the subject. While no one can dispute the role of the Information Revolution as a harbinger of progress, opening to man a world of possibilities and allowing writers to launch unparalleled experiments in language, technology has often reminded us of its dark side as well. Looking at examples of Language poetry, I argue that its paratactic, transgrammatical structure and often radically truncated verses attest to a peculiar kind of a not-yet-fully mastered traumatic experience. I read the Language poems as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest, and furnish with semantic weight. I argue that this overpowering condition of information overload has caused an abnormal reversal of temporality, an unnatural and traumatic flattening of the chronotope

Introduction

5

parallel to that observed in conceptualist poetry. Unable to assign any cognitive value to the rapidly encroaching technological future, the lyric self is suspended in a boundless and meaningless present, an infinite post-futural “now time,”18 as Bernstein defines the experience. I draw some evocative parallels with Mez’s postmodern code poetry that deals with bodies traumatized and wounded by overloads of information. Studying the “traumas of code,”19 I then delve into the ways in which Mez salvages the body from the structure of information and automated image proliferation through “somatizing” the excessive data and rearranging the code. Rather than precluding referentiality, Language poetry, I conclude, records the asignifying processes and coding of post-industrial society and bears witness to the traumatizing impacts of the global information network. My project thus problematizes the belief in the self-referential nature of postmodern writing. Instead of blocking our access to reality, postmodernism, I propose, documents the traumatic historical impact of the past decades, when, overwhelmed by the sudden advent of a mighty ideological or technological system of control, exceeding by far the capacities of human mind to grasp it and the powers of imagination to picture it, the subject experienced an unsuspected psychological trauma. The analysis of the distinct models of trauma representation in postmodern trends belonging to divergent cultural traditions allows me to advance some larger theoretical assertions about the ways in which the place, the social structure, and the cultural ideals determine the individual modes in which psychological trauma is manifested. Despite their peculiarities, however, the testimonies to events of trauma I explore unfailingly insist that, first of all, they all should be defined as symptoms of a history—a history that one cannot entirely possess, but that is nonetheless uncannily authentic as it was never tarnished and refracted by the subjective structures of the mind. Crossing cultural and disciplinary borders, the study of Metarealism, Conceptualism, and Language writing that lies in your hands aspires to present a valuable contribution to the field of contemporary criticism and poetry, as it pioneers the endeavor to study comparatively these seemingly unrelated literary phenomena and link them (and the problem of postmodernism’s referentiality) to the theory of trauma. Products of different cultural traditions and realities, these schools exhibit a striking similarity of concerns and poetic responses and offer a compelling testimony to momentous cultural events that shaped the end of the twentieth century. The works of Russian and American postmodern poets testify that postmodernism’s celebrated closure of phenomenal reality presents, concurrently, an opening to an unmastered non-perceptual reality—the reality of trauma, catastrophe, and crisis. While the initial sections of my book suggest the possibility of the referential nature of postmodern writing, at the close of my project, I come to believe that reading postmodern texts is nothing other than the historically invaluable experience of witnessing.

Part One

Post-Communist Traumas, Postmodernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism

1

The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism 0

1. The origins and meanings of Russian conceptualism Postmodernism was barely recognized in Russia at the moment of its birth. Even the writers of “postmodern” literature seemed unaware of the label their texts would soon attract.1 Ever since its debut on the Russian cultural scene, however, the term “postmodernism” sparked heated scholarly debates.2 Critics invested it with an array of meanings and ardently disputed its origin and manifestations. While most theorists have seen Russian postmodernism as a development of the late twentieth century (of the 1970s and 1980s)3 and have linked it to the decline and final collapse of the communist system, some have traced its roots back to the first half of the century—the time of communism’s growth and consolidation. “The development of Russian modernism was artificially halted in the thirties, while in the West it continued smoothly up to the sixties,” Mikhail Epstein contends.4 “This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, one in the thirties and another in the seventies.”5 Similarly controversial has become the issue of the literary trends and individual writers belonging to the postmodern tradition. While there seems to be a consensus that it is conceptualism that best epitomizes the meanings and peculiarities of Russian postmodernism (specifically, the poets Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Timur Kibirov, Mikhail Sukhotin, the narrative prose writer Vladimir Sorokin, and the visual artists and theoreticians Ilya Kabakov6 and Grisha Bruskin), the postmodern movement has been variously linked to trends that range from soc art to the official literary school of Soviet Russia—socialist realism.7 Soc art, in particular, has been often regarded as roughly equivalent—if not interchangeable— with Russian conceptualism. As Viacheslav Kuritsyn argues, “As far as soc-art is concerned, it has been understood by us in a rather straightforward way: as a version of conceptualism.…”8 One and the same or diverging cultural phenomena, conceptualism and soc art had set themselves a common goal: the deconstruction of the only monolith in Russian culture—that of socialist realism. Since socialist realism has been regarded

10

The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry

as the “official” avant-garde of Russia, its deconstruction has been often linked to the destruction of the avant-garde tradition in West European literature and culture. Despite some superficial similarities, however, the schools of postmodernism in the West and Russia exhibit different character and manner of origination due, for the most part, to the different paths that the formation of the modernist tradition followed there. As Mark Lipovetskii explains, “the sovereignty of the modernist value system in the West was the result of an organic process, whereas in Russia the institution of the Socialist Realist canon came at the price of the destruction of the organic culture.”9 It is in this sense that, while Western postmodernism developed from a monolithic unity to a culturally diverse entity, Russian postmodernism evolved to recover an organic, preexisting wholeness that had been untimely violated.10 Acknowledging the multifaceted developments emerging from this “violated wholeness,” some critics have avowed that Russian postmodernism is not one uniform and strictly demarcated school of literature, restricted to the works of several wellknown writers, but, rather, a distinctive tendency and sensibility that runs through individual works of many different authors. While critics such as Boris Groys and Mikhail Yampolsky limit Russian postmodernism to the traditions of conceptualism and soc art, and to the names of Rubinshtein, Prigov, Sorokin, Kabakov, and Bulatov, Lipovetskii claims that postmodernism is a tendency revealed in the creative work of many other writers (among them, Andrei Bitov, Venedikt Yerofeev, Yevgenii Popov, P’etsukh, Tolstaia, and Vladimir Sharov).11 Lipovetskii, however, also agrees that, among all of the schools and individual writers viewed as belonging to the postmodern tradition, the lead undoubtedly belongs to the conceptualist school. “[T]he most radical version of our native [Russian] postmodernism” is how Lipovetskii defines the movement.12 Interpreted as a term, “conceptualism” suggests a link with the conceptualist trend in medieval philosophy and culture that, along with “nominalism,” was opposed to realism. The school’s association with nominalism is implied in “NOMA”—one of the names used to designate the Moscow conceptualist circle.13 Proposed by Kabakov in his 1988 paper “The Ideologization of the Unknown,”14 the term “NOMA” was defined on the basis on its members’ common linguistic behavior: “ ‘NOMA’ signifies a specific circle of people that identify themselves as a collective body by means of an ‘inner’ complex of linguistic manifestations. Strictly speaking, this word indicates what previously was referred to sporadically as the ‘Moscow Conceptual Circle,’ or the ‘Circle of the Moscow Avant-garde’ ” (489). Explaining the meaning of the term and tracing its semiotic origins, Kabakov expounds: [T]his term refers to the arbitrary linking of cultural allusions, each of which, in its own way, is significant for the self-consciousness of that circle. Primarily, such “NOMA’s” were territorial units of Ancient Egypt, named according to the names (“nom”) of the parts of the dismembered body of Osiris: each part was buried in one of these territorial units. (489)15

The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism

11

The overt association of conceptualism with the names (“nom”) of a body—the broken Osiris’s body—testifies to its nominal character and defines it as a school that seeks to disengage itself from the objective world, a school that represents a kingdom of the name as such and disavows all correlation to the real. Indeed, it is the nominal and purely linguistic nature of conceptualism that transpires as the primary characteristic in all delineations of this practice. As Alexei Parshchikov and Andrew Wachtel explain, “First and foremost,” conceptualists use “the vocabulary of signs (visual or verbal…) for in their view the individual’s semiotic field defines his world. Although they did not know the works of Roland Barthes, they would have agreed with his formulation ‘my Japan, a system of signs I call Japan.’ ”16 Conceptualism’s split between linguistic signs and real facts reflects the truculent encounter of two incompatible and clashing systems—one praising Soviet rule and the “bright future” it promised, the other mirroring the stark reality of life in Soviet society. This manifest irreconcilability of Soviet vocabulary with the conditions of the real world around it informs the major practice of conceptualist writing—the execution of a break between the worn-out communist clichés and their purported realities, which typically results in gruesome parody. While the uneasy laughter is indeed produced by this abnormal disengagement from the real, I will undertake to challenge the idea of the purely linguistic nature of conceptualist writing and advance the belief that it concurrently attests to an uncanny realignment of poetic discourse with reality. Problematizing the widely accepted theorization of conceptualism as self-referential, I will suggest that in the disruption of conceptualist language, in its refusal to record phenomenal reality and go beyond the realm of clichés, the testimony to another, not readily available reality emerges. Though largely unacknowledged by the critical community that stresses the parodical dimension of conceptualism, this hidden, non-transparent reality is one of crisis and catastrophe, of minds that face disintegration, of both historical collapse and personal invalidation. Conceptualist poets, I will argue, relate the story of a split identity and share bitter feelings of bewilderment and impasse. Their testimonies, often inarticulately rendered, attest to the traumatic abolition of communist reality, which had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, as well as to its unforeseen displacement by an impenetrable political order. Rather than obstructing our dialogue with history, conceptualism thus records the psychic trauma accompanying the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society that, because of its sudden occurrence, had failed to attain immediate and direct registration in the human mind. In its capacity to bear witness to the psychological ramifications ensuing from the fall of communist utopias, conceptualism, I will argue, questions the belief in postmodernism’s disengagement from reality and in the poet’s inability to document it. While unequivocally denying reference to the perceptual world, postmodernism, conceptualist poetry asserts, presents a new and unprecedentedly potent way of allowing reference to emerge, a new means of letting unassimilable moments of important crises be recorded, and a new promise of enabling historical memory to prevail over forgetting.

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2. The striptease of totalitarian concepts: De-referencing the communist idiom … [T]he ideological formula protrudes like a bare stake from the back of a scarecrow. Mikhail Epstein17 Critics have largely theorized conceptualism as a poetry of overused imperatives and cliché slogans from the recent Soviet past, which presently emerge stripped of all signification, fatigued and eager to find solace in a world where they will no longer be summoned to control reality.18 Looking back at Russian literary history, such barefaced rejection of meaning characterized the school of Futurism. Critics such as Mikhail Epstein have found a common ground between conceptualist and futurist poetics based on the distinctive semiotic features of the two. Both schools reject the cult of hermeneutic poetry with its insistent pining after transcendental signifieds. In an open defiance of signification, “conceptualism tries to wrench out of the word any meaning whatever, leaving an empty, echoing shell: a senseless cliché that says nothing.”19 In much the same way, futurism dispels the aura of the signified as a guarantor of overriding meanings and ventures to create a poetry of pure signifiers. “Futurism … was the world of the signifier itself, where the word, the ‘self-sufficient’ word (Khlebnikov), is the authentic reality…,” Epstein notes. “At the risk of oversimplification, we can … trace paths of succession from … futurism to conceptualism…,” the critic concludes.20 The role of “self-sufficient” words or concepts, in the conceptualist poem, has been performed by clichés emptied of signification. In his literary manifesto, “Kontseptualizm,” S. B. Dzhimbinov explains: “The notion of concept signifies to the conceptualists that, which we call cliché, i. e. the hackneyed and trite phrases such as ‘towards life,’ ‘struggle for peace,’ ‘in the light of decisions,’ and so on.”21 On a similar note, Sergei Kuznetsov observes that “an interest in clichéd constructions and figures of speech, outworn metaphors, and everyday quotations is central to the poetics of Conceptualism.”22 Under Soviet rule, these overused formulas and ideological clichés aspired to give birth to and determine communist reality, while, in fact, they were completely cut off from the real world. It is this dissociation of the literary from the real that reemerges as a major trait of the conceptualist poem whose main stylistic goal becomes to re-enact the schism between the vapid clichés and the reality surrounding them. As Kabakov insightfully points out, it is precisely this characteristic that distinguishes the Russian version of conceptualism from its opposing Western counterpart: “The activating principle of western conceptualism,” Kabakov proposes in “Conceptualism in Russia” (Introduction to the Exhibition Life of Flies), “can be seen as the idea—‘one thing instead of another.’ It is not the same in our country. In contrast with the West, the principle of ‘one thing instead of another’ does not exist and is not in force, most of all because in this binomial the definitive, clear second element, this ‘another,’ does not exist.”23 In its place, an abyss of soul-wrenching emptiness gapes.24 Taking Kabakov’s observations a step further, Viacheslav Kuritsyn remarks:

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[T]he works of pop-art demonstrate advertisements of various things, and, “inside” the store, there are real things that correspond to the advertisements in the “shop windows”—the shop windows advertise, promise “something real,” in actual fact existing. Nowhere and nothing, as everyone knows, corresponds in reality to our advertisements, slogans, explanations, and directions. Those are very clear utterances, complete in themselves,—“TEXT” in the most precise meaning of the word. This is text which is known to be directed to no one, to mean nothing and correspond to nothing, but nonetheless one that signifies a lot in itself.25

Quoting Mikhail Ryklin, Kuritsyn concludes that conceptualism “establishes observation as a hollow and empty act that cannot be attributed to any possible referent.”26 Reading conceptualist poetry, we discover that much of it fully corroborates the belief that it “cannot be attributed to any possible referent.”27 Conceptualism functions as a poetry of pure signifiers, detached from the correlative signifieds and utterly divested of coherent meaning. Staging a play with empty language amidst the debris of previously operative ideological signs, conceptualist poetry lays bare the formerly revered slogans and placards and shows that they contain no link to the perceptual reality. They are just clichés that partake of textual realities and, therefore, should not be linked to the “apparent” world. A vivid example of the thorough disconnection between political slogans and reality emerges in “Screaming Cantata (Who Killed Stalin)” by one of the leading conceptualists, Dmitry Prigov. The poem exposes the widely celebrated communist cliché of the unanimous and enthusiastic consent demanded by every directive of the omnipotent Party and Leader, regardless of whether it bears any relation to reality whatsoever: “The point is not who killed him—just, killed and/killed! The point now is how we’re going to agree. Let’s/sing. O.k., so let’s all do it together: Yes! Yes! Yes!/Yes-yes! Yes!—you answer me, but somehow discordantly/and without confidence…/… O.k., once more, only all together:/You killed!”28 The whole poem is a performance of unfaltering consensus on certain issues whose relevance to reality is rendered altogether insignificant and is, therefore, dismissed. The poem is reduced to a series of imperatives, to a multiplicity of voices indiscriminately screaming “You killed!” to everything they are asked, until the lyrical persona, in the true spirit of the communist dictate to obey the will of the people, sacrificially accepts the guilt for all the major murders in the history of Russia: Who killed Pushkin? You killed! No, really!—no! You killed! No really, it’s my joke! You killed!… Who killed Lermontov? You killed!

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry Me again? You killed! No, really, no!… Who-who killed Stalin? You killed! No, no, I wasn’t doing any killing!… YoukilledIkilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilledyoukilledikilled I killed him!29

Another hackneyed totalitarian cliché, disclosed by Prigov, evinces the quintessential tenet of the communist doctrine that ideas are superior to reality and as such represent the driving force for its radical transformation.30 As staged in Prigov’s “From Reagan’s Image in Soviet Literature,” ideals not only enjoy the privileged status of governing ideological reality but also hold the unequaled power to determine human biological existence and satisfy man’s most fundamental physiological needs. The perceived shameful, egotistic material goals of the West give way to the glory of Russia’s ideal, spiritual inspirations, which, by virtue of their higher nature, prove altogether capable of sustaining human life, substituting even for the lowly nature of capitalist food: “Reagan doesn’t want to feed us/Well, OK, it’s really his mistake/It’s only over there that they believe/You’ve got to eat to live/But we don’t need his bread/We’ll live on our idea…” (104).31 In the realm of the visual arts, the clichés of communist reality become the main means of expression for the Russian-American artist Grisha Bruskin.32 In an attempt to preserve the archetypes of communism, Bruskin lays the foundation of what he ambitiously calls “modern archeology.”33 Bruskin’s project began as an attempt to circumvent the political regime and its unforgiving ideological censorship. Since appropriating the derivative images of the Soviet system was unacceptable to the artist, he opted to work with stock images from the communist world, which he then transported to new contextual settings.34 As Hans-Peter Riese notes, Bruskin’s work is that of an archeologist “who ‘excavates’ the various mythologies of these epochs and, irrespective of their original context, arranges them in a completely new one.”35 A further contextual reorganization comes in the years of post-totalitarianism, when Bruskin’s archetypes acquire a totally new meaning and function as historic testimonies to an unexpectedly abolished era.36 Among Bruskin’s most evocative renditions of the archetypes of communist reality is his provocative work Life Is Everywhere. The sculptures that comprise it come from almost every sphere of public and private life and range in age from the youngest members of society to the methodically indoctrinated adults. The “Girl with the Medal of ‘Maternal Glory,’ ”37 for instance, portrays a young pioneer-girl who aspires to become the ideal communist mother—the medal that she holds depicts a mother with a baby on her lap and carries the inscription “USSR,” featuring the red communist star above

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it and the sickle and hammer of the Soviet state emblem right below. The sculpture parodies the communist cliché of eternal perfection—the idea of progress that passes from the realm of ideology to the sphere of the most private and intimate experience. The girl, while still a child, is no exception here. She is not simply a girl but a young pioneer, with a life already devoted to the communist ideal. How this girl grows into a mother is not a family matter but, as Bruskin reveals, an overt preoccupation of the Soviet state (Figure 1.1). Similarly, young men need to be raised in the spirit of communism and in the adulated image of the Leader, as the sculpture of the boy holding a portrait of Lenin in his childhood years suggests (Figure 1.2). Even the works that do not communicate directly any ideological message are designed to reveal the derivative nature of communist reality. The sculptures of Bruskin refuse to convey any new content or original ideas. Their statements are familiar, repetitive, and deliberately boring. A doctor cures the body, a gymnast lifts weights, a historian teaches of Chingiz Khan, a man with a gas mask has a picture of a house in fire, a butcher holds a poster with images of meat cuts, an officer enfolds a missile, a

Figure 1.1 Grisha Bruskin, Girl with the Medal of “Maternal Glory,” 1999, silver and enamel, 8.1 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.2 Grisha Bruskin, Boy with the Portrait of Lenin as a Child, 1999, silver and enamel, 8½ in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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bride accompanies a groom, a couple in love embrace one another, and so on. There is nothing unique in the messages of Bruskin’s “Doctor with a diagram of human blood circulation,”38 “Character in a gas mask with a model of a burning house,”39 “Teacher with the image of Chingiz Khan,”40 “Officer with a missile,”41 “Bride with a groom,”42 and “Couple in love.”43 They are just clichés from a make-believe society based on ideas rather than the real world (Figures 1.3–1.10). Similarly, conceptualism is the self-sustenance of poetry on pure ideas, repudiating any recourse to what we have grown accustomed to label as reality. However, if one considers reality in all its intricate and unpredictable identities rather than reduce it to the narrow realm of the empirical, observable, and cognitively masterable world, another inquiry appears tenable: What if the celebrated closure of phenomenal reality, that is, the reality apparent to and perceptible by the senses, presents concurrently an opening to another, non-perceptual reality—the reality of trauma, catastrophe, and crisis? Cannot the divorce of language from one of reality’s diverse modes of existence mark the point of birth of another of its infinite protean manifestations? Cannot conceptualist works, despite their open break with communist reality, be read as testimonies to a hidden psychological condition—as documents of the displacement of the subject caused by the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society?

Figure 1.3 Grisha Bruskin, Doctor with Diagram of Human Blood Circulation, 1999, silver and enamel, 10¼ in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.4 Grisha Bruskin, Character in a Gas Mask with a Model of a Burning House, 1999, silver and enamel, 9.4 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 1.5 Grisha Bruskin, Teacher

Figure 1.6 Grisha Bruskin, Officer

with the Image of Chingiz Khan, 1999, silver and enamel, 9.2 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

with a Missile, 1999, silver and enamel, 10.6 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.7 Grisha Bruskin, Bride with

Figure 1.8 Grisha Bruskin, Couple in

Groom, 1999, silver and enamel, 9.2 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Love, 1999, silver and enamel, 9.2 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 1.9 Grisha Bruskin, Sportsman with Dumb-Bells, 1999, silver and enamel, 9 5/8 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.10 Grisha Bruskin, Butcher, 1999, silver and enamel, 9 in. height. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin44

3. Life on the threshold: Ideological manipulations of the 1980s What was supposed to become the beautiful shining “tomorrow” has stopped, has become the eternal immobile “now,” and it is not at all clear what can be done with it. Ilya Kabakov45 Around 1985 … some important period of Soviet history ended. Some sort of new, already “non-historical” time beg[an]. Ilya Kabakov46 [A] situation of delayed and indefinite time … [A] time outside of time… Vladimir Aristov47 At first glance, it appears untenable to delineate the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society as traumatic in nature. After all, the overthrow of the defunct totalitarian system and its supersedure by a democratic society was a dream that even the bravest

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had not dared to nurture—an event that, when realized, caused widespread rejoicing and unforgettable euphoria. How could this celebrated development be at the same time traumatic? In the ensuing section I will argue that, despite marking a huge step in the advancement of freedom and democracy, the displacement of one social system by a fully unfamiliar other was collectively felt as baffling, disorienting, and downright catastrophic in nature. Alongside the overwhelming amount of new and perplexing social developments, what produced the traumatic effect was mainly the fact that the subject had never, not even remotely, suspected the likelihood of this grand-scale collapse. As a result, he proved completely unprepared for the historical turnover and, even after it happened, was very slow to register the change. This peculiar belatedness in recognizing the arrival of a new world order can be attributed to the persuasiveness with which the former communist regime communicated the idea that communism was impending, yet unconquered—that its realization lay in the imminent future. “The common idea that communism was impending prevented us from seeing that we were actually in it,” that “[a]ll the key metaphors of communist utopia ha[d] turned into reality…,” Vladislav Todorov observes on the subject.48 Thus, while communism “turned into reality” as early as the 1980s, the already solidified perception of this system as forthcoming thwarted the subject’s realization that he/she had long been living in a fully realized communist order. “All that we know and have, ultimately, all of it is around us…,” Kabakov notes on the fusion of the communist dream with reality. “It is merely reality, and everything around us is merely imagination, one empty dream…”49 Or, as the Czech writer, dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, remarks on the premature attainment of the beautiful dream: “[T]he real question is whether the ‘brighter [communist] future’ is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us…?”50 Struggling to recall and make sense of their “former life,”51 conceptualist poets attest to a mass-scale scheme of villainous ideological deception. Because of its unsuspected nature, this experience is described as traumatic, unassimilated, and impossible to remember (as the recurring motif “I don’t remember anything” testifies). In the poet’s mind, it becomes closely related to images of hopelessness and darkness, of widespread, inexplicable, and unpreventable death:52 Please write: “I don’t remember anything… … the night sky, along with all hope of returning to our former life… … returning to our former life.” Please write: “I don’t remember how these days were going… … They began, at any rate, with me… … with me, most painstakingly, sweeping… … with me, most painstakingly, sweeping my room clean… … of numerous tiny corpses…

1 7 8 23 24 25 26 27

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry … of numerous tiny corpses of moths.” Please write: “This I remember well: the first of April… … This I remember well: the first of April… … around 1956… … around 1956… … when all were out to deceive me… … when all were out to deceive me…”

28 33 34 35 36 37 38

Among the principal strategies used by the Party to conceal the untimely achievement of communism was that of creating a continuous temporal vacuum, often referred to as the “eternal present.” Through generating the illusion that everyone should tirelessly strive to attain the Ideal—the communist ideal—the Soviet regime suppressed the truth that communism had been already accomplished, that what was featured as utopian had, for a long time, been achieved. To cover up the unsuspected conquering of communism, the Party undertook to destabilize the subject’s sense of time through the invention of a series of empty clichés that denoted fully meaningless stages in the evolution and “maturing” of communism. Since it no longer made sense to chart plans for the future, ideologues manipulated and blatantly disfigured the estate of the present by filling it with specious aims and senseless phrases such as “actual socialism,” “developed socialism,” “acceleration,” and “perestroika.” This unnatural distention of time characterized much of the 1980s and, in the course of this decade, effectively concealed the untimely attainment of communism. As Epstein recounts the experience: Suddenly, it became evident that all possible and sufficient communism had already been achieved in our country and well within the promised time frame— by approximately 1980.53 The subsequent ten years were an attempt to rid ourselves of this oppressive fact—to put the triumph of communism somewhere further off, in order to retain at least a semblance of historical perspective, through a sequence of sociopolitical periods: “actual socialism,” “developed socialism,” “acceleration,” and—the longest of all—“perestroika.”54

If this statement is particularly crucial, it is because it places the end of communism in Russia as early as the 1980s—a decade earlier than the official date of its demise.55 As Rubinshtein remarks on the premature arrival of the communist future and on the temporal and ideological deceptions of the 1980s: “I had a dream that if they said ‘Today is Thursday’ on Thursday, then/that meant that today was Thursday. If they said ‘Today is Thursday’ on/Friday, then this was either a lie or a mistake or something else…/Waking up, I thought that really what was important after all was not/only what was said, but also when…”56 It is nothing short of a deliberate lie, Rubinshtein’s poem announces, when in a point of time that delimits the future (marked in the work by the fifth day of the week, “Friday”), the subject is told that he still lives in the present (designated by the preceding day, “Thursday”).

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To achieve the task of sustaining this arrogant lie, the clichés of “actual socialism,” “developed socialism,” “acceleration,” and “perestroika” were invented. Coined to maintain the illusion of an endless, ahistorical present, these hackneyed formulas stood for analogous, if not equivalent, realities. A look back at the time when the terms originated reveals their deceptive nature and the masterful manipulation of meaning that they were designed to accomplish: “Developed socialism” was introduced in Soviet political vocabulary in the late 1970s, under Brezhnev, and, since its very conception, possessed no specific meaning or link to reality. As Neil Robinson remarks, the term “successfully became a code word for all the things that guaranteed the party’s power. It was indeed a ‘cover’ behind which the party could exercise power without having any real responsibility for socialist development.”57 When this term could no longer mask the Party’s inability to overcome the sluggishness of communist construction, another equally empty term acquired currency. This time the Party coined the semantically obscure phrase “socialist way of life” and raised it as the standard according to which the “new Soviet man” had to be molded. The phrase denoted a shift from society as a whole to the concrete individual as the object of continual improvement and perfection. Just like “developed socialism,” however, this was a phrase that did not stand for any new reality but only endeavored to legitimize the already existing one, to give new life to the stagnant political rule and hide successfully its more and more conspicuous flaws. Thus the “socialist way of life,” together with “developed socialism,” turned into another “charter for inaction,”58 whose only purpose was to make the present moment last a little longer, to put off just a little longer the truth of communism’s downfall. A powerful metaphor for the seemingly eternal and stagnant period of “developed socialism” (the Brezhnev period) encapsulates the message of Kabakov’s installation We Are Living Here (1995). Kabakov’s work represents a large construction area where the building of a grandiose structure has already begun—perhaps it is a “Beautiful Palace of the Future,” the shining and ideal edifice of communism. But inspecting the structure more closely, the viewer discovers that the construction has stopped long ago; the building has been abandoned, and all we see is nothing more than piles of long forgotten garbage. “What was supposed to become the beautiful shining ‘tomorrow’ has stopped, has become the eternal immobile ‘now,’ and it is not at all clear what can be done with it,” Kabakov explains.59 In a talk with Kabakov, the critic Boris Groys interprets the message of We Are Living Here in the following manner: “I think this is a metaphor you have discovered for the Brezhnev period of stagnation. … [I]t seems to me that this romantic gazeebo shows the period of stagnation, when time stands still, this ‘stagnating time.’… This effect of ‘stagnant’ time, time of a whirlpool, this is not ‘stop, moment, you are wonderful,’ but rather simply, ‘there is no place further to go, there is no strength’ ” (80, italics added). “Time has stopped, departing from the past but not moving toward the future.” (Figure 1.11)60 Such perceptive remarks reveal that, while the effort to create and maintain a fake historical perspective went by unregistered and unacknowledged by the masses, some intellectuals had the acuity to sense the deathly pangs of communism and

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Figure 1.11 Ilya Kabakov, We Are Living Here. Copyright: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov register them in their art. Locating the demise of the Soviet system and the outset of ahistorical time back in the 1980s, Kabakov, in his installation The Red Wagon (Figure 1.12) (another commentary on erecting the edifice of communism), testifies to this unusual and anomalous time: Around 1985, because of some sort of peculiar drop in energy in our country, I and many of my friends felt that some important period of Soviet history had ended. Some sort of new, already “non-historical” time had begun. But for me, it was clearly felt also that not only a particular period but all of it, of this “Soviet history” which had begun in October 1917 ended this year (1985)—it had ended and would never return. That which seemed would last for an eternity had quietly burst and leaked out, like an old painful, purulent boil.61

Figure 1.12 Ilya Kabakov, The Red Wagon. Copyright: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

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Despite the elaborate terms invented to hide it, the stasis in Soviet society became more and more evident in the era of Brezhnev’s rule, especially in its last years, and the danger of discovering the fact that no communist future lay ahead of the people became increasingly imminent. To conceal the discrepancy between communist rhetorics and reality, time had to be again unnaturally distended, and another craftily invented stage of socialist development was arrogantly tucked in. This was the time of perestroika. While, in the minds of people worldwide, it has become equivalent with thoroughgoing transformation, perestroika was, in many ways, a part of the “eternal present,” a period preoccupied with the agenda to keep the legacy of socialism intact. The articulation of perestroika as a concept that both stood for transformation and remained loyal to the socialist idea was also effected via a painstakingly planned and aggressive manipulation of the semiotic potentials of language. By way of an artful linguistic maneuvering,62 the present was made to appear alive and very much meaningful—the invalidation of communism was successfully masked, and the objective was set to perestroit’ (reconstruct) the communist system, regardless of the fact that it had long been defunct and practically inoperative. The reconstruction itself was conceived as cosmetic. The idea that the Party was on its right path to the heaven of communism was never questioned. The goal itself remained untouched—the course of history was never challenged. Even the Party’s leading role remained a given—it just had to improve and perform better than it did before. In this sense, perestroika was another vacant term that signified no real changes in communist society. Like all the other stages that preceded it, it was invented to conceal the fact of communism’s premature happening and abrogation. For those few, however, who had discerned the unsuspected transmutations of the 1980s and recognized that communism, inasmuch as possibly achievable, had become a reality in Soviet society, life acquired the taste of hopelessness and finality. As Rubinshtein records the experience: 23. Мне приснился едкий дым и с себя посмертный слепок… 24. Мне приснилось, что в ночи сердце вынуто из ножем… 25. Мне приснилась неба пустота. В ней с тобой мы потерялись оба… 26. Мне снилось, будто б мы простимся на мосту…Последнее свиданье… 27. Мне снилось, что в земле сырой лежал он сам не свой и длинным пламенем свеча горела сгоряча… 33. Кому и знать… что все уже не так, как прежде, что нет прибежища надежде и непредвзятому уму… 34. Мне приснился поутру в золоченой раме поудемон-полутруп с многими глазами. Он сказал: “Не стоит ждать—не случится чуда. Если есть, куда бежать, сматывай отсюда.” Он сказал “пойдем со мной, покажу дорогу.” И с тяжелой головой я проснулся…63 23. I dreamed of acrid smoke and my own death mask…/24. I dreamed that at night the heart is taken from its scabbard…/25. I dreamed of the emptiness of the sky. In it you, my girl, and I were both lost…/26. I dreamed as if we were saying farewell on a bridge … We’re tired … And you and I together cannot assume what

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry will happen a day from now, no less two days from now … A final meeting…/27. I had a dream that he lay in the damp earth deranged. And the long flame of a candle burned heatedly./33. Who would know … that all is not as it was before, that there is no haven for hope and the unbiased mind…/34. I had a dream in the morning of a semi-demon in a gilded frame, a semi-corpse with many eyes. He said: “It’s not worth waiting—a miracle won’t happen. If you have somewhere to run, then get out of here.” He said: “Why don’t you go with me and I’ll show you the way.”/And with a heavy head I woke up … 64

The images of hopelessness, bewilderment, and death, recurring with obtrusive persistency in Rubinshtein’s “From Thursday to Friday” (1985), record with disturbing incisiveness the trauma caused by the severe temporal displacements of the 1980s. As the poem announces, “all is not as it was before.” Numerous poetic figures allude to the emergence of a peculiar, uncanny void, caused by a reality that was abolished for which no substitute had yet been found. The sky itself, to which one often turns in hope and prayer, looks down as threatening and ominously empty (“25. I dreamed of the emptiness of the sky…”). The lyric heroes feel betrayed and lost, unable to locate themselves in space and time, and find the formerly-so-clear foothold of their biographical existence (“25 … [Y]ou, my girl, and I were both lost”). Helpless to reverse the course of history and to foresee in any way their lives and future (“26. …[Y]ou and I together cannot assume what will happen a day from now, no less two days from now…”), the lyrical personae sense an ultimate finality (“26. …[W]e were saying farewell on a bridge…”) and the advent of the inevitable death (“23. I dreamed of acrid smoke and my own death mask…”). The images of death, monstrosity, and abnormality hold sway over and, in the end, completely overtake the poem: “27. I had a dream that he lay in the damp earth deranged. And the long flame of a candle burned heatedly.” “34. I had a dream in the morning of a semi-demon in a gilded frame, a semi-corpse with many eyes.” In its finale, Rubinshtein’s poetic work extends a dark and inauspicious warning: “34 … ‘It’s not worth waiting—a miracle won’t happen. If you have somewhere to run, then get out of here.’ ” Submerged in this macabre nightmare, the reader is struck by its heavily pictorial quality.65 We can never forget the vivid images of the lyric self ’s death mask, the menacing emptiness of the sky, the death-portending farewell on the bridge. Numerous studies on psychological trauma have underscored the perceptual organization of an overwhelming event, at the expense of its semantic and verbal representation, as a paramount characteristic of traumatic memory par excellence.66 Visual images identify the dark areas of our mind for which we presently possess no meaningful and structured words, the silent territories for which coherent speech will come forth only later. Interestingly, Rubinshtein’s “From Thursday to Friday” has served as the basis of two of Bruskin’s best recognized works: Life Is Everywhere and Modern Archeology. While these works differ greatly in their thematic scope and artistic approaches, they both rely heavily on Rubinshtein’s verse and his evocative poetic choices. The poems serve as a forceful accompaniment to the images that Bruskin draws and reinforce, through the medium of words, the visual message of Bruskin’s work.67

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Rubinshtein’s poem “From Thursday to Friday,” about the unsettled and troubled mind of a subject residing on the borderline between two meaningless realities, becomes the poetic foundation of a series by Bruskin that similarly focuses on defining the liminal—the space between one mode of living and another. Just as the title of the poem by Rubinshtein reflects an image of the threshold—between one day of the week and another—Bruskin’s work elaborates on the condition of marginality, as evident in On the Edge (Na kraiu), the series’s baleful title. It is interesting to acknowledge that Bruskin’s work, created years after communism broke down,68 elects to enforce its ideas through the same imagery and devices that Rubinshtein used back in the 1980s, that is, more than a decade earlier. This choice points to the analogousness of the two historical periods, which both define a state of marginality, be it in late communist or post-communist society. Bewilderment, stupefaction, and a sense of unreality pervade both Rubinshtein’s and Bruskin’s works. The repetition of “I dreamed” at the beginning of each line of Rubinshtein’s “From Thursday to Friday” underscores the importance of relating a dream, of witnessing not reality but a mental representation of it. Faithful to this quality of Rubinshtein’s poem, Bruskin envelops the characters of On the Edge in the same surreal, almost trancelike environment. They are blurred and discolored, vaguely reminiscent of reality but still belonging to a dream.69 In “I Dreamed Of … #1” (Monument, 2003; On the Edge),70 Bruskin represents a human figure stepping down a pedestal. One leg on the pedestal and the other in the air, this figure is positioned on the threshold between two far-removed realities— the communist one, which extolled and glorified him, building a monument to him, and the post-communist one that dethroned the formerly revered leaders. As their teachings, however, have not been replaced by any consistent doctrine or clearly formulated ideology, this substitution of values seems enshrouded in cloudiness. The painting of Bruskin is grayish, almost colorless in tones, with a distinct quality of unearthliness, etherealness, and unreality. Interestingly, the same image has its blackand-white prototype painted on a 1998 plate. It is part of a collection of drawings on porcelain plates71 that Bruskin entitled, just like his 2003 work, On the Edge. While the picture on the plate lacks the visual hint at dreaminess and incorporeality, it shares with the later drawing the topic of unsettleness and liminality. The image of the man stepping down from his formerly deifying pedestal is situated at the center of the plate and is surrounded, alongside the plate’s margin, with the text of Rubinshtein’s “From Thursday to Friday.” The verses on the plate appear in Russian, but, as part of the description, the artist provides their translation in English. It reads: “All night long I dreamed about the borderlands of being. When I awoke, I could only remember something between water and dry land, silence and speech, sleep and waking, and just had time to think: Here it is, the esthetics of indeterminacy. Here it comes again” (On the Edge, Life Is Everywhere 20) (Figure 1.13, Figure 1.14).72 Strikingly similar in its rendition is the theme of liminality in Bruskin’s plastic work “Fragment.”73 On a porcelain plate, the artist portrays a sequence of indistinguishable “cloned” men. Stereotyped by a depersonalizing society, they walk in a single file toward the top of a cliff and then, stepping mechanically over its edge, tumble into

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Figure 1.13 Grisha Bruskin, I Dreamed Of #1 (Monument), 2003, oil on linen, 57 ¾ × 44 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.14 Grisha Bruskin, Step, 1988, from the series “On the Edge,” porcelain, 12.2 in. diameter. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

a wide-gaping chasm. As the title suggests, the work presents a sudden fracturing of eschatology—a borderline condition in which the subject is forced to forsake his reality, to cross the perilous threshold of life and step over the terminal precipice. Sensing the imminence of an unthinkable calamity, Bruskin writes: “The work has a clear eschatological foundation. It uses the motif of the threshold, the edge, the border, which combined with the red background calls forth a feeling of anxiety, an expectation of a painful event or a catastrophe” (“A Cloned Plot” 236) (Figure 1.15). “I Dreamed Of … #2” (Couple, 2003)74 takes us from the sphere of public life and ideology to the private world of love and intimacy. As evident in the subtitle of this picture (“Couple”), Bruskin portrays a couple in love—cheek to cheek, frozen in a tight embrace. Despite the profusion of the couple’s happiness, however, the image once again conveys the impression of an impending catastrophe and collapse. Neither the man nor the woman has set his/her two feet on the ground. They both are touching it with one foot only, while their other leg hangs ominously in the air. The position of the couple thus bespeaks a disconnection from reality—a state of transition, possibly, from life to the abode of death and immateriality. The formal, ceremonious attire of the lovers forbodes the grandness of the change to come. As the picture is indistinct and grayish in color, we are unable to uncover where and when this event would occur (Figure 1.16). The same (2003 edition) of On the Edge, however, includes a colored version of the drawing (the only color picture in the whole collection), which, by means of both text

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Figure 1.15 Grisha Bruskin, Fragment, 1998, porcelain, diameter 17 5/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.16 Grisha Bruskin, I Dreamed Of #2 (Couple), 2003, oil on linen, 60 × 40 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

and color, makes the premonition for death more vivid and real. The picture is entitled “Blue Sky” (2003)75 and captures the moment of departing from the grim earthly reality—on the threshold between heaven and earth, the lovers are right on the verge of being fully engulfed by the sky (Figure 1.17). As the text makes it clear, however, this is not the heavenly paradise of a blissful existence but an empty and ominous sky—the final abode for the love seekers. “Blue Sky” is concise, but quite eloquent, in the text that

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it makes use of to reinforce its central message—it once again comes from Rubinshtein’s poem but now forms a part of the painting rather than its added description. The text reads: “I dreamed of the sky’s emptiness in which you and I both got lost. You said, ‘that swallow over there will remember us now unto death.’ ”76 Like “I Dreamed of … #1” (Monument), “Blue Sky” and “I Dreamed of … #2” (Couple) from the 2003 version of On the Edge have their prototypes in Bruskin’s 1998 collection of porcelain plates. Situated at the center of the plate, the image of the couple is surrounded by Rubinshtein’s words—again, in Russian on the plate and in English in the work’s description (Figure 1.18). We can recognize that the verses come from “From Thursday to Friday” and testify to the characters’ helplessness and acute psychic distress: I dreamed that in the middle of the night my heart is drawn from its scabbard. What do we know? What can we do? He who knows, let him be silent. I dreamed of the sky’s emptiness in which you and I both got lost. You said, “that swallow over there will remember us now unto death.” I dreamed that they—my remaining days—run looming up ahead leaving me behind. The flutter of six transparent wings revealed to me much that was in me. And I woke up.77

The theme of the threshold reemerges in the most recent works of Bruskin, such as H-Hour. In it, reminscing of his “On the Edge,” Bruskin confides: “The theme of edge, boundary, is important to the author: dream and reality, reality and recollection, art and life, life and death. Heaven and earth.”78 In H-Hour, Bruskin finally reveals the image of the “Guardian of the Threshold.” He depicts him as a “creature that is found at

Figure 1.17 Grisha Bruskin, Blue Sky, 2003, oil on linen, 55 × 41 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 1.18 Grisha Bruskin, Couple, 1988, from the series “On the Edge,” porcelain, 12.2 in. diameter. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

the intersection of two worlds: here and beyond, solid and thin, living and posthumous, awake and dreaming” (Figure 1.19).79 Waking or being asleep, abiding in this world or escaping in another, the protagonists of both Bruskin and Rubinshtein inhabit the borderline, the space between our, earthly mode of existence, and a heavenly, unknowable one. With just

Figure 1.19 Grisha Bruskin, “Guardian of the Threshold.” Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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one foot in our reality, they overhang a deathly precipice and hover on the brink of a tragic collapse. The borderline condition—the inability of the subject to settle firmly in any reality—his/her state of being torn apart between earth and sky, life and death, dream and awakenness—reappears with striking consistency in the works of conceptual artists. In Kabakov’s Ten Albums (1985), for instance, “the flying Komarov” is in a “state of eternal hovering, suspension between heaven and earth, between a dream and reality.”80 Similarly, in Kabakov’s I Will Return on April 12 (1990), the protagonist resides “ ‘between heaven and earth,’ on the border.”81 Prigov’s poetry also evokes the dichotomy of our mortal world and a more perfect other, and summons none other than the poet to bridge the sepulchral gap “between raven and dead man,” to negotiate the space between the world of the dead and ours: “A raven-bird hangs in the sky/And under the earth lies a dead man/They look each other in the face…/O, thou, my native earth!/You hold me here as a singer/Between raven and dead man.”82 It is this in-betweenness, this unsettling peripherality, that best characterizes the existence of the subject in Russian post-communist society. A similar preoccupation with liminal experience defines the work of poets and artists from all the formerly communist East European bloc. So rampant in the countries that underwent a transition from totalitarian rule to democracy, the borderline condition was chosen as the theme of Manifesta 3—the Biannale held in Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000) and entitled “Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence.”83 As the term “borderline syndrome,” in psychoanalysis, delineates the border between neurosis and psychosis, it is of little surprise that many artists at this forum sought to problematize the boundary between madness and sanity. Slavoj Žižek (whose hometown is the Biennale’s host, Ljubljana) identifies as a primary manifestation of the borderline syndrome the “pathological disintegration of the personality” (exhibition catalogue).84 The theory of borderline personality disorder, as developed by Otto F. Kernberg,85 is what, in fact, formed the conceptual basis of all works presented at the exhibition. Similarly to Žižek, Kernberg sees the “diffusion of identity” (as well as the weak ego) as principal characteristics of the borderline syndrome.86 The image of the border is thus placed within the context of disease, psychosis, and pathology. It seems that all of Eastern Europe, in its transition to democracy, has fallen prey to a type of borderline syndrome. As Susan Snodgrass suggests in “Manifesta 3: Diagnosing Europe,” postcommunist Europe can be likened to a patient whose symptoms include an atomized identity and weakened ego87—the symptoms that we have already seen to define the condition of borderline syndrome. In her introductory piece on the Slovenian Biennale, Kathrin Rhomberg discusses the rationale behind associating this grave diagnosis with the state of present-day Europe. “Why ‘Borderline Syndrome’ as a metaphor for present-day Europe?” she inquires in the Catalogue of the exhibition. “On the one hand,” Rhomberg suggests, [T]he end of the bipolar European post-war categorizations has led to an ideological fragmentation, to a collapse of traditional ideologies. On the other, the simultaneous globalization of the free market has intensified social and

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economic dysfunctions and voluntary or forced migration. In association with the interweavings of communication, abruptly modified as multinational and decentralized due to these changes, which seem to be too much for the human mind to deal with, for the resultant characteristics this means a proclaimed absence of ideology, as well as pragmatism, a diffusion of identity and the emergence of undifferentiated fears.88

Let us pause for a moment and consider the key points of Rhomberg’s observation. It underscores several critical factors that may have caused this collective “borderline” experience. Firstly, a “change” happened and brought about unprecedented shifts in the formerly communist sociopolitical structures. Notably, this was not a gradual change, but one that occurred suddenly and “abruptly.” Last but not least, the change was radical and overwhelming—just “too much for the human mind to deal with,”89 as Rhomberg describes it, using the precise terminology of trauma. Not surprisingly, the result was “undifferentiated fears” or what, in its more acute manifestations, could be defined as psychological trauma.

4. Witnessing a catastrophe: The sudden breakdown of communism Someone, rushing toward eternity, slips and falls down. Bright light falls on him. A rather deplorable sight.… Lev Rubinshtein90 An alternative way of perceiving conceptualism, on first sight antithetical to its customary reading as self-referential, posits it as the immediate result of a historically induced psychic trauma. Psychic trauma is generally termed “an emotional shock or injury or a distressful situation that produces a lasting impression, especially on the subconscious mind.”91 As Cathy Caruth defines it, the “emotional shock” or psychological trauma is always the result of a sudden and unanticipated occurrence that is registered, but not assimilated, by the structures of the mind. “In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to unexpected or overwhelming events,” Caruth points out—events “that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in … repetitive phenomena.”92 Such an event, I would argue, was the unexpected collapse of the communist system and its hasty replacement by a largely unknowable post-totalitarian order. Because of its sudden occurrence and the enormity of the change—unprecedented in nature and in the sheer amount of its newness—the moment of changeover remained secluded from the mind and totally unmastered by cognition: hence its lingering impact on the memory of the subject and the subconscious urge to re-enact the experience (both in real life and in poetical writing), in the hope of coming to terms with it. While the creation of what we have referred to as the “eternal present” made it possible to conceal the attainment of communism for almost a full decade in the

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1980s—a period when only the most perspicacious suspected the duplicity of communist rhetorics—at the close of the decade, the task of maintaining the illusion that continuous progress and perfection would soon lead to the triumph of the communist Ideal became futile and fully untenable. The gap between the promised bliss and the disastrous economic state of Russia became impossible to hide, and it was soon obvious that, rather than being on the threshold of a glorious paradise, the subject was on the verge of communism’s full-scale collapse. After seven decades of a seemingly interminable Soviet order, all of a sudden, “[h]istorical perspective collapsed, and we [the Russian people] felt ourselves carried off into some kind of Beyond,”93 Epstein remarks. “[T]he Soviet Empire … fell like a house of cards in 1991,” Bruskin describes the collapse.94 “Thus, I understood that the future had tricked me by showing up so swiftly,” 95 he further recounts. Though impossible to name or define in any meaningful way this unforeseen traumatic event, this is how Rubinshtein reports it felt, in a poem revealingly entitled “Unnamed”: Absolutely impossible. Not at all possible. Impossible. Perhaps, at some point. Sometime. Later. Not yet. Not now. And not now. And not now. Perhaps, soon. It could be soon. Really soon. Perhaps earlier than expected. Quite soon. Just about. Now. Pay attention. Here. Well, that’s about all. That’s all.96

Even the most undaunted projections could not have predicted the sudden and radical uprooting of communist reality in Soviet society as well as in the rest of Eastern Europe.97 “Nobody believed that one day we would be free from the totalitarian grip. We, as Russians, thought that it would last forever, this regime,” Bruskin remarks.98 “But history had a surprise in store for us: [t]he historical magician waved his wand

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and in the twinkling of an eye Russia’s communist pyramid came crashing down.”99 Robert Weiner similarly notes: “The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 caught everyone by surprise.”100 The “extraordinary changes exceeded all predictions,” Elie Abel concurs.101 Not by accident, the year 1989 has often been referred to as the “annus mirabilis in Eastern Europe.”102 This was a year of “rapid and unexpected developments which changed so radically the picture of what used to be the Soviet-dominated part of Europe”103—a year witnessing the overnight collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia, the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, the replacement of the discredited communist party by the government of Solidarity in Poland, the symbolic opening of the border with Austria in Hungary, the ouster of the Stalinist-type of dictator Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria, and the murder of the leader Nicolae Ceausescu that put an end to decades of totalitarianism in Romania. The Iron Curtain, which for more than forty years had split the Eastern from the Western part of Europe, all of a sudden turned into memory. “No one forecast the suddenness of the changes late in 1989 that … removed the physical Iron Curtain…,” Peter Laufer remarks.104 These drastic changes in historical reality were too extreme to be imagined by people’s unprepared minds. As Abel testifies, “Few expected the totalitarian systems imposed by overwhelming Soviet force in the forties to disintegrate overnight.”105 Paradoxically, “[t]he unlikely revolutionaries were no less surprised by their swift success than the rest of the world.”106 “[S]omething unimaginable is starting to happen!”107 Rubinshtein exclaims in dismay. The rest of his poem is an attempt to come to terms with the sudden and unfathomable event of communism’s collapse and its surprisingly traumatic aftermaths. How did the “general exaltation,” born with the breakdown of the totalitarian system and “kn[owing] no bounds,” fade away? Why did the “clear feeling that everything difficult and horrible had left our life, never to return” – the feeling that “ahead of us was nothing but joy, [e]ndless joy” – give way to pain and “anguish[ed]” “nauseating attacks”? As the lyric hero confides, I am writing against the roar of surf, the nauseating attacks of anguish, 4 the clatter of glass… I write: “It’s hard to believe what’s happening here!” 5 I am writing against the clatter of glass, the mocking glasses of those nearby, the howling wind… I write: “It’s impossible to describe what’s happening here!” 7 Good God! What’s going on? 8 Is there anyone, just one person, who could explain what this all 9 means? In a word, general exaltation knew no bounds. 111 In that moment, all of us had a clear feeling that everything 112 difficult and horrible had left our life, never to return. And ahead of us was nothing but joy. 113 Endless joy. 114 115 However, let’s start from the very beginning…108

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Sadly, the beginning brings no cause for such elation but entraps the lyric hero in a vicious circle, where the prospects for joy revert to the all-too-familiar “attacks of anguish”: Here I am, writing…                                                                                                       1 I am writing against the howling wind, the rattling window frames, the               2 Roar of surf… I am writing against the roar of surf, the nauseating attacks of anguish,                4 the clatter of glass…109

The sudden invalidation of the “beautiful communist dream” by an inscrutable posttotalitarian order, as well as the abrupt eschatological displacements ensuing from it, emerges as a common theme in conceptualist poetry. Rubinshtein’s Lichnoe delo, for instance, attests to the unnatural speed with which the lyric persona was forced to forsake his familiar, recognizable, and appealing reality (it all happened “когда мы и ахнуть еще не успели”) and to his desperate attempt to comprehend the sudden shift (“куда ж мы спешили—летели?”), to pin down the moment in history when the beautiful dream ceased guiding his life (“И где отошли от летучего сна?”) and he entered a new, no longer desirable world (“…там, где уже не прозрачна сосна/и где не прекрасны, но памятны ели”): Прозрачные сосны стояли. Меж ними стояли прекрасные ели: Но все это было когда-то вначале, когда мы и ахнуть еще не успели. Все это по-прежнему где-то стоит, но мы уже мимо всего пролетели и мимо сосны, что прозрачна на вид, и мимо прекрасной и памятной ели куда ж мы спешили—летели? И где отошли от летучего сна? Да там, где уже не прозрачна сосна и где не прекрасны, но памятны ели.110 (There were translucent pine-trees/With beautiful firs among them./But all of this was once, in the beginning,/Before we even knew where we were./All of this is still somewhere, in its former place,/But we have already flown past everything./We’ve flown past the pine-tree that appears translucent,/We’ve flown past the beautiful, memorable fir./Where did we hasten to? Where did we fly to?/And where did we move away from the flying dream? –/Yes, to a place where the pine is no longer translucent,/And the still memorable firs—no longer beautiful.)

The reader is inclined to trust the testimony of the lyric hero, since it comes from what Rubinshtein presents as the hero’s authentic and confidential personal file

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(lichnoe delo). In it, the poetic persona relates the traumatic experience of confronting the loss of his beautiful present and coveted future, and entering a weird beyondness that lacks any meaning, an unknowable space one could only define through what it “no longer” is or ever could be. A feeling of nostalgia and irretrievability pervades the poem. No matter how strong is the lyrical hero’s desire to return to the beautiful landscape of pine-trees and firs—a part of his life “once, in the beginning”—he is soon to discover that he has flown by and surpassed them (“But we have already flown past everything”) and that it is already too late—in fact, fully impossible—to go back to them and revive them. The suddenness with which the world of communism ended and the unnatural speed at which the subject surpassed his/her own biographic reality acquire critical representation in the visual realm as well. In many of his works, Ilya Kabakov draws on the topic of “speed,” which, initially, he imbues with positive connotations. “Speed! That’s what I love, that’s what has attracted me since childhood!” Kabakov proclaims in the introduction to his installation Falling behind the Race (originally planned as Catching the Rabbit, 1998).111 However, when speed is of unnaturally great proportions, Kabakov notes its detrimental, traumatizing nature. “… I have had one strange, inexplicable defeat since childhood,”112 the artist confides in the same installation. Whenever we would race with one another in school, I would always feel that the upper part of my body was rushing much faster than my legs. My legs, no matter how quickly they would run, couldn’t catch up with my body, which was far out in front and it seemed, was reaching its goal. Because of this, I often couldn’t run even 20 steps. I would lose my balance and fall painfully to the ground.113

Such focal words as “race,” “goal,” “catch up,” and “fall,” in this candid avowal of physical impotence, imply that there is more to the hero’s unfortunate situation than the drama of a purely personal failure. They invite a provocative parallel between the fate of Kabakov’s running persona and the dramatic fall of Soviet people, unflaggingly racing to catch up with, but unable to arrest, the ever slipping goals set by the Party. Just the way Rubinshtein’s heroes, in the poem mentioned earlier, hastened and flew (“speshili, leteli”) to seize the “beautiful dream,” but tragically crashed down in a place that is “no longer beautiful,” Kabakov’s character ran as fast as he could to attain his ever elusive ideals, only to arrive at the point of inadvertent and sudden breakdown. Like Rubinshtein’s heroes who, having rapidly “flown past everything” beautiful, suddenly found out that their lives had elapsed, the running man, portrayed by Kabakov, fell out of balance and “painfully” collapsed. As Kabakov explains it, the cause for this collapse of the subject resides in the complete inadequacy of his legs (the physical) to catch up with his upper body (the home of the heart, traditionally linked to the ideal): “My legs, no matter how quickly they would run, couldn’t catch up with my body, which was far out in front and it seemed, was reaching its goal.”114 This condition of unattainability is peculiarly evoked in an excerpt from Rubinshtein’s “Regular Writing,” in which the poet refers, in strikingly similar terms, to the inevitable fate of falling behind:

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry In his article “Rules for Falling Behind,” the author writes: “This strategy is, at times, reduced to the function of a carrot on a stick held in front of a donkey’s nose—in the sense of absolute unattainability and stability of position, a half-step ahead of any process.”115

In a broader perspective, it is the powerlessness of the subject to arrest the truth of having reached and thus revoked the “goal”—the ideal communist goal—the discrepancy between having mentally attained communism, but being physically entrapped in the moment of racing to get hold of it, that has led to perceiving the changeover event as an unsuspected and painful collapse, as a catastrophe traumatic in nature. Thus, Rubinshtein’s heroes’ “constant presentiment of/some unknown [and fully unavoidable] catastrophe,”116 while ominously portentous, comes as little surprise.117 Many of Kabakov’s installations feature the shocking invalidation of totalitarianism as a grave and unexpected catastrophe. While some of his works are hesitant to refer directly to the calamitous moment of communism’s breakdown, others provide a rather transparent evocation of this psychically traumatic experience. Kabakov’s Fallen Sky (1995),118 for instance, relates the fall of communist utopia to the catastrophe of fallen heaven. The half-broken board, featured in this installation, has been positioned on a peaceful lawn and thus unwittingly creates the feeling that it arrived from somewhere above, that it descended from the sky and crashed into the ground. The idea of a sudden, catastrophic landing is communicated through a number of details. On the one hand, the position of the board—one part lying on the grass and the other piercing the ground—produces the impression that this board has not always been here, but has only recently come down and settled on the lawn. Also, the pronounced horizontal orientation of the whole installation bespeaks an unnatural leveling of the strong vertical lines—a flattening and crushing of man’s aspirations upward, of all his hopes for upheaval and ambitions for the future. A closer examination reveals that the geometrical interplay of verticals and horizontals is staged on a much wider arena. The broken pieces of plywood, representing the fallen sky, are not situated on just any lawn but on the lawn where another important monument stands—the monument of the astronauts given by the Soviet government to the United Nations decades ago and representing a slanting spire taking off upward. Looking from the position of the explanation board, the installation of the fallen sky and the monument that celebrates man’s valiant endeavors to move up and to catch the stars are situated on the same “axis of vision.” This allusion to a former position of invincibility and power and its juxtaposition with a drastically different state of powerlessness and collapse evoke in yet another way the cataclysmic nature of the changeover event. In the words of Kabakov: A monument to astronauts in the middle of the 1960’s represents the image of the superiority of the Soviet state in conquering space, a symbol of the victory of Soviet power and movement upward, vertically, to new victories of this power and

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this country. The Fallen Sky is laid out horizontally, and represents a disintegrating sky, that same sky into which thirty years ago this country was striving with such confidence and solemnity.119

On the other hand, the feeling of a sudden and accidental displacement is reinforced through the painting on the board—while lying on the ground, the entire surface of the plywood piece is covered with a picture of a sky—a beautiful blue sky with clouds sailing in. The viewer is prompted to see in this heavenly, transcendent world a metaphor for the ideal communist reality and is, therefore, forced to face the condition of its sudden and cataclysmic breakdown. The feeling of witnessing the scene of a calamity is further conveyed by placing a barrier all around the fallen board—just like the police would do around any place of catastrophe. The installation thus suggests a parallel interpretation of the disastrous crashdown of the sky and the traumatic and surprising fall of communist utopia. Beyond the failure of a flawed ideology, Kabakov’s work refers to yet another breakdown—that of the system’s rickety economy: “1995 was the year of the virtual collapse economically of this empire that at some point was so powerful, and the collapse of the empire itself, a time of the onset of chaos and impoverishment for an enormous segment of the population.”120 The abrupt catastrophic reversal displaced the subject from what used to be “home”—a hospitable, safe environment—into a foreign and incomprehensible reality. This new and unknowable world was one that Kabakov’s characters could no longer reside in—a reality “for sale” that they no longer felt theirs and hastily wanted to get rid of. As the description of Kabakov’s work For Sale (1994) relates, “At some time in the past, there existed a well-ordered, tranquil everyday reality, and then, suddenly, everything changed for this or that reason, and it all melted away without a trace.”121 Kabakov’s installation represents a dark, ancient hall with a golden cornice in the center and lots of furniture clustered together and covered from the dust with a large white sheet. It becomes clear that the people who lived in this room have left and all that has remained behind them is currently for sale. While For Sale is done specifically for Spain, in particular for Madrid, where old family homes are being torn apart and disappearing, the author is quick to alert us to the relevance of this work in the context of his own, Russian experience. Relating the theme of For Sale to his life as a child, Kabakov remarks: “Apparently, I unconsciously recreated this situation from my childhood, where everything was unsettled, temporary, groundless.”122 It is of little surprise that in the mid-1990s, a period of confounding reversals, the artist reexperienced with fresh intensity the groundlessness that marked his childhood years.

5. The unforeseen arrival of the future. Displacements in a post-futurity modus vivendi It is already late/ Someone arrived I did not expect.123 Lev Rubinshtein

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry … Let’s go there, too … Where brains/crumble, where there are screeches and total darkness…/…We assumed we would have our own/lives, but that’s what you get … 124 Lev Rubinshtein Only to the most crude dreamers does the future here reveal itself in the modus of common sense … [E]ven the cumulative future, most predictable in its nature, is, here and now, most evasive and indeterminate … 125 Mikhail Ryklin

While the suddenness of communism’s displacement was principal among the factors producing psychological trauma, it was the shift in temporality, the severe and irreversible eschatological dislocation that defined the essence of this traumatic experience. Loyal to the Ideal or forced into serving communism, people had devoted a lifetime to building the communist future. Communism was all they had known, and its fruition and full realization—all they had aspired to attain in the future. When, suddenly, the unnatural rupture of the communist paradigm redefined the course of political history, an impossible temporal shift took place and reversed the subject’s biographic experience. Before people were able to notice it, the past and the future had exchanged their places. The subject was ousted beyond the confines of his/her meaningful life and conceivable future—in an unknown and ungraspable postfuturity modus vivendi. As Epstein observes in his book, revealingly entitled After the Future,126 “In the course of this year [1989–1990], our past and future have exchanged places. The principle problem posed by this year is no longer a (derivative) social or a political one, but rather an eschatological one: how to live after one’s own future, or, if you like, after one’s own death.”127 Rushing to attain the alluring communist dream, the subject was thunderstruck by the never suspected: he/she was cold-bloodedly cheated—toiling to build the bright communist future, he/she was shocked to discover that the future had sneaked into the past. All that had seemed impending was already achieved—the future had already happened.128 Ideologists were prophesying a radiant time to come from the catacombs, where it long lay buried. Strategists were planning a life that had already been lived out: “Our life comes to an end/outside, at that pole./ And where does your [the Party’s] life end?/Oh, your life is eternal!/Congratulations on your life!/How beautiful your life is!/But how beautiful it is we don’t know,/since our life has already ended.”129 To Rubinshtein, the subject’s future in this temporal disruption seems totally “comedic”: 23. You could get ahead of events, but you will not be able to predict them; … 93. You could think that something completely unusual is happening; 94. You could think that nothing happened; 95. You could end up noticing nothing at all; … 110. You could stop worrying about tomorrow: its nature will be comedic.130

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The startling epiphany of having reached and, thereby annulled, the future sparked passionate discussions. As Prigov reports, “[R]elentless and critical disputes and fights apropos of the future take place…”131 It also brought up the troublesome question: “And now, as it [the future] is already here, it’s interesting to imagine: how come there is no future? But it seems there is no past either, as the present lasts for so long…”132 The loss of the past, the impossibility of the future, and the prospects for an eternal, meaningless present acquire central significance in Kabakov’s work as well: We have now come to some stage in the consciousness of everyone when the past is not only powerless over our consciousness, but it is as though it doesn’t even exist inside of us at all, we don’t know it and never did … But if there is no past, then there is no future … The art of this eternal “today” only perpetuates this situation.…133

Numbed by his hibernation in the continuous present, the subject failed to notice the arrival of the future. “There was no stop sign,” a hero of Prigov declares, grappling with the discovery of having unknowingly outstripped his life. “It might be just that both of us, together, overslept and missed this sign?” the hero’s opponent suggests in response.134 As the lyric self of a poem by Rubinshtein strives to define this peculiar comatose state between sleep and reality, as well as its shocking and catastrophic impacts, it was something like when you think you’re pretending to be asleep, but                 69 in fact you really are sleeping. Or, as if something invisible sneaks up from behind, lays his hands on          70 your shoulders, and laughs with such a familiar laugh, that you couldn’t hold back your tears. And, obviously, that’s the reason you feel a constant presentiment of              71 some unknown catastrophe.135

As Kabakov also observes, the historical changeover occurred “sort of without [the subject],” without his knowledge and participation. “Something has happened to me, something has occurred, but also sort of without me, and I didn’t notice it,” Kabakov attests, uncannily alluding to the same peculiar “something” that, in Rubinshtein’s poem earlier, caused the inability of the self to fathom the transformation.136 Many of Kabakov’s installations revolve around the failure of the subject to notice the arrival of the future as well as the untimely revocation of his/her dreams and life. Some images depicted by the artist emerge as metaphors for this disturbing powerlessness of the self to recognize his death and sudden end. Among them is the image of a “white speed skater.” Kabakov draws a picture of Gorky Park in Moscow, where, alongside the gypsum figures of swimmers and disk throwers, the figure of a white speed skater is installed. Unlike the others, however, the figure of the skater no longer stands on its pedestal but is, instead, fallen to the ground. Failing to acknowledge the reality of his collapse and his position at a point from which any movement ahead is completely impossible, the

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figure of the skater makes desperate attempts to run: “He was still lying in the pose of someone running, not knowing that he was lying down,” Kabakov describes.137 The same sense of futility is conveyed through another image Kabakov presents—that of an overturned toy car whose wheels, as if incognizant of the catastrophe, continue to function and move: “I am very small and I am winding up mechanical toy cars,” the artist relates. “They race forward, crash into the wall, turn over. But the wind-up mechanism doesn’t stop: the wheels keep turning, the cars keep buzzing.”138 The feeling that the world the subject used to know had long ago crashed down and ended but he/ she completely failed to notice (or was extremely late in recognizing) that resurfaces with tragic overtones in many of Kabakov’s works. “When he awoke it was already 10 o’clock,” Kabakov notes of his hero in The Underground Golden River.139 “He thought with horror that all was lost—he was late.”140 The belatedness in recognizing the overtaking of the hero’s dreams and life (which all “remained behind”) and the abrupt invalidation of his biographic time (which, as the author claims, “has irreversibly expired”) had a psychically traumatic impact on the unaware subject.141 Stunned by the rapid shifts in temporality, the subject experienced a complete lack of understanding of his new, post-futural reality: It already is late…/Nothing makes any sense…/To sleep in solitude…/To confuse the left with the right/A corpse on the street/The match breaks/A black dog/ Arrived someone I did not expect/While playing hide-and-seek with your soul, minuting your fate,…carelessly … in the grave/A black cockroach/You’ll forget what you wanted/You’ll wake up in the dark/You did not recognize yourself in the mirror/There will be no one to talk to/No escape from death/You have hopes about something unknown/To fight with excruciating doubts/To clutch at the pitiful remnants of your own ideas/You will approach fatally the moment when all of this decidedly loses all meaning/You did not notice how the wind died down, and the last stars went out/You’ll forget that all remained behind, and time has irreversibly expired/You disappear somewhere and then reappear unexpectedly, uninvited/Suddenly you’ll understand that it is time to leave and go somewhere. But where?/Nothing is clear.142

On a similar note, Kabakov observes: “[C]larity and comprehensibility flicker, are extinguished … Time is passing on, it is time to leave this place. Something was and has ended, and something else has begun.”143 No matter how hard he tried, the subject could no longer unravel the riddle of his reality: “…A mind like Euclid’s/would unsuccessfully endeavor to untangle/cause and effect’s inexorable knot,” Kibirov claims.144 “[T]ime now and then narrows down, now and then expands,/and one can no longer understand what occurs when…,” a baffled Rubinshtein reports.145 As a result, the lyric self is faced with a set of equally undesirable choices: You could engage in classifying positions from the viewpoint of their hopelessness;                                                                                                                11 You could engage in classifying doubts from the viewpoint of their unsolvability;                                                                                                                12146

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The sudden fracture of the temporal dimension scrambled all chronologies and denied the subject the power to situate himself in space and time. He felt entrapped in a terminally outlined circle—unable to get hold of the slippery fiber of his fatally failing reality: … The student left and became engrossed in thought. First he thought: “What direction shall I look in? From all sides: forward and backward, to the left and to the right, upward and downward, in breadth and in depth unfolds the incoherent space of our arhythmical exertion and pretensions. What direction shall I look in?”… Then he thought: “The circle is outlined, and there is nowhere to go…” Then he thought: “Approaching gradually the irrefutable limit, it seems it is already time to come to my senses, at the moment when cause and effect exchange places, and one can no longer understand where and what…” Then he thought: “Gradually drawing closer to the borderline being described, all of a sudden I feel I am failing in my final attempt, at the moment when I endeavor to get hold of the thread, slipping away, now of a thought, now of a memory, and I cannot, I cannot, I cannot.”147

An excerpt from this poem has been used by Bruskin to accompany one of the central images in On the Edge (1998)—the image of a blind man escorted by another one who seems similarly disoriented.148 The two men are on the verge of a precipice. The blind man is trying to find his way, fumbling around with a cane, but, without any success, he is already hanging over the precipice. His guide is strangely situated behind, instead of in front of, him. The eyes of the guide surprisingly downcast, his only function seems to be to hold the blind man back and not let him fall over the precipice. However, his attempts appear doomed to failure, as no matter what direction they turn to, the two men face an unavoidable precipice—a fatally outlined circle of death. The voices of others remind the two men that they are not alone in this calamitous situation (“… other voices persist in reminding that you are not alone here”) (Figure 1.20).149 The image of the blind man, of the person deprived both literally and metaphorically of vision, recurs with striking consistency in conceptualist art and poetry. “A blind man was going home,” Rubinshtein recounts in “This Time.”150 “It was night. The blind man carried a light in front of him. What a foolish blind man, carrying a light in front of him. He is blind, what does he need light for?”151 As Rubinshtein’s question suggests, just as in Bruskin’s visual work, the struggle of the lyric self to recover his vision and find his place in the abstruse universe is both hopeless and, as the author claims, plain foolish (Figure 1.21, Figure 1.22). Unable to find his coordinates in space or time, the subject in post-totalitarian society was fated to drift in a continuous borderless present. I argue that this anchorless floating in time reflects the experience of psychic pain and trauma. As Rubinshtein accounts, “If the past and the future are indistinguishable in the all-consuming present, then this is merely one of the results of a position achieved through suffering.”152 In an attempt to overcome the pain caused by the abrupt reversal in the course of

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Figure 1.20 Grisha Bruskin, Blindman, from the series “On the Edge,” 1988, porcelain, 12.2 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.21 Bruskin, Partner, 2001–

Figure 1.22 Grisha Bruskin Blinder,

2003, painted bronze, figure 1: 48 × 13 ¾ × 15 ¾ in; figure 2: 47 5/8 × 17 ¾ × 22 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

fragment from “Leben uber alles” 1999. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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temporality, the lyric hero desperately tries (though always fails) to reestablish the confines of his/her previously meaningful reality: “… someone is trying to draw a distinct line between the past and future. He simply remains unnoticed…”153

6. Traumatizing the mind: Psychological death of the subject Someone cannot regain consciousness struck dumb by certain news. Stunned as he is, he walks around;… Someone remains alone. He is in utter confusion. He has absolutely no idea what to undertake. On his face a whole gamut of experiences rests; … Someone is inconsolable. He would not accept any words of consolation. He says he needs noone and nothing;… Lev Rubinshtein154 Displaced beyond the confines of his once meaningful life, into a confounding and absurd post-futural vacuum, the subject experienced a vertiginous psychical breakdown, an acute and unsuspected identity crisis. Unwilling to part with hope, but unable to comprehend his predicament and find a way out of it, he is terrified, lost, inconsolable, and distraught. Someone, in the semi-darkness, decides to part with hope but cannot; Someone, in straitened circumstances, is looking for a way out but can find none; Someone makes a futile attempt to un-explain something to someone. The lack of comprehension drives him out of his wits. Someone is dispirited by what is going on. The attempt to elucidate what’s going on is namely what depresses him; leads nowhere. He is grieved;… Someone does not even see or listen to himself. In vain: he would have started looking at many things in a different way; … Someone is looking straight ahead. His eyes show he is paralyzed with fright. Most likely, he can no longer be saved; Someone drags himself not knowing where to. He can still be discerned. Here he is;155

Like Rubinshtein, Kabakov often describes his personages as having ceased to exist— as psychically already dead. They no longer have any sense of identity. They are simply observers of their own destiny who have long perished as individuals. “I no longer exist” are the words ushering in Kabakov’s The Underground Golden River (1985). “[N]othing is happening to me—I am merely an observer.…”156 Kabakov’s character has turned into a ghostly creature, deprived of both his sense of self and of the link to his surroundings: “…[W]here am I myself? And who is this ‘I’? I don’t know. Here I am standing, walking—and all without myself. And I walk on, ‘I’ without ‘myself.’ ”157

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Two other works by Kabakov, The Rope of Life (1985) and The Boat of My Life (1993), present particularly powerful testimonies to the psychic death of the subject. Although the two installations were created eight years apart, they make use of analogous, sometimes identical, material. Most of the narrative introducing the two installations overlaps, with only a slight variation of a word or two. This reiteration comes as no surprise, since both works portray the same experience of psychic death inflicted by the sudden shifts in temporality—be it in the context of late-communist (Brezhnev) or post-communist society. Where the two installations differ is in their choice of metaphors. While the first one works with the metaphor of the “rope” to present the hero’s (more accurately, Kabakov’s) life158 and psychic death, the second one employs the image of a sailing boat drifting between the world of Hades and ours. “I decided to describe my life in the form of a rope…” is how Kabakov’s The Rope of Life opens.159 The installation represents a rope to which, by means of strings, various objects from the character’s everyday life are adjoined: empty bottles, buttons, a broken toothbrush, papers, and so on. Each one of these objects has a small paper label with text on both sides, and each label contains a date and the memories of the character about the events of that day. All of the recollections are linked to the author’s biography. “In this way, year after year the entire story of his [Kabakov’s] life is ‘strung’ on this rope—from earliest childhood to the day when the rope was laid down on the floor.”160 The words “laid down on the floor” evoke a sense of closure and completion. They suggest that the person whose life they relate most probably abides in a realm beyond ours. Like The Rope of Life, Kabakov’s The Boat of My Life is a comment on the author’s life from the moment of his birth to the year of the installation, this time, however, “carried” by a sailing boat. Once again the author tells his story by means of objects with various explanations. This installation, however, creates an additional physical impact through the arrangement of objects in a unique corridor, the movement through which evokes the sense of traversing the character’s (or, maybe, the viewer’s own) life. The experience is further enriched by means of placing the exhibits on the deck of the huge boat. As Kabakov notes, for “the viewer who is walking along this ‘labyrinth of life,’ the impression created by his movement inside of it is superimposed upon the sensation of a vessel sailing somewhere. Where?” (465) (Figure 1.23). Both The Boat of My Life and The Rope of Life testify to the loss of direction in life and the subsequent psychic demise of the subject who suffered an unforeseen eschatological shift. The installations reflect the unnatural feeling of being physically alive but psychologically dead; of failing to recognize the unsuspected “upheavals” of one’s own time at the moment of happening and seeking to comprehend their impact only in retrospect; of living after one’s life has long been invalidated—after death has arrived and a point of no return reached. As Kabakov describes this borderline condition: “to be living and yet still not living, not to participate in all of this life, in all of its upheavals, but rather to be living as though ‘later’ and to see this whole life … as though it has already been lived, as if you were dead.”161 Kabakov is also quick to identify as the main cause for the subject’s traumatic experience the unexpectedness of his displacement in the fathomless post-futural

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Figure 1.23 Ilya Kabakov, The Boat of My Life, Copyright: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

world. This unexpectedness, the author argues, results from the exclusion of the subject from the process of planning and carrying out the social overturn. It all happened without the subject’s knowledge and awareness—he was not allowed to “participate in all of this life” but was, instead, merely an “observer.”162 This was a life orchestrated by others, “happening to you at someone else’s bidding.”163 The rope of life had been placed by an unfamiliar power, and one could do little more than follow its course back and forth, not straying away from the already preordained. “Perhaps this observer is still moving along this life, back and forth,” Kabakov surmises: [A]nd someone placed this very rope on the floor in front of him for review. But then a certain time will pass and the rope … will be shoved into a sack and taken away, put somewhere … And what about the observer? Where will he go? What will happen to him? It is impossible to say anything about this, for to tell the truth, he existed only because the rope existed.164

It seems that, with the sudden fall of communism, the life of man was similarly “shoved into a sack and taken away,” forever carried off from the unwary subject. Then it suddenly transpired that the subject had lived only because and in the way the system ordered him to live. Accustomed to follow someone else’s commands, he became helpless to decipher the meaning of the new world and terrified with the prospect of taking the lead: “I don’t understand anything in myself or anything around me, or the landscape floating past me. I am gasping with horror and afraid to capsize head-first into the cold water.”165 It is this inability of the subject to confront his new life and come to terms with its ambiguous realities that have led to his premature psychological death.166 Indeed, even a cursory look at the titles of Kabakov’s installations from this period (He Lost His Mind, Undressed, and Ran Away Naked; Dislocations; Devil on

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the Stairs: Looking back on the Eighties, etc.) suggests the author’s preoccupation with the themes of dislocation, psychic trauma, and mental derangement, and conveys an unmistakable presentiment of imminent catastrophe and death, brought, in the turmoil of the eighties, by the devil lurking on the stairs.167 A similar foreboding of the looming death pervades Bruskin’s visual work as well. “Oak is a tree. Rose is a flower. Deer is an animal. Sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable” are the words that Bruskin borrows from Vladimir Nabokov’s Gift to open his famed work Azbuka (Alphabet).168 As Hans-Peter Riese notes, “Death is always present in Bruskin’s oeuvre, both as connotation and as actual depiction.”169 His works, in Riese’s mind, embody the artist’s “vision of a catastrophic future, in other words a collective eschatological vision in which the individual has no hope of escaping death.…”170 Placing the problem of psychological death in a larger theoretical perspective, Lipovetskii, in his illuminative essay “Izzhivanie smerti: spetsifika russkogo postmodernizma” (“Overcoming Death: The Specifics of Russian Postmodernism”), goes so far as to locate in death the specifics of Russian postmodernism. “…[D]eath becomes the integral symbol of Russian postmodernism,”171 Lipovetskii suggests. In the same work, he recognizes the roots of the experience of death in Russian postmodern writing in the cultural and social crises unleashed by the Soviet rule: “Postmodernism was born out of the utmost deep realization of a cultural crisis—and, in our country, out of the fully irreversible experience of the impasse of Soviet civilization.…”172 In a more metaphysical sense, death is perceived as the necessary condition through which not only the subject but all of Russian culture must pass before it is reborn and reinvested with new values. “Temporary death is what one must undergo in order to be born again or to obtain a new quality,” Lipovetskii claims.173 Death is the liminal, borderline state defining the transition to a qualitatively new national culture. On a broader scale, death has the mission of discarding the leftovers of socialist rhetorics and, having purified language, to ensure a new place for Russian writing on the international arena (or, put otherwise, to “synchronize” Russian culture with the culture of the rest of the world). “This synchronization,” Lipovetskii writes, “is [indeed only] accomplished through temporary death, which is possible only on the scale of what Bakhtin calls culture’s ‘great time,’ in turn understood as an organic, living, dying wholeness that has the potential for rebirth.”174 Like Lipovetskii, Epstein recognizes the necessity of death as a means for resurrecting Russian culture. He finds in conceptualism, and to a much greater extent in arrière-garde writing,175 the ultimate stage of defacing literature and language, the final throbs of a dying culture that needs to go to the bottom and completely dismantle itself in order to be born in a new and glorious form.176 An example of such linguistic dismantling in conceptualist poetry emerges in Prigov’s “Forty-ninth Alphabet Poem.”177 Despite its playful and parodic handling of language, the work, at times, contains traumatic overtones. The poem reveals the dissipation of language through enacting the breakdown of the word into unintelligible syllables or meaningless constellations of sounds: “A-tsa-tsa/Ba-tsa-tsa/…Da-tsa-tsatsa-tsa-tsa-tsa-aaaa…”178 Alongside the death of meaningful language as a precondition for the revitalization of Russian culture, Prigov’s “tsa-tsa” speaks of a much more literal form of demise—the psychic death of the subject who survived the collapse of an

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absurd society, only to find himself abiding in a far more ludicrous reality. In this new reality, death often remains the only possible future: All that remains to him is DEATH!/(tararareerarararareerara rareerarararaaaa!)/DEATH! DEATH! burdensome and painful! Death, death/irredeemable, unavoidable, unremitting…/Uoo! (frightening?)/Foo! (frightening! frightening!)/ Hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-ey! (very frightening!)/ Tsa-tsa-tsa-tsa-tsa/ Cha-chacha-cha-choo-choo-choo, oom-tsa-tsa, oom-tsa-tsa,/choom-tsa-tsa, choom-tsatsa…/ Y- tsy-tsy, y-tsy-tsy/Eh-tse-tse, Eh-tse-tse /You-tsu-tsu-tsu-tsu-tsu-tsu-tsutsu-ooooo.179

In the verses’ lack of lucidity, the reader can unmistakenly sense the impasse and fear of imminent death. The linguistic effacement of meaning in Prigov’s alphabet poem recalls the stripping off, denuding, and cliché construction in Bruskin’s Archeologist’s Collection we have examined. Discussing Bruskin’s “white, neutral figures,” Mikhail Iampolski compares them to “figures of impoverished experience, having lost the ability to express and thirsting, as we will see, to acquire expression. They express nothing, they are devoid of style, they do not bear the imprint of an individual creator, it is as if they were made on an assembly line.”180 Interestingly, just as Prigov’s disarticulated verses, these “figures of impoverished experience,” relate to the experience of psychic trauma. In the words of Iampolski, “Figures of impoverished experience, that is, figures of silence, are directly related to trauma.”181 Drawing a parallel with the experience of the people who came back from the front, Iampolski points out that they “lost ‘experience’ and speech not because they had experienced nothing but because their experience lay outside the [coherently] expressible, that is, the very thing we call experience.”182 Despite being inexpressible and inaccessible to the mind, however, the conceptualist works we have studied suggest that, the trauma of reversing the subject’s temporality becomes engraved on the mind, etched into the brain—a historic recompense for the erasure of its normal encoding in memory. These “figures of impoverished experience … are memorials without memory, without past. And yet, they somehow fix the time, the era.”183 Precisely this quality of imparting the original, unfathomed traumatic experience, untarnished by subjective reinterpretations, gives grounds for recognizing in conceptualist testimonies the truth of pivotal historical facts. It suggests the possibility of a history that is not straightforwardly referential—a history not based on the direct and readily transparent copying of the world. Such a rethinking of reference, Caruth contends in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, is “aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.”184 Indeed, as “tsa-tsa,” the subtitle of Prigov’s “Forty-ninth Alphabet Poem” testifies, understanding the words of the lyric self is altogether unimportant, as he himself is utterly denied the knowledge that trauma has imprinted on his mind. What matters in conceptualist performance is that one can ultimately vent all silenced trepidations and come to terms with them. The words in Prigov’s poem still keep their alphabetic

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order185 but are unable to establish any sensible design and, therefore, stream humble, unadorned, uncomplicated. “After death one should be writing much, much simpler…,” Prigov explains the phenomenon.186 Freed from the obligation to refer and pledge allegiance to the “great socialist reality,” the verses recuperate the reality of another, collectively traumatic experience. It can finally brim over the eye and articulate itself in voice but, nonetheless, remains utterly inconceivable to the mind: “A-tsa-tsa/Ba-tsatsa/Va-tsa-tsa/Ga-tsa-tsa/Da-tsa-tsa-tsa-tsa-tsa-tsa-aaaa…”187 “Everyone is listening attentively,” Prigov announces in another poem, “and then it turns out these are the ravings of an insane man.”188 “Revel[ling] in the excess of insanity and hopelessness,” poets forget the words they want to say, “the word [roaming] in delirium amid transparent graves.”189 Literary heroes likewise fall victim to the psychic trauma. “Many heroes are either mad or mentally inadequate,” Victor Erofeyev records the phenomenon.190 “Psychological prose gives way to psychopathological prose,” he further remarks.191 It thus comes as little surprise that, as Kabakov attests in his work NOMA (or The Moscow Conceptual Circle), psychopathology is central to the agenda of the conceptualist school. “Here we have the concept that is so important for NOMA of psychopathology and perversity…,” Kabakov asserts.192 The psychological affliction of the literary hero, and the incomprehensibility that comes as a result of it,193 extend far beyond the sphere of the artistic. As Rubinshtein remarks in his essay, tellingly entitled “What Can One Say?,” it is human existence itself that has grown increasingly indecipherable: “… Art—that’s all fine: what’s to be done with it. But then with us it’s even more incomprehensible.”194 The disclosure of such ubiquitous disorganization of human sensorium and cognition suggests the appropriateness of applying schizophrenia, a term long employed in diagnosing the subject’s condition in late capitalist society, to the equally disrupted existence and writing of the Russian postmodern subject.195 It seems highly probable that the same sociocultural milieu that generated psychic trauma in the Russian individual became also responsible for the truly schizophrenic condition of the literary character in Russian literature. As Erofeyev observes in his introduction to Russia’s Fleurs du Mal: In a literature which once bore the perfume of wild flowers and hay there is now a new smell—a stench. Everything stinks: death, sex, old age, bad food, everyday life. The themes of violence, sadistic aggression, broken lives come to the fore…. Many heroes are either mad or mentally inadequate. Psychological prose gives way to psychopathological prose. It is no longer the Gulag, but Russia herself, falling apart at the seams, that serves as a metaphor for life.196

While the “End Time” is the moment when we and “everything around us [is brought] to the brink of annihilation,”197 or perhaps because of it, “visions of the Apocalypse are among the best ways to tell time in strictly historical terms.”198 Our relivings of trauma and “nightmares are … in detail unnervingly specific to their moment and mileu”199 and as such, rather than cut off from reality, possess a powerful referential potential.

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7. Conceptualism, corpora, and history. The body-aggregate and the disarticulated body The mutilated invalid can be nothing other than the reassertion of reference Cathy Caruth200 Critics have underscored the material, bodily nature of postmodern literature and of Russian conceptualist poetry, in particular. While socialist realism puts an emphasis on the ideal aspirations of the human spirit, conceptualism marks a return to the corporeal and material understanding of writing. As Kuritsyn observes in “Conceptualism and Sots-Art: Bodies and Nostalgia:”201 In the first place, literature is a product of the body.… Socialist realism, with its mania for plans, took a significant step away from the corporeal understanding of writing; here of utmost importance was the mere quantity of literature, some object made of paper and of letters symbolizing the national priority in the sphere of the spiritual .… Postmodernism externalizes the latent problematics of the corporeal in socialist realism, makes it superficial and topical.202

The corporeal, physical aspect of conceptualist writing transpires both in the genesis of the poetic works and in the peculiar character of their performance. Rubinshtein, for example, often writes his verses on separate index cards and, while reading the poems, places these cards one after another as if meticulously filing them in a library catalogue. The plasticity of the authorial performance and the voice of the author, in Kuritsyn’s mind, “underscore the heavy materiality of the poetical word.”203 Pointing to Boris Groys’s perception of Rubinshtein’s readings, Kuritsyn remarks: “B. Groys emphasizes the material dimension of Rubinshtein’s works: ‘One is under the impression that something happens from one card to another: something indistinctly gnashes, winks, unfolds and changes the surrounding world as well.’ ”204 The materiality of Rubinshtein’s poetics is similarly actuated through rhetorical devices and literary categories such as the pause: “[L]et’s go back to the point of corporeality,” Kuritsyn suggests. “For Rubinshtein’s text the category of pause is very important. The break in speech presupposes not dispersion of the perceiver’s attention, but his/her focusing on himself/herself, on his/her own impressions, on his/her own corporeality. We can assume that there is a chance to find anti-totality inside his/her corporeality.”205 A similar emphasis on the material character of artistic production is discerned in Prigov’s understanding of poetry. For Prigov, the poem is not ethereal and spiritual but an objective, material product of a worker’s efforts and labor. “For me the poem is the same as every ton of coal is a small contribution to the gross output in a planned economy,” Prigov explains in a 1995 interview.206 Writing poetry is not the elitist enterprise of producing unattainable, selected ideas but the often boring routine of manufacturing large quantities of poetical matter, of meeting daily norms set up by the planned economy. In a section of Russkii literaturny postmodernizm entitled “24,000 Verses by the Year 2000!,”207 Kuritsyn notes that “Prigov produces an inhumanly

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enormous quantity of verses,” and then he introduces Prigov’s own words: “I … wanted to write twenty thousand verses by the year 2000… But since the counter-plan was accepted rather late, it became necessary to raise the daily norm.”208 Conceptualism, however, is much more than a material product of the human body— it is, more importantly, the product of a body that suffers. As we have seen, suffering has been closely related to postmodernism in general, including such playful varieties as conceptualism, in particular. Lipovetskii observes: “Postmodernism … grows out of sincere and large-scale s u f f e r i n g. Where there is no suffering, there is no art. Playful art is by no means an exception.”209 Among the poetic realizations of the theme of suffering in conceptualist writing, the depictions of mutilated bodies stand out most prominently. Evocative of the lyric self ’s traumatic experience is the gruesome spectacle of death portrayed in conceptualist verses: And now picture something entirely unrelated. Like a bird’s tiny                 45 feather with a drop of clotted blood, frozen to the railing of a balcony. … the roadside littered with dead birds…                                                        55 … with dead birds.210

As the poem continues, the author stresses the unnatural and unanticipated nature of the death he describes, and the struggle of the mind to recall this traumatic event and come to terms with it: Please write: “I can’t remember now…                       71 … whether back then I really found myself…           72 … on a cold deserted beach…                                      73 … or whether it really happened…                             74 … that to my very feet…                                               75 … the sea brought the unnatural…                             76 … brought the unnatural, swollen body…                 77 … swollen body of a drowned sailor…                       78 … of a drowned sailor.”                                                  79 Have you finished writing?211                                       80

In works such as Prigov’s Piat’desiat kapelek krovi (Fifty Drops of Blood, 1993) and Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (The Appearance of Verse After Its Death, 1995), the author goes even further in portraying the extensive grip of death—with his future suddenly surpassed, the lyric self visualizes the horrid spectacle of his own unforeseen death. While in Piat’desiat kapelek krovi212 blood inundates all poems and streams from each of Prigov’s graphics smearing the verse to near indistinctness, the pictorialization of death in Prigov’s “Napodobie” (“Resemblance”), a section of Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti, is incisively specific: Suddenly, for some reason, I imagined I died like a wolf./But I was dying so agonizingly and prolongedly… (40)/…I imagined I died like a dove (41)/…I

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imagined I died like a crab (42)/…I died like a quivering creature (49)/…I died like the one who had already died before (61)/I died like I died/When they carried all the others/My hair and nails were still growing/And I said to myself: Don’t think about this!… (62)213

The subject’s split identity and psychological death, discussed in the previous section, are thus often accompanied by physical death and radical bodily mutilation. “Our speech is already at a nearly quasibiological level…,” Prigov observes in Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti.214 In one of its sections, entitled “Vnutrennie razborki” (“Internal Dismemberment”), Prigov graphically depicts the hero’s outright bodily disarticulation: “… All entrails are being scraped out of man, but his/her organism continues to function normally. It is just necessary to, all the time, hold them, man’s entrails, before the sight of their owner, which is a spectacle technically complicated and extremely disagreeable in appearance.”215 Symmetrically situated on the page is the last of a large number of drawings accompanying Prigov’s poems and signed with the name “Dushevnobol’noi” (“Insane person/Mental patient”), together with a certain, perhaps hospitalization, number. The latter always contains ninety-three as a probable date of the disease’s incipience (or, maybe, culmination) and, possibly, an allusion to the year 1993, witnessing the traumatic affliction of the subject’s psyche and body. The last drawing carries the ominous inscription “Nothing.”216 A feeling of absolute dismemberment, nearing the point of utter non-existence as the limit of man’s violated wholeness, imbues every line of Prigov’s hero’s discourse with the parts of his body: From my nail I’m trying to find out:/What do you feed on, old chap?… (72)/Then about blood… (74)/Then a long night conversation with the shin-bone … (75)/ Then something altogether on the cellular and even—molecular level … (76)/Then of something alien…, some kind of cancerous cells … (78)/A senseless dispute with the hood-shaped muscle about honor … (80)/Then about the nerves … (82)/Then a meeting with the heel … (83)/A certain rest while playing the tibial bone … (84)/ Then—the head;… (86)/Interesting versions: suppose all people’s intestines, in their sum total, present some kind of an independently existing, self-sufficient creature … (102)217

Traumatized and disfigured, the mutilated body, Caruth claims from a somewhat different perspective, functions as “the paradoxical evocation of a referential reality neither fictionalized by direct reference nor formalized into a theoretical abstraction.”218 It thus appears plausible that the disarticulation of the body, accomplished in conceptualist verses, can testify in valid ways to the disfiguration of a society, undergoing a grand-scale sociocultural crisis. In fact, Prigov himself alerts us to this correlation in the manifesto-shaped “Preduvedomlenie” (“Forewarning”), ushering in the “Internal Dismemberment” poetic section: “In our day of crisis in political and ideologic systems, … this [the bodily dismembering] presents itself as, perhaps, the upper symptomological stratum of the deeper collapse of traditional anthropology…”219

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The disarticulation of the human body acquires a vivid visual representation in Bruskin’s On the Edge.220 The exhibition traces the genealogy of death. It maps out the transfiguration of the body—from the point of its healthy wholeness to its absolute dismemberment. Since this is a collection of sculptures, the aspect of corporeality and its destruction become particularly tangible. On the Edge opens by depicting a couple in love spellbound by the moonlight (Figure 1.24).221 Right in the following sculpture, however, the wholeness of the lovers becomes completely violated. Entitled “Broken Love,”222 this sculpture represents a woman falling to the ground and a man who desperately clings to her, unwilling to let his love go. His hands, however, are also falling apart—a wrist is still embracing the woman’s tumbling body, but this is a wrist strangely detached from the man’s arms. The arms are malformed and fully dysfunctional—they seem eaten away by an implacable and unrelenting process of disintegration. The body as a whole appears crumbling and impossible to heal. The image of the couple has a sinister quality—this is not simply death but a gradual decomposition of the organism that seems to have started from the body’s interior and to be claiming every part of it (Figure 1.25). The same two figures resurface in the next few compositions. In “Accomplices,”223 they are impaled and looking down ashamed as if they are accomplices in a

Figure 1.24 Grisha Bruskin, Moonlight, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 46 ½ × 15 ¾ × 13 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.25 Grisha Bruskin, Broken Love, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 48 × 25 5/8 × 20 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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horrendous crime. Both figures are falling apart—they lack hands, have one leg each and a corpus that is quickly dissipating. Dead for the world, the lovers engage in a clandestine and heartrending tête-à-tête. Bruskin’s “Tête-à-Tête”224 communicates a feeling of spiritual communion, which, once again, is countered by a violated physicality. While the heads of the two lovers have preserved their wholeness and are intimately touching each other, the rest of their bodies is reduced to nothing more than broken pieces, which someone diligently tried to reassemble so we could mentally restore the former contours. Some of these parts are thrown in nobody’s territory and seem to be possessed by no one in particular—we wonder if the hand between the figures belongs to the man or, perhaps, to the woman beside him (Figure 1.26, Figure 1.27). While these sculptures (“Accomplices,” “Tête-à-Tête,” “Broken Love,” and “Moonlight”) comment on the fate of love in a society that undergoes transition, the next group of sculptures comes from the public sphere and portrays the dismemberment of the body of the political leader. Stepping down the pedestal of a godlike prophet and teacher, the formerly revered leader, as depicted in “Step,”225 cannot preserve intact his ideology and body. In a world where his teachings have

Figure 1.26 Grisha Bruskin, Accomplices, 2001–2003, painted bronze, figure 1:54 3/8 × 11 ¾ × 15 ¾ in; figure 2: 55 1/8 × 11 ¾ × 9 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.27 Grisha Bruskin, Tête-à-Tête, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 7 1/8 × 37 3/8 × 26 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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proven baseless and sham, the leader falls apart in silence (“Silentium”)226 and suffers a complete collapse (“Collapse”) (Figure 1.28, Figure 1.29, Figure 1.30).227 Dismemberment extends to the sphere of the artistic and claims the life of one of Bruskin’s favorite heroes—the musician. While in the first statue, portentously named “Blind Musician,”228 the body of the hero seems intact, he is portrayed as blind— incapable of seeing the meaning of the world he lives in—and is positioned on the

Figure 1.28 Grisha Bruskin, Step, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 46 1/8 × 11 ¾ × 19 5/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.29 Grisha Bruskin, Silentium, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 44 1/8 × 13 ¾ × 17 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.30 Grisha Bruskin, Collapse, 2001– 2003, painted bronze, 18 7/8 × 36 ¼ × 19 5/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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very verge of precipice. In the next sculpture, “Improvisator,”229 the musician is left with nothing but his beloved accordion, which he continues to play with the only hand he still has. The lower part of the musician’s body is totally missing, and the upper one is in a state of full-blown breakdown. In the last sculpture of this group, “Echo,”230 even music has dissipated—the musician is sprawled on the ground fully dismembered and what has remained of his song is just a fatally resounding echo (Figure 1.31, Figure 1.32, Figure 1.33).

Figure 1.31 Grisha Bruskin, Blind Musician, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 48 3/8 × 19 5/8 × 15 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.32 Grisha Bruskin, Improvisator, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 58 ¼ × 34 5/8 × 11 ¾ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.33 Grisha Bruskin, Echo, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 12 3/8 × 37 ¾ × 29 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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The disarticulation of the body in the work of Bruskin is so complete and allpervasive that even the child cannot escape its impacts. While in “Happy Childhood”231 we recognize the image of a boy who boisterously plays at war, in the sculpture that follows, the soldier-boy turns into a victim, and we can only attempt (but will most certainly fail) to reconstruct his physical body (“Reconstruction”).232 The last sculpture of this group, portraying the boy as severely injured but nonetheless ready to strike, provides the author’s take on the fate of the young man—in the words of Bruskin, he was playing a “dangerous,” though seemingly innocuous, game (“Dangerous Games”).233 The series concludes on a dismal note, depicting a heap of disarticulated and forsaken bodies.234 They are lying in a pile one over the other, and we can still discern the face of the woman in love, the head of the blind musician, and, perhaps, the shoes of the political leader (Figure 1.34–1.37). The body in Russia’s tempestuous history has always held a powerful referential potential. Within the context of Soviet society, whose innate homogamy precluded the sprouting of any alien offshoots from the uniform totalitarian ur-corpus, the “communal body, or the Mass Man,”235 the integral “body-aggregate”236 operated as communism’s best referent. The pretended normalcy of corpora, welded harmonically together, testified to the homogenizing urge of a society resolved to obliterate uniqueness and

Figure 1.34 Grisha Bruskin, Happy Childhood, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 34 5/8 × 21 5/8 × 9 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.35 Grisha Bruskin, Reconstruction, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 26 ¾ × 9 7/8 × 7 7/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 1.36 Grisha Bruskin, Dangerous Game, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 9 7/8 × 23 5/8 × 21 5/8 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 1.37 Grisha Bruskin, Dramatic Art, 2001–2003, painted bronze, 18 1/8 × 49 ¼ × 27 ½ in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

engineer an amorphous, depersonalized, communal subject. Communist solidarity transcended the realm of ideas and demanded the uncontested consolidation of bodies. Social engineering embraced the unprecedented challenge of designing a new breed of people and stunned mankind with a villainous campaign of infusing “ideology [into] … the genitals.”237 Indiscriminate blood transfusions (as conceived by Alexander Bogdanov) undertook the production of comradeship and “technological togetherness of bodies” sharing a common substance.238 Utopian projects envisioned the impeccably unified body of the Mass Man. A massive, all-encompassing amnesia

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injected oblivion of the individual’s congenital drive to copulate, causing his/her utter dissolution into the parthenogenic “crossing of twigs in the crown of the tree called Mass Man.”239 Looking as far back as Nikolai Fyodorov’s utopia, Todorov identifies the “principle concern of the project … [in] the invention of a blissful collective organism,”240 a truthful referent to the “Russian communal way of life.”241 Similarly, within the milieu of Soviet totalitarianism, the organically united body functioned as a faithful referent to the totalizing urges of communist society. While the intact wholeness of the body (even after its demise, the mummy of the Leader) objectivized political power and was the ideal measure of communism, only the mutilated, terrorized, distorted, and dismembered body, twisting in its traumatic agony, could be the adequate touchstone of post-totalitarianism.242 The subject seems incapable of grasping the sudden replacement of one symbolic order (communism) by another (post-totalitarianism). Man is not biologically programmed to rationalize the survival of his/her own death, to come to terms with the invalidation of his/her own future. Thus, in Alexander Kiossev’s mind, it is only through the engravings etched in the mind, through the indelible scars grooved in the body that the impact of this traumatic reality speaks. To institute itself, he believes, every new regime must violently disfigure the body, forcibly branding its members with the novel social laws. Therefore, only the terrorized body, brutally disarticulated and tattooed afresh, can be referential of the new, post-totalitarian, post-paranoid condition. “To be born, ‘the world’ was terrorized,” Kiossev claims.243 Taking a slightly different stance, Rubinshtein contends: “You know what came into my head? In order to revive a dead person (aesthetically, of course) one must kill him again. The main thing is to find the means.…”244 Terror emerges as an inexorable orthopedist, ordaining the absolute disarticulation of the corpora that “danced, grimaced, and twisted in an effort to shed their tattoos and tear their own monstrous members engraved by totalitarian terror” (just to see their convulsions freeze in schizoid tics).245 The body, in postcommunist conditions, had to be traumatized in order to be born anew (Kiossev). In its most excruciating pain, the body becomes most truly referential of its agonal post-futurity.246

8. Referring to the loss of reference In the entire course of this section, I have construed the psychic and corporal disfigurement of the subject, portrayed in conceptualist poetry, as a testimony to the conditions of an eschatologically apocalyptic historical reality. It therefore becomes incumbent to confront the question of whether and how this conviction could coexist with the seemingly antithetical belief in the wholly self-sufficient, exclusively linguistic nature of conceptualist constructs (Conceptualism is “the poetic of bare ideas, of selfsufficient signs abstracted from the reality they would seem called to denote…,”247 a poetry that executes a “break between the idea and the thing, the signs and reality…,”248 “…language that exists by itself, independently of the reality it describes”249).

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The signs used in conceptualist poetry, the already inoperative ideological clichés, “describe,” “would seem called to denote” and govern the reality of Soviet communism. It was then that reality’s parameters were encroached on and violated by ideological formulas. The conceptualist ironic play with communist clichés marks the emancipative gesture of breaking the relation between them and the historical context they functioned in, opting for a reality free to define its laws unperturbed by signs. The registering in conceptualism of the moment in Russian history when the split between ideological placards and the communist reality they used to control took place, however, is concurrently a registering of the very same historical moment when the sudden shattering of belief and overriding of values produced psychic trauma in the individual. Conceptualist verses thus document the historical point when, with the traumatic demystification of the communist utopia, language broke free from its former obligation to command and transform reality. It is in this sense that the paradox of referring to and registering the loss of reference appears altogether justifiable. The two functions of conceptualism, to break with proper communist reality (as existing prior to the 1980s) and to perpetuate the history of man’s traumatic awakening after his/her future (in the 1980s and 1990s), seem legitimately construable as complementary and reciprocally enriching, rather than mutually exclusive, aspects of one and the same phenomenon. It appears pertinent to make yet another stipulation: my reading of postmodern conceptualist poetry as a record of collective psychological trauma does not automatically equate it with pain and anguish, thus going against the demarcation of postmodernism as the locus of ecstasy and delight. Contrary to the straightforward identification of trauma discourse with suffering, the outcome and manifestations of psychic trauma have been noted to range from the deepest depression to the most euphoric exhilaration. Indeed, the pain at times seems so intolerable that the subject cannot stifle his or her wail. If Edvard Munch’s The Scream voices the alienation of man in the modern age of anxiety, the piercing shrieks, often accompanying conceptualists’ performances, come from the pandemonium of a traumatic postmodern reality, whose menacingly escalating clamor the poets struggle to outshout: “58 … The sudden outbreak of silence makes it clear that, in the character’s life, nearly the most decisive moment sets in. The noise, born in the heart of the absolute silence, however, imperceptibly grows louder. It all the time grows louder and louder, gradually becoming unbearable.”250 On other occasions, however, conceptualist verses uncover a sense of joyful predisposition (a holy-fool meekness: “33 … He walks around so quiet and blissful, all the time smiling at something”251) or an outburst of collective elation. No longer capable of mediating the emotional extremes, the subject and his/her mood oscillate between unrestrained happiness and disconsolate despair: “23. Someone, caught on the fishing rod of life, laments his fate and suspects nothing;/Someone, in half-stifled voice, tells of how happy he is. All unnoticeably exchange glances.”252 As Fredric Jameson remarks on the idea of excitement in postmodern writing, “…what I have been calling schizophrenic disjunction or écriture, when it becomes generalized as a cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid content we associate with

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terms like schizophrenia and becomes available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation.”253 My analysis of conceptualist poetry and art has endeavored to advance the belief that literature, in its postmodern development, has not lost the capacity to refer to and document historical reality. Postmodern literary texts, whose defiant interpretative opacity often frustrates the attempt at a meaningful decoding, have not terminated our discourse with the world. They have simply called for a new manner of dialoguing and engaging with the real, which, as evinced in Russian conceptualism, opted for the archiving and transmittance of historic truth, regardless of the often blatant nontransparency of the poet’s testimonial word. The chapter has explored the mechanisms that underlie the process of historical transmission. It has proposed that, in conceptualist poetry, what is etched in the brain becomes inscribed on the page. The mind is a tabula to engrave the story of reality’s cataclysmic impacts, the individual—a tool through which history confides it to mankind. In verses that are often jumbled-up and incoherent, conceptualists tell us of the abrogation of their biographical existence and future aspirations. They testify to the abrupt displacements that forced them to accommodate within the span of several years a psychological experience exceeding the confines of human life. It is in this sense that conceptualist poetry can be read as a vital historical corrective—a counterpoise that offsets the surplus of reality that has unpremeditatedly blinded the subject. It voices the pressing compulsion to dispose of reality, to alleviate the person from the intolerable historical burden that has overwhelmed his or her mind, to dehistoricize and assuage the brain. A post-traumatic performance, conceptualism registers the subject’s headlong fall into the “somber space of … futurelessness.”254 There, beyond the estate of an already possessed and consummated future, he/she confronts the eschatalogical impasse of surviving his/her own, personal death. Rather than being non-referential in nature, conceptualist poetry provides a faithful testimony to the subject’s unforeseen suspension in time and his/her intensely traumatic condition in the morbid temporality of “a flattened clock: the time of history at a standstill.”255

2

Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude 0

In the chapter on Russian conceptualism, I have suggested that the trauma accompanying the transition to post-totalitarian society affected the condition of the subject in all the formerly communist countries. Each of the literary paradigms in the newly shaped, post-communist cultures registered the unimaginable shift in a strikingly analogous manner. While it is impossible to discuss the developments in each of the East European post-totalitarian traditions, it seems provocative to draw at least one theoretical and poetic parallel with the case of Russian postmodern literature. For reasons related to my personal life experience (I am a native of Bulgaria, where, as a student at the University of Sofia at the time of the transition, I witnessed firsthand the collapse of the communist system and the despondent and schizoid nature of the ensuing years), I have chosen to explore the testimonies to the psychically traumatic changeover in Bulgarian postmodern literature. To underscore the parallels between the latter and the characteristics we have already observed in Russia’s conceptualist literature, I will narrate the story of Bulgaria’s transition in the words of Bulgarian poets, but following the alignment of topics and outline of sections that I have used in the chapter on Russian conceptualism.

1. Denuding and revoking the clichés of communism In Bulgarian literature of the transition, the play with totalitarian clichés, governed by the intent of their ultimate unveiling and invalidation, evokes the linguistic games with the socialist formulas and Party directives in Russian conceptualist poetry. It may not be merely coincidental that the leading figure of a similar trend in Bulgarian poetry, Bojko Lambovsky, spent considerable time in the 1980s as a graduate fellow of the Maksim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia. In the attempt to expose the clichés that dictated communist reality, Lambovsky’s 1991 verse collection, Red Decadence (Ален декаданс),1 with red unequivocally connoting the color of the communist star and banner, is of foremost significance. Under communism, the governing literary method, socialist realism, was entrusted

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with the mission to impose, control, and transform everyday reality to the point where it ultimately merges with the sublime communist ideal.2 Disclosing the absurdity of the socialist realist practice, Lambovsky strips naked the hackneyed communist clichés and disrobes them of their semiotic apparel, laying bare the inadequacy of the creed that ideological constructs can serve as command models for reality. Exhausted from bearing a specious ideological mask and wearied of prevaricating reality, Lambovsky’s verse is now evading reference to it. His poetry, instead, is one of names and verbal structures with no reality behind them, a play with vacant language amidst the rubble of previously functional totalitarian signs. The raving of ideological clichés, however, provides a testimony to a moment of the recent historical past, when communist stereotypes became abolished with nothing meaningful to substitute for them. Lambovsky’s 1991 poem “Collapse” (“Колапс”)3 is an evocative exemplification of this practice. The work activates a semantically rich plethora of meanings—it is concurrently a story of historical, linguistic, and psychological collapse. The poem consists of a series of widely popular communist clichés, of formulas that, in the course of decades, dictated the life of children and adults alike. A reader privy to the communist poetics would immediately recognize the clichés that crammed in newspapers and textbooks, the slogans blared out from street loudspeakers and national broadcasts. “Collapse” begins in unintelligible monosyllables (“й/ко/пух”), then turns into a list of ideological stereotypes, and ends in a complete breakup of language and disintegration of meaning. The catalogue of clichés opens with “the tomorrow of our dreams” (“мечтаното утре”),4 a key formula evoking the promised future of the communist bliss. It then proceeds with the enumeration of widespread ideological constructs: “the young boy scout [or ‘pioneer’] is a diligent child” (coming from the Party-spirited code of boy scouts), “Always ready!” (a salutation announcing one’s preparedness to obey the imperatives of the Party), “I am Timur and his band” (proclaiming an allegiance to an ideologically inspired boy scout band), “I’m the Youngest son of the Party” (coming straight from The Young Guard, Alexander Fadayev’s widely read work, teaching the youngsters complete self-denial in the name of the Party), “I am Come all of you, young men” (evoking a famous song that summoned the youth to participate in the construction of communist Bulgaria).5 “Collapse” initiates a play with the ideological clichés, evincing their inadequacy and revealing the progressive loss of sanity they have induced: “I am the cat hanged in the name of the people,” “I am the proletariat for dictatorship,” “I’m Europe through which the specter roams,/a brave jet-propelled engine under a Soviet flag.”6 The lyrical hero gradually transforms into a schizoid type raving delirious, barely intelligible words: “I am the totoLitarian schizophrenia./I am a totElitearian schizoid type.”7 Bewildered and disoriented, the subject finds himself unstuck in space and in time: “I am to the left to the right beneath above and sideways.”8 The poem’s finale enacts, in Lacanian terms, the complete decomposition of the subject’s ego. We can finally hear the discourse of the Other, language speaking by itself, the voice of no one coming straight from the abyss of the unconscious. The lyric hero has fully disintegrated and so has his speech. What we see on the page is a list of senseless words, figures, arithmetic signs, passport registers, and various acronyms. Next to each other are the abbreviated

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names of different parties, organizations, and even of department stores (Union of the Democratic Forces, Bulgarian Socialist Party, NATO, European Economic Community, Central Department Store, etc.), the year in which the Bulgarian state was founded and that in which communist rule was established, figures and percentages reflecting norms in the planned but almost mystical economy of communism, the unlucky day in superstition (Friday 13th), and other, utterly unrelated, formulas and facts. Sloughing off all pathetic definitions of socialist reality, silencing the unabashed voices extolling its bogus glory, the poem concludes with a mathematical equation, stating that infinity roughly equals zero and, possibly, implying that the grandiose plans for the bright and joyous communist future have resulted in complete and irreversible collapse: ИВД КМР ЦУМ СГНС АОНСУ АУАКС СИВ НАТО СБП УБО СДС АСО БСП АЛФ ПЕТ+К 13 & 22 ○”39” 681–1944 99,99% за! Н 00856331 ЕГН 6003136922 ∞ ≈ 09

A compendium of emptied ideological clichés and often flagrantly delirious babble, Red Decadence seems to repudiate any recourse to what we have grown accustomed to label as reality. A self-sustenance of poetry on pure ideas is what we rather discern in Lambovsky’s frenzied vocabulary. Amidst the comfort of such interpretation, however, the anxiety one feels in the often schizophrenically disrupted verses alerts to the presence of another, not so tangible reality—the non-perceptual reality of collective psychological trauma.

2. Surviving a changeover: Testimonies to the outbreak of post-communist trauma In the words of Cathy Caruth, psychic trauma is “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”10 A look into the poetic representation of the totalitarian breakdown elicits all the characteristics of psychological trauma. Sudden and unforeseen in its nature, the changeover of ideological regimes and invalidation of life-configuring values overwhelmed and paralyzed the mind. After decades of totalitarian stagnation, deemed unending and unalterable, history embarked on an unprecedented and unnaturally accelerated course. “Historical perspective collapsed, and we felt ourselves

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carried off into some kind of Beyond,” Epstein claimed of the Soviet downfall.11 “As a sand colossus/the great experiment of our age collapsed,” Stefan Tsanev affirms from Bulgarian perspective.12 The breathtaking shift from a communist system of beliefs to a new, yet fully unknowable one, happened too soon for the unprepared mind. Hence, the mind’s failure to register the event and turn it into an experience that has been lived out (an erlebnis, in Benjaminian terms); hence, the unparalleled magnitude of its traumatic impacts on the psyche. The failure of the subject to assign semantic weight to communism’s overnight collapse and its speedy displacement by a bewildering order turns pivotal in defining the thematic scope of postmodern Bulgarian poetry. Overpowered by the unforeseen change, the lyric self feels fully unable to decode his/her rapidly evolving world. “Something terrible/people say/has happened,”13 Ani Ilkov’s hero confides, disclosing utter incapacity to grasp reality and trusting the word of others. “… [N]ot remembering, not thinking, not knowing, not living.…,”14 the hero finds himself submerged in an impenetrable mental maelstrom and feels completely impotent to reconstruct his biographical experience. Meaning falls apart. “… So what did I want to say?/Whom did I want to pray?/Where did I want to go?/Why…?,”15 the lyric hero falters in dismay. Confused and disoriented, he begins to question even his own existence: “Maybe it was me whom they killed? And I am no longer alive, but just thinking I am alive.”16 “It is ultimately in the ways in which it exceeds simple understanding,” Caruth promptly explains, that the “address that takes place in all the struggles to communicate traumatic experience opens up the possibility of what could be called a truly historical transmission.”17 We only need to embrace the “difficult task of this historical listening.”18 Attentively listening to another poem by Ilkov, revealingly named “Mental Derangement” (“Umopomrachenie”),19 we learn of the lyric self ’s psychic entrapment and corporal dislocation through both its semantic and syntactic levels. The poem commences with an ominous foreboding: “I’ll never be able to get out of here.”20 This frightful prognosis forms a recurring motif that opens and closes each of the stanzas, and reemerges within it as the implacable malediction of a third person singular: “You are not able to get out of here.”21 The second stanza is an almost exact repetition of the first one; only the order of the verses has been reversed. This mirror image creates on the structural level a feeling of fateful entrapment, precluding all prospects for fleeing the vicious circle, in which the hero’s distraught thought chaotically moves. The last line of the poem endows the lyric persona’s predicament to dwell in an infinite, meaningless present a greater, almost cosmic, dimension: “I know there’s no God to help me get out.”22 In the face of such quandary, the lyric self ’s question “Why am I here? Why am I so much here?” acquires nearly tragic overtones. Lost in a paradoxical universe, the hero floats by a law of space that has been irredeemably reversed: “in town I’m a horse fallen down in the sky … /I’m flying with my ears downward, oh, I’m a raven.…”23 Temporally and spatially destabilized by the vertiginous course of history and hurled beyond the confines of his/her future and death, the subject, in Bulgarian postcommunist society, finds himself/herself deprived of any reference points, “all of a sudden,” as Ivajlo Ditchev notes, “detached from death and eternity.”24 “Where am I?

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In some other world? In some other times?,”25 Tsanev anxiously demands in his 1997 verse collection Stupki po oblatsite (Steps on the Clouds). Тичам по белите облаци Зее под мене земния черен ковчег… Земята лети (неясно—напред или назад?) п а д а в небесната тъмна утроба п а д а като огромна сълза отронена от окото на Бога.26

(“I’m running on the white clouds./Below me gapes the black coffin of the Earth…/The Earth is flying (it is not clear—forward or backward?)/It is falling to the dark celestial womb./It is falling like a huge blue tear-drop/shed from the eye of God.”) Yordan Eftimov’s 1993 poetry book, Metametafizika (Metametaphysics), is even more graphical in rendering the thrust of Ditchev’s theoretic claim and picturing the subject’s disconnection “from death and eternity:” “On one planet people had no vestibular apparatusses./They could not differentiate between up and down, forward and backward./Even less did they know what sidewards is./They were just floating in space.”27 This anchorless floating in time and in space, Ditchev contends in his 1990 essay “The Post-Paranoid Condition,” evinces “the ultimate sense of [the] new, postmodern, postparonoid democracy: no power, no walls and borders, no progress, nothing—just being there, forever.”28 Before I proceed with my inquiry into the trauma-born post-communist poetry, it seems imperative to make a crucial stipulation. It would be altogether inaccurate to claim that all post-totalitarian Bulgarian poetry testifies to the realities of psychic trauma, accompanying the momentous historical changes. What I seek to establish is rather that, within the post-communist literary production, a huge body of gruesome, trauma-engendered poems exists and fulfills a vital historical function. It must, however, be noted that the younger poetic generation increasingly demonstrates a refusal to engage with political clichés and ideologically related realities and, instead, frequently indulges in an unprecedented playfulness and experimentation with language. The following excerpts by two of the youngest, at that time, Bulgarian poets

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provide a lucid example: Eftimov: “I play with my cat/or she plays with me/or the play plays with us/or language plays with the play/or I play with language/or language plays with the cat.…”29 The play is vivaciously rendered in a variety of languages and multifaceted perspectives.30 Georgi Gospodinov’s Phonetics partakes in an analogous linguistic exercise. The first of its poems, simply named “P-R-A-S-K-O-V-A” (“Peach”) skillfully juggles with the word’s mellow vowels and strident consonant sounds: “How huge and plump to the point of bursting out is this word /a-o-a /. P-r-s-k is making crunching sounds, nibbled by someone as accidental as the summer.”31

3. Attaining the impending. Temporal and psychological displacements of the post-totalitarian subject As I have already suggested, seminal for defining as traumatic the changeover event is the suddenness and unexpectedness with which it occurred as well as the mind’s absolute unpreparedness to register and assimilate the abrogation of a largely perceived as upcoming, yet paradoxically attained, ideological order. The already solidified perception of communism as forthcoming precluded the realization that the subject had long been living in it, that the utopia he/she so zealously strived to achieve had actually been fulfilled. In a similar stance, Tsanev’s “Steps on the Clouds” grapples to rationalize the unforeseen collapse of an allegedly looming and everlasting regime: “We thought communism will last forever./The other alternative was a third world war./But this meant that together with communism all mankind would disappear./ … Sh-sh-sh-sh-t!/Na-ni-na!/Na-ni-na!/Na!” (“Hush! Go to sleep! Don’t worry!”).32 The stanza closes in disintegrated meaning, offering no solace to the troubled mind. With the unforeseen attainment of the communist regime, the subject found himself/herself transposed beyond the borders of a consummated future. This precipitate reversal in the modes of temporality, as well as the accelerated pace at which it overruled the subject’s imminent reality, translated into an array of images. Among them, the recurrent image of the lyric hero’s violated future plays a focal part. The sudden discovery of having achieved, and subsequently canceled, the future is palpably conveyed in Lambovsky’s poem “Mountain” (“Planina”).33 In it, the author plays with the stereotype of a man hastening to climb a mountain and conquer its aerial summit. The poem reads as a parable of the enthusiastic person rushing to arrive at the aspired communist heights. Instead with the shining forth of the longed-for ideal, presumably marked by a sunrise, however, the mountaintop greets its courageous victor with the sun already in its red decadence (significantly, Red Decadence is chosen by the author as the title of his entire collection). Having reached the top, the lyric self finds himself at a loss: “I am standing on top of the mountain./I am looking around./Now what?/Where to?/ The mountain is silent.”34 No matter how hard he attempts, the hero is unable to resolve the questions, posed by his precociously attained reality. He is yet to realize that, in a frenzied hurry to achieve his goal, he has overtaken it without a chance to even notice it.

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The Sun becomes the central image within another major work of the contemporary, post-totalitarian period—Kiril Merdjansky’s play entitled Tiresias the Blind. The play was staged in 1998–1999, at the Sfumato theater in Sofia, Bulgaria. By the early 1980s, the ideas of communism had largely turned into reality in Bulgarian totalitarian society. The following years presented an impudent endeavor to conceal this fact and uphold the illusion that communism was impending, unattained, and worth striving after. A testimony to this temporal prevarication emerges in Tiresias the Blind (Тирезий Слепият) through the central motif of the play—the motif of the Sun, which categorically refuses to either rise or go down. As the play unfolds, the audience becomes aware of the straightforward identification of the Sun with time: “But just like the Sun/time stays motionless too!”35 This immobility of the Sun evokes the frozen temporal dimension of late communism’s artificially invented time (the meaningless decade of simulated temporality and social phases indistinguishable to the mind: actual socialism, developed socialism, acceleration, etc.). The play opens at Tiresias’s sanctuary, where everyone, except for the revealingly blind Tiresias, is looking at the Sun. The Sun, however, stays immovable, reluctant to advance to any new position—it already sojourns “somewhere beyond” the past but is unable to locate itself within the subject’s future: “…[P]allid, and immobile,/ … It stayed and didn’t go away -/ … It was visible, … but, in a way, it already seemed somewhere beyond -/it stayed and didn’t go away./It didn’t blind us so that we would see/the way we used to see … /Before or now … /I don’t know … always …”36 The entire play revolves around the theme of the abnormal Sun, which “neither rises, nor goes down,” thus leaving people altogether at a loss. Unwilling to set or to rise, the Sun becomes the object of vehement polemics, played out in a multitude of contexts. The daughters of Jocasta and Oedipus—Antigone and Ismene—for example, in complete bewilderment and fright, remark: “Father!/Mother!/ … The Sun has disappeared!/It is there, but at the same time it isn’t! … /It stays immobile!”37 The condition of the Sun thus directly relates to a state of bafflement and horror: “It stays … and it doesn’t go away,/perhaps it is already tired -/and has even lost the desire to move./And we can already clearly, more and more clearly see/how horror freezes the despondent faces.…”38 The unsettling realization that the “bright communist reality” had arrived too soon, unanticipated by the subject who believed it to reside somewhere in the distant future, attributes almost cataclysmic nuance to the heroes’ disconcerting observations: “It grew dark too early”39; “I looked at the Sun -/it was there … /but was emptied out,/as if shining, but unable to lighten things up … /just hanging there by itself/neither rising, nor going down.…”40 Unable to rationalize the mysterious conduct of the Sun from the perspective of their present, the heroes seek to unravel the temporal mystery embarking on a voyage to the estate of the future: “ ‘We are sailing to the future.… Is this right?’/‘Yes, to the future’—I respond -/‘I am going there to learn/how long will our Sun remain like that … /neither going down … nor rising?’ ”41 As the subject proves incapable of coming to grips with the idea that there has been nothing else the Sun could do, no sunrise that the communist society could still achieve, he turns into the object of the

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Sun’s severe ridicule and sneer: “[A]nd it [the Sun] is hanging … hanging, as if having been hanged … /pulling faces at you … yes, ridiculing you.”42 The play thus leads to its enlightening and long deferred epiphany: The heroes suddenly become aware of the fact that their future has been voided and annulled, and they have long been victims of ideological deception: “[T]here is no future … /something … something has irreversibly changed there … /somewhere … /somewhere up above … /nothing here is going to be the same any longer.”43 The result is all-pervasive fear: “The Sun stays … / stays … and fades away … /and everyone is frightened.”44 Particularly powerful is the depiction of this frightful and apocalyptical reality, embodied in a sinister, prophetic song, recurring many times within the texture of the play: “The shadows have escaped,/the birds have swum away/from the pitch-dark sky -/the eyes desire … desire to escape,/but there is nowhere … nowhere to go …”45 At the close of the play, “the eyes” become replaced by the collective image of “the people,” abiding in the realm of this inscrutable reality: “The people stay too. They want to escape,/but there is nowhere … nowhere to go … /The shadows have escaped,/ the birds have swum away/in the pitch-dark sky.”46 In its final judgment, Merdjansky’s play is definitive: Oedipus, the tsar, has to prick his eyes out and lose sight forever; the Gods have to leave the sacred Olympus, so that the eyes of everyone else can recover vision and the Sun can once again rise and go down, resuming its regular cycle. Delineating the traumatic ramifications of the precipitously annulled communist reality and the concurrently displaced temporality, Tiresias the Blind subscribes to the conviction that the anomalous ideological objective to surpass the future and subordinate it to a ludicrously utopian dream has forced the subject to backtrack on his journey and caused psychological trauma. As another central motif of Merdjansky’s play conveys it, “Sailing off this shore,/everyone aspires for the future,/but back to the shore he/she always comes/and learns the answer.”47 With the seemingly upcoming ideological dream so inopportunely accomplished, the post-totalitarian subject faces the necessity to survive his premature demise. The post-mortem existence and strains of the subject constitute the primary focus of Kiril Merdjansky’s 1992 verse collection Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya (Selected Epitaphs from the Decline of the Roman Empire). The poems, included in it, confirm the impression that the characters they depict have been untimely, unnaturally, and suddenly pushed into the kingdom of death. None of the epitaphs tells of a person who has suffered a natural death. Instead, death sneaks in uninvited and remorseless. Recurring in many epitaphs is the motif of a man who, totally unable to figure out why, while ascending the path to his goal, collapses and slips into the abyss of death: “And just as he was climbing the stairs to his room … /Did he slip?/Did he misplace his foot?/ His head bumped into the banisters/and, before we even knew what had befallen him,/ he died.”48 Life is interrupted absolutely unexpectedly; the subject is taken by surprise by the unpremeditated arrival of death: “… After a hard day of work/when, to relax, I was wondering in the woods,/I stepped on a snake, hidden in the foliage,/and the snake bit me.”49 In the face of such ubiquitous and uninhibited morbidity, life loses all its meaning and lucidity: “What awaits us and where/no one can foresee.”50

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Set up on sepulchral, marble-patterned paper, the necropolis Merdjansky builds reveals the virulence of an after-death life. The poems vocalize the testimonies of lyric personae, witnessing their death, surviving death, and abiding in the realms of a beyond-the-grave existence. With lives suddenly cut short, Merdjansky’s heroes visualize the terrifying spectacle of their premature deaths. The poems abound in instances of lyric selves who witness their unforeseen demise and describe it with the vividness of a truly traumatic experience: “… Something clutched me by the throat so mercilessly/that my legs stretched out immediately,/and I fell flat, breathless, on the marbled floor … /I had only lived half of my life…,”51 or, “…[Kar] stabbed me with his sword, most vilely, in the back …./A red shroud enveloped my eyes,/and I headed for the somber dwelling place of Proserpina …”52 A rhizome with after life is created. In this aspect, even the knowledge the heroes possess about events occurring after their deaths ceases to surprise: “And, after I died, a real mess occurred … /They started indiscriminately killing one another.…”53 Merdjansky’s heroes unencumberedly observe and comment on the way their corpora have been entombed and mourned: “And although by the people’s tears/the soil that covers me is almost soaking wet,/And although I was mourned and buried with the highest honors …”54 Transfigured and reborn, the lyric selves subsist and manage to converse even beyond the confines of life and death: “Now, when I am dust chased by the wind,/dust clinging to the stonepines, cypresses, and linden-trees,/I am asking you in their rustle over, and over, and over again.…”55 The testimony of another of Merdjansky’s heroes alerts to the possibility of identifying in the epitaphs, left from the time of the Roman Empire, the vestiges of another, by centuries distanced from Rome, communist world, whose epitaphs have only recently been written. “Only my death remains mysteriously inexplicable …,”56 the lyric self embarks on relating a story with the already salient motif of unfathomable death. “… Along the way I saw a meadow all engulfed in green … /and the murmur of a stream that ran through it, and coolness … /And just as I stretched out my trembling arm,/reaching for some life-giving crystal-clear water,/I fatally slipped/and hit the back of my head/on a big, sharp-pointed stone./I could never realize why … / just for a sip of spring water.”57 The sip of “crystal-clear water” easily deterritorializes into the crystal-clear communist idea. Eager to taste it, the subject fatally collapses into the chasm of death. Semantically crucial are a number of nuclei in the verses mentioned earlier: the idyllic picture of a dreamful world, the endeavor to attain it, the unexpected “slipping” that thwarts an achievement rendered altogether possible, the fatal outcome of the happening (death), the lyric hero’s survival of death and his post-mortem testimony imparting the event’s unavailability to consciousness (death is “mysteriously inexplicable,” the hero “could never realize” why it occurred). The sudden and forceful revocation of a seemingly interminable ideological world order, the unanticipated character of the event, and the traumatizing impact it exerted on the psyche are all intoned in Ditchev’s powerful synopsis “… All of a sudden [the subject] was forced into a state of unexpected and ill-timed freedom (as he or she was detached from death and eternity), and this deconstructed him or her into a series of paranoid situations.”58

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4. Witnessing and testimony. The lethal imagery of post-totalitarian poetry Inhabiting this morbid, paranoid, and totally inexplicable world, the lyric hero in many postmodern poems takes up the historic task of witnessing and testifying to the perplexing post-communist reality. Dilated “like a photographic plate,” the poet’s eye stays wide awake—“the eyelid/drops down, but instantly bounds back again,” so that the eye can “watch and watch” and be “prepared to absorb it all” and store pictorially the secluded-from-the-mind experience: По навик в тъмното клепача се спуска и нагоре пак отскача с готовност всичко да фиксира. Калта. И по-нагоре – границите на всемира. Не питай същността къде е, а само гледай, гледай. Докоснато от мрака, окото се разтяга като фотографска плака.59

(“By force of habit, in the night, the eyelid/drops down, but instantly bounds back again/prepared to absorb it all/The mud. And higher up –/the borders of the universe./ Don’t ask where the essence lies,/just watch and watch/Touched by the duskiness,/the eye dilates/just like a photographic plate.”) The pervasive feeling of death and the obtrusive lethal imagery we have discussed in the preceding section are thus much more than a literary technique. They bear witness to lives abruptly revoked and a future—instantly devoid of meaning, and register the subject’s transposition in the deathly realm after his/her already accomplished future. The association of traumatic imagery with what has been rightfully crowned as one of the healthiest events in mankind’s history mitigates our shock when, awaiting verses of triumph, we stumble in a poetry of blackest desolation. “I’ve reached the slimy bottom of desperation,”60 Tsanev confides in Stupki po oblatsite. “… I am opting for death,/I am opting for death,”61 the lyric self cries out and further explains, putting his words in historical perspective: “Now mankind is sobering down, tired of all ideals … /It’s already a different story … /I believe neither in tomorrow nor in yesterday … /In vain the black pupils of the skulls,/filled with dirt instead of brains,/stare into our eyes./ The shadows of mysterious birds soar above our heads/outlining a black cross over everything.”62 Death implacably invades the provinces of post-totalitarian literary writing. Even a cursory glimpse at the titles of the poems included in Ani Ilkov’s 1994 verse collection, The Spring of the Ugly-Beautiful, evinces the incontestable salience of a morbid, cadaverous ambience: “Graveyards” (33), “Verses about Death” (a separate section of the book, 58–66), “In Articulo Mortis” (61), “Death is.…” (60), “Peace on Your Soul!” (30), “Against Death” (34), “The New Graveyard in my Soul” (37), “In Commemoration of the Heroes” (17), and so on.

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No longer forced to abide by clichés and glorious, invincible ideals, the verses of Bulgarian postmodern poets communicate the outcome of the post-totalitarian experience. The psychic trauma to which the poets testify, it seems imperative to emphasize, is fully unrelated to the horrors of the communist past. Among the strongest vindications of the fact is the unflagging milieu of death and destruction haunting the works of the youngest generation, of the writers, at the time, in their late twenties to early thirties, who never witnessed the atrocities of concentration camps or suffered any harsh form of repression. It is a traumatic reality of an altogether different nature that their verses testify to. Inhabiting a gruesome and utterly incomprehensible world, the young writers tell the story of a vertiginous and unanticipated psychic breakdown, of an intense and hopeless identity crisis. “They are tearing down the old graveyards./The bulldozers dig out the crosses,”63 one of the youngest Bulgarian poets, the then 29-year-old Gospodinov, relates in his Lapidarium. This ominous description only sets the tone for the reader’s forthcoming encounter with what will emerge from the ground—“A skull/with terrified/eye sockets”64—an image that could well be seen as emblematic of the overall semantic message of the book. In “Apocalypse,” another death-portending poem, Gospodinov prophetically exhorts: “… And the sand tortoises living on the shore/will make their way to the sea.”65 This drive for death, the suicidal and unnatural behavior beheld in the animal kingdom, alerts to the magnitude of an impact that has caused a reversal of the soundest natural law—the instinct for self-preservation and continuation of the species. Another poem by the same author alludes to the grounds for this abnormal behavior. “The cemetery security officer,/sitting on a stone-made cross,/spreads sunset on his slice of bread,”66 Gospodinov notes, ironizing the belief in the utopian communist sunrise and identifying in its sudden displacement, the unsolicited advent of sunset and death. In the context of such an unnatural historical shift, the lyric hero’s question “What are you guarding, cemetery officer?”67 suggests that the dead can be no longer enclosed within the cemeteries and graveyards; they now freely reside around us—in the real, post-communist world. “Toward the Free World,”68 the inaugural poem of Ilkov’s Izvorut na groznokhubavite, opens with a concise and evocative motto: “We call ourselves dead, because we have lived before our deaths./But why do you call dead those who have not lived?”69 The words come straight from a work by Joan Ekzarkh (Йоан Екзарх), a Bulgarian writer and translator from the Middle Ages and a venerated proponent of Bulgarian letters and literature. As the poem unfolds, we come to believe that the real dead are those who, in the time of life, were able to dream and aspire: “Yes! The dead are merely those formerly alive,/who happily rejoiced the gift of hope.…”70 In the past decades, however, the author describes, a new, post-mortem populace has briskly emerged. With his/her prospects repealed and life’s meaning beclouded, the subject was forced to resort to a barren and futile existence: “But are we, are we simply nothing,/if there are no words for us to herald? … /Who has a need for the departing ships, … /when one is so unsure of the words’ signification/and of their meanings? … /Dressed up, shoes on, well-fed –/ Is this the legacy our lives will leave?…”71 Death, Bulgarian poets announce, is all-encompassing and pervasive. In fact, Tsanev insists, it has already turned in an emblem for the whole Bulgarian nation.

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“A sign saying: BULGARIA … a cemetery …”72 welcomes the traveler upon entering the country. Nothing reassuring awaits him/her inside: “There is no hope./There is no salvation./Amin!”73 In the face of such impasse, the lyric self feels derelict in the drift to death. “I can sense her:/quiet and invisible/as a white cat on the snow/death sneaks by me/purring my name/and hypnotizes me with her rosy eyes,”74 Tsanev forebodes the advent of death and dolefully entreats its terminal embrace: “Come death and caress me/Come death and caress me.”75 On an even more sinister note, Ilkov desolately begs: “Let all the dead from the village graveyards wake up/and come to gnaw my flesh away/ the worms and waters of Inferno.…”76 The straightforward identification of Ilkov with his disheartened lyric creation does not unveil until the poem’s finale, where, flung ahead of his time in a dismal and unrecognizable world, the author reveals he has been reduced to a nobody, a nonperson lost in the inscrutable expanse of the universe: “Ani Ilkov—nobody—air, fields, boundlessness.”77 Listening to these gruesome Bulgarian verses, the reader is stunned by their emphatically pictorial character. Long after closing the collection of poetry, he/she is still haunted by the image of the “skull/with terrified/eye sockets,”78 the baleful stare of its blackened pupils “filled with dirt instead of brains,”79 the vivid cross-shaped poem of a soul that, as we learn, has just been crucified (“Here every stalk is a soul”),80 the deathbound voyage of the turtles headed for the solace of the sea, the apocalypse-portending shadows of the birds “soar[ing] above our heads [and] outlining a black cross over everything.”81 It seems impossible to ever disremember the pervasive morbidity of the world around us: Вятър. Пръски кръв по зеления гръб на тревата. Макове с черно в средата. С черно в средата. С черно в средата…82

(“Wind. Splashes of blood/on the green back of the grass. Poppies/with black in the middle./With black in the middle./With black in the middle…”)

5. Corpora and history: The mutilated and dismembered body The body and its utter dismemberment emerge as central themes in post-communist Bulgarian writing—themes, surprisingly, exhibiting a striking prevalence in the works of the youngest poets. “In this part of the book everything is stones/ears noses lips heads legs—these are stones/the stones are also stones…,” the young poet Eftimov asserts in his Metametafizika.83 It seems only natural that a poem attesting to the psychic mutilation of the subject is built of disparate bodily ruins. “I can no longer

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catch up with my head!” the lyric self, in a poem by Tsanev, also screams in despair.84 The author then graphically renders a corporal disfiguration that quickly acquires cosmic dimensions: Тялото ми се е проснало като съсирена локва върху занемялата земя, а главата ми бяга—все по-далеч, все по-далеч – опъва шията ми като ластик… прескача обръча на хоризонта, откъсва се и полита като къдрава комета в глухия мрак на Вселената. (“My body has sprawled as a blood-curdled puddle on the speechless Earth,/ but my head runs away—further and further away, further and further away–/ It stretches my neck as a rubber band … /It jumps over the horizon ring./It cuts loose and flies off,/like a curly comet in the stone-deaf darkness of the Universe.”)

In both totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, the body contained a fundamental referential power. As I have demonstrated in the chapter on conceptualism, the aggregated, mass, communal human body, projected in the works of communist ideologues and literary scholars, the body in its intact wholeness and inviolable totality, has been seen to serve as faithful referent to communism’s totalizing and homogeneous society.85 Conversely, some critics have argued, only the dismembered and distorted human body, traumatized and violated, contains the power to refer to the traumatic impacts of post-totalitarian reality. The excruciating condition of the human body operates as sensitive litmus of the traumatizing conditions of reality. This is the belief expounded by Kiossev in “An Essay on Terror”—a piece that focuses on the peculiarities of the transitional period from the perspective of Bulgarian post-communist history. The new symbolic order of post-communism, Kiossev contends, can only institute itself after an indispensable act of violence (soon to be turned into mere convention), a vehement clash with what is believed to be the “normal” and “natural” order of the “hitherto suppressed reality itself, which now ha[s] a right to free expression.”86 The deadly fight appears the only possible interaction between two antagonistic regimes doomed to never reach a consensus. Post-communist societies, however, obstructed the occurrence of this violent and drastic act, and, as Kiossev argues, imposed “utopia[s] of normalcy,”87 asserting that nothing new needs to be engraved, only the old, natural order, suppressed under totalitarianism, needs to be recovered. Therefore, Kiossev claims, the post-totalitarian body has only being painted, not engraved on; it has simply been doubled, not dismembered in “parts, zones, members” and articulated into a new body. Mutants are being born out of the interbreeding of the two mutually exclusive symbolic orders and the failure of the new one to validate itself by tattooing the body. As the post-communist world abjured terror, it never cut off the “distorted, nonfocused, mutant members struggl[ing] to break out”88—the bodies, instead, “remained mutants with a traumatic self–awareness of being ‘abnormal.’ ”89

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Kiossev’s depiction of the “traumatic bod[ies],” “waver[ing] between two conflicting engravings,”90 records the failure of East European post-totalitarian corpora to shake off their already obsolete communist stigmata and become radically dismembered. It is precisely this lack of a destructive frenzy that distanced East European “velvet revolutions” from true revolutions and annexed them the paradoxical label “counterrevolution[s] of normality.”91 Thus, in Kiossev’s mind, the body had to be disarticulated in order to articulate itself as novel one. In the anguish of the endeavor to tear apart its already defunct and useless parts, the body testifies to the traumatic angst produced by post-totalitarian reality. Attempting to design a method for narrative representation of the corporeal and psychic disarticulation, Todorov, analyzing the debris of totalitarianism, introduces a perceptive theoretical idea (which concurrently evolves into the method of composing his book). The linguistic arsenal utilized in the “act of reading ruins and fractured objects,” Todorov contends, should “figuratively resemble the ruined space itself.”92 Quoted as a motto of Todorov’s book is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s endorsement of the claim: “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made.”93 Such might be the rationale behind Gospodinov’s opting for the crippled stones (in his poetry collection Lapidarium) as the most suited figurative means for portraying the wounds of the post-totalitarian psyche. The lapidarium Gospodinov constructs as, in his own definition, a “place in museum where stones of a certain archaeological value are placed,”94 operates as an experimental arena, where the inscriptions on collected fractured stones provide a faithful testimony to the disrupted existence and writing of the post-totalitarian subject. Amidst the heaps of ideological, psychic, and corporeal wreckage, Gospodinov emerges as what Todorov keenly defined a “(re) collector of ruins.”95 Very suggestive in delineating the theoretical charge of Gospodinov’s collection is the idea of the writer as a lapidary. Gospodinov describes his poetic practice as the work of cutting inscription on “stone, … on a bird, … on flesh.” Inscribing thus emerges as an antagonist to representing. The author refuses to fictionalize the world; instead, he timidly retreats into the trauma-imbued (though covert) realities of the mind and, absorbed in them, reinscribes their unfathomable stories. Becoming a word thus gives way to being a word: “Do you want to become a word? –/the stone asked me./I am a word—I answered in a stony voice/and sank into the stone …”96 The totally surprising and unanticipated advent of trauma problematics in Bulgarian post-totalitarian poetry alerts to the danger of forgetting a moment of an overwhelming crisis, subsuming its catastrophic impact under the all-embracing euphoria of totalitarianism’s collapse. Discerning the traces of trauma in the celebration of art’s deliverance from ideological thralldom and inscribing the story of this unfathomable moment are acts of exigence and grave historical responsibility. In the face of imminent death, Gospodinov’s hero bequeaths: “Ultimus Lapis: Let the one who is more alive than the buried here, place the ultimate stone.”97

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Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: Reference Genesis in Russian Metarealist Poetry

1. Russian metarealism: The expansion of realism and referentiality Alongside the conceptualist trend, another major school of poetry emerged in Russia in the 1980s—a school, most commonly named, “metarealism.” While it is relatively easy to recognize an underlying shared practice within the works of the conceptualist writers, the grouping together of such poets as Ivan Zhdanov, Aleksei Parshchikov, Alexander Eremenko, Ol’ga Sedakova, Elena Shvarts, and Viktor Krivulin into a common school appears somewhat problematic. The school in question, according to S. B. Dzhimbinov, arose in 1983 or the beginning of 1984, when almost simultaneously two Moscow critics, Konstantin Kedrov and Mikhail Epstein, announced the birth of a new kind of “ism” (which Kedrov named “metametaphorism” and Epstein— “metarealism”).1 As prompted by the prefix “-meta” in both these designations, the new poetic trend had set out to transcend the bounds of our common everyday reality and open up communication with higher, metaphysical, religious realms. In the following chapter, I will seek to reveal that none of these transcendent realms remains detached and cut off from reality—the new poetic school, which I will hereafter designate as metarealism, includes them on an equal footing with our commonplace, familiar realities, and demonstrates that they are just as real as everything we see or touch. What forms, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of Russian metarealist writing is its enactment of incessant transmutation between perceptual and metaphysical realities— its actuation of a process of metamorphosis and deterritorialization, resulting in continuous engendering of novel and unrivalled worlds. Contrary to the general reading of metarealism as a practice severed from reality, such active fostering of links with multiplicities of “other” alternative realities calls for expanding the notion of realism and recognizing its inclusion of realms beyond the phenomenal, perceptually registrable one. Because of its capacity for integrating multiple realities, metarealism, Helena Goscilo suggests, could be rightfully termed “multi-realism” as well. To examine the parallels in the thematic preoccupations of the metarealist and the conceptualist schools, my chapter opens with an exploration of the poetry of Viktor Krivulin. Then, in an attempt to study the peculiarities of metarealist poetry, I focus

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on works by the two most prominent women belonging to the metarealist tradition— Ol’ga Sedakova and Elena Shvarts.2 Having matured as poets in the same sociocultural milieu—both being a part of what Sedakova called the “lost generation” smothered by the “grey terror” of the Brezhnev years—these two contemporary women poets give voice to common philosophical agendas and concerns.3 Their works exhibit strong religious and metaphysical underpinnings and immense psychological intensity. Ungratified by all the imperfections of the reality that humans dwell in, both Shvarts and Sedakova strive to elevate the spirit and grant it access to the often agonizing, but also wondrously regenerative meta-world. By way of analyzing Sedakova’s and Shvarts’s spiritual poetry, its distinctly metamorphic quality and the multifaceted modes of reality’s manifestation within it, I undertake to challenges the belief that postmodernism has lost its capacity to refer to and record the multiform conditions of reality. While unequivocally denying reference to the phenomenal world, the poetry of metarealism, I suggest, expands the scope of realism and strives to redeem reality’s innate multidimensionality, often neglected in an undue privileging of the quotidian and the mundane. It is in this sense, I argue, that metarealism presents a cogent vindication of the notion of reality and of our natural capacity for a referential intercourse with it.

2. Viktor Krivulin’s Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert)4 and Novoe zrenie (New Vision)5 A coeval of conceptualism, Russian metarealism shares some of the same problematics and concerns. Like the conceptualists, metarealist poets comment on the unexpected outset of post-communist reality, its forceful imposition on the masses, and the effects of temporal displacement and lack of cognitive assimilation that demarcate its traumatizing nature. As in conceptualist art and writing, the metarealists also dwell on the historical imperative of witnessing and testifying, which marks events of social change and mass-scale psychic traumas. Indicative of the momentous transformation, Viktor Krivulin’s Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert, 1993) and Novoe zrenie (New Vision, 1988) provide a poignant testimony to the unanticipated supersedure of the seemingly eternal communist regime by a new, unknown, and altogether unimaginable order, as well as to the traumatizing impacts that this event exerted on the psyche. In Kontsert po zaiavkam, the author portends the looming of a frightful and tempestuous reality, located on the verge of unpreventable apocalypse “…[T]he world was shaking— and was just about to crash down,”6 the lyric self recounts. This instant sociohistorical crashdown is already a fact in the poetic texture of Novoe zrenie. The latter documents the suddenness of communism’s downfall and the desire of the subject to flee from its reality of bafflement and psychic anguish: “Within a single hour the climate was changed,/it went, it departed … Let’s go,/let’s go somewhere … /to where no entryway is seen,/where the snow, like white freedom, lies/at the bottom of the Earth, unaltered in a garden.”7

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The “sudden freedom” from the communist winter is likewise portrayed in Krivulin’s “Verses from the New Primer” (“Стихи из нового букваря”). In it, the poet alludes to the untimely spurt of social freedom amidst the harsh totalitarian cold through drawing an analogy with the unseasonable gush of heated air and breaking in of golden sun in the conditions of austere, frosty wintertime: “steam swirls, a gilding shines/ amidst the wintertime—a sudden freedom.”8 The spectacle of social transmutation is also re-enacted on the typographic level. In “Typographic Massacre” (“Типографский погром”), the sudden transformations that define the process of composing written work evoke the brusqueness of the changeover event and the resulting puzzlement and psychic disarray: “… but within a single/minute everything, in fact, became completely mixed up/Something came in, spilt the type-set words –/and smashed the spectacles to smithereens! What am I for? This compassion –/where is it? A Precipice. The vacillating pine/is weaker than a stalk of grass. Perplexity.”9 The baffling suddenness of the surprising social shift is a recurring theme in Krivulin’s collections. They document the moment when, in the blink of an eye, time “hardened” and reversed its course—it slipped out and transposed the subject beyond the Red Date, marking the attainment of communism’s yearned-for future: Time did not come to a halt, no, as a rivulet in the ice-cold, it hardened and began to sparkle, rejoicing in the metamorphosis. Whether riding or just standing – time slipped out and carried us beyond the borderline of the conditions located after the Red Date10

The sudden annulment of communist reality is thus again directly linked to an astonishing displacement in the modes of temporality. As in the conceptualist works, the subject is transported, in a mere instant, beyond the limits of an already consumed and voided future, into an empty and meaningless realm after his life and psychological death. “We live—you are saying—after history/in a realm where there are only names/ in pure space …,”11 Krivulin notes. The unimaginable light of freedom is finally before the subject, but, entering it, he/she irrevocably surpasses the boundaries of his/her biographical existence, or, put in different terms, outlives himself/herself: … the higher light and the insurmountable upsurge that have been stifled through the effort of time are here                               meeting us –                                         if we enter and stop as if we’ve outlived                                        our own selves12

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Completely unprepared for the drastic temporal reversal, the subject, as Krivulin testifies, has failed to live it out, close off the past, and confidently settle in the future. Something residual has lingered in the past—a leftover of historic meaning that never managed to acquire cognitive import and, therefore, could not be carried over to the subject’s present. Put in Krivulin’s words, “there is in this climactic epoch/a sunset of the past we failed to live out.”13 Suspended in an alien and meaningless reality, the subject faced his/her untimely death as individual who knows and can be known, who has coherent and recognizable existence: “I know: we long ago have ceased to live/ where our lives contain a meaning …,/where everybody knows us both at face and from a distance.”14 The new, post-communist reality is utterly incomprehensible to the confounded subject. “I resemble a graphical sheet, unable to hatch out/the grandiose plan,” Krivulin’s lyric persona confides.15 With the outset of post-totalitarian freedom, the so far concealed and unapproachable truths have finally shined through. The epiphany of such Big Truths, however, has often prevented the subject from seeing the multihued, minor, less obvious truths and retain the capacity for analytical thinking (or, as Krivulin has put it, “…where now is he [man] if everything in the end has been resolved?”).16 The transparent Truth is an elixir for the public, inclined to unquestioningly embrace the newly arrived freedom and see it as nothing more than antithesis to the autocratic communist rule. For the critically thinking persona, however, the unforeseen acquisition of so many, and so hard to decipher, Grand Truths has turned in a bewildering psychic experience. As Krivulin remarks on the subject, “The truth that everyone desired,/I neither know nor want to know … /and I would wish to no one/such denudation and bewilderment …”17 In the uninhibited transparency of the new, post-communist order, in the subject’s overexposure, through glasnost and freedom, to the so long forbidden and now so easily blinding Grand Truths, resides the danger of losing the rich, profound, multidimensional layers of meaning, which even the dark years of communism failed to entomb. “I still/feel sad for the full of meaning murkiness/of the semi-hues and those semifreedoms –/full freedom, she will extirpate them all,” Krivulin forewarns.18 Unable to capture the sound and unravel the involute meanings of “full freedom,” the subject sojourns in a world of omnipotent silence: “beyond the high-pitched threshold of hearing/in the acoustic tomorrow howls the snow blizzard/and this is why the throat grows desiccated and resonant/and an impossible silence surrounds us from all sides …”19 As the poem unfolds, Krivulin directs the reader’s attention to another factor responsible for the traumatic character of Russia’s post-totalitarian experience—the artificial, not deriving from the masses, nature of the socio-historical developments, which ultimately culminated in the changeover event. As Kruvulin observes in his poem, the objectives of moving in a novel direction have been set somewhere “on the stage,” without the knowledge and participation of the common people. The masses have become reduced to mere witnesses of artificially produced occurrences, whose overall design completely slips off their consciousness and rational mind: “… the clear note taken there, on the stage/ … under the artificial wind it reaches a purpose/which slips off my consciousness …”20 Not by chance, Krivulin’s book,

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discussing the ramifications of the orchestrated “from above” changeover concert, bears the elucidative title Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert). This title might be seen as an allusion to the prior knowledge of and active role in the event of communism’s overthrow, possessed by the authorities above—event of which the common people were, in contrast, fully ignorant and unsuspecting, and which, as a result, completely took them by surprise. “It has been ordered that we sober up. A sadder order/I have never known,” the lyric hero of Novoe zrenie reports.21 In many of his works, Krivulin notes that what he has repeatedly addressed as “upsurge,” “air,” or just “change” has not been an organic, natural development, but was, instead, imposed, bestowed, dictated from above. No, I am not exhilarated by the air, bestowed from above! Yes, it’s true I am breathing, but when from everywhere I hear: Now! Breathe in this air, which was bestowed from above! Do you hear me—breathe! and otherwise … otherwise, I am hearing. What else has been left, how not to hear, when from everywhere the greasy freedom splashes round like oil drops, until you choke—how to escape from it all, from where I live and I breathe, suffocating with the smell of oil?22

Despite its inarguably positive potentials, the setting in of ill-timed and unanticipated freedom that has been forced from the outside (“bestowed from above”) produced ambiguous, emphatically more complex, and, in many ways, quite dreary results: It grew dark long before the time for bed by the twilight of freedom… and, what did, as a result, brought in the naïve faith of people in the overturn? A sublunar swamp, soil without a bottom below the sinking feet.23

Engulfed by the bottomless and precarious post-futurity slough, the subject could no longer get hold of his or her swiftly transmuting existence. Abiding in the mirthless and desolate “twilight of freedom,” he/she experienced a traumatizing anguish, which writers describe as collective insanity or schizophrenia: “…the schizophrenic/shows up before me, shattered to pieces,/with no firm occupation, with no money … /Plurality has sunk into a unified appearance,/into a murdered by the neuroleptics body/in our native language the hidden God began to babble,/without coherence, without a purpose.”24 “The insane. There are too many for a single city,” Krivulin observes, speaking of the city of St. Petersburg. “To be chosen, socially untouchable, is a kind of a divine privilege…. They are raving about Van Gogh, whose cut off ear wanders in the attics and the basements of the masters just like Gogol’s nose…. The insane. The unrestrainedness of their attacks. The euphoria …”25

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The dark tones thicken even further as Krivulin’s poetry collection draws to a close. In “On the Way to the Cross” (“Na doroge u kresta”), the book’s concluding poem, Krivulin builds up a relation between the cataclysmic present of his country and the most excruciating episode in the eventful history of Christianity. Marching along the path that leads them to the cross, the Russians, Krivulin recounts, are “sing[ing]/in their language of farewell ” and looking forward to acquiring “the final vision.”26 As we have seen in the analysis above, Krivulin’s work shares much of the same problematics (though with a different charge) as the conceptualist art and writing we have discussed in the previous chapter. Preoccupied with similar concerns and queries, the two postmodern schools of Russian literature seem to approach them from a different angle, still ultimately meeting in the middle and offsetting each other. The negative charge of conceptualism, vastly theorized as the rescission of all kinds of reality excluding the linguistic one, becomes neutralized by the positive, engendering potential of metarealism, copulatively merging reality’s multifaceted planes into fertile symbiotic intercommonalities. It is this regenerative power of metarealist poetry that the following section will seek to explore. I will argue that, by means of metamorphoses and transmigrations, metarealism aims at recuperating a reality principle in distress— at saving the real almost fully effaced by decades of communist manipulations and dogmas. Rather than denying our access to the world, metarealism, I will thus assert, ensures its multivoiced enunciation. As it effects dynamic intercourse with actual and transcendental worlds, metarealism heralds the recuperation of the belief in our capacity to refer to the various levels of reality and converse with the cosmic infinitude of the universe.

3. A poetry of the threshold: Ol’ga Sedakova’s Vrata, Okna, Arki (Gateways, Windows, Arches) As we look back at the history of Russian literature, metarealism emerges as the convalescence of reality from its brutal incapacitation in the art of socialist realism, which attempted to transform the estate of the real in compliance with the ideals of the communist world. Words, in socialist realism, did not refer to and reflect the facts of real life, but strived, instead, to give birth to and dictate the world. From the viewpoint of semiotics, the signifiers in such works served as command signals for reality, while the signifieds were extirpated and altogether redundant. In contrast to the art of socialist realism, Russian metarealism may be termed a poetry of suprasignification, a practice that grants absolute precedence to the signified. Words, in metarealist poetry, form links with numerous realities and express the rich and multi-nuanced meanings that reside in them. It is precisely such a sense of overflow and surplus of signification that we find conveyed by Sedakova, in one of the poems of her verse collection Vrata, Okna, Arki (Врата, Окна, Арки): В каждой печальной вещи есть перстень или записка,

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как в условленных дуплах. В каждом слове есть дорога, путь унылый и страстный.27 (In every wistful object/a ring or note is hidden,/as in a pre-agreed tree hollow./ From every word a route emerges,/a path despondent and impassioned.)

The poem reflects on the multi-layered structure of the word as determining its wide range of possible meanings. The word sets the beginning of a route that, in the semiogenesis of Sedakova’s work, evolves as both “despondent” and “impassioned.” The richness of signification contained within each word is being paralleled to the semantic message of material objects that waits to be uncovered and deciphered much like a note concealed into the hollow of a tree. This emphasis on the word as a rich reservoir of available meanings has prompted critics, such as Valentina Polukhina, for instance, to note a similarity between the art of Sedakova and that of the Acmeist poets, whose works explore the infinite potentials of the word. As Polukhina observes, Sedakova follows Mandel’shtam and Acmeist poetics in her treatment of language: for her, the most important thing in poetry is the word, the word per se, the word as name; it is more important, she insists, than syntax, versification or tropes. All in all, the poem, in her opinion, serves the word, so that each individual word realizes the full range of its etymological and phonetic potential, its potential for ambivalence of meaning.28

Or, as Sedakova herself declares, “What does excite me is the intensity of a word, its semantic, phonetic, grammatical strength, and it is there that I see new possibilities.”29 Not by chance, Sedakova acknowledges that “The most powerful influence of my [her] youth was Mandel’shtam.”30 “It was as if he were passing judgement,” Sedakova explains. “What could one write after that? It was not a matter of writing post-Auschwitz, as they say now, but of writing post-Mandel’shtam…”31 The striking commonality between the Metarealist school and that of Acmeist poetics has been perceived by Andrew Wachtel and Alexei Parshchikov as well. While these critics do not label the innovative poets they introduce as “metarealists,” but simply refer to them as “nonconceptualists,”32 they single out as their key characteristic the same incessant drive for reinventing language that formed the core of Acmeist poetics. As Wachtel and Parshchikov explain, Each and every thing or situation [in the poetry of “nonconceptualists”] was renamed: Adam’s task was taken on anew. Indeed, it is significant that this loosely connected group of poets felt a tie to the Russian acmeists (through the work of Mandelstam and Arsenii Tarkovsky), a group that was originally dubbed “Adamists” by one of its founders, and had also attempted in their poetry to rename the concrete external world. Thus, what these young poets valued most of all was the idiosyncratic world produced by the poet’s language—his or her personal world.33

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Metarealism invites a provocative parallel with yet another major literary school, the school of Symbolism.34 Sharing pronounced religious and philosophical aspirations, both symbolism and metarealism embody the search for another, higher, metaphysical world beyond the estate of our humdrum everyday existence. This metaphysical reality could be attained, as Charles Baudelaire expressed it in Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, “à travers la poésie” (through poetry). Baudelaire created the image of the poet as a seer, a prophet, who could see beyond the tangible, material world to the world of pure ideas.35 The task of the symbolist poet became to create this “other,” transcendental world by means of metaphor and symbol, by using concrete images that correspond to abstract essences and forms in the ideal meta-world. Thus, the symbolists would be able to transcend the material, earthly existence and penetrate the realm of the eternal truth, the sacred world of God. Metarealist poets express the same longing for going beyond the confines of the everyday into a sublime metaphysical world. While the symbolists, however, insist on juxtaposing the earthly reality here to the eternal spiritual world beyond, the metarealists profess an optimistic monism, wedding the quotidian, perceptual existence to a life in a metaphysical beyond. Transcendental worlds in metarealism become incorporated, on terms equal to those of any other reality, into the multifaceted body of our universe. As Mikhail Epstein observes, Metarealism is not a negation of realism, but its expansion into the realm of things unseen, a complication of the very notion of realism, revealing its multidimensionality, irreducible to the level of physical and psychological verisimilitude and including a higher, metaphysical reality…. That which we are accustomed to call “realism,” narrowing the breadth of that concept, is the realism of only one reality, the social reality of day-to-day existence that directly surrounds us….36

The expansion of referentiality beyond the scope of any single reality is how one might encapsulate the primary agenda of Sedakova’s verse collection Vrata, Okna, Arki. My subsequent analysis focuses on a poem in the collection that Sedakova chose to leave untitled, as if unwilling to limit within a single name the interminable flux of mutually transforming identities.37 The poem dramatizes the heroine’s incompetence and inability to transcend the limits of the body and initiate communication with higher, consummate realities. This personal tragedy and the eloquently rendered futility of all attempts to overcome it define the poem’s central theme. Despite the poetic persona’s desperate desire to fathom worlds transcending ours, she remains as sterile as a rose incapable of blooming and glancing beyond the illusory microcosm enclosed by its petals: Их легкая душа цветет в Элизии, а здесь не знает, как выглянуть из тесных лепестков, как показать цветенье без причины и музыку, разредившию звук….38

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(Their ethereal soul/in Elysium bursts out in blossom, but here knows not/how to peep out of the tightly closed petals,/how to reveal its causeless florescence/and show the music, rarefying the sound….)

As evinced in the poem, human language and reason can only aspire to, but never attain, the knowledge they are striving after. Indeed, Plato himself postulated a strict separation between the realm of knowledge and truth, in which ideas reside, and the world of opinion, or Doxa. It was Plato’s belief that only through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, we might be empowered to obtain knowledge. Similar was the belief of “transcendental” symbolism, based on the “transcendental” concept, elaborated by the neo-Platonists in the third century and given, by Swedenborg, considerable vogue in the eighteenth century. It also posited a universal and ideal world of which the real world was just a shadow, and argued that the knowledge of this “other” world could be attained through the perfection of the soul, this time, however, as achieved in poetry. In Sedakova’s work, the Creator remains the only one who possesses the ineffable knowledge of existence. People can only endeavor, but repeatedly fail, in their attempts to grasp the abstruse meaning of reality: Ни разум мой и ни глухой язык, а знаю, никогда не прикоснутся к тому, чего хотят. Не в этом дело. Мы все, мой друг, достойный состраданья хотя бы за попытку. Кто нас создал, тот скажет, почему мы таковы, и сделает, какими пожелает.39 (Neither my reason nor my muffled language,/I know, will ever touch/what they’ve been striving after. But this is not the point./We all, my friend, are worthy of compassion/if only for our attempt. He who created us/will say why we are such,/and make us as he wishes.)

The poem embodies a distinctly religious strand that runs through all of Sedakova’s work. Not by chance, the poetry of Sedakova has been regarded as “metaphysically and theologically thought-provoking” and as a powerful “demonstration of the beauty of faith.”40 A more in-depth inquiry into the religious implications of Sedakova’s works reveals that religion, to Sedakova, is a very broad and comprehensive concept, and that it certainly cannot be limited to any single school or tradition. As Catriona Kelly observes, “… if Sedakova’s mysticism can draw on Orthodoxy as a convenient and domestic repository of the spiritual, she is equally at home with Western spirituality (as the reference to St. Francis suggests), or Oriental traditions (which are, as one would expect, worked into ‘A Chinese Journey’).”41 It seems that religion to Sedakova is a particular sensibility and attitude to the universe, an internal wisdom in approaching the phenomena of the world.

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In the verses discussed above, the religious theme is expressed through the poet’s recognition of a higher creative force as the only agent that begets life and holds the knowledge of the universe. The poetic persona recognizes the omnipotence of this force and withdraws, struck by the futility of language and reason to gain access to the higher truth. Apart from its religious implications, the poem is distinctly philosophical in character. Sedakova’s extreme erudition prompts her to pose a vital epistemological problem: how do we know something to be true; is it possible at all to attain truth?

Metabolic transfigurations Sedakova’s poem introduces a multiplicity of metamorphoses: the “desert of life” (pustynia zhizni) becomes a “lighted house” (osveshchennyi dom)—a garden of wistful roses (sad pechal’nykh roz): В пустыне жизни… Что я говорю, В kakoй пустыне? В освещенном доме, где сходятся друзья и говорят о том, что следует сказать…. В саду у дружелюбных, благотворных, печальных роз….42 (In the desert of life … What am I saying?/In what desert? In the lighted house,/ where friends gather and talk/of that which ought to be said…./In the garden of amicable, beneficial,/wistful roses….)

The interrelations between the desert of life, the lighted house, and the garden of roses reflect the copious crossings-over among the various levels of reality. In their inherently transfigurational capacity, these poetic figures seem to subvert all familiar literary definitions and are nowhere to be found in the catalog of tropes. Each one of them incessantly becomes the other and, in deconstructing the fundamental distinction between the literal and the figurative, violates the conventional criteria allowing metaphors to operate. The garden of roses functions neither metaphorically nor metonymically. The desert of life is neither like the garden of roses, nor like the lighted house—nor are these realities interchangeable on the basis of any common affiliation. The lighted house is a garden of roses, just as it is the desert of life—there is no inviolable border between them. Any differentiation between the house, the garden, and the desert appears impossible when metaboles define the rules of the poetic field. With the metabole, as postulated by Mikhail Epstein, “One thing is not simply similar or corresponding to another, which presupposes an indestructible border between them, the artistic predication and illusory quality of such juxtaposition; rather one thing becomes the other.”43 An agent of this vigorous becoming, the metabole renders our simultaneous presence in the garden of roses, visiting everyone, and in the desert of our life, engrossed in utter solitude, altogether justifiable: “… в саду у роз,/в гостях у всех—и все таки в пустыне,/в пустыне

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нашей жизни….” “… in the garden of roses,/a guest of everyone—and yet, in the desert,/in the desert of our life….”44 In Sedakova’s poem, despite the heroine’s innermost wish to impede it, a fullscale metamorphosis occurs, and the garden of roses is transformed into a desert of life. Sedakova’s poem epitomizes how the so-far-fixed and unequivocal realities are supplanted by the unstable, continually slipping “and” state of in-betweenness of things. The poem’s reality is not definitive and stable. No secure reality exists at all. Realities emerge in the continuously evolving chain of this, and that, and another meaning, as a constant transcendence of previous quality, governed by an insatiable passion for becoming. “All of Sedakova’s poetry could be called, if we select for it the most concise single term, poetry of transformation,” Epstein suggests.45 The agent of this vigorous transformation, the metabole, ceaselessly captures the flowing of reality and produces between the textual layers assemblages that pilot new realities, nuclei that give birth to novel entities.46

Imagery of the threshold “If only it were otherwise….” (A esli by ne tak….) Sedakova’s poem contemplates an alternative development, which, though rendered in the subjunctive rather than present indicative mood, incites a whole new chain of becomings.47 The poetic persona has discovered the abode in which music and florescence dwell. The “inaudible music” (neslyshnaia muzyka) from the poem’s first section now gathers and transforms the “desert of life” into a celestial paradise, a home of “constellations, musical sequences, and burning interweavings of happiness” (sozvezd’ia, tsepi,/goriashchie perepleten’ia schast’ia). The formerly impotent body becomes a unified whole with transcendental reality, absorbing its absolute harmony through a rhizomatic coupling of the divine keyboard and the lyric heroine’s hand: “Глубокая, покойная рука/лежала б сильно, впитывая все/из клавишей….” “Profound and calm, the hand/would powerfully lie, absorbing everything/from the keys….”48 An unsuspected twist in Sedakova’s poem, however, briskly returns us to the real world. The subject’s unified-with-the-universe body becomes a groaning, mutilated body, suffering a parting (razluka): “… Да, эта была б лучше,/чем жестяные жалобы разлуки/и совести больной … Я так боюсь.” “… Yes, this would’ve been better/than the harsh complaints of separation/and of my unhealthy conscience … I am so very scared.”49 Then, in the whirlpool of becomings, another change occurs, inaugurated by a brief transitional line: “Но правда ведь, какая-то неправда/в таких стенаньях?” “But isn’t it also true, that there’s some untruth/in such a moaning?”50 A new transfiguration helps transgress the female lyric speaker’s lonely hermitage: the body, the abode of the “invaluable creature” (bestsennoe sozdan’e) nestles the destitute repentance, which thereby becomes a melody of beauty, grace, and mercy: “… и, как в меха, в бесценное созданье/раскаянье закутать, чтоб оно/не коченело—бедное, чужое … /А шло себе и шло, как красота,/мелодия из милости и силы” “… And, as in wine-skin, in this invaluable creature,/wrap up repentance,/so that it/does not

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grow numb—alien and poor … /But goes on and on, like beauty,/a melody of mercy and of power.”51 The ever-flowing, buoyant intensities reverberating in Sedakova’s poem frustrate a congealing into a stable representational whole and preclude any possibility for arresting a climax. Much in this line, Gregory Bateson, the originator of the concept of textual plateau, uses it to designate “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.”52 Metarealist poetry could thus be viewed as a system dealing with intensities and medialities, an internal communication of plateaus sustaining a number of involute links. Everything in metarealism undergoes a constant metamorphosis. Its plateaus, however, are situated “always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end.”53 As if to subvert any possibility for imposing representational limits, metarealism embarks on sustaining a world of continuous evolution and transfiguration. Every kind of change seems attainable and desired; one can dream the impossible dream of acquiring any cherished identity. Likewise, Sedakova’s loving lullaby promises a transmutation into anything the caged bird ever craved to be: poor or rich, a sea wave or God’s angel: Спи—говорит—голубчик, кем захочешь, тем и проснешься: хочешь, бедным, хочешь, богатым, хочешь—морской волной, хочешь—ангелом Господним.54 (Go to sleep—it says—my dear,/You’ll wake up whoever you wish to be:/If you like—poor; if you like—rich;/If you like—a sea wave,/If you like—God’s angel.)

This short poem by Sedakova, composed in the plain words of a baby lullaby, embodies one of the most representative features of her poetic style—the exquisite simplicity with which she communicates her lofty ideas of the spiritual and the divine. The lack of technical elaborateness in the works of Sedakova is one of the main distinctions between her style and what we will see presents the style of Shvarts. In the words of Polukhina, “Sedakova’s poetry embodies a rare nobility and sublime simplicity. Although beautifully crafted, her poems are in many ways poor and ascetic: that is to say, as a technician, she is much less interesting than Elena Shvarts. But that is not her purpose. Her poetry offers a wonderful spiritual expansion, elevation….”55 Indeed the simple and repetitive words, comprising Sedakova’s lullaby, suggest unequaled prospects for spiritual and corporal expansion. The unencumbered transformational activity, enacted on the body and the spirit, reveals that, in the poetry of metarealism, all major textual developments take place on the threshold. Engrossed in the attempt to go beyond our everyday reality, we often fail to detect the line that separates our earthly world from the divine, spiritual abode. As Mark Lipovetskii, discussing the poetry of Zhdanov, suggests: “The border separating the chaos, seething with life, from the chasm of non-existence is imperceptible—‘we

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stand on the threshold, without knowing it is a threshold.’ ”56 The threshold is a point of crisis, of radical turns, new beginnings, or drastic collapses. Vrata, Okna, Arki, refuting any stable reality, marks precisely these points—the moments of undecidability and liminality, of openness to any process of becoming and reluctance to abide by the dogmas of already established, finalized definitions of reality. Implicit in the very title of Sedakova’s verse collection Vrata, Okna, Arki (Gateways, Windows, Arches), the borderline imagery emerges as revealing testimony that things, in metarealism, always function on the threshold of becoming something else, of being born anew and totally transfigured.

4. Deterritorializing into new realities: Elena Shvarts’s Lotsiya nochi (Sailing Directions of the Night) The dynamic transformations that take place in metarealist poetry, the neverceasing flux and reflux of metarealist poetic entities, evoke the processes of de- and re-territorialization, as described by the philosophers and critics Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They introduce the concept of deterritorialization in their definition of assemblages (assemblage of enunciation and machinic assemblage) as having “both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.”57 Deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “is the movement by which ‘one’ leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight,” beyond which nothing can retain its former quality, autonomy, and self.58 Reterritorialization, on the other hand, “does not express a return to the territory, but rather these differential relations internal to D[eterritorialization] itself, this multiplicity internal to the line of flight,” yet unable to traverse it.59 The concepts of de- and re-territorialization, I would argue, reflect the manifold becomings that occur in Russian metarealist poetry and reveal the processes it registers as nomadic, transformational in character. Within the poems that comprise Shvarts’s verse collection Lotsiya nochi, the identity of the poetic persona is persistently deterritorialized into new dimensions. In “Simbioz” (“Symbiosis”), for example, the heroine is depicted in her self-identifications with the soul of a dying oak-tree and with the spirit of her poetic lyre that has been doomed to death: Симбиоз Нету моей замшелой лиры Дуба, что рос здесь на Черной речке, Его спилили, срубили, спилили, И не поставишь даже и свечки. Нету для дерева рая, нет и могилы, И когда впилось острые пилы в нежно-шершавое и беспомощное тело,

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The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry Мне приснилось, что со скалы В пропасть я полетела. То ль душа его прилетела Со мною навеки проститься, То ли в смертной тоске хотела За душу мою уцепиться… Нету лиры замшелой, А душу она исцеляла, У нее глаза были, Ум был у нее. Приносила я в жертву вино и монеты, Два серебряных там зарывала браслета, И она меня обнимала, лечила, как увидит—всеми листьями ахнет. Грубо нас разлучили, Разделили—и я умираю и чахну.60 (Symbiosis // My moss-covered lyre no longer exists,/The oak-tree that grew here, at the Black rivulet,/They sawed it off, cut it down, sawed it off,/And even candles one cannot set on it./No paradise for trees exists, not even a grave,/And when the saw blade stuck into/The tender-rough and helpless body,/I dreamed that from a cliff/I flew headlong over a precipice./Did the oak-tree’s soul come flying/To bid me farewell forever,/Or did it in its mortal pang desire/To catch hold of my spirit … /The moss-covered lyre is no longer here,/And my soul she used to cure,/She had eyes,/She had a mind./In sacrifice, I used to bring her wine and coins,/Two silver bracelets did I bury there,/And she embraced me, and she healed me,/And at my very sight, in all her leaves exclaimed she./They rudely parted us,/They separated us—and I am dying now and pining.)

The poem opens with a statement announcing the disrupted existence of a peculiar “moss-covered” lyre: “Netu moei zamsheloi liry.”61 Unlike any ordinary lyre, the musical instrument that Shvarts describes is rhizomatically connected, through its interwoven moss, with the natural and living universe rather than the man-made world. Indeed, in Shvarts’s poetry, objects and phenomena of both the material and spiritual world are frequently interlinked with Nature and often become Nature. As Darra Goldstein observes in her essay “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” “Shvarts’s personae long to find a place in the natural order of things. They undergo marvelous metamorphoses to grow closer to the natural world, becoming shaggy with fur like a bear or prickly with sedge grass.”62 On a similar note, discussing the transformational activity in Shvarts’s “Vtoroe puteshestvie Lisy na severo-zapad” (“The Second Journey of the Fox to the North-West,” 1988), Kuritsyn makes the following remark on Alexander Kushner’s introduction to the book: “Vot odna velikolepnaia ogovorka Kushnera: ‘v stikhotvorenii ‘Kniga na okne’ ‘… lezhashchaia na podokonnike Bibliya perekhodit iz tsarstva dukha v tsarstvo prirody, kak budto udocheriaetsia eiu, stanovitsia sama iavleniem prirody, tsvetushchim kustom, privlekaiushchim pchel…’; ogovorka v etom

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‘kak budto’—ne ‘kak budto’ udocheriaetsia i stanovitsia, a deistvitel’no stanovitsia.” “Here is an excellent reservation regarding Kushner’s words: in the poem ‘A Book at the Window,’ the Bible, ‘lying on the window-sill, passes from the realm of the spirit to the realm of Nature, as if adopting Nature, as if becoming itself a phenomenon of Nature, a blossoming bush, attracting bees…’; the reservation consists in this ‘as if ’—not ‘as if ’ adopting and becoming, but really becoming.”63 In “Simbioz,” right after Shvarts depicts the lyre as having unified with and become a part of Nature, and having her existence prematurely abolished, we stumble into the disclosure of another death—this time, of a mysterious oak-tree: “Duba, chto ros zdes’ na Chernoi rechke,/Ego spilili, srubili, spilili,/I ne postavish’ dazhe i svechki.” Thus, in the swirl of only a moment, the wooden corpse of the pristine, “moss-covered” lyre deterritorializes into a severely dismembered oak-tree. If this transformation is particularly critical, it is because of the peculiar meanings that Shvarts, in her poetry, attributes to the image of the tree. “Trees particularly are kindred to the soul,” Goldstein remarks, discussing the function of trees in the poems of Shvarts. “This kinship is based on the fundamentally cruciform shape of both human and tree, which suggests that both can endure suffering but also experience redemption.”64 Interestingly, many Russian writers, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev, and Zabolotskii, have used oak-trees, in particular, to represent the same themes of death and life, rebirth and metaphysical reincarnation that operate in Shvarts’s “Simbioz.”65 In “Simbioz,” the death of the poetical persona is ushered in by multiplicity of intermediate becomings. The story of the oak-tree’s murder reveals the deterritorialization of the dying tree into a dying human soul, a heroine that plunges headlong into a bottomless and terminal abyss: “I kogda vpilos’ ostrye pily/v nezhnoshershavoe i bespomoshchnoe telo,/mne prisnilos’, chto so skaly/v propast’ ia poletela.” The deterritorializing process takes place on a neutral site, a “tender-rough and helpless body” (nezhno-shershavoe i bespomoshchnoe telo), as the author points out, not designating through a pronoun the bodily possession. We easily assume that this is the oak-tree’s body, as it has been the oak-tree’s life that we have mourned (“Netu dlia dereva raia, net i mogily”), and, to this point, have not even met the lyric speaker of the poem. What strikes us as an unforeseen development is the abrupt displacement of the direct object “it” (ego), through which the tree so far has been described as the victim of slaying and death (“Ego spilili, srubili, spilili”), by the surprising pronoun “I” (ia) as the syntactic subject of a structure that plots the female speaker as the agent of a destructive death-bound action (“v propast’ ia poletela”). This utterly surprising substitution suggests a symbiosis of the two distinct and very different bodies, joined by their fate to die, into a common and inseparable one. Alongside the transformations defining the corporeal level, a symbiosis on the level of spirituality takes place. Shvarts implies the possibility that, in its concluding moments, the dying tree’s soul strives to seize the female speaker’s spirit and reunite with it before the final farewell: “To l’ dusha ego priletela/So mnoiu naveki prostit’sia,/ To li v smertnoi toske khotela/Za dushu moiu utsepit’sia….” Immediately after the portrayal of this imaginary merging, we hear once again the ominous refrain, “The moss-covered lyre is no longer here” (Netu liry zamsheloi), and witness, through a painful reminiscence, the story of the blissful former union and mutually dependent

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coexistence of the poetic self and her devoted lyre, which now acquires human features: “A dushu ona istseliala/u neë glaza byli,/Um byl u neë./Prinosila ia v zhertvu vino i monety/Dva serebrianykh tam zaryvala brasleta,/I ona menia obnimala, lechila,/ kak uvidit—vsemi list’iami akhnet.” The poem’s finale unveils the heroine’s innermost yearning for reinstating that ecstatic condition of union, this time, however, within the mystic embrace of impending death: “Grubo nas razluchili,/Razdelili—i ia umiraiu i chakhnu.”66 While in my analysis of “Simbioz” I have referred to the various reincarnations of the heroine in terms of deterritorialization, they all remain internal to the territory claimed by her persona. The deterritorialization of the female lyric speaker into her defunct poetic lyre is overlaid by compensatory reterritorializations, obstructing the line of flight and blocking the creation of a new poetic entity. In “Simbioz,” the heroine seems never to have fully transcended her identity and supplanted it by a qualitatively new one. The full-fledged metamorphosis of her character into a novel one is always undermined, internally subverted. The intimate interrelation between the female lyric speaker and her loyal lyre remains a symbiotic union. And symbiosis is not yet an event of absolute deterritorialization. It is a state of shared existence and mutual interdependence, but still of separate, distinct identities, not thoroughly united and indistinguishably merged in one. Sometimes, however, the articulateness of the lyric entities preserved in “Simbioz” becomes supplanted by an interpenetration of mutually transformable identities. A work by Shvarts, entitled “Хьюмби” (“Kh’iumbi” or “Humbe,” deriving from the English “human being,” as Shvarts herself explains), unfolds the magical world of such metamorphoses. The subtitle of “Kh’iumbi,” “Prakticheskii ocherk evoliutsionnogo alkhimizma” (“Практический очерк еволюционного алхимизма”/ “A Practical Outline of Evolutionary Alchemism”) sets the tone for the miraculous changes that follow. Related by Shvarts, they acquire the following shape: Вот алхимический процесс: В мозгу у Хьюмби созревает Вольшебный камень. Но это очень долго длится, Уже и крылья прорастают, Уж хьюмби полуптицы, Кентаврики с другим лицом….67 (Here is an alchemical process:/In the brain of Humbe/A magic stone matures./ But this lasts for a very long time,/Already wings are sprouting too,/And Humbes, indeed, are already half-birds,/centaurs with a different face….)

By force of a mystical alchemical process, Humbe is transfigured into a half-bird and, simultaneously, a centaur. The odd humanoid being forms a common body with the bodies of the two mysterious creatures. In this new corporeal shape, the bird, the centaur, and the eerie human being become interconnected, through a rhizome, by a multiplicity of routes and paths.68 While the conversion of the human body into a

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body sprouting wings and having, at the same time, the features of a centaur, evinces, no doubt, the impact of deterritorialization, the latter fails to unfold in full swing and gain its ultimate and irreversible dimensions. The lack of full-dress transformational activity still leaves residual components and points of return to Humbe’s previous identity. Deterritorialization picks up utmost power within the texture of another work by Shvarts, “Temnyi angel” (“Dark Angel”).69 The poem illustrates the most extreme variety of transformation—the case of absolute deterritorialization. “Temnyi angel” traces how the heroine is thoroughly transformed into a novel entity, that is, how her principal identity traverses and transcends “the line of flight or deterritorialization,” which, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, presents “the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.”70 At the line of flight, some realities disseminate and pulverize; others congeal, precipitate, and crystallize. Here is how “Temnyi angel” renders the thrust of absolute deterritorialization: Темный ангел Проникновенье пара в пар (А сонная душа есть дым непрочный) Иль может быть—всего порочней. Как бы повтаряя паденье, Ангел свалился с небес, И, в темное облако слившись, Кружили мы под потолком. И кости мои растворились, И кровь превратилась в ихор. Чужим ли крылом, заемным Я пробовала взмахнуть. Долго во мне он копался Как будто зерно искал, В котором вся сладость земная И тайна,—и не отыскал.71 (Dark Angel // The penetration of the exhalation into steam/(the drowsy soul is fragile smoke)/More innocent than anything,/Perhaps—most sinful of all./As if reenacting the Fall,/An Angel fell down from Heaven,/And, merging together into a dark cloud,/We whirled round under the ceiling./And my bones dissolved,/ And my blood turned to ichor./Did I try to flap, using/Other’s, borrowed wings./ He searched through me for a long time –/As if looking for the grain,/Which holds all the earthly sweetness/And the mystery,—and never found it.)

Since its opening line, “The penetration of the exhalation into steam,” “Temnyi angel” submerges the reader in a universe of vigorous and dynamic becomings. In its extraordinary transformational capacity, this poem is a wonderful example of the exceptional dynamics, the perpetual movement characteristic of Shvarts’s poetry. As Kuritsyn observes, “ves’ mir [Shvarts]—v beskonechnom neostanovivom dvizhenii….

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Vse u Shvarts letit, plyvet, peretekaet odno v drugoe” “all of Shvarts’s world is in an endless, unstoppable movement…. All in Shvarts flies, swims, overflows one thing into the other.”72 Reflecting on the all-inclusiveness of these dynamic metamorphic processes, the critic explicates: Ia, vprochem, tak chasto povtoriaiu “vse letit”, chto zakonomeren vopros: vse—eto chto? Vse—eto VSE…. Angel i medved’, sad i sadovnik, Kitai, Rim, Peterburg, Chernaia rechka, Ilia i Moisei, Adam i Iona, Venetsiia i Iudif ’, segodnia i vchera—vse zhivet v etoi real’nosti na ravnykh pravakh, vstupaia v neozhidonnye sviazi i stol’ zhe neozhidanno razryvaias’, meniaias’ mestami, sovpodaia i ne sovpodaia…. I, by the way, repeat so frequently “all flies,” that it is legitimate to ask: what is this all? All—this means ALL…. The angel and the bear, the garden and the gardener, China, Rome, and Petersburg, the Black rivulet, Ilia and Moses, Adam and Iona, Venice and Iudif, today and tomorrow—all lives on equal terms in this reality, entering unexpected connections, and so unexpectedly blowing up, exchanging places, coinciding and not coinciding….73

In Shvarts’s “Temnyi angel,” this process of a mutual conversion and becoming is manifested in the deterritorialization of the lyric speaker’s “drowsy soul” (sonnaia dusha) into divine and “fragile” (neprochnyi) steam. This primary metamorphosis only sets the scene for the prolific chain of transmutations yet to come. The poem then proceeds through re-enactment of the Fall and pictures the descent to Earth of one of Heaven’s angels. A most miraculous transfigurement occurs. Through metabole, the poet renders the conversion of the angel in a human being, and of the human lyric heroine into an angelic creature. This full-fledged transmutation presents a case of absolute deterritorialization. It is absolute in that it holds the power to balance and to offset all forces of compensatory reterritorializations, that is, all efforts to reclaim and reestablish the primary quality. The metamorphoses depicted in the poem are thoroughgoing and full-scale in nature—all characteristics of the former selves melt down, all boundaries become abolished, and a completely unified identity is born. “[M]y bones dissolved,/And my blood turned to ichor” (I kosti moi rastvorilis’,/i krov’ prevratilas’ v ikhor), the female lyric speaker testifies to her miraculous conversion. The body of the female speaker opens up to fuse together with the angel’s body. Her blood, as metabole conveys the process, transforms into the blood of gods, into celestial and godly ichor. The lyric speaker thus becomes a fallen angel. No boundary between the two exists; no differentiation seems achievable or possible.74 The heroine no longer can retain her formerly inviolable and safe autonomy. She is inseparable from the angel’s soul and body, her spirit flying, spreading out the angel’s wings: “Chuzhim li krylom, zaemnym/ia probovala vzmakhnut.” The angel, on his part, dives into the human body and rummages in it to find the hidden truth: “Dolgo vo mne on kopalsia/kak budto zerno iskal,/V kotorom vsia sladost’ zemnaia/I

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taina,—i ne otyskal.” The female speaker and the angel have become a new, and utterly oblivious of its preceding selves, identity: “I, v temnoe obloko slivshis’,/Kruzhili my pod potolkom.” The process of convergence has involved a deterritorializing element (the lyric speaker’s self) and a deterritorialized one (the body/spirit of the fallen angel). The latter are assigned two asymmetric roles, but as components of a single transformation, as quanta of a single flow and undivided transmutation. The miraculous transubstantiation of the female speaker of this poem into a divine, angelic creature is among the many religious motifs in Shvarts’s poetry. The works of Shvarts display a distinct orientation toward religious questions and themes. In the words of the poet herself, “I’ve been somehow drawn to God since I was a child.”75 “The only things that have ever really interested me are poetry and theology, separately and together.”76 Similarly to Sedakova, Shvarts has refused to be confined by any single faith or religious tradition. Instead, her work interconnects and mixes a number of different belief systems and religions. As Michael Molnar remarks, “Though she is a believer, she is far from (Russian, or any other) orthodoxy. On the contrary, …her faith is heterodox and heretical … .”77 And her poetry is much richer for that.

5. Conclusion This chapter has attempted to reveal the main characteristics of metarealism through the analysis of works by Krivulin and two of its foremost female representatives— Sedakova and Shvarts. The poetry of Krivulin has demonstrated the same sensitivity to the traumatic shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society that we have observed in the works of conceptualist authors. Part of the unofficial poetry of Russia, the works of Sedakova and Shvarts were also conceived in response to the oppression of official Soviet culture and were first published in Russia only after communism ended.78 On the basis of the intensely metaphysical orientation of their oeuvre, both Sedakova and Shvarts have been regarded as virtually synonymous with religious poetry, but both of them have ardently refused to be constrained by this limited definition. Sharing a range of themes, the poetry of Shvarts and Sedakova explores the lyric speaker’s inescapable mortality and her uncertain habitation in the universe, the pain and lonesomeness she often feels amidst the overwhelming cosmic chaos, but, first and foremost, her spiritual quest—her yearning for a better world, in which the soul can be renewed and born to life again. The journey to this heavenly abode, however, is rendered in distinctly different ways within the works of Shvarts and Sedakova. Sedakova’s poetry is deep, profound, and simple. The rhyming scheme she uses rarely surprises. Her works reject all false pretense and artifice, and delve, instead, into the age-old meanings. She stays detached and distanced from the reader to whom her broodings have a metaphysical dimension and who is rarely allowed to feel her pain. The poetry of Shvarts, conversely, feels like it overflows with feelings and emotions.79 The style of Shvarts is noticeably more exuberant, and she is freer in the mode of her expression. Shvarts frequently changes themes and rhythms, and loves to launch experiments with imagery and metrics.80

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Thus, although both the poets work with similar religious concepts and material, some critics, such as Kelly, for example, regard the poetry of Sedakova, in its internal, hermeneutic intricacy, as closer to the modernist tradition, and that of Shvarts, in its eclectic, vibrant quality—as reminiscent of the postmodern one.81 The chapter has suggested that a major commonality in the poetic works of metarealist writers is the continuous enactment of deterritorialization and becoming, resulting in the ceaseless birth of novel, long-desired universes. I have endeavored to reveal that, in the genesis of worlds so manifold, kaleidoscopic, and profuse, the mourning over the loss of reality yields to the unequaled pleasure of conversing with multiple realities. Through its engagement in an endless process of metamorphosis and transformation, the works of metarealism, I have argued, broaden the scope of reference, interconnecting, in a rhizomatic fashion, the multiplicity of possible and real worlds. The constant fostering of bonds between phenomenal and metaphysical realities produces myriad referential axes, thus rendering the striving after a singular and textually stable referent naïve and fully obsolete. Rather than fixed and univocal, reality irresistibly flows as dynamic and multiple; rather than confined to the phenomenal or metaphysical realm, it feels excessively empowered to engender myriad symbioses between them. In the conditions of an overstimulated reference genesis, proclaiming the postmodern demise of reference appears highly preposterous. Man holds an unparalleled power to refer to the world, which in itself virilely proliferates. In the preceding chapters, I have attempted to analyze Russian metarealism and conceptualism as paragons of two approaches in our discourse with reality that are dissimilar in style but intricately linked thematically. Metarealism exhibits the incentive to comprehend all dimensions of reality, the quotidian world here and the transcendental realm beyond. In contrast, the conceptualist work is often blatantly defiant to comprehensibility, reporting unassimilated, trauma-born realities, secluded from the rational mind. Largely banned in the Soviet Union because of the abundance of Biblical motifs and absence of civic themes, metarealist poetry strives to compensate for a former lack of reality (the repressed religious reality in the era of communism). The compensatory gesture is a vigorous production of realities, in which man’s innermost longings can finally come true. While metarealism offsets a lack of reality, conceptualism deals with a surplus of historical material that has unexpectedly blinded the subject and traumatized his or her mind. It counters the engendering, productive potential of metarealism, restoring reality to its pristine diversity and amplitude, with a pressing compulsion to do away with reality, to relieve the subject from the anomalous historical burden that has overpowered his mind, to heal and dehistoricize the brain. Conceptualism and metarealism thus mark the two antithetical poles on the scale of contemporary Russian poetics, the stylistic boundaries within which postmodern poetry strives to restore the pristine polyphony of our multifaceted world and vindicate the prestige formerly allotted to referentiality.

Part Two

Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in Postmodern American Poetry: The Testimonies of Language Writing

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The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry

The gesture of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E has always been a wide gesture: the relation of writing to reference, the relation of writing to politics and support for a “languagecenteredness” that refuses to take for granted the habitual linguistic “givens” of vocabulary, grammar and the ideological “neutrality” and critical inviolability of meaning.1 Steve McCaffery

1. The meanings of Language poetry In the previous chapters, we have probed into the problem of referentiality in postmodern poetry and art from the perspective of Russian conceptualism and metarealism, and have advanced the belief that, rather than sequestered from reality, these schools record the traumatizing impacts that marked the shift from communist to post-communist society. The following chapters will redirect our attention from the ideological disruptions in the Soviet paradigm to the sweeping technological advances redefining the Western (in particular, American) landscape. Focusing on Language poetry—a postmodern school that has been widely construed as self-referential, I will seek to dismantle the belief that it precludes our access to reality. Instead, I will aim to establish, the Language verses testify to the abrupt and unsuspected in its scale (thus psychologically traumatic) outset of post-industrial Information society. Language poetry originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s and a few years later in New York City2 as an heir to the tradition of the avant-garde. It succeeded such schools as modernism, the Surrealists, the Objectivists, Black Mountain, and the New York School, and shaped in opposition to the prevailing institutions of American poetry. Among the major venues in which the work of the Language poets appeared, in the 1970s and early 1980s, were the magazines Hills, Roof, This, Tottel’s, the “language” periodicals Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K, Poetics Journal, The Difficulties, as well as the small presses of Tuumba, Burning Deck, Sun & Moon. Some of the best known critical proclamations of the Language poets were published in Open Letter, Alcheringa and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978), a journal

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edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Presenting a comprehensive list of the Language poets seems challenging and perhaps inadequate, since it has always been questionable to what extent Language poetry can be seen as a group phenomenon. While, by the mid-1990s, “language writing”4 had become a widely accepted term, many Language poets agreed that “there was never any selfconsciously organized group known as the language writers or poets—not even a fixed name.”5 A “movement without specific manifestos or official membership”6 is how Perelman defines the Language group. “Subsequent publications would show that ‘the group’ was not often all that cohesive,” Perelman notes. [I]nfluence and interaction never produced a uniform literary program, let alone a university style. But there was a loose set of goals, procedures, habits, and verbal textures: breaking the automatism of the poetic “I” and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal devices; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to open the present to critique or change.7

Despite some common verbal practices, the Language movement thus did not appear as a cohesive group that shared uniform agenda and a consistent literary program. “A certain definitional miasma has arisen that has argued for a consistent school or movement in this body of work, but such imputed consistency is contradicted by the facts themselves,” Steve McCaffery contends.8 Despite their often analogous features, the Language works read as “an heterogenous body of writerly texts.”9 Still, there is a circle of writers whose similar poetic choices and artistic sensitivity associate them with what can be loosely defined as the Language group. Most prominent among them are Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, David Melnick, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Grenier, Stephen Rodefer, Peter Seaton, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Michael Palmer, Ray Di Palma, Tina Darragh, and Diane Ward. Any such list, however, would seem rather inadequate, as neither the critics nor the poets themselves have ever reached a consensus on who, in case it existed, would best represent the so-called Language group. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, broaches the view of Eliot Weinberger, who, attacking Language poetry in Sulfur, admits that he makes an exception of Clark Coolidge, Palmer, and Howe (seen by most to be closely associated with the Language school), on the grounds that “these are not really Language poets.”10 Evocative is also the case of the two analogous initial anthologies of Language poetry: Silliman’s work In The American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry and Douglas Messerli’s “Language” Poetries: An Anthology, and a later anthology, The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets, edited by Peter Ganick and Dennis Barone. Silliman’s anthology includes thirtyeight writers; he names seventy-nine more, ending the list with “and others.” At the same time, The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets does not present a single work that had appeared in Silliman’s or Messerli’s collection. This discrepancy, as well as the uncommonly large number of writers often associated with Language poetry, poses inevitable problems. “[T]he idea of an avant-garde becomes meaningless once it refers to at least one hundred and sixty writers in a single historical moment (and remember,

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Silliman is collating actual and potential inclusions only for two texts),” Alan Golding contends.11 “That avant-garde is close to the size of its mainstream Other,” the author concludes.12 Similarly, in her discussion of how viable the term “marginal” remains in relation to Language poetry, Lyn Hejinian asserts: “The language poets, for instance, are being taught all over the place. It’s not maybe the mainstreaming of the work, but it’s not by any stretch marginal.”13 As Golding sums it up, using a quote by Robert Dole that had appeared as front-page news: “The mainstreaming of deviancy has to be stopped.”14 Even the name of the Language school (I use “school” and, later on, “movement,” aware of the inherent fallacy of the terms) is hard to agree on and pin down. It is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing for Jerome McGann and Charles Altieri, and “Language Writing” for critics such as Jed Rasula who get rid of the equal signs to demonstrate disagreement with McGann’s institutionalization of the movement. Language writers themselves have been no more united in the terminology they adopt: “language” is invariably a part of the phrase that defines their movement (at times capitalized; with, but mostly without, equal signs); the second word of the phrase is most often “poetry,” but could sometimes as well appear as “writing” (e.g., Language Writing, in McCaffery).15 There is also “the language school,” “the language movement,” and the increasingly popular “so-called language writing.”16 Inconsistent are even the ways in which the same poets and critics refer to the movement. Perelman, for instance, uses “language poetry” and “language writing” interchangeably. Despite this difference in the terminology, however, there is a sense of a common underlying trait— an internal connection and similar preoccupation that all members of the Language movement share. I would broadly define it as an outright dismissal of self-expressive mainstream poetics and an interest in formal experimentation, which in their work directly relates to the contentious problem of reference. As McCaffery asserts, “While these writers form a very heterogeneous group, they share for the most part an interest in the question of reference, a question which they see as having its social and political as well as aesthetic consequences.”17

2. The rapprochement between Language writing and Russian postmodern poetry The relationship of the Language movement and Russian postmodern poetry has been the object of passionate discussions among theorists and poets alike.18 The Russian postmodernists have felt exclusively drawn to the works of the American postmodernist avant-garde. As Perloff recalls, at a reading at New Langton Street in 1992, when Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov were asked about the American poets who had influenced their work, the reply instantly provided by Parshchikov was “the language poets.”19 This feeling of affinity in the projects and mindset of the two postmodern trends is shared by the Language poets as well. Lyn Hejinian, along with some other poets associated with the Language group (Michael Palmer and Jean Day among them) have been the first to undertake translating the works

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of Russian postmodernists in English. Inspired by Russia, Clark Coolidge presented to the American public his forthcoming Russian Nights, while Hejinian, in close collaboration with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, wrote the travel book Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. Beyond the prominent thematic borrowings from Russian postmodern works, the Language poets explored and emulated some forms invented by the Russian writers. Notably, Hejinian’s Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991), for example, has been modeled on Pushkin’s novel-inverse Evgenii Onegin.20 In the mind of Vitaly Chernetsky, the pattern of this cultural exchange can be seen to extend to more authors and texts, as Language works such as Perelman’s “China,” for instance, resemble in form the “catalog” poems of the Russian conceptualist Rubinshtein. “And, to look in the realm of poetry,” Chernetsky inquires, “doesn’t, for example, such a specimen of American language poetry as Bob Perelman’s poem ‘China,’ which Fredric Jameson analyses in his essay ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ strikingly resemble ‘catalogs’ by the Russian conceptualist Lev Rubinshtein?”21 American poets and critics seem to be more reserved. To Perelman, comparing his “China” to some of Rubinshtein’s work seems emblematic of the space between contemporary Russian and American (U.S.) poetry. “Vitaly, when I read that ‘China’ ‘strikingly resembles’ Lev Rubinshtein’s catalogs, it feels like ‘quack’ where I expect ‘bow-wow.’ I.e., I’m at a loss to find much similarity to my own work.”22 While graciously acceding to Chernetsky’s views, Perloff also alerts to the problematic nature of the discussed parallels: “Vitaly Chernetsky is right, of course, to say that my remarks were superficial; indeed, I only wanted to raise an issue that had come up because certain parallels were being drawn between the ‘language’ poets and ‘new Russian’ poets that I found dubious and I was having a hard time finding a connection.”23 “Russian Postmodernism: an Oxymoron?” also signals Perloff ’s uneasiness about oversimplifying the analogies between the two postmodern schools: “… [T]he question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries [Language poetry and the ‘new Russian poetry’] are really as prominent as they are claimed to be.” Yet, Chernetsky insists on the existence of a common spirit: I do find some of Rubinshtein’s texts (“Poiavlenie geroia” [“The Birth of the Hero”], “Vse dal’she i dal’she” [“Further and Further On”] and others) to some extent “Perelmanian,” while in some of Bob’s poems (here I would mention, in addition to “China,” “Holes in the Argument” and “Doggerel Overtaken by Order”) I see a mode present which is similar to that of some of the writings of, say, Rubinshtein or Druk.24

The overriding parallel, however, between the Language movement and that of Russian postmodern poetry has been drawn on the basis of their celebrated selfreferentiality. The attention that these schools devote to language has given grounds to theorists and writers to find a commonality in their literary practices. In the introduction to Kent Johnson and Stephen Ashby’s anthology Third Wave: The

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New Russian Poetry, Andrew Wachtel and Alexei Parshchikov point to the groups’ preoccupation with language as the main similarity that characterizes them: “For both groups,” they write, “the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group [the Language one] that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue … [I]n the last few years these contacts have increased as the Soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound American poetic soulmates.”25 Having already revealed in the previous chapters that the project of Russian postmodern poetry goes beyond the playful handling of language to document the cataclysmic changes in historical reality, I will extend my analysis to the peculiar ways in which the Language poem testifies to the conditions of post-industrial Information society. Problematizing the belief in the self-referential nature of the Russian and American movements, I will thus elicit as a major parallel between the two their capacity to bear witness to a psychically traumatic (ideological or technological) world. Both schools, I will contend, record the impacts of the subject’s sudden transposition beyond his/her envisioned biographical future into an unfathomable (post-totalitarian or post-industrial) modus vivendi. While conceptualism documents the psychically traumatic dislocations, accompanying the shift from Soviet to post-Soviet society, Language poetry, I will propose, records the traumatizing impacts of media and information overload brought by the setting in of post-industrial reality. This section of my book will inquire into the work of some of the major representatives of Language writing and introduce examples of postmodern installation and video art26 to illustrate the underlying argument. It will open with a discussion of the self-referential nature of Language writing and argue that it is shaped as a response to two major instrumental discourses—the discourse of commodity fetishism (or reification) and, what I will later propose, is that of technology as the governing discourse in the Age of Information. I will outline the revolutionary agenda of Language poetry as an attempt to undermine these dominant discourses through the creation of an alternate language system—an innovative, experimental, self-reflexive writing that disrupts the standard enunciation of the regimes of media technology and reification. My study will then probe beyond the purposeful refusal of the Language poets to mirror and create a double image of reality and focus on the unintended ways in which they rewrite the effects of media in post-industrial society. With the outset of the Information Age that has reduced the status of language to just one of the multiple media around us, the Language poets, I will contend, are doomed to reinscribe the technological environment in which they are increasingly emplaced. No longer conceivable apart from the information networks that determine it, Language poetry thus unavoidably repeats their pervasive, disjointed discourses. My analysis, however, will venture even further and assert that the Language works go beyond reiterating and playfully experimenting with the post-industrial discourses. I will focus on the atypical language employed in the representations of technological realities and suggest that it attests to a peculiar kind of a not-yet-fully mastered traumatic experience. I will then propose a reading of Language poetry as a testimony

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to the overwhelming and traumatic impacts of contemporary media, which have beset the mind with far more signals than it can process and assign semantic value to. This overpowering condition of information overload, I will further establish, results in violent and unforeseen eschatological displacements. The latter inescapably affect the structure and themes of Language poetry, whose fractured and paratactic design thus reflects a real-life disorganization of human sensorium and cognition. To parallel the analysis of the ideologically traumatized post-totalitarian corpora and their testimonial power, this part of my book will dwell on the technologically traumatized body and its referential potential. Looking into code poetry and rethinking the notions of experience and cognition, I will discuss the traumatic impacts of technological code, while also suggesting that the latter’s rechanneling can have a therapeutic power and open ways to overcoming trauma. Rather than precluding literary representation, Language poetry, I will affirm as this second part of my work closes, records the asignifying processes and coding of post-industrial society, and testifies to the traumatic impacts of the aggressively encroaching information networks.

3. The self-referentiality of Language poetry The problem of literary representation has been of paramount interest to critics of Language poetry. They have written widely about the intricate ways in which the Language poets, “theoretically militant about their nonreferential … poetics,”27 openly defy referentiality.28 Not accidentally, Language poetry has been variously termed “formalist,” “de-referential,” “structuralist,” “cipheral,” “minimalist,” and “language centered.” After all, this is the main agenda of the school—we need not look further than its name, selected to proclaim an emphasis on language and a divorce of the linguistic and empirical realities. Anyone who has even had to type L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E more than once will recognize the deliberate act of subversion of any easy reference to language. In place of it, we are forced to experience the labor of materiality invariably involved in the production of writing: uppercase L, lowercase equal signs, uppercase A, another lowercase equals, uppercase N, and yet another equals sign—all of this repeated five or so more times. “If the equal signs are focused on,” McCaffery notes in North of Intention, “then there seems to be a general functional equivalence, L equals A equals N—a letter is a letter. A Saussurian poetics, perhaps, where sign equals nothing more than its difference from every other sign.”29 Though it may be overly annoying, the overpunctuation from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. comes with a mission of its own. It works to frustrate any phrase- or sentence-oriented readings and takes away all direction as to how the words in a given piece should (or should not) be bundled together and, therefore, all possibility for establishing reference. Chosen in 1978 by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein as the name of the school’s leading journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, “the name of the aesthetic tendency that produced this referential schism would partake of the nonreferentiality of the work itself, which it represented, as it were, in absentia. Nonreferentiality, thus, was central to the discourse of the journal, not just the texts it referred to.”30

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Focusing on the school’s self-reflexivity, critics have often dismissed the works of Language poets as “an endless succession of depthless images and empty sounds, each canceling the previous one,”31 a writing functioning “against the conventionally referential and representational capacities of language” and heralding a “future in which … all that’s left of language are the fragmented inarticulate remains, a nonreferential solipsistic muzak.”32 Language writing has widely been seen as a literary practice severed from reality, overtly self-descriptive and self-centered in character. Tom Clark, among others, has accused the Bay Area poets of a “gang mentality,” “…working together against the conventionally referential and representational capacities of language” and heralding a “future in which … all that’s left of language are the fragmented inarticulate remains, a non-referential solipsistic muzak.”33 This predilection for the use of self-referring language has largely been seen to result in meaningless, disjunctive writings that should be dismissed rather than taken seriously and delved into: One writer complained of “disconnected phrases, avoiding communication,” and said the movement should be called “Rambling Typists….” These poems are “hard” if you try to find meaning. In fact the writing is so easy. The only difficulty is in avoiding connections that could be called insightful or profound.… Perhaps I’ve been struggling too hard over the years to make my poems make sense when nonsense is so easy.34

Language writing has thus been described as a literary enterprise precluding our link with history, an exercise in pure language denying access to specific socio-historical realities. As Weinberger argues, the Language texts consist of “words whose effect is not meant to go beyond the second in which they are uttered, words without history.”35 Referring to the discussion of his work “China” in Jameson’s “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Perelman observes: “Fredric Jameson … not only identifies language writing with the new sentence, but with depthlessness, Lacanian schizophrenia, the erasure of history, and the end of personal identity.”36 At the same time, however, the structure that Jameson discerns in Perelman’s “China” is far from being unique for the Language poems. Instead, it defines the broader phenomenon of postmodernism and unwittingly extends to Jameson’s own style, in particular. In the words of Perelman, “Jameson’s style, with its long periodic sentences, the clauses packed with qualification, seems far removed from such phenomena, but in the overall organization of its material, his essay is itself paratactic.…”37 Thus, in the same breath in which he recognizes “Jameson’s vision of the ahistorical anomie of postmodern schizophrenic production,”38 Perelman cannot help but acknowledge the imprints of history on Jameson’s own writing that registers the paratactic design of today’s postmodern reality. Perelman hence makes the provocative point that the self-reflexivity of Language writing is not always a purposeful strategy aimed at attaining a pre-charted outcome. It is also a symptom of a socio-historical condition and as such is both unavoidable and bizarrely analogous to other postmodern discourses, created within and doomed to repeat late capitalism’s parataxis. Thus, what transpires in present-day writing is a constant tension between the ahistorical nature

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of postmodernism’s self-referentiality and its historicity as symptomatic of a specific socio-defined reality. Even to those critics, however, who recognize in Language writing a symptom of a cultural condition, a practice that reiterates late capitalism’s disconnected patterns and registers its pulse irrespective of authorial intention, Language poetry, first and foremost, presents a deliberate and purposeful tactics that aims at the subversion of mainstream poetics. The “antireferential” and “antisyntactical” agenda of the Language works39 has turned into a tool for fighting the instrumental discourse of late capitalist society and undermining the commodification of both life and language. At the heart of this agenda lies the poets’ belief that the referential transparency of postmodern language should be countered by the non-referentiality of a non-representational text production.

4. Debunking the referent as linguistic equivalent of commodity fetishism. The project of de-referencing language The project of “de-referencing language”40 has turned into a formative principle of Language poetics. It has been elaborated in such early pieces as the “Politics of the Referent” issue of Open Letter (1977) that reveal the passion behind the program of undermining capitalism through sabotaging its referents. Preoccupied with a brazenly theoretical, rather than strictly poetical, agenda, Language writing has therefore led a peculiar twofold existence, inhabiting “a middle territory bounded on the one side by poetry as it is currently instituted and on the other by theory.”41 Poetic praxis and theoretical examination have rarely been so intimately bound together in American poetry, Jed Rasula avows in “Politics of the Referent.”42 Yet, Language poetry’s “rapprochement with post-structuralist and cultural studies” is hardly surprising in a writing that openly “contests the expressive model emanating from workshops and creative writing departments and their commitment to voice and immediate experience.”43 The reciprocal attempt to reinvent and repoliticize language has, in turn, made the Language project overtly political—at times, too programmatically political to be poetry. Language poetry is thus not just a new experimentalism that goes against the dominant institutions of American poetry but also a vibrant critique of U.S. imperialism and capitalism in general, rife with a potential for new social alternatives. At the heart of this social critique and the “non-referentialist” agenda of the Language poets rests the belief that the referent is a linguistic analogue to commodity fetishism. “[T]he primary impact on language, and language arts, of the rise of capitalism has been in the area of reference and is directly related to the phenomena known as the commodity fetish,” Silliman asserts in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.44 As Silliman explains the parallel: [I]f we permit the word to stand for something else, if we exchange the word for its meaning, we thereby initiate a process in which anything can stand for anything else and anything can be exchanged and replaced. Once the word can be

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exchanged, it can circulate (just as money circulates in a capitalist economy), and like money, the word as a medium of exchange cannot serve as a source of genuine human values.45

In late capitalist economy, the formerly sacred and inviolable word of the poet operates as one more commodity among myriad others. Determined to resist the status quo, Language writing undertakes to construct an incisive commentary on this commodification of language basing its theoretical premises on the Marxist analysis of reification. It seems worthwhile to pause at this point and explore the core Marxist ideas that underlie the works of Language writers. We have already mentioned the parallels drawn between commodity fetishism and the fetishism of language, so let us open our discussion with a brief overview of this concept. In a Marxist reading of the term, fetishism conceals the true nature of commodities as the product of human labor and reduces them to objects that circulate and have meaning exclusively and only as an exchange value. This definition invites a provocative parallel between commodity fetishism and linguistic reference. Applying the notion of commodity fetishism to conventional forms of literary writing, the Language poets see words as commodities that have ceased to be valued for what they really are, but, instead, operate as mere instrumentalities used to establish connections with pre-ordained (capitalist) realities. As Silliman describes the process in his early essay, “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,” it is a situation where language (words) become transparent and disappear, leaving behind a picture of the world readily consumable by an uncritical reader. This “myth of transparent signification,” as McCaffery calls it, posits “words as innocent, unproblematic sign-posts to a monological message or intention; it wants a message as a product to be consumed with as little attention as possible drawn to the words’ dialectical engagements.”46 Thus, to Language poets, a direct parallel exists between the world of capital and that of writing. Using linguistic analogies with Marx’s Das Kapital, McCaffery explains the commonality in their mode of operation: Like capital (its economic counterpart) grammar extends a law of value to new objects by a process of totalization, reducing the free play of the fragments to the status of delimited, organizing parts within an intended larger whole. Signifiers appear and are then subordinately organized into these larger units whose culmination is a meaning which is then invested in a further aggregation … It is clear that grammar effects a meaning whose form is that of a surplus value generated by an aggregated group of working parts for immediate investment into an extending chain of meaning. The concern of grammar homologizes the capitalist concern for accumulation, profit and investment in a future goal.47

McCaffery’s criticism implies that, instead of being active producers of language and meaning, we have turned, in the world of late capitalist economy, in mere consumers of previously molded totalized linguistic structures—a “surplus value” that has no

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existence outside the cycle of investments into the larger chain of preestablished meanings. Language as such, in this scenario, is dead in its conception. Denied power, creativity, and freedom, the writer is reduced to mere vehicle for actuating preestablished language—a passive consumer through whom it reproduces and propagates. Language does so in a manner that excludes any individual intervention, operating, instead, in unconditional compliance with the laws and rules of capital. In the words of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, this is a case where language “functions like money and speaks through us more than we actively produce within it. It is a surplus value that draws the speaker away from what ought to be his own world view and processes her through the rules and regulations of the detached and ‘surplus’ system.” Linguistic production is transformed into linguistic consumption. “More and more the USE of language takes the place of its PRODUCTION. The notion of linguistic use supplants that of linguistic work.”48 Or, as McCaffery aptly recaps it: “Producing a sentence is actually re-producing the internalities of the system by a consumptive ‘use’ of its rules and forms.”49 The reproduction of the system of normative language (which, to Language writers, evokes that of capital) can only be achieved via a disciplined use of predetermined rules of syntax and grammar—all of which point to an extra-linguistic reality, in which they will ultimately be invested and integrated. This gives grounds to Language critics to apply the term “fetishism” not just to the referent, but to grammar as well, describing the two as “the two major fetishisms operating in language.”50 Grammar prevents the construction of true meaning and restricts the free flow of ideas and structures, thus proving unable to generate new patterns or rejoice in unanticipated polysemies. One cannot violate the rules of representation and set the words free, and still produce the desired (and pre-programmed) meaning. “…[T]he extraction of meaning (surplus value) from a text, necessitates the suppression of polysemy, ambivalence, errant connotations and undecidability (i.e. the semantic-paragrammatic work force) by means of the integrational drives and hierarchical constraints of grammar, in order that meaning does not proliferate beyond a bounded, intentional horizon (i.e. the surplus value is not eroded).”51 Instead of flowing freely, language in such texts congeals in the precast molds of syntax and grammar and is thus reproduced and thrust in a system, in which its meaning is reduced to that of exchange value and its function limited to reinforcing the capitalist order with no deviation from the “standard.” As the Language writers forewarn, “Sentences that follow standard grammatical patterns allow the accumulating references to enthrall the reader by diminishing diversions from a constructed representation. In this way, each word’s references work in harmony by reinforcing a spatiotemporal order conventionalized by the bulk of writing practice that creates the ‘standard.’ ”52 The utilizing of standardized syntactic patterns and normative poetic grammar makes the capitalist discourse still easier to digest, more effortless to consume. Reproducing the ideological jargon, it commands obedience and rules out the reader’s involvement. “Prescribed rules of grammar & spelling make language seem outside of our control.” They function as a means of “denying the validity of our power over the constitution of our world through language.”53 Readers are thus

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excluded from such poems’ hermeneutic structure—they are only the final recipients, the buyers and consumers of previously constructed and dictatorially imposed meanings. As Bernstein recaps it, “Standardized spelling, layout, & punctuation enter into a world of standardization…. Language is thus removed from the participatory control of its users & delivered into the hands of the state.”54 A primary target on the poets’ agenda thus becomes the discourse of commodity fetishism. The only way to “erode” the “surplus value” of capitalist meaning is to effect a radical switch from the mode of language usage to that of semantic production, to “repossess the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production.”55 To get involved in the making of meaning, the Language poets announce that grammar needs to be abolished. So that language returns to a defetishized arena of production, the referent—a linguistic equivalent of commodity fetishism—needs to be effaced. “[T]he exposure of fetishism as an operation within the domain of representation and reference”56 thus turns into a revolutionary tactics and the poets’ foremost agenda. Through consistent misspelling, disjunct syntax, and erroneous grammar, Language poets pledge to disengage language from its subjection to the capitalist project and reendow it with its “genuine value.”

5

Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry

To arrest the meaning of words once and for all, that is what Terror wants.1 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Rudiments paiens language control = thought control = reality control: it must be decentered, community controlled, taken out of the service of the capitalist project.2 Charles Bernstein

1. The commodification of poetry …Poetry has been moved/to aisle 12, between the get-well/cards and the pantyhose. Bob Perelman3 As commodity fetishism turns into the main target of Language writing, poets undertake to delineate its omniscient nature and negative impacts. “Incredible amount of illusory materiality,”4 is how Bernstein encapsulates his imminent environment. In a concise and illuminative manner, Susan Howe depicts the destructive impacts of commodification as a phenomenon inscribing “distance,” “outness,” and “withdrawal” and causing the alienation of the human subject: “Consumable commodity/a Zerosum game/and consequent/spiral haze structure/Distance or outness/Phrase edged away/Money runs after goods/Men desire money/Wages of labor/Wages in a mother country/Authorial withdrawal …”5 In his poem “Emotions of Normal People,” Bernstein also portrays in elucidative ways the manifestations of commodity fetish. An entire page of this poem is devoted to questions, attempting to investigate the ownership of products and research a variety of shopping habits: Which best describes your dress size? What brands of bar soap have been used in your household in the past 6 months? Which of the following hypoallergic products are currently being used in your household? … Do you use a facial cleanser other than bar soap? Do you or anyone in your family wear support

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pantyhose? What brands of underwear do you wear? … Do you own an automatic dishwasher? … How many vehicles are owned by members of your household? … Which of the following do you own or have, or are you considering for first-time purchase or replacements within the next six months? … How many times have you shopped by mail in the past months?6

Reification, however, has long transcended the sphere of consumable goods and colonized the higher realm of poetry. “… Poetry has been moved/to aisle 12, between the get-well/cards and the pantyhose,” Perelman notes.7 The poem turns into a subject of uncompromising market standards that rate the writing of a poem by nothing but its end result—the product, or the poem’s publication. As Bernstein caustically remarks in “Emotions of Normal People,” the poets’ greatest goal becomes to get published, their works—one more commodity among the myriad others: “A 1985 survey shows that 23.3 percent of all writers write poetry—that’s 2,180,000 people who are writing poetry and want to get published. 1989 Poet’s Market contains current, accurate, and complete information to help poets to do just that.”8 In his text bearing the self-explanatory title “The Dollar Value of Poetry,” Bernstein alerts to the impending transformation of authentic literary values into tradable commodities and repudiates the effort to subordinate contemporary poetry to the capitalist system of power. “So writing might be exemplary,” Bernstein decrees, “—an instance broken off from and hence not in the service of this economic and cultural-social-force called capitalism.”9 Refusing to write about capitalism and get ensnared by its instrumental discourse, Bernstein communicates the reality of consumerism through re-enacting it in his verses. A poem of his, included in Disfrutes, reads: ownership ments mars bars & joule boxes         (feather weight) can         cray pas10

While, at first sight, disconnected, all fragments and words in this short poem appear to relate to the same semantic nucleus—that of commodity culture. The initial word of the poem, “ownership,” announces this fact irrefutably. Each of the following lines enumerates a product—a chocolate bar, a box for measuring volts/amperes that promises to be easy to carry and light, a generic can, oil pastels, etc. As no narrative skeleton connects these words in a coherent unity, they do not stand for (or, represent) any external reality—such separation of poetic facts and outer world is undesired and uncalled for by the poet. Instead, these verses seem to be a fragment (or, “an instance”) “broken off ” the real world—a part from (rather than about) consumer culture as prime determinant of late capitalist society.11

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Similarly to the works of Bernstein, Perelman’s poems openly lament “the words/that died on/the way to/the mall, mad/that the world/hadn’t thought/to provide/anything more interesting/than ranked merchandise…”12 Reminiscing of the high ambitions and artistic breakthroughs once associated with the Modernist experiment, Perelman mourns their untimely invalidation by the rampant culture of commodification: “… Modernism’s big adventure/is still in print/on matchbooks and corporate towers, / … /with customers paying for the pleasure/of buying.”13 The avant-garde newness has been replaced by a “future where the/dead are already buried en masse/by judgments already made, beneath lobs/of fundamental meaning.”14 This future is also portrayed as conceived by a new type of readership—an audience that can no longer transcend the overused meanings, imposed by the governing system of power: “…[O]n the street,/ideal readers are/just now giving/birth to the future/while chained to preowned/words, structured sentences,/oversexed genres …”15 Pessimistically, the author concludes: “Meaning is a dog,/following masters …”16 The discourse of reification has thus robbed the poet of his/her freedom and imagination and inflicted an implacable death of the mind. As Perelman expounds, The inward shopping center is laid down onto the bare ground. The imaginary has no other place … And someone is somewhere, writing it up. See the eye moving across the page. Montgomery Clift saws histrionically at the rope that is dragging him out of a gloomy K-Mart. Afterwards, it’s still light. The death of the mind, not visible on the mobile features, is a fact of life.17

2. Undermining the instrumental discourse of reification: Alternate linguistic discourses in Language poetry In language writing any president of any body may name a cloud a whale a whale a cloud a whale a whale a cloud a cloud.18 Bob Perelman

As they share the belief that it is referential language that, in its predictable and transparent patterns, causes death of the mind and rebroadcasts, on the level of writing, the rules of commodity fetishism, Language poets set out to create an alternative linguistic discourse that aims to undermine the instrumental use of language. The “reference-equals-reification” argument enthuses poets to attack the absorbability of writing in favor of what Bernstein, in his verse essay “Artifice of Absorption,” labels “artifice” and defines as “a measure of a poem’s/intractability to being read as the sum of its/devices & subject matters.”19 Since, to Language poets, coherent subject matter and ready-made structures convey familiar, ready-made meanings—that is, conventional syntax and rhetorical devices only reaffirm the logic of capitalism—only new patterns of syntax and grammar are seen as equipped with the power to express any new thought authentically. Non-absorptive writing is thus the product of an effort to create poetic texts that cannot be deciphered and easily looked through. It is accomplished

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through the poets’ endeavors to cancel and disrupt familiar meanings, to “language” the world for themselves by means of “ironiz[ing],/experiment[ing], writ[ing] wrong…” As Perelman believes, you either swallow the “pre-owned” meanings of the world or “language it for yourself./Make your own recipes: ironize,/Experiment, write wrong…”20 It is the freedom of language to signify anything it chooses to, rather than obey a pre-assigned singular meaning, that Language poets venture to reestablish. The “truth” of language, they believe, should not be deciphered, but, instead, felt, listened to, and enjoyed in its multifaceted nuances and original materiality. As Bernstein suggests in “Palukaville,” “It’s not the supposed referent that has that truth. Words themselves. The particulars of the language and not, note, the ‘depth structures’ that ‘underlie’ ‘all languages’ require the attention of that which is neither incidentally nor accidentally related to the world. It’s sweet enough.”21 The gustatory sensation evoked in the last line—the sweetness of the new experience in language, suggests the need to keep our senses open, so we can taste fully and freely the richness of the word. The Language poets urge us to listen, feel, hear, and touch, and neglect none of the rich “textures of … life”: Listen. I can feel it. Specifically and intentionally. It does hurt. Gravity weighing it down. It’s not too soft. I like it. Ringing like this. The hum. Words peeling. The one thing. … It tastes good. Clogs. Thick with shape. I carry it with me wherever I go. I like it like this. Smears. You can touch it. I know how to get there. Hold it. Tickles. I’m the one beside you. Needs no other. Textures of the signs of life.22

This excerpt from “Palukaville” is emblematic of the use of “parataxis,” in the sense with which Perelman endows the term, i.e., a technique that “involves placing units together without connectives or subordination.”23 “ ‘I came. I saw. I conquered’ is paratactic,” Perelman affirms.24 Writing paratactically is an act of subverting the power of hypotaxis, which, Perelman explains, “involves grammatical subordination and the latter entails political and moral subordination as well.”25 With no pre-assigned structure and governing meaning, “Palukaville” provides no interpretative clues in our attempts to decipher it. Are the verses above referring to a romantic encounter? Or do they, indeed, evoke our intimate involvement with language? While the presence of the lyric self beside something or someone other (“I’m the one beside you”), the exclusivity of the encounter that “needs no other,” and the denouement of the poem (“I woke up. I met this girl”)26 carry overt sexual connotations, it may be that the lines allude to the eroticism of the closely and always-accompanying us language. Indeed, the lyric persona attests to feeling a profound “erotic pleasure pressing against the pen with my thumb, sore under the nail from a splinter”27 and a passionate desire to “pronounce” the word and the world, as the last line of the poem asserts: “Let me pronounce it for you.”28 In the world of “Palukaville,” the senses appear a much more adequate descriptor of language than its relationship to truth. Language is there to be felt and relished rather than rationally interpreted. Its meaning is in no way more important than its

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texture, weight, and sound. Savoring its materiality appears to Language writers a much more pertinent approach than the quest after its signification. Hold and tickle the words, instead of dissecting them in search of a signified, is what Bernstein’s “Palukaville” calls for. Heeding the “particulars of language” is thus a rebellion against the “owned” and pre-established meanings—an emancipatory gesture breaking apart the yoking of words with reference and truth, and setting free the multivoiced enunciation of poetry. One of the voices we discern in the poem seems to describe the poet’s idea (and love) of the new language—the “love of language—the hum—the huhuman—[that] excludes its reduction to a scientifically managed system of reference in which all is expediency and truth is nowhere.”29 Truthfulness emerges in the painstaking attention to language, in attending to the word and to the story it tells: “Truthfulness, love of language: attending its telling.”30 “The world is in them [the words]”31 rather than anywhere outside of language, Bernstein affirms.

3. Implosive referentiality. The new sentence Apart from such rare formulations of complete thoughts, “Palukaville” is a typical example of a work using the Language poets’ signature device, the new sentence,32 and consisting of phrases and sentences placed next to each other without any obvious connection to a singular meaning. Instead, what emerges in the Language poem is this AND that AND another meaning. “Peaches and apples and pears; biscuits and French sauces,” Bernstein’s poem enumerates, following the list with a paratactic arrangement of sentences: “Acknowledgment. We can get up. A blur is no reason for distress. Already made it. The mists before each of us at any time can put to rest any lingering fantasies of clear view. I can still hear it. I’m sure…”33 In “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” Perelman describes the role that parataxis plays in the meaning formation of the new sentence in the following manner: …[F]rom a purely formal perspective, the new sentence was not that drastic an innovation. A new sentence is more or less ordinary itself, but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance: new sentences are not subordinated to a larger narrative frame nor are they thrown together at random. Parataxis is crucial: the autonomous meaning of a sentence is heightened, questioned, and changed by the degree of separation or connection that the reader perceives with regard to the surrounding sentences.34

It is this reinvented relationship between the sentences or sentence fragments that transfigures language from subservient to subversive. The paratactic constructions contest the reduction of meaning to a trouble-free reflection of referential certainties. They help recast and undermine the advertising jargon and product-oriented narratives through a reshuffling of the reification parlance. In Bernstein’s Log Rhythms, for instance, the new sentence undercuts the rule of Coke and Pluri-Cola, french fries and

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coffee shops, pineapple margaritas and “simusoy fish-bit fingers,” which accompany every single event in the lyric self ’s life—from the reading skills test-preparation course to perusing the books “you’re always foisting on me.”35 In line with Silliman’s understanding of the new sentence, these are sentences “devoid of punctuation, [with] no deliberately calculated line breaks”:36 Where there’s life there’s Coke and where there’s Coke can Dr. Brown’s Pluri-Cola be far behind if you’d just let me take the reading skills test-preparation course instead of making me waste my time with all these books you’re always foisting on me, like so many greasy french fries from a 70’s-theme coffee shop. “Another 20-ounce frozen pineapple margarita with a side of simusoy fish-bit fingers, sir?”37

The tradition of advertising and product-name verses can be traced back to the school of concrete poetry. “Watch out, the text seems to be saying, when you read those headlines, those cigarette ads, or road signs,” Perloff alerts the reader in her discussion of “Lag” by McCaffery, “the ‘message’ may not be what you think it is.”38 Instead, the verses seem “to place the reader, along with the author, in the position that we are now actually in as we drive the freeways, shop on the mall, push our carts through the supermarket, or watch the evening news”39 thus hoping to provoke a critical, and no longer submissive, attitude. Laboring toward a summary of the distinctive features of the new sentence, Silliman poses the question: “So what is the new sentence?”40 and, a few pages later, lists its distinguishing characteristics: (1) The paragraph organizes the sentences; (2) The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument; (3) Sentence length is a unit of measure; (4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity; (5) Syllogistic movements is: (a) limited; (b) controlled; (8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.41

Let us consider the following verses:42 1. the last time/I had/pot/roast/the rain/poured/through the ceiling/& it was fat./ my teeth/got stuck/(too chewy)/& I wondered/if the/butcher/wasn’t/getting worse. (61) 2. I got a headache/& all the paintings have been/switched around/the impressionist one is now on the other wall/& the one with blue floating shapes has been moved to the living room/where a plant now sits. (61) ………… heat’s off again/or still/& it’s the coldest winter/(it’s always the coldest winter) (63) …………

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6. …………. Oh Chris I miss you & your name, breaks across any thoughts I distract myself with. (64) 11. For Ellen michael & bruce & ray         & rae & susan and jane              & betsi         & gale and charlie                     & steve              & alfred & ted (67) …………. 15. for Terry Swanson I get up – shit – coffee’s burned. another day. (69) 16. MORE STEALS everybody’s talking about the fall of man, but nobody’s making an effort to get up. (69)

The sentences and stanzas in this excerpt from Bernstein’s Islets/Irritations are not in “free standing isolation”43 as Jameson would have seen them, but, instead, appear related through a common theme and intensity. They are in the ambiguous condition of “not [being] subordinated to a larger narrative frame,” while not being “thrown together at random” either.44 Despite their seeming arbitrariness, the verses reveal a

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shared theme of sadness, illness, unrequited love, or loss. The negative connotations invested in most of the images, which all convey a feeling of despondency, emerge as one of the “methods for enabling secondary syllogistic movement to create or convey an overall impression of unity, without which the systematic blocking of the integration of sentences one to another through primary syllogistic movement … would be trivial, without tension, a ‘heap of fragments.’ ”45 Nonetheless, any attempt to explicate the work as a whole according to some system of meaning, such as narrative or character, seems fallacious and is ultimately doomed to failure. The author refuses to integrate the multiple semantic levels and never raises them to a higher order of signification. Taken individually, any of those stanzas would be haphazard and downright incoherent, but put together they form a central movement of meanings that share a common charge and uniform direction. Moreover, this movement never congeals in a stable and predictable signification, but continually morphs in accordance with the links actuated with its neighboring elements. We go from one sentence to the other without coming out for a new breath of air. Bernstein calls such sentences that refuse “the syntactic ideality of the complete sentence,” in favor of a durational flow of meaning, “imploded.” “While in the complete/closed sentence, attention is deflected to an abstracted, or accompanying, ‘meaning’ that is being ‘conveyed,’ ” Bernstein writes, “in the imploded sentence the reader stays plugged in to the wave-like pulse of the writing. In other words, you keep moving throughout the writing without having to come up for ideational air, the ideas are all inside the process.”46 Reference is thus reterritorialized through implosion to circulate among rather than within the signs’ internal relationships. “Through implosion reference has passed into its opposite (the material and inwardness of the signifier) and simulates its own presence in the dead space of a sign field, among its mirror reversals, self-reflections and utterly internalized exchanges.”47

4. Linguistic experimentation. “Ludism”48 as the unlimited play of signification The reterritorialization of reference and the use of implosive referentiality in the new sentence liberate the infinite possibilities of language, and provide exploratory space for new and radically unconventional experiments. Let us look at Bernstein’s “The Elephant Appears…”49 The sentences in this poem seem fully unrelated, indifferent to each other and bound by no semantic skeleton. What is this poem about? Who are the lyric selves it describes? An elephant, “I,” “You,” “we”? A title would have hinted at some answers, but even this clue has been withheld by the author. Instead, the page presents a list of often incomplete and unconnected sentences, at times further disrupted by additional linguistic noise (as in the line: ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABAB, for instance). Nonplussed by the streams of unreadable information, the reader is unable to find any common theme that verses such as the following share:

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The elephant appears without the slightest indication that he is demanded. It was simply a series I didn’t care for. Possible pictures.

The line concluding Bernstein’s poem by quoting the bewilderment of an anonymous speaker, “So in what sense…?” seems to be voicing precisely this bafflement and inability of the reader to “own” or interpret the poem. The Language poets’ idea of the new sentence, however, suggests that it may be worth inquiring beyond the poem’s seeming incongruity. Just like the new sentence, these lines do not possess a selfcontained poetic value, but still may have the power to acquire meaning as a result of the relations that they form with the adjacent sentences and fragments. The elephant appears without the slightest indication that he is demanded. An infinite inappropriateness. Continually learning. It was simply a series I didn’t care for. Small cupolas. A numbered pairing. Trail off. Invasion of space. Name of cigarette. You can tell at any time. I get up for breakfast. You feel it is impossible to continue. Diffuses. There. Feel it. Terrible tedium. ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABAB. Some snoring. & regardless of their relation or that we were in some ways unnatural. Possible pictures. “So in what sense…?”

Indeed, a more attentive reading of the poem reveals that our verdict about its verses’ disconnectedness was somehow rash and injudicious. In fact, instead of being nonintegrated in nature, the sentences seem to establish some peculiar interrelationships. The unwelcome, inopportune appearance of the elephant without being “demanded” relates to such semantic nuclei as “infinite inappropriateness,” the “invasion of space,” etc. Next to this idea of encroachment, another thread connects such verses as “It was simply a series I didn’t care for,” “Terrible tedium,” “Some snoring,” “cigarettes,” and creates the impression that, despite the will to “continually learn…” and the prospect of “possible pictures,” all is permeated by a constant state of deficiency: “small cupolas,” “a numbered pairing,” inability to advance and bring anything to fruition (“trail off ”) and total failure to proceed. “You can tell at any time,” even at the rise of the day when the lyric self “get[s] up for breakfast,” that hope is dead and “[y]ou feel it is impossible to continue.” The following verse makes the sentiment almost palpable: “Diffuses. There. Feel it.” While it appears that the scenario of a love triangle is alluded to (“& regardless of their relation or that we were in some ways unnatural”),

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the impossibility of love seems to be just a synecdoche for a much more all-pervasive condition of hopelessness and failure. Thus, regardless of our initial impression about the disconnectedness of the poem’s verses, we come to perceive that, in fact, they are profoundly relational in nature. It is just that the provisional connections made at the time of the reading are not ones of logic, nor of the signified, and openly refuse to construct any larger narrative wholes. The reader’s productive engagement with the text generates only local pockets of meaning that never accumulate into a static aggregated mass. Thus, despite our inability, and, in fact, unwillingness to pin down Bernstein’s poem’s definitive meaning, the latter is far from signifying anything whatsoever. In the course of our encounter with it, we generate numerous conditional meanings whose free play can be described by using Vicki Mistacco’s term “ludism.” As she defines it, “ludism” designates an open and boundless play of signification, “a free and productive interaction of forms, of signifiers and signifieds, without regard for an original or ultimate meaning. In literature, ludism signifies textual play; the text is viewed as a game affording both author and reader the possibility of producing endless meanings and relationships.”50 The open performance staged by Bernstein’s verses thus prevents their congealing in a fixed representational whole and enables the reader to produce manifold plausible readings rather than dismiss the work. Like Bernstein’s “The Elephant Appears…,” Andrews’s work “WAS”51 is pervaded by a similar sense of impasse and impossibility.                                        WAS was    had  felled       burst          hadn’t was pursued went was went came asked had forgave threw     didn’t  came  lived        bid

burst married desired lived went was moaned didn’t saved

The title itself announces the topic of loss and alludes to a state no longer recuperable. What follows are two columns of words that, at first sight, appear quite accidental. The perceptive reader, however, would be quick to discern that all the words are verbs and, at that, they are all in the past tense. Moreover, they appear to mark noteworthy stages in the life of the lyric persona who “pursued,” “married,” “desired,” “moaned,” in a word, “lived” all the transient moments of joy and travail, and, when all of this “went,” “was,” and “burst,” he was “saved” and “forgiv[en].” The words of the poem are arranged in a way that creates an evocative visual image, thereby forming a peculiar

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caligram for life and time’s implacable irreversibility. The four sides of the poem frame a menacing void—a gaping hole that threatens to engulf all that is “to be” and place it in the terminal “was” modality.

5. The revolutionary charge of morphemic and phonetic disruption As Andrews’s “WAS” attests, the sentence quite seldom remains the most basic unit of disruptive activity. The Language verses abound in disjunct words, signifiers, sememes, and, at times, even phonemes. Let us pause and consider the fragmentation of language in Melnick’s work Pcoet. Here is section eight (Figure 5.1):

Figure 5.1 David Melnick, PCOET, # 8. Copyright: David Melnick The misplaced morphemes, pronouns, prepositions, and word segments of Melnick’s poem seem totally indifferent to each other, positioned in a way eliciting no cleancut meaningful relationship. It matters little where Melnick has preferred to place the white, non-letter spaces—between illegible phonetic groups or camouflaged root structures that only barely relate to a semantic nucleus. The fragmentation is even more radical in poems such as the single-line section 37 of Pcoet that appears to be little more than a disjointed phonetic string. in tr uc kt ua er hh im to we ob ie ra r52

Similar are the snapped chains of unrelated signifiers in Andrews’s work Factura that mark the breaking down of language to the primeval level of phonemes (Figure 5.2 and Figure 5.3):

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Figure 5.2 From Bruce Andrews’s Factura. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

Figure 5.3 From Bruce Andrews’s Factura. Copyright: Bruce Andrews Phonemes, to Language poets, present those most fundamental units which, while organized in accordance with the stringent rules of language, do not have yet a socially determined meaning. These elementary, primordial entities function as the building blocks of the Language poets’ archaeology of negative spaces. In the words of Perelman himself: “Only the phoneme is a purely differential and contentless sign. Its sole … semiotic content is its dissimilarity from all other phonemes.”53 Not yet charged with any pre-conceived ideas, the phoneme is seen by Perelman as closer to the world of “sense.”54 And if reaching the level of “senses” is important, it is because the power to manipulate them can enable the author to interfere with and change social behavior. Paraphrasing Julia Kristeva’s thesis, set forth in Revolution in Poetic Language, Joel Nickels observes that “our ‘intuitive’ sense of possible social relations is rooted in the primordial regulation of our senses.”55 Thus, the disarticulation of verse to the level of phonemes emerges as a strategy for impacting and altering society through a deft exploitation of the readers’ senses. It is from this perspective that the Language poem’s unintelligibility, ensuing from its radical disjointing, can be regarded as a purposeful attempt to challenge and reshape the present structure of socially imposed meanings. Indeed, the desemanticization of poetry seems a rather unorthodox means for exerting a shift in societal standards. Such a practice, however, appears quite justifiable through the lens of Baudrillard’s provocative insight: “[A]ny direct appeal to ‘the people’ as such is no longer a viable option given not only the avant-garde’s failure to sway the masses but, more radically, the implosion of the social itself as a stable referent…”56 While vastly theorized as avant-garde in nature, this poetry of defragmented textual structures and undefined-by-rules nontextual spaces recalls a peculiar arrière-

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garde experience, which, analyzing parallel developments in Russian culture, Epstein associates with the “literature of the end.” Such literary works, Epstein proposes, constitute an erratic and disordered “zero-degree writing,”57 a type of literature indistinguishable from language and reduced to the laws of orthography, morphology, and simple grammar. By rupturing the sentence to unintelligible segments, rotating spatially the nonsequential fragments, and outlining pictorial designs and graphic patterns, Language poets call into question the hegemonic systems of discursive power. Any attempt to follow the rules of standard syntax and grammar constitutes, to Language writers, a concession to the regime of political power. As Bernstein succinctly announces, the “use of standard patterns of syntax and exposition effectively rebroadcasts, often at a subliminal level, the basic constitutive elements of the social structure…”58 Such an impingement on the sacred parameters of writing is inadmissible to Language poets. Language, they believe, is endowed with the power to constitute and transform; it should never be used to subjugate and control.

6. Becoming meaningful: Re-narrativizing Language poetry While the rejection of normative patterns of morphology, syntax, and grammar no doubt gives birth to new forms of poetic language, it still appears questionable that, by defacing standardized structures, poets can efficiently fight the commodification of language. As Perloff remarks, discussing the fractured enunciation of Language writing, “[T]he work that lasts is one that does not merely fragment, distort, write over or under, cut up, splice, or collage, but that uses these techniques to encode complex meanings.”59 No matter how anti-absorptive a text is, the reader invariably attempts to translate it into some form of commonsense meaning, and when such meaning is fully refused to him/her, the agenda of poetry becomes gravely destabilized. “An open text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpretation,” Umberto Eco asserts in The Role of the Reader.60 Indeed, the Language poets urge us to resist forming larger narrative wholes beyond the provisional links shaped in the process of reading (i.e., to fight de-narrativization). But does this process deprive the Language verses of meaning? It appears, instead, that each act of de-narrativization opens up multiple possibilities for re-narrativization, that is, the construction of new ideas and meanings. As Silliman asserts, De-narrativization is a necessary part of construction in these wider paratactic arguments. But this process needs to be seen for the combined reading and writing practice that it is: re-narrativization is also necessary. If we try to separate out the results of these practices, we are left with fictions, metaphorical condensations: the purely autonomous, politically efficacious new sentence on the one hand, and the rubble of snapped signifying chains on the other.61

While it is unquestionably true that the intuitive quest of the reader after “some form of commonsense meaning” may be a deeply frustrating experience (for, as McGann

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points out, one of the “crucial feature[s] of the LANGUAGE approach to poetry and writings centers in its preoccupation with nonsense, unmeaning, and fragmentation”),62 I believe that meaning is nonetheless an indisputable element of Language poetry’s “nonsemantic” verses. It is just that a shift has occurred in Language writing from the centrality of the unified sentence and form as measures for the meaningfulness of poetical structures, to other, less transparent modes of semantically charged and historically significant literature. “A refusal to exchange language for meaning does not imply that language is meaningless but implies rather that the opposition of language and meaning needs to be reconceived,” Reinfeld proposes.63 Ultimately, the Language poems are interesting not only in terms of how perplexing they are, but also in terms of how much meaning may be constructed in them. The discourse of Language writing is thus meaning-constitutive rather than meaning-referential.64 “The signs of language … are not … mere structures,” Bernstein explains, “they do not sit, deanimated, as symbols in a code, dummies for things of nature they ‘refer to.’ ”65 Instead, they require our active engagement in the production and actualization of meaning. Meaning “is” not to be found ready-made in the poem, meaning “becomes” part of it as a result of the readerly efforts. Therefore, we are to think of poetry as “making a path” rather than “designing a garden”66 and of its meaning as a meaning-ofbecoming rather than a meaning-in-being. Let us consider the following brief poem: She shells smells by the by67

It would be equally unfitting to contend that this poem doesn’t make sense or to assert that it yields productively to the reader’s attempt to decipher it. Despite appearing random and incoherent, the poem seems to possess certain internal logic. The first and second lines have the same beginning (“she”), the second and third lines—the same ending (“ells”). The last line re-enacts the doubling of word structures via a repetition of the preposition “by” in a symmetrical construction that creates a mirrorlike effect and actuates the vibrant semantics of sound (“by the by”). Little more can (and, perhaps, should) be said about the poem’s signification. It is one of those Language “[t]exts [that] are themselves signif ieds, not mere signifiers.”68 As Andrews remarks, describing such Language works, “The text requires no hermeneusis for it is itself one—of itself.”69 Similarly to the poem above, the one preceding it in Bernstein’s Disfrutes seems, at first sight, a pointless piece of writing. to           at on          it the         at on to           the at            on

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it he            it the          at70 on is

It would be hard and, indeed, unproductive, to attempt to extract any meaning from verses, defined by cognitive dissonance and radical dispersion of meaning. Still, the poem undoubtedly reveals an underlying grammatical logic. Indeed, there are no selfstanding semantic units, not even roots that express a central idea. What unites all the parts of the poem and constitutes it as “meaningful” is namely the auxiliary nature of its elements. The poem is made up of prepositions, pronouns, and a single verb (at that, auxiliary) that need to be attached to a semantic nucleus in order to produce conventional meanings. Still, I would argue, the refusal to generate legible meanings and be integrated in a larger, coherent structure is far from an act of desemanticization (though, admittedly, the semantics at play is of a distinctly unorthodox nature). It is the kind of meaning-production of which McCaffery writes in his book, tellingly entitled Prior to Meaning: “Meaning is guaranteed to linguistic form not in a mirror-image correspondence to extralinguisticalities but in the linguistic form per se.”71 As Aleksei Kruchenykh once put it, “one can read a word backward, and then one gets a deeper meaning.”72 The refusal to copy reality does not strip the Language poem of meaning. As Bernstein suggests, “Anti-realism need not imply, as certain French theorists might claim,/a rejection of meaning. All that Artifice requires is that nonmeaningful levels be taken into account…”73

7. The semantics of sound This reassignment of the locus of meaning is a common gesture in Language writing, which engages in opening up to the reader the often discounted semantics of poetic sound. “[S]and and sane an,” Bernstein chants in Disfrutes. “[L]eans/ looms/remains / … fade/fumbling, quivering,” he intones, exploring the infinite possibilities of sound to anchor non-conventional meanings.74 Or, as Melnick’s verse in Pcoet sings (Figure 5.4):75 For the Language writers, poetry is categorically contingent on sound, a viewpoint they wholeheartedly embrace despite the prevalent dismissal of sound and of the poem’s nonlexical components as “meaningless” and “nonsemantic” features. As Bernstein reveals in his critique of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s account in On Poetic Artifice, the capacity of “nonsemantic” elements to carry and preserve poetic meaning has often been ungroundedly devalued: “… It/seems to me she [Forrest-Thomson] is wrong to designate the nonlexical,/or more accurately, extralexical/strata of the poem as ‘nonsemantic’; I would say/that such elements as line breaks, acoustic/patterns, syntax, etc., are meaningful rather than,/as she has it, that they contribute to the meaning/of the poem.”76 All in all, “the designation of the visual, acoustic,/& syntactic elements of a poem as ‘meaningless,’ ” Bernstein concludes, which “is a common habit/of much

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Figure 5.4 David Melnick’s PCOET, # 77. Copyright: David Melnick current critical discussion of syntactically/nonstandard poetry—is symptomatic of a desire to/evade responsibility for meaning’s total, &/totalizing, reach.”77 The semantics of sound is particularly visible in Andrews’s Acappella—the name alluding to the music of the “a cappella” singing performed without the use of any instruments. Listen to the sound of the following lines (Figure 5.5):

Figure 5.5 Bruce Andrews, Acappella, #12. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

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The poem showcases alliteration based on the repetitive use of the initial “b” sound along with the phonic liquidity of multiple assonances (as in “boy/boy,” “but/ business,” “bed/began,” etc.). The latter are often interrupted by the raucous grating of the “br” alliterative groups (as in the case of the musical “e” assonance in “before, bed, bed,” intercepted by the hoarse “br” of “breaking” and “brother” in the neighboring lines) (Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6 From Bruce Andrews’s Acappella, #12. Copyright: Bruce Andrews This poem by Andrews, though emphatically centered on sound, still preserves the autonomy of the word rather than focus on the materiality of the phoneme. In this, it is reminiscent of the earlier phase78 in the evolution of sound poetry when, as McCaffery attests, “sound poetry was still a largely word-bound practice … [with] the materiality of the sign emerg[ing] as a central preoccupation.”79 Since the 1950s, however, a critical move to orality has occurred, culminating in Henri Chopin’s creation of the audiopoème.80 Just challenge yourself to pronounce out loud the following poem, and you will be immersed in the pre-linguistic vocality of indiscriminate sound patterns and structureless phonetic groups (Figure 5.7):

Figure 5.7 From Bruce Andrews’s Factura. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

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Sound poetry thus demonstrates the ways in which meaning is generated on levels prior to grammatical synthesis. This relocation of meaning subverts the possibility for any easy reference of word to non-linguistic externalities and marks the Language poets’ revolutionary endeavor to undermine the authority of standard grammar and normative discourses. “There is no place words cannot take us if we don’t take them as authorities, with fixed codes hardwired into the language, but as springs to jump with, or as trampolines to hurl ourselves, inward and outward, upward and downward, aslant and agog, round and unrounded,” Bernstein proclaims.81 Writing wrong, diminishing or fully effacing reference via consistent misspelling, word rupture, and faulty syntax and grammar, is thus presented as a strategy that aims at disengaging language from its subjection to the capitalist project. “The fight for language is a political fight,” McCaffery contends and further explains: “The fight for language is also a fight inside language.”82 As evinced in the very title of Silliman’s essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,”83 in order for a new world to appear, the word in its conventional sense should disappear. This is what we saw enacted in the poetry of Russian postmodernism—this, we have likewise established, is the creed embraced by its American (Language) counterpart. Commenting on the “textualist/improvisational techniques [used by East European experimentalists] to undermine the party-sanctioned representations of ‘reality,’ ” Marcel Cornis-Pope suggests an underlying parallel with the American Language school: “The capacity of self-reflexive, revisionistic art to both ‘de-doxify’ and change the dominant systems of meaning and value is well understood today both by East European experimentalists … and the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.”84 What the two have in common is the commitment to transform and reimagine society via a radical reinventing of language and its deliverance from the oppressive dictates of reality.

8. The referential potential of silence A humbling of speech, a deflation of meaning—these are ways of pointing to another, silent reality for which there are no and can be no words. Any value is made small, when we assume the Supreme Value. The latter cannot itself be made manifest; only that can be manifested which this value is not.85 Mikhail Epstein Our discussion in the previous section has revealed that the self-referentiality of Language poetry is not an attempt to cut off links with the world and escape in a solipsistic reality. Conversely, as we have seen critics avow, it is in the self-reflexivity of Language art that we can identify the means to “ ‘de-doxify’ and change the dominant systems of meaning and value.”86 Language poetry thus implores to be recognized as much more than a purely linguistic exercise, a project restricted to experimental formalist explorations. Instead, the refusal to speak in a coherent manner and reiterate the dominant discourse of power emerges as a gesture of grand revolutionary potential.

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The violation of the bounds of standard syntax and grammar gives birth to a peculiar abode of silence—an empty space for the imagining of new, never before formulated ideas. Thus, in an act of effacing reference to existing realities, the Language poets’ refusal to verbalize positive meanings establishes reference to a moment in history when new worlds are being created and the old—boldly uprooted. Unable to define the yearned-for but yet unformed social reality, the poets can only describe what this new world is not, that is, define it negatively. In an attempt to trace the roots of Language poetry’s negative aesthetics, we once again revert to the traditions of Russian modernism and postmodernism. As we have noted, Language poetry has often been linked to the avant-garde school of Russian Futurism, with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velemir Khlebnikov as its forefront figures.87 In Part one, we have observed that similar paths of succession connect futurist poetry to Russian conceptualism. In the words of Epstein, “we can … trace paths of succession from … futurism to conceptualism,”88 as both give full precedence to the “world of the signifier itself,”89 “the self-sufficient word” (samovitoe slovo), as Khlebnikov once termed it. A parallel plotting of American Language poetry and Russian conceptualist verses on a single stylistic, poetical graph thus manifests points of peculiar convergence via the commonality of the two with the futurist school. Futurists’ transrational poetics and Khlebnikov’s zaum technique have often been regarded as analogous to the mechanism operating in the Language verse. Many critics have recognized in postmodern Language poetry the same method of textual estrangement (ostranenie) that Shklovsky, at the outset of the twentieth century, ushered as a signature device of the early Russian avant-garde. Shklovsky preached the need to make art strange, to capture the attention of the reader by removing his/her senses from the hurried, automated mode in which he/she had grown accustomed to perceive reality, and to reveal what is unique and totally surprising in the banal everyday world. At the heart of Shklovsky’s theory, known as the theory of defamiliarization, lies the objective to slow down the reader’s adventure and let him/her savor the uniqueness of the words on page—the desire to help the reader find the words’ distinctly singular and unrepeatable quality. Leading him/her away from the habitual modes of perceiving reality, the practice of estrangement seeks to shock the reader into a recognition of the new, of what has been suppressed and buried by life’s implacable automatisms, and thus initiate him/her on the road to social critique and analysis. While Language poetry often employs the estrangement technique however, in the mind of Kalaidjian, it still remains unclear if the latter engenders any politically significant criticism or merely records the symptoms of late capitalist reality. As the critic observes, Today it is still an open question whether the Language poets’ postmodern version of Shklovsky’s ostranenie actually serves politically, as the Russian formalists claimed it would, to subvert the bourgeois world outlook—its rituals of social consumption and ideologies of the imperial self, introspective privacy, “voice,” and so on—or if it merely reflects, symptomatically, capital’s own fragmented spectacle of commodity exchange.90

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While unquestioningly sharing some common features with the futurist and formalist agendas of the early Russian avant-garde, Language writing, I would argue, adopts some immensely dissimilar poetic techniques as well. Practically the opposite device to that of the early avant-garde estrangement functions in late avant-garde literary trends, to which both Russian conceptualist poetics and the Language theory and verse pertain. Language writing seems to employ the same strategies of automation of perception or “sloughing off ” (otslaivanie) that Epstein finds to operate in Russia’s late poetic avant-garde (1970–1980s) and, more specifically, in conceptualist poetry and art. Bernstein’s “Emotions of Normal People” exemplifies the peculiar ways in which the Language verses enact the automation of perception technique: I’d like to meet Jane Franham. Jane was my mother-in-law until I married Jim. [While I was sure of Joan’s love … Now both hands are able to work, since the magnifier is suspended around the neck on an adjustable length of cord …] I suspected that your father had an adrenal gland tumor … Lillie was very emphatic that she wanted to be a ballet dancer;… Lipstick is meant to be the perfect finishing touch—one that doesn’t compete with your eyeshadow or clash with your blushes. Only when the soup course is finished is the service plate taken out.—Who’s the woman YOU most admire? Is it Shirley Temple Black, Raisa Gorbachev… Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Ella Fitzgerald?91

In works like this, the Language poets do not attempt to disengage familiar words and ordinary views from commonplace realities, to place them in an unconventional environment, and grant them strangeness to acquire visibility; they, rather, choose to let words stream out unadorned and hackneyed as we encounter them in our dayto-day existence. Nothing in these indiscriminately flowing words seems strange and unexpected—they all are well-known, nugatory, trivial; no statements come out as surprising or provocative—instead, they are repetitive, derivative, familiar. The “sloughing off ” poetic practice does not attempt to hold the reader’s focus or attention, but, on the contrary, to speed up its removal from word to word, from line to line, from

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page to page—to automate our readerly perception until we, fleetly thumbing through the pages, forget about the verses in the book and, blissfully oblivious, arrive at the abode of total silence. There, in a domain where no pre-charted rules apply, the reader can discover his distinctive ways to grapple with the problems of society. Facing the ultimate silence is, in fact, a profoundly religious experience. Getting rid of, or, as the founder of negative (apophatic) theology Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth century A.D.) puts it, “clearing aside,” the layers of conventional meanings, we approach the estate of the Absolute, the sovereign land of the Supreme Value, which no words can ever describe, as it is greater than all possible descriptions and definitions. As Epstein penetratingly construes it, “After all, the Supreme Value (which is also nonValue) keeps silent, and the more words about it we quote, the sooner we will approach its ‘authorial’ word about itself: silence within itself, where we, too, may abide.”92 Interestingly, in Prior to Meaning, McCaffery also alludes to the negative aesthetics of Language poetry and suggests that it may have been rooted in Zen Buddhist ideas such as emptiness, nothingness, and the effacement of one’s mind and ego. He introduces a conversation between Mac Low and Bernstein, in which Mac Low shares the importance of Zen principles for his “silent” poetics. “Zen taught me both to try to minimize the expression of the ego during the act of composition and to let each word, etc., ‘speak for itself,’ ” Mac Low points out.93 Apart from the Buddhist conception of egolessness, Mac Low underscores the Taoist ideal of Wu-Wei (non-action, letting the Way do it) and the Zen Buddhist conception of the No-Mind as the main Taoist ideals that lie at the basis of chance composition. In a subsequent response to a question posed by Bernstein, Mac Low elaborates: “Yet the Zen Buddhist motive for use of chance (&c) means was to be able to generate a series of ‘dharmas’ (phenomena/events, e.g., sounds, words, colored shapes) relatively ‘uncontaminated’ by the composer’s ‘ego’ (taste, constitutional predilections, opinions, current or chronic emotions),”94 that is, to lead the reader to a space of emptiness and silence where, without the presence of any authorially imposed ideas, he/she could uncover a way to negotiate and alter reality. Abiding in the realm of silence, which forces no interpretations of the social problems, no evident and clear-cut solutions, the reader is free to find his/her individual path in the labyrinth of social issues. It is in this sense that Language poetry provides an alternative arena for political deliberations, a zone of social quests and inquiries. Refusing to address the people with formulated, ready-made ideas, denying them the solace of already established categorizations, the poems empower the reader on the path of political activism. Thus, what might seem a silence, thoroughly devoid of social meanings, appears charged with political energy and a potential to contest the discourse of power. The late avant-garde device of “sloughing off ” finds numerous manifestations in Language poetry. Bernstein’s “Lapidary Entropy” (Islets/Irritations), for instance, demonstrates the process of peeling off, divesting one by one the rich semantic layers of reality, until the reader is confronted with the nothingness of pure silence, utterly unburdened by a pre-existing meaning. Enumerated one after another, in the poem’s seventeen digressing verbal sections, are trivial, boring, and altogether insignificant statements, whose only role is the automation of the reader’s perception and his/

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her hastened transposition into the realm of nothingness. Sections 6 and 13 of the poem read: 6. 13. SONNET TELEPHONE CALL See “did you the idea of form speak to is to fit tight ted greenwald (Frank O’Hara said that) he called at & a sonnet seems like one ten to nine.” of those turtlenecks that if it’s also, I a good color had some & the shape hugs cereal then it becomes & my tooth still hurts.95 one. Oh Chris I miss you & your name, breaks across any thoughts I distract myself with.96

There is no logocentric subject in this poem. The stanzas are not unified by any lyric persona or singular consciousness. They are, instead, spoken in a multiplicity of voices, thus exhibiting peculiar heteroglossia. It is a case of “monadic ontology,” as McCaffery defines it based on Leibniz’s concept of the monad: “Under the rule of monadic ontology, the subject ‘liquefies’ into a seriality of viewpoints within which subjectivity can only be defined retrospectively as a trace construction after the event.”97 The reader’s initial attempts to decode the poem’s deep meanings thus yields to a fully unexpected discovery—the poem, in its intrinsic fluidity, strives to convey no definitive meaning; it refuses to point to any singular truth. Instead, it attempts to divert our attention, to lead it away from its particular content, to set our minds free and open them up to new, unattained social epiphanies. Language poetry thus constitutes a valiant act of initiation, a plunging board letting us dive into unknown and diverse social realities, an arena to exercise our political will and transform a deficient society. Interestingly, the technique of labeling the poem’s sections by using consecutive numbers is a popular device in Russian conceptualism as well. Just as in Bernstein’s poem, in Rubinshtein’s “A Little Nighttime Serenade” the different stanzas are painstakingly numbered, each number denoting the consecutive layer whose removal will lead into the wordless world of silence. The mental peeling off of the semantic layers is reinforced through the physical act of removing one by one the cards on which the author has inscribed the individual poetic sections. “In the original each fragment of my text, is placed on a separate page or card,” Rubinshtein explains; “… [i]t is a visualization of the text … Most likely I am exaggerating, but it seems to me

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that the authentic three-dimensional version of my text relates to its flat version in approximately the same way as an orchestral score relates to a transcription for one or two instruments.”98 At the public performances of his poetry, Rubinshtein files one after another the cards, a practice evoking his work as a librarian, Rubinshtein’s fulltime professional occupation. “A Little Nighttime Serenade,” presented below, thus lists the stanzas that Rubinshtein catalogues in an attempt to “slough off ” predictable meanings and automate the reader’s perception. 1. Nightingale, my nightingale He appeared here in the dale! 2. Like a phantom in the dale There appears a nightingale… 15. You and I, O nightingale – We’re alone amid the dale! 16. (Applause) 17. —I wonder whether premonitions come true or not? 18. —What premonitions do you mean? 19. —Well, there are certain premonitions… 20. About what? 21. —It doesn’t matter. If they’re right, you’ll find out… 22. —Oh, well… 23. (Pause)

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24. People are not nightingales, Even if they’re in the dale! … 61. —Yes … Levels of communication… 62. —What about “levels of communication”? 63. —Here’s what I think: there is, no doubt, a means of attaining those levels of communication which are unattainable by any other means… 64. —Well, no doubt… 65. —So there you have it. But you say… 66. —I say? 67. (Pause) 68. People need to sing a song, If the soul requires it! 69. People have to have some love. Or they’re not true human beings!… 90. —I don’t understand … 91. —What don’t you understand? 92. —I don’t understand a thing!

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93. —What do you mean “a thing”? 94. —Just what it means. I don’t understand, that’s all! 95. —Strange … 96. (Lengthy pause) 97. (Applause)99

Starting from line one, down to ninety seven, the poem presents a sequence of altogether unrelated statements exemplifying the “sloughing off ” technique. Sometimes these statements are citational, other times—original, the line dividing the two becoming blurred and, ultimately, irrelevant. The style of the poem is manifestly dictionaric. No longer indulging in the glory of an unrivalled creator, the author has assumed the humble role of a reporter responsible for writing down all he has heard, read, or perceived as in any way pertinent. By the end of Rubinshtein’s poem, the reader’s expectations for arriving at any truth or meaning in his/her effort to construe the text become totally frustrated (as the debate on the lack of understanding, at the poem’s finale, reveals). In an environment denying any easy reference points, amidst the solitude of absolute poetic silence, the reader faces the necessity to find a guiding, orienting point, to probe himself/herself into the baffling reality and draw up potent strategies for social action.

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The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments 0

… [A]s if a “poem” could exist in the United States today that has not been shaped by the electronic culture that has produced it. There is today no landscape uncontaminated by sound bytes and 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… 1 Marjorie Perloff

1. Introduction As we have revealed in the preceding chapter, the syntactic rupturing of the Language texts and the attempt to lead the reader away from previously constructed meanings into the abode of silence aim at the formation of alternate discourses designed to undermine the efforts to “commodify, fetishize, make instrumental language.”2 This strategy springs from the belief that the instrumentality of language is closely linked to the specter of commodity fetishism. Though generally unacknowledged by critics, however, another type of discursive instrumentality seems to define the agenda of Language writing. Alongside the phenomenon of rampant commodification, an unprecedented boom in the sphere of technology has redefined the limits of late capitalist society and overwhelmed the subject with unparalleled informational glut, an incessant media babble spawned by communications systems and digital technology. Radio and television, computers and film, the internet and the World Wide Web have drastically reshaped the landscape of late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Created by technological developments combining computers and telecommunications, the new media have transformed us into components of complex technological systems— via a keyboard, mouse, or a joy stick, we get hooked to and instantly interact with powerful computer screens; using the internet, listserves and newsgroups, we relate to each other in ways unimaginable before. It thus appears imperative to recognize that in postmodern Information society, alongside commodity fetishism, the discourse of media and information technology functions as a central instrumental discourse or, to word it in a slightly different

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manner—alongside reification, information technology becomes a crucial determinant of late twentieth-century instrumental discourses. From this perspective, it is essential to consider the condition of literature in late or multinational capitalism not only in the context of consumer culture, but in that of the Information Age and the new technological environments. The two, moreover, seem to have been closely interlinked and codependent. In an era where “much of what is now the internet promises to become the largest shopping network on earth, and possibly in the universe (even exceeding the Mall of the Milky Way on Galactica B282),” the discourse of commodification and that of technology and media information can no longer be conceived as unrelated and autonomous.3 Language poets have often reminded us that the discourse of technology and of the public media is closely linked to and impacted by late capitalist reification. In My Way: Speeches and Poems, for instance, Bernstein blames consumer-oriented culture as the cause for “the degraded cultural agenda of the print and electronic media.”4 Bernstein asserts that even such leading journals as The New York Review of Books, The Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and New Republic make no exception here, as they have regrettably failed to report noteworthy intellectual developments of the recent years. He claims that even public radio and television stations such as NPR and PBS have moved their focus from providing unique and independent programming to reaching a larger and more homogeneous audience, thereby fitting in the new cultural climate, in which “consultants stigmatize as elitist anything that would provide a contrast to the bland and uniform programming their market research supposedly mandates.”5 To them, Bernstein expounds, “ ‘Elitism’ is the code word for a process of cultural lobotomization that offers the same prospect for the cultural life of the nation as lobotomies offer for the creative potential of the individual.”6 It is thus of no surprise that the outcome of this cultural philosophy is an environment where public media are overtaken by consumer interests, so that “[i]n place of public parks of ideas we have private malls of predigested cultural packages.”7 Beyond its manifestations in the consumer-driven news and electronic media, the discourse of technology has permeated every aspect of artistic production, extending to the formerly immune realm of writing. Even before the arrival of “late” or “multinational” capitalism, poetry began to be infiltrated by the up-and-coming media technology. “…[I]t was [John] Cage who understood, at least as early as the fifties, that from now on poetry would have to position itself, not vis-à-vis the landscape or the city or this or that political event, but in relation to the media that, like it or not, occupy an increasingly large part of our verbal, visual, and acoustic space.”8 As the media theorist Friedrich Kittler (often dubbed the “Derrida of the digital age”) prophetically announced in the opening line of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, “Media determine our situation.”9 They have always determined it and continue to do so, even beyond the writer’s personal death (as Kittler’s foreboding words resound after his recent passing: “What remains of people is what media can store and communicate”).10 With the outset of the Digital Age, the boom in the communicating and storing potential of the computer and all newly burgeoning electronic media reshaped radically the domains of writing and literature. “[C]omputer textuality transforms

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the way we receive as well as the way we create written texts,” Perloff relays Richard Lanham’s shrewd insight.11 Such “digital equivalency,” in Lanham’s mind, “means that we can no longer pursue literary study by itself: the other arts will form part of literary study in an essential way.”12 And it is no other but the new computer art that claims the foremost place in the artistic sphere. Set on a pedestal of its own, “the personal computer itself constitutes the ultimate postmodern work of art.”13 In an environment where literature and all the other arts have been increasingly emplaced in and heavily determined by technology, it thus becomes imperative to recognize and to account for the latter’s indispensable role in producing them. Focusing on the new powers in discourse formation, Perloff observes a shift in the valorization of literature. “The new Madonna film, the TV sitcom, the deodorant ad, the graffiti—these are now being scrutinized with a care once lavished on the poetry of Donne or the fiction of Flaubert,” she remarks.14 Not literature but “the database,” Lev Manovich concurs, “becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age.”15 Effecting an even more radical turn, “the database,” Manovich contends, “has displaced narrative as the dominant cultural form.”16 In this new technological climate, it seems imperative to explore the ways in which the electronic environments impact the production and reception of literature.

2. The wedding of Language poetry and media technology [T]he most interesting poetic and artistic compositions of our time do position themselves, consciously or unconsciously, against the languages of TV and advertising.17 Marjorie Perloff Though overlooked by critics of Language writing, the role that technology plays in the production of Language poetry seems impossible to ignore. Language poets have increasingly, consciously or unconsciously, infused their work with the discourse of technology. Keeping abreast of the latest technological developments, they have also embraced some of the newest media environments to disseminate and define their verses. Bernstein, for instance, has recently used the power of YouTube to explain and publicize his poetry. In a response to an anonymous interviewer, posing the question “What is language-centered poetry?” Bernstein provides the following video answer: “I really couldn’t say. It’s a term that refers to a wide range of things that don’t seem to conform to people’s normal expectation of what poetry is, but in the process transforms people’s experience of what poetry could be.”18 We are thus no longer surprised as we come across Language poems that are presented to us as free MP3 downloads and cater to the needs of the growingly mediasavvy, perhaps younger audiences (such is the case of “Azoot D’Puund,” which we will focus on further on in the chapter). In the Information Age, the wedding of content and form, of poetic meaning and competing media becomes increasingly consensual.

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“Extension is never more than a form of content,” Stephen Ross quotes from Bernstein’s “Dysraphism,” and further explains: “The kind of extension of content he [Bernstein] has in mind is … that which comes from, say, channel surfing, or thumbing through the Yellow Pages or the TV Guide — anywhere that disparate units of meaning are aggressively yoked together by a totalizing force, be it an artist or a cable network.”19 As McCaffery remarks from a somewhat different perspective, “technology is the primary instrument by which that nonrepresentational, nonsemantic state [of poetry] is realized.”20 Language poets reveal intense sensitivity to the impacts of the technological environment and the need to account for it in their verses. In his innovative work, Bernstein boldly sets out to “traverse institutional contexts (contemporary photography and painting, tv news and ads, video games, postructuralism).”21 Perelman’s writing is likewise informed by the belief that “[i]t is of value … to set the new sentence beside postmodern architecture and television…”22 Indeed, an attentive examination of the work of Perelman and Bernstein reveals that much of it attests to the positioning of Language poetry against the settings of technology and electronic culture. Step by step, Bernstein’s “Emotions of Normal People” leads us to a world of computerized, high-tech devices, a world of “connectors and cables,” “digitalizing oscilloscope,” “logic simulator,” various “systems components” and “floating interface[s],” a world where you can “configure,” “eas[ily] … install and reconfigure,” and “cut down on chances for device failure.”23 “You can connect a bi-directional/Buffer or dumb terminal to the/Module’s digital inputs & relay/Outputs with crystal-controlled/External trigger for jitter-free/Duplex data compression & protocol/Source codes.”24 The lyrical persona is rhizomatically25 connected to different technological regimes and does not seem to have any autonomous existence outside of them. He has become one with the world of bits and bytes—the tethers between them growing increasingly shorter and impossible to discern. The technological realm stretches beyond our earthly abode, where Perelman’s heroes, Oedipus and Kreon, converse through machines about the depraved state of humankind. Kreon is plugged in his “transcendental desktop” and Oedipus is “one/ with the machines that go boom in the night.” People, Kreon reports, are dying or on the verge of death: What news, ancient uncle, from the transcendental desktop? Kreon: The people, hemmed in by liberal playgrounds/and rightwing communication systems, are dead/or dying. Oedipus: Sense perception/is a thing of the past … I’m one/with the machines that go boom in the night.26

Perelman is quick to acknowledge the new emplacement of the subject in an information-governed reality. In “Motion,” he portrays the lyric hero in a realm of omnipresent media, in which “the TV plots” frame every aspect of life, including his romantic encounters: “let’s get out of here, they sing,/go for a walk, just you and me and the seven basic plots.”27 A voyeuristic pleasure in sex comes from the intermediation of the camera: “Meanwhile it was midnight. The sentence groped

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hurriedly for/some flimsy rhetoric, but things were too clear. The camera/was rolling, the grammar grinding, moans and groans filled/the soundtrack precisely, like food in airline trays, far away/but in theory edible.”28 The sexual act is performed in front of the VCR, observed through its eyes, and trivialized as just another serial take: “With the VCR I thee watch take off your clothes and make love/into/a speech about democracy, making the world safe for,/take seventeen.”29 Sex, in the Information era, is not an intimate, but technological experience. The romantics of a personal encounter is replaced by an impersonal contact via technology and messages interspersed with consumer terminology: “I’ve faxed you, e-mailed, left a message on the machine, sent you a letter, & you still don’t seem to get it. Your routine is my Gatorade, like the hen coop you call your gray matter, you know, upside your nasal canal. To you localization just means another franchise location.”30 The pictorial enframing of Bernstein’s verse (contributed by Susan Bee) is an evocative example of the use of ekphrasis, in which the medium of art adjoins skillfully and complements the vibrant flesh of Bernstein’s poetry.31 The media have penetrated our lives so aggressively that it has become increasingly difficult to imagine our existence outside their regimes. They have effaced the border between reality and unreality, placing the subject in the realm of the hyperreal and forcing him/her to abide amidst simulacra, to use Jean Baudrillard’s famed term.32 In his description of the uniformity and all-pervasiveness of each night’s TV lineup, Perelman, in “The View from the Dollar Bill,” ponders if we actually exist beyond this media reality. Unlike a slave who would have fled away to a place of no slavery, we know of no place of escape that had not yet been pervaded by and subjugated to the media: If you’re a slave you want to run away,/but only to where there’s no slavery./The will isn’t magical, overseers pounding those bricks/into nearly identical shape, the Wednesday Night lineup, the/Thursday Night lineup./All the episodes, contemplated one by one, become monuments/enclosing a dead divinity, a vivid picture of what it must be like/to actually exist.33

No “actual” existence outside the regimes of media appears tenable or possible. As Perelman attests in “Streets,” the lives of people have been thoroughly subsumed within a world of media commercials and discarded images: “For the general populace, it was discrete/leftover images: newspaper stacked on the back porch, the smell/of Chinese restaurant spreading across the/tracks and the reddish-green sumac/episodic, meaning less & less after each commercial.”34 In a world that can no longer operate without technology, the latter has become its major axis of coordination and source of information: “The stump don’t work ‘cause the loggers took the cell phone … At least with an infomercial you know where they’re coming from.”35 The subject’s close interconnection with the technological environment is the topic of the installation “Couch Potato” by the internationally acclaimed KoreanAmerican performance and conceptual artist Nam June Paik.36 The distance between the TV viewer, sitting in his reclining La-Z-Boy chair, and the TV screen

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Figure 6.1 Nam June Paik (South Korean, 1932–2006), Couch Potato, 1994, mixed media, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, Museum Purchase with funds from Patron Circle for Contemporary Art and Art Purchase fund, 2005, 2006.25

he is watching has melted, as TV sets and other technological media pile on and penetrate the subject. Who sits in Paik’s La-Z-Boy chair is thus no longer a person, but a robot made out of a television set, remote controls, video game joysticks, mailboxes, cash registers, and a fax machine. The installation seems to forecast the moment when technology will have conquered the human to the point of making him unrecognizable and redundant (Figure 6.1). In the technology-governed reality, television has mediated and dictated our view of Nature and the divine. God, the highest divine power, has turned into a media event that is unable to compete with the glitzy Superbowl—he can “come back to life” only after the game and, even then, as a mortal TV man: “Now that the Super Bowl is over/ … God has come back to life/in the form of a man in a suit on TV…”37 Similarly, as a video work by Paik describes, we no longer know the shape of the moon unless we see it on the TV. Before there was television, man used to watch the moon, Paik reminisces in “Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965)—an arc of thirteen monitors, portraying the moon’s phases. “Moon Is the Oldest TV: Colored Version” (2000) draws a parallel between the moon and television, suggesting that, by virtue of reflecting light from the sun, the moon functions like a primitive TV receiver. Nature has thus been increasingly turning into an intimate part of the media landscape. In another of his works, entitled “TV Garden,”38 Paik places luminous monitors among luscious philodendron branches. At first sight, the installation appears to problematize the plants’ existence in the darkness, deprived of any light but that emitted by the TVs. This initial unease, however, soon gives way to a more critical query, as viewers start questioning if we, the humans, can survive glued to the TV receivers, mesmerized and benumbed by the screen’s blue glow (Figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.2 Nam June Paik, TV Garden, 1974 (2000 version). Nam June Paik TV Garden, 1974 (2000 version) Video installation with color television sets and live plants, dimensions vary with installation Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members: Ann Ames, Edythe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cindy Johnson, Barbara Lane, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Willem Peppler, Denise Rich, Simonetta Seragnoli, David Teiger, Ginny Williams, and Elliot K. Wolk; and through prior gift of The Bohen Foundation 2001.6 © Nam June Paik. Photo: Ellen Labenski, New York It appears that in our Information Age, we are constantly abiding in the realm of media, helpless and blind in the midst of infinite darkness. In this “poor visibility,” it gets increasingly hard to tell if we are dead or still barely living. Do we ever wake up from our dreaming sojourn in the maelstrom of media images? Do we even have an existence outside and beyond it? It was dark needless to say. And as I go to write this, again, it is dark. Of course, if it never got light in between sessions of dark, then “again, it is dark” wouldn’t have much bite. And if you never wake up between dreams then they are hardly dreams now are they?/Really all this is to apologize for the poor visibility, the disgusting state of the media.39

The inability to differentiate between the world of media and our real world, our life in the murkiness of media whose “poor visibility” tends to reflect rather than produce any new meanings are also the themes of Bernstein’s libretto for Blind Witness News.40 As in Perelman’s poem, the author parodies the loss of reference to any reality other

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than that created by the television medium. Bernstein’s opera is structured like a thirty-minute evening newscast, delivered by two anchors, a weatherperson and a sportscaster. The TV news report reflects the routine verbal behavior of the anchors, the clichés and meaningless banter, the vacuous bywords, and, ultimately, the idea that there is no message behind them, that the TV medium itself, as in McLuhan’s signature phrase,41 remains the only (and, at that, pointless) message. It is a case, in which, as McCaffery has argued, “The production of new equals the reproduction of the media itself. Meaning is no longer consumed (as in the realist novels of last century), nor is meaning produced (as in the struggles of much post-modern narrative and non-narrative), it is reflected without absorption.”42 “Hence,” McCaffery contends, “the entropicity of the late night news where information, instead of occurring inside the communication engendering response (real or theoretical), is exhausted within the very act of its narration.”43 “[M]edia narration is [thus] located at the end of the social and closer to an excremental than to an informational ‘function.’ ”44 The “excremental” reflection of media-engendered meaning, without any semantic absorption, is often observed in the disconnected Language verses. As Perelman acknowledges, critics have uncovered an uncanny “similarity between the new sentence [used in Language poetry] and current media practice.”45 “[T]he stylistic gesture most characteristic of language writing,” those critics contend, “is the nonsequitur … It is the product of a generation raised in front of a television … A nonsequitur implies a loss of memory, an erasing of history. ‘Language’ poetry as it is practiced by its strictest followers is identical to the speech of television’s masterpiece, Ronald Reagan.”46 Apart from such scarce remarks, however, the rapprochement between Language poetry and contemporary technology has remained largely unnoticed by scholars in the field. Such an oversight seems particularly inadmissible given the increasing connectedness of present-day lyric poetry with the “wired world.”47 As Perloff asserts, our contact with the discourses that surround us “tends to be always already mediated by a third voice, the voice of the media.”48 The “poet’s arena” has become “the electronic world—the world of the Donahue Show and MTV, of People magazine and the National Enquirer, of Internet and MCI mail relayed around the world by modem, (as in the case of the journal , which publishes fiction, literary and cultural criticism via electronic mail).”49 Determining the contemporary forms of knowledge production, media technologies have thus acquired a crucial importance in the way we conceive, but also define, present-day literature. As Craig Dworkin provocatively notes, “A classification of literature according to criteria like a text’s awareness of its medial noise or material status might prove a useful alternative to standard, highly fraught classifications like ‘modernism’ or ‘post-modernism.’ ”50 A comprehensive study of Language poetry thus calls for acknowledging the impact of technology and situating the works of Language writers in the context of two (instead of just one) instrumental discourses—the discourse of reification and, what I have proposed is, that of media technology and information. Calling for an expansion of the standard analysis of Language poetry as a reaction to the regimes of commodity culture, I therefore argue that Language poems demand a recognition of their unacknowledged function as a response to the pollution of

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poetic discourse with the intrusive noise of media environments. As in the efforts to fight commodity fetishism, the response consists in the creation of an alternate system of language that seeks to undermine the discourse of late twentieth-century electronic technologies.51 The reading of Language poems as a form of resistance to the “coercion” of the media environments provides an interesting perspective on the problem of referentiality in Language writing. To disrupt the dominant enunciation of the technology-engendered discourse, produced by numerous media—video, computer, visual design and graphics, Language poets aim to problematize technology’s underlying system of reference. As “[p]oetry now functions in an environment that foregrounds precisely those information systems that suppress ‘redundancy’ or ‘noise,’ particularly the digital environment of the computer,”52 the attack takes the shape of polluting the non-redundant discourses of media, of introducing new, excessive (and, importantly, linguistic) noise in a virtually noiseless world. The production of linguistic noise thus emerges as a form of resistance to the discourse of today’s Information society in which, due to their digital nature, electronic media provide unprecedented possibilities for the reduction of noise and thereby transform the ways in which poetic texts are conceived, transmitted, and received.53

3. Resisting the instrumental discourse of information technology: The production of linguistic noise in Charles Bernstein’s “Azoot D’Puund”54 “Azoot D’Puund,” a poem from Bernstein’s Poetic Justice, provides an evocative example of intentional effacement of meaning and contamination with noise of normative poetic discourse. The production of noise is materialized through the destruction of coherent words and the formation of multiple protosemantic assemblages. Heeding our intuitive interpretive drive, we can still recognize that, behind the noise of inarticulate letter groupings, once existed meaningful words and verses. They were only later transformed into noise by a methodical rearranging of the constitutive sounds and letters. The quest for some provisional meanings in the disrupted verse of Bernstein’s “Azoot D’Puund” could thus still, at times, prove a worthwhile endeavor. Whenever, however, we succeed in tracing back the original, meaningful word—the word that existed before it was reshuffled and polluted, we are reminded that this tampering with the word was deliberate—that the introduction of noise and creation of an alternate system of language is the result of a purposive stand against the instrumental operation of media that sabotaged the formerly inviolable discourse of poetry. The following analysis of “Azoot D’Puund” will thus seek to examine the ways in which Bernstein obfuscates meaning and recasts letters and words, in the hope that this aggressive production of noise will challenge and problematize technology’s noiseless enunciation. Even a quick glance at “Azoot D’Puund” reveals that this is nothing like a conventional poem—we are confronted with strings of nonsensical

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words that proliferate at a rate unfathomable to the reader. At first sight, it appears that any search for meaning would be utterly futile. Bernstein disrupts all coherence in the poem—starting with the structural rupture of sentences, which, broken in fragments, abandon regular margins and blend in one uninterrupted prose utterance—and extending to the violation of the semantic unity of words that, barely recognizable, enact their own, incomprehensible semiosis. “Azoot D’Puund” rejects the interiority of a lyric self that holds together the multiple threads of cohesiveness and undertakes to replace the intersubjective address by a language that speaks by itself, free from the cognitive control of authorial figures. “The limits of language are the limits of my world,” McCaffery writes in Prior to Meaning.55 No longer making any cognitive investment in the disclosure of the lyric self, language (or, in Wittgenstein’s words, the use of it) teaches us its own, untainted meanings.56 The signifiers, free from the dictate to seek a final destination in a prescribed referent or signified, engage in an uninhibited centrifugal play that yields, in place of a definitive meaning, nomadic signifying bonds.57 In a Poundian style (could “de Pound” be implied in “D’Puund” of the work’s title?), Bernstein produces a work that is meaningless, but nonetheless signifying—a bold experiment with nonsense words, a play with letter groupings and syntactic chains that are not legible in any language, but still have their own signification. Indeed, Bernstein experiments with a plethora of techniques in his attempt to produce noise and dislocate meaning. As we start reading “Azoot D’Puund,” what strikes us immediately is the title’s capitalization. It evokes such early experiments in typography as Mac Low’s “H U N G E R ST rikE wh A t doe S lifemean” (the title of Mac Low’s first poem, dating back to the mid-1930s). We are unsure what, and if, the words “Azoot D’Puund” are meant to denote (apart from a defiance of conservative poetic values), but we are prompted not to dismiss the potential for a semantic integration by the duteous attention of the author to the grammatical marker of the apostrophe in the title. And, indeed, interspersed among “Azoot D’Puund’s” aleatory reconfigurations, we are, at times, able to uncover a clue to some plausible interpretations. These findings, albeit occasional, alert us to the fact that varied language games are at play in the poem. A close look at “Azoot D’Puund” indeed helps us to perceive that Bernstein never lets language congeal in a stable whole, but, instead, experiments with concrete techniques and tropes (such as paragrams, anagrams, palindromes, and others) to complicate familiar meaning and infiltrate the verse with noise. Nevertheless, the poem sustains a continuous flow of pulsating (rather than “conveyed”) meanings, embedded in freely evolving, ungrammatical sentences, which Bernstein would define by using the term “imploded.”58 “Moving throughout the writing” of “Azoot D’Puund” without “com[ing] up for ideational air”59 is a laborious, but, at times, rewarding process. At first sight, in the overabundance of noise, only a few words are immediately legible: “daily” (page 25, line 24), “see” (19), “abhor” (20), “marsh” (21), “MiSSy” (19), “fur” (23), “guLpIng” (19). The rest of the page is filled with an uninterrupted chain of grammarless writing and transgrammatical spacing that, once again, is “imploded” rather than in any way meaningful. How should the reader interpret “phrases” such as “brr & akk,” for instance (line 27)? What is the “meaning” he or she can uncover in lines like the following:

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girgh abut ahl ghet sucsh sH pcrk. ray aht regJ & (line 30) klupf n akli ud predriSshh. ug it og up. gzp. ig (31) ahrs. ig ahrgzp. i’pple. chuUds & gahrs. pijf (32) iggih earh. asw ap sum fiVic fabeh etsli. Ig ep (33)

Despite the fact that such lines make no immediate meanings available, if we tune up our ears to the cacophony of discourse, we may discern the phonetic equivalent of some coherent (albeit grossly misspelled) words: “buNNday’d” (bandaid, line 24); “abstTruCt” (abstract, line 21); “AbUt” (about, line 23); words such as “spac” (line 24) and “mak” (line 23) that lack the ending “e,” but are nonetheless phonetically legible, and complete phrases like “inVazoOn uv spAz” (“invasion of space,” line 18), which make sense despite all the noise that has invaded them. With a more creative effort, the reader could recognize the roots of a cohesive thought behind the anagrams that becloud it, as in “ionsv astc ownk”—almost a full anagram for “vision cats know.” The poem abounds in such anagrammatic examples, which subvert normative meanings and disarray them to the point of looking tantamount to noise. Still, the invalidation of meaning is never complete in the scrambled and incomprehensible verses. The author always grants the persevering reader a brief (and well-deserved) respite, as he shows him/her the way to reassemble a word from the unintelligible mass of sounds. Readers are thus able to recognize the word “wasp” (line 8) behind the recurring letter group “aswp” and come up with a plausible meaning for many other compilations of sounds, such as “inovmg” (moving, 10), “eglar” (large, 13),“joram” (major, 16), “ebrib” (bribe, 34), “iStl” (list, 36), “rties” (tries, 16), “geAt” (gate, 24), “CKUL” (luck, 28), “ooz” (zoo, 6), “sag” (gas, 9), “ees” (see, 10), “ays” (say, 18), “aht” (hat, 30), etc. Still, the meanings the reader produces are far from being definitive—they are just one among many possible readings and never fully cancel the chance of being no more than nonsensical noises. Indeed, while we can sometimes form a viable meaning by rearranging the sounds of the meaningless groupings, at other times the anagrammatic formations seem to be altogether nonsensical. What are we to do with anagram morphs such as “mogh & hmog” in line 15 of the poem? Close phonetic equivalents to that of “mock,” they seem to mock any attempt to find a lucid design amidst the senseless amalgamation of letters. Such groupings are best understood as protosemantic textual elements. In the words of McCaffery, “Like Kristeva’s genotext, the protosemantic is more a process than a material thing;… that includes those semantic jumps that manifest within letter shifts and verbal recombinations, and the presyntactic violations determining a word’s position: rupture, reiteration, displacement, reterritorialization.”60 Still, a more scrutinized study of the poem reveals that some anagrams reappear with greater consistency: “hatw” (what, lines 8, 11, 29, etc.), “asw” (was or saw, 12, 32; “Asw” in 8) or “sih” (his, 12). Indeed, such grammatical units with an auxiliary meaning are a necessary part of each syntactic formation. Even when the repetitive units remain altogether illegible, we may conjecture (based on the groupings’ recurrence) that some of them contain a grammatical meaning. Thus, it is hard to ignore the repetitive “ig” (or “Ig”) that recurs in almost all sentence fragments and is invariably placed in an initial position. Does it stand for the first person pronoun “I” or the third person one “it”? We are

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unsure about its exact meaning, but, as the letter group always appears in place of the subject, we may surmise that what it syntactically designates is the person or thing performing the action: ehk nugkinj sJuxYY senshl. Ig si heh hahpae uvd r (line 2) Ig ew oplep lucd nvn atik o im. ellek Emb ith ott (5) Enghip ag ossp heh ooz. ig confri wid suGan fagt iv (6) ig muhhrei elle fihgt dundt mag elexVigr. ep gug (7)

These verses cannot be attributed to any unitary consciousness or mutual linguistic code. We are never sure if they are fully nonsensical (just look at compilations of sounds such as “plgrmpf,” 35, or the final word of the poem “AgggG,” 36), if they are meant as examples of sound poetry (listen to the music of “alacey ee ancey,” 29; “sOond,” 9) or if there is any meaning embedded in them. The eruption of so many indeterminacies in the text effaces any interpretational certainty. Does not the double “o” (“oo”) in the first word of the title (“Azoot”) suggest visually such openness to producing new meanings, a window to look out of the prisonhouse of truths and grand narratives and welcome regenerative semantic air? (Heed the recurrent usage of “oo” in Bernstein’s poem: “aZoOt” (1), “ooz” (6), “sOond” (9), “inVazoOn” (18)). It is as if “Azoot D’Puund” is one open, gaping textual void, expecting to be filled with new and original content. As in Bernstein’s “Azoot D’Puund,” the sublexical events, protosemantic recombinations, and multiple break-ups disrupt meaning and introduce noise into the semantic structure of Language poetry. The production of linguistic noise as an alternate system of language emerges as a means of resisting direct reference to, replication of, and subjugation to the logic of technology. Using this strategy, the Language poets openly defy the uncontrollable proliferation of media and information discourses and their instrumental power in defining poetical writing. By choosing to write in fragments, in antireferential and antisyntactical verses, they create a “quintessential disequilibrium [that] can be specified as the excess of information over meaning.”61 As McCaffery asserts, it aims “to ensure that there is no semantic passage without detour, and introducing noise into systems.”62

4. The unavoidability of reference. Replicating the language of technology. Code as the “unconscious of language”63 Words, finally, are not non-referential. Ron Silliman64 At the same time, however, when, through the introduction of noise, the Language poets persistently undermine reference, an uncanny, unnoted event takes place in Language verse and topples the logic of willful creation. The randomness and

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all linguistic noise, aimed at destabilizing the technological discourse, at times unwittingly resemble and involuntarily rewrite the formulas of media technology. Unaware of being so intricately entwined in the technological circuitry, Language poets repeat the same formats and sounds that media stridently blare around them. Discussing Bernstein’s lyrics next to that of his modernist precursors, Perloff notes this contamination of verse with the numerous discourses of the media environment. She remarks: “…in Bernstein’s poem, the pieces of the puzzle are always already contaminated, bearing, as they do, the traces of media discourses (legalese, Wall street-speak, National Enquirer gossip, and so on) in which they are embedded.”65 As Bernstein himself admits in “An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,” his work has been directly impacted by the reality of present-day media—it replicates the jargon of technology, “its blather and its displacement” and “sounds” the “methods of organization” of the environments defining it: I am a part of the first generation to grow up on, or anyway with, TV. My work is as influenced by Dragnet as by Proust. Indeed, quite apart from the sorts of contexts and influences I was belaboring earlier, I would insist on the primary influence of the contemporary moment: on the forms and materials given to us in the specific time we are living. This makes for a poetry that engages the social world directly, by taking on its jargon and its technologies, its blather and its displacements, not only as subjects but as methods of organization, as environments, to be sounded and tested and thought through by and in the poem.66

The infection of poetry with the virus of media is likewise a reality in Hannah Weiner’s Weeks, in which “[t]he material, says Weiner, is all found—‘taken at the beginning from written matter and TV news and later almost entirely from TV news’ [and] … in which ‘I went by [can only go by] the information I received’: i.e., not very far.”67 Using “the forms and materials given to us in the specific time we are living,”68 Weeks likewise registers “the virus of news … as a pattern of reiteration and displacement, tale without a teller….”69 Even a cursory look at another Language work, an untitled poem from Bernstein’s Islets/Irritations, evokes the patterns of a TV Guide, its topical disjunction and structural displacement. Comprised of a list of unrelated sentences, the poem reads: Comraderie turns to rivalry when 12 medical students learn that only seven of them will be admitted to the hospital. A CIA agent is ordered to feign a breakdown to trap a spy at a mental hospital. … A retarded young man witnesses a murder but is not articulate enough to tell his story to the police. A husband is betrayed in medieval Japan where adultery is punishable by death.

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Julie grows attached to an abandoned baby. A grim smuggling operation and a dead hippie lead to intrigue in Malta. Boxed candy includes frog-filled chocolates.70

It is easy to see how the verses above, which exhaust meaning and information within the very act of narration, do not point to any external reality, but, instead, enact “the eclipse of representation.”71 Still, the recurrence of media-spawned patterns in the Language verses hints that, despite the poets’ agenda to subvert reference and undermine technology’s instrumentality, their works unavoidably testify to the reality that has engendered them—the postmodern reality of Information society. Language poetry thus reveals that no writer has the power to govern language fully. Regardless of their flagrant rejection of reference, the Language poets prove also unable to cut off completely their link with reality, which enters the text through their unconscious re-echoing of the ubiquitous technological jargon. As McCaffery observes, at times, “[t]he system of meaning overflows the limits prescribed by any self-identical, intentional subject”72 and then, “both writer and reader [disappear in the] nonintentionality of the sign experience.”73 This assertion of McCaffery recasts the poststructuralists’ belief that texts are always the product of the simultaneous action of forces that a writer is in charge of and has the power to control consciously, and those that he/she is fully unaware of. “And the reading [a deconstructive reading],” Derrida insists, “must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.”74 Bernstein himself acknowledges the concurrent operation of conscious and unconscious forces in the production of a writing: “Whatever gets written gets written in a particular shape, uses a particular vocabulary & syntax, & a variety of chosen techniques … Sometimes this process takes place intuitively or unconsciously … Sometimes it is a very conscious process…”75 Importantly, in our Information Age, the role of the unconscious acquires a new meaning, as next to the mind of the writer now operates the code of the machine: “ … [O]ur conscious intentions do not entirely control how our language operates,” N. Katherine Hayles asserts. Just as the unconscious surfaces through significant puns, slips, and metonymic splices, so the underlying code surfaces at those moments when the program makes decisions we have not consciously initiated. This phenomenon suggests the following analogy: as the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.76 I will risk pushing the analogy even further; in our computationally intensive culture, code is the unconscious of language.77

Or, to phrase it differently, code controls our language, not we. If the conscious and unconscious are both determining forces in the production of language, Language poets could never strip completely language of its intrinsic

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referentiality. With the unconscious forces that co-model Language poems and reinscribe the discourse of the systems in which this poetry functions, reference sneaks in where least suspected. The “technological unconscious,” as Nigel Thrift defines it (or, “technological nonconscious,”78 as Hayles modifies it to avoid the long association of the unconscious with dreams), thus unavoidably registers the technological world, in which all our “everyday habits [are] initiated, regulated, and disciplined by multiple strata of technological devices and inventions, ranging from an artifact as ordinary as a wristwatch to the extensive and pervasive effects of the World Wide Web.”79 Language poetry therefore demonstrates that, no matter how hard the poet attempts to disrupt the instrumental discourse of the ruling technologies, even at the peak of experimentation, he/she cannot help but replicate their jargon and thus testify to a specific reality—that of late twentieth century Information society. The Language poets’ errant and evasive patterns, aiming to undermine reference and displace dominant meanings, inescapably encode some first-hand information about the reality that engenders them. In a way, it is a scenario in which the poet honorably claims (and rightfully so) to have undercut the discourse of technology and killed its referential, instrumental power only to find out that the rubble of fragmented words and randomly adjoined signifiers involuntarily repeats the disconnected media blather. This “semantic world” in which the voices of various technologies coalesce and enter the poem as incoherent chatter (mirroring the fractured media patterns) thus seems to allow us a crucial, though often impenetrable, access to reality. But what kind of relationship is this if we are often unable to comprehend it? Do these fractured, disjointed verses make any meanings about the Information Age available or, as the poets intended, the excessive linguistic noise they introduce in the poems problematizes what we have come to interpret as reference—that is, a semantically meaningful representation of reality? “Indeed, antireferential and antisyntactical, Bernstein’s poetry has been largely seen as ‘not saying anything,’ ”80 Perloff notes on the link between meaning and non-referentiality in Bernstein’s avant-garde writing. As McCaffery also affirms, Language poetry is one that “the reader experiences a ‘feel for’ rather than an ‘understanding of.’ ” It “comes close to being an experience in language rather than a representation through it.”81 Yet, Caruth implores that we look more attentively into the critical efforts to “distinguish reference from … cognitive models” as, what they ultimately do is, “not eliminate reference, but rather examine how to recognize it where it does not occur as knowledge.”82 A consistent analysis of referentiality in Language poetry thus calls for acknowledging the underlying differences between “reference,” “meaning,” and “information.”

5. Reference, meaning, and information Language poetry is often perceived as difficult to decipher, at times—bluntly meaningless in character. In general, we are accustomed to associating meaning with comprehensibility as well as with such hermeneutic ideas as “knowledge,”

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“cognition,” and “truth,” the likes of which are hard to discover in many Language poems. Does this fact, however, entail the conclusion that meaning is fully suspended in Language poetry? If we abide by Perloff ’s definition of meaning, we would respond in the negative, since meaning, to this critic, constitutes a large and comprehensive concept, including both the notion of reference and that of information. As Perloff defines it, … “information” refers to input, to a specific, quantifiable message that a sender transmits and which is not necessarily received intact, whereas “reference,” involving, as it does, the receiver as well as the sender, is not primarily concerned with accuracy (is the received message identical to the one sent?) but with issues of connotation, nuance, context, and the like—indeed, all the factors that determine to what a given word or phrase is taken to refer. The meaning of a given message, in other words, includes not only information (the message actually sent) but whatever modifies that message, whatever references become relevant, in the course of its transmission. In information theory, the term for such modification is “noise.” 83

As evident in Perloff ’s definition, meaning includes not only information, but noise as well. Meaning is thus not restricted to comprehensibility. Even the most impenetrable texts, abounding in linguistic noise, can be profusely meaningful, as they impart invaluable messages about the reality that engenders them, both via the information they carry and through the forces that alter it—reference and noise. Furthermore, the lack of specific meanings defined by the author predetermines a much wider, sometimes unlimited, range of interpretations on the part of the reader. When there is no clear message transmitted, readers are left on their own in interpreting it, that is, in adding reference and noise to it—in putting the impenetrable information in a variety of contexts and making it refer to wide arrays of subjectively-structured realities. The less clues the author/sender provides about a text’s meaning and destination, the more are the references likely to be added on the end of the receiver. It is in this sense that Language poetry, even when blatantly unintelligible, appears fundamentally referential, though reference is not supplied by the poet himself, but actively adjoined by the reader. Still, another scenario in approaching the Language texts appears equally plausible. Incomprehensible, as the Language works often are, the reader might find himself/ herself unable (or unwilling) to add any reference to them and could, instead, opt for dismissing them. “A reader might admit that these texts are unreadable and resist entirely the semantic exchange,” McCaffery asserts in Prior to Meaning.84 In his mind, this nonetheless entails an equally rewarding and pleasurable experience, though one that “promises the jouissance of loss and expenditure rather than the pleasure of retentive accumulation…”85 The two are equally important and valuable journeys in our interaction with the Language poems. As McCaffery contends, “Language writing should be encountered at the bifurcation of these two orders of value: productive utility on the one hand and sovereignty on the other.”86 Every time we ponder if we should “encounter the [incomprehensible Language] work and produce a reading or proceed

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further into the textual experience of the unreadable,” we are reminded of the “double disposition of the language poem that simultaneously petitions active productive engagement and a negative refusal to engage” with the impenetrable text.87 The suspension of decodable meanings in Language verses is likewise affected by temporal dynamics. By subverting meaning provisionally, critics such as Joel Nickels have argued, Language poets call to a future community of readers that would bestow upon their yet-unfinished poetry a newly emergent social interpretation. Speaking of Perelman, Nickels remarks: “[T]he poet should … create enclaves of non-meaning in order to call out to these supplementary futural meanings.”88 Impenetrable now, Language poetry awaits the audience of its futural readers to lend it some coherence, or interpretation, that is—in terms of information theory, to add reference or noise to it. Since the right social environment for understanding Language poetry has not acquired its definitive shape yet, readers in our time often lack the capacity to interpret the messages Language works send. As a result, the latter remain little more than carriers of information today. It is only when readers decode, through a socially valid perspective, the now covert meaning of Language verses that the latter will fully reveal their intricate referential potential. As Nickels accounts for the semanticization of Language verses, alluding to the poetic practice of Perelman, [T]he poet is actively lending himself to a possible future, whose contexts of understanding are necessarily unintelligible from his temporally anterior standpoint. The poet is to be imagined here as constantly operating on the margins of intelligibility, all the while trusting that his moments of incoherence are the formal harbingers of an emergent social configuration that will belatedly lend a coherence and practical intelligibility to his literary experiments.89

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, writing “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping … realms that are yet to come.”90 Thus, if we take into account the temporal component in the creation and interpretation of Language verses, we could conclude that, while the latter do not function as overtly referential in the present, in a certain, undetermined time of the future, the reader will make the reference embedded in the poems explicit. Reference, in this sense, does not appear to be absent in Language poetry. It is simply withheld and provisionally deferred in time. Such a reading of reference posits it as an intrinsic feature of Language writings contingent upon temporal factors for its proper actualization. Even at the present moment, however, our inability or unwillingness to interpret the information invested in Language poems and attach to it a definitive signification does not reduce the referential value of Language poetry, but, by virtue of avoiding the subjectification that necessarily ensues from a refraction through the mind, only increases the poems’ commitment to accuracy. As revealed in current debates about Language writing, positing “general truths versus particular facts, meaning versus information,”91 the Language poem decisively sides with the second term of each juxtaposition. Information is much more closely allied with historic realities than definitive meanings; particular facts are much more referential than general truths.

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6. Complicating the vectors of reference:92 The multivalent referentiality of Language poetry I believe that everything exists within material, historical situations, within contexts.93 … [T]he cost of escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split off.94 Charles Bernstein It is “reference” in the sense of particular information about historical reality that Silliman means when he uses the term to propose that nothing exists that is not referential in character. Silliman maintains that we all operate within the specific conditions of a certain reality and are thus involuntarily carriers of key information about it. “When, for example, Bruce Andrews writes ‘Referentiality is diminished by organizing the language around other features or axes … [by] refusing to ‘point’, or to be arranged according to a ‘pointing system’,’ readers are assuming that Andrews is denying the very possibility of referentiality.”95 Even “[t]he recent non-referential formalists, such as Clark Coolidge and Robert Grenier,” however, Silliman argues, who “frontally attack referentiality,” do this “only through negation by specific context. To the extent that negation is determined by the thing negated, they too operate within the referential fetish.”96 No poetic trend, Silliman contends on a similar note, can free itself from the defining elements of its reality. “Every major western poetic movement has been an attempt to get beyond the repressing elements of capitalist reality, toward a whole language art…,” he explains. “Typically, they have been deformed at the outset by the very condition of existing within the confines of the dominant reality.”97 Silliman’s statement posits reference as an intrinsic component of language, which, despite the writer’s attempt to dispose of it through shattering linguistic conventionalities, resurfaces and unveils the imprints of specific sociopolitical realities. The formal experiments in the infinite possibilities of language staged by Language poets and the consistent theory underlying them are inescapably branded with the marks of the age that they operate in and act as a product (or, to put it again in Jameson’s words, “symptom”) of late capitalist (post-industrial) society. This intrinsic dichotomy of symptom and critique and the continual tension between them reemerge in the words of the poets themselves as they seek to define Language writing. “Rather than being a symptom of postmodernism, language writing fits into the sequence of twentieth-century avant-garde poetic movements,” Perelman contends98 only to assert a few pages later, rejecting Jameson’s vision of the “ahistorical anomie of postmodern schizophrenic production”:99 “The new sentence is both a symptom of the age and a formal device that is highly motivated by literaryhistorical concerns. It marks an attempt to move literature closer to daily life…”100 In a slightly different context, discussing Silliman’s What, Perelman remarks: “The ‘new’ of the new sentence is poised here between symptom and critique.”101 The sentences “simultaneously depict and critique their world.”102 Critics of Language poetry have also acknowledged that even the most purely formal poetical exercise cannot help but be tainted with the imprints of its time period. “[I]n reading the textual poetics of the

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Language writers, what might seem a linguistic swerve from political engagement, appears, when focused through the lens of a more historicized account, a symptom of postmodernity,” Kalaidjian notes.103 “The Language writers,” he further explains, “have sought to close the gap dividing poetry from the world.”104 Dwelling on the same problem through the lens of Bernstein’s poetry, Linda Reinfeld observes that language, for Bernstein, is “multireferential as well as material, and the project of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E refers to a social world.”105 “The antiabsorptive, insofar as it is accurately/understood as essentially transgressive, is/historically & contextually specific,” Bernstein himself asserts.106 Despite the indisputable attention that Language poets devote to the internal, formal aspects of the literary work and their commitment to write in a language that, “free of the presidential logic of the referent,” is not “directed to a point beyond itself,” but, instead, obeys a “paralogical drive that settles meaning in highly local, selfreferential events,”107 it is thus imperative to note that Language writing is much more than a self-enclosed and self-reflective formal exercise. Hidden in the pronounced denunciation of the impacts of referentiality is the Language poets’ recognition that a language that is devoid of any external coordinates is a rather frivolous concept: “…[T]he idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, oneon-one, to an already constructed world of ‘things.’ ”108 Particularly troublesome is the fact that a language that is the sole locus of representational power is potentially no less dictatorial in essence than the one that Language poets target. As McCaffery points out, [T]his refusal of the referential logic of the sign and the culmination of signification in an extra-linguistic finality raises certain problems. I have argued that a writing of diminished reference necessarily privileges the signifier over both the signified and the referent. I have argued too that the historical function of Language Writing is a partial critique of language inside the commoditarian experience of a bourgeois ideology. But this is precisely the condition, according to Baudrillard, that constitutes the essence of political economy.109 According to this argument, rather than being an effective critique of the language of advanced Capitalism, Language Writing would be its perfect simulacrum and far from problematizing dominant ideology would actually reflect it.110

Though relatively rare among the Language poets’ blaring denouncements of reference as the linguistic equivalent of commodity fetishism or of technologically defined instrumentality, such avowals of the inevitability of reference by critics and poets of Language writing reveal the inadequacy of dismissing the impacts of referentiality and demand a more comprehensive study of the intricate “complications within the vectors of reference.”111 As Bernstein announces, Language writing effects “[n]ot ‘death’ of the referent—rather a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has…”112 Even the fragmentation, enacted in Language poetry, Andrews

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proposes, “doesn’t banish the reference embodied in individual words; merely, they are not placed in a series, in grammar, in a row, on a shelf.”113 In an essay revealingly called “Repossessing the Word,” written as an introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Bernstein and Andrews emphatically assert: “[R]eference, like the body itself, is one of the horizons of language, whose value is to be found in the writing (the world) before which we find ourselves at any moment. It is the ultimate powers and scope of reference (denotative, connotative, associational), not writers’ refusal or fear of it, that threads these essays together.”114 To alleviate the confusion of imbuing “reference” with concurrently positive and negative connotations, writers such as Silliman (in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book) posit the dichotomy of “reference/referentiality” with a third, intermediate, term, “post-referentiality.” It is when burdened with the reality of the capitalist world and commodity fetish that reference metamorphoses into referentiality (and represents nothing, but serialized words, as Silliman announces): What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an aesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the nature of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed (deformed) into referentiality.115

The juxtaposition of reference and referentiality lends help in interpreting McGann’s provocative observation: “Silliman does not attack ‘reference’ in language—all language is social—but that deformed and repressive form of reference called referentiality wherein language [in capitalist society] is alienated from its use-function.”116 It thus becomes apparent that, in order to challenge the foundations of capitalism, the words and their “referentiality” should disappear. New, “post-referential” (not carrying reference to capitalist reality) words would have to appear and be used in the struggle against capitalism. Our world is continually constituted through language (Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World”) and it is a wholly new poetic idiom that we need to discover in order to construct a more perfect reality. “Post-referential” is how Silliman dubs this new language, but he invariably finds its original roots within the existing, contemporary conditions: “[P]oetry can work to search out the preconditions of post-referential language within the existing social fact,” Silliman argues.117 Unveiling this new language and using it for social purposes emerge as the alternative to the attempts to contextualize language and make it instrumental. As the Language poets avow, there is no need to go far to find this new, politically efficacious language. Its words are unseen, yet all around us, imploring to be revisited and once again discovered. “Making words visible”118 confronts the alternative of letting words stay transparent and reproduce the spectacle of capitalism. It is this agenda—to reinvent the word through reinvisioning of language—that Language writers embrace and turn into their credo. In an endeavor to disrupt and

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reconfigure the existing literary structures, they struggle to efface the standardized linguistic make-up defining capitalist society. Even when broken down to the level of parataxis119 and almost unintelligible, however, language retains the tension between symptom and critique. Are those incomprehensible fragments simply the poet’s formal experiments or, do they tell, despite (or perhaps, because of) their overt incoherence, the elaborate story of late capitalism? Should we accept Perelman’s belief that “parataxis can seem symptomatic of late capitalism”120 that posits the disruption of grammar as self-generated, independent of the subject and linked, instead, to social reality (i.e., referential) or see in it a purely linguistic exercise whose aim is to critique the status quo and undermine it in the name of purposefully set agendas? This tension between symptom and critique, between a referential and formal understanding of Language poetry and its main vehicle, parataxis, underlies the Language oeuvre and defines its complex internal dynamics. We have thus far examined the ways in which parataxis is used in the conscious attempts of Language poets to create an alternate language system that challenges the instrumental discourses of reification and technology. I have also observed that, while initially conceived by the poet as a deliberate means of disrupting the standardized modes of enunciation, the fractured Language verses often end up recasting the fragmented design of the media landscapes. The critical ways in which technology affects (further on, I will argue, traumatizes) the subject thus result in the creation of particularized writings in which parataxis, rather than intended, resurfaces as unaware witness to the impacts of media and Information society. The following chapter will endeavor to reveal how the mind’s cognitive overstimulation by the excess of media signals and information, as well as technology’s covert mode of operation, affects the subject’s psychological make-up and, ultimately—his/her poetic production.

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Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma

1. Cognitive overstimulation and information overload: The traumatic impacts of mass media technology on the mind [The explosion of unlimited information] will be the great accident of the future, the one that comes after the succession of accidents that was specific to the industrial age.1 Paul Virilio Alongside its positive potentials, the emplacement of the subject in the new media environment has turned into the cause of anxiety and gloomy predictions. The “pressures of technology” is how McCaffery describes the impacts of the rapid technological developments of the 1970s.2 Language poetry, in his mind, is registering a technological world (not an absolute reality, but a functional and speedily developing media environment that overwhelms the subject with too much information within too short of a time). Such characterizations evince the terminology of trauma that has been increasingly employed in the critics’ attempts to depict the technological future. Discussing the “information bomb” and the “damage caused by the explosion of unlimited information,” Virilio portends that “what lies ahead is … a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects.”3 Virilio further contends that “[t]he specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation…, this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world.”4 Language poets reveal a similar awareness of what lies beyond the boundless possibilities opened by technology and call for identifying and withstanding the negative impacts of the new information environment. “[This] technological change—it’s a mistake to call it progress—will not be reversed,” Bernstein asserts, “and artists run the risk of nostalgia if they refuse to recognize and respond, the better to resist, the communications environment within which, for better or worse, they find themselves.”5

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Unlike the media characterizing the Second Wave production system, each one of which performed more or less independently of the other, the new communications media are closely interlinked together and constantly supply a flow of information back and forth to one another. These media, developed with the power of both computers and telecommunication, engender what McLuhan has termed a “global village”—a world united in a singular communications network and operating at uncommonly accelerated speeds.6 The World Wide Web (as we have come to call this universal network) has brought the world together by effacing the notions of distance and depth and granting us immediate access to inexhaustible pools of data. A powerful descendant of the Internet, new “information superhighways” have emerged and shaped as what, in Bernstein’s mind, will be the future sites of boundless information. As Bernstein forecasts in “I Don’t Take Voice Mail: The Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Technology,”7 “Today’s internet—a decentralized, largely textbased, linking of individual sites or constellations of users—will be superseded by what is aptly called the information superhighway.”8 The fast changes in technology that Bernstein projected released abundant flows of data, which swiftly overwhelmed the subject and threatened to disrupt his/her continued psychological experience. More than a century ago, Albert Einstein warned that this detrimental force, which he called “unlimited information,” would follow in the footsteps of wartime industrialism and prophesied the coming of the “second bomb” in the wake of the atomic one, “a bomb whereby real-time interaction would be to information what radioactivity is to energy. The disintegration then will not merely affect the particles of matter, but also the very people of which our societies consist.”9 Thus, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Einstein envisioned the traumatic effect that the information overload would exert on the subject and, using the metaphor of the bomb, alluded to its destructive impact on his/her body and psyche. The condition of information overload first became a reality in the wake of modern society. In his signature essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “The Storyteller,” and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”10 Walter Benjamin anticipates this phenomenon by tracing the major transformations in the structure of human experience as industrial society set in. Back then, the new media of newspapers and cinema and the shock effects of modern urban life overwhelmed the subject and made the absorption and meaningful integration of new experience in the mind no longer possible. Popular art, according to Benjamin, became the primary manifestation of the sensory state of information overload.11 As the post-industrial era advanced, the threats of unlimited information became increasingly more apparent. In 1973, Daniel Bell announced the arrival of this age in his work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,12 thus popularizing the term, which has become closely related to the concept of “information society.” While the transformations defining “information society” can be traced back to the 1970s, the last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of regimes of media and technological power unprecedented in their scale and limitless in potential. Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, calls

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this late capitalist stage in the evolvement of technology The Third Machine Age13 and places its arrival in the 1980s. Colossal in its dimensions and unparalleled in its sophistication, the late capitalist boom of highly developed electronic technologies arose as unforeseen and utterly unfathomable to the subject. The latter was abruptly overwhelmed by an unmatched “network of power and control even more difficult for [his/her] … mind and imagination to grasp,”14 a phenomenon diagnosed as incurring a state of global high-tech paranoia. Failing to keep pace with the exclusive velocity of technological developments, the subject proved unable to process and assimilate them in an adequate manner. He/she was biologically unequipped to take in so much newness within so little time. As a result, the new regimes of media and electronic culture inflicted an implacable “mutation of the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject.”15 The subject’s inability to catch up with the changes of the rapidly transmuting technological environment thus redefined the limits of his/her psychic existence. In many ways, I will argue, the works of Language poets recast these multifaceted transformations in the psychic life of the subject and offer a glimpse into the vigorous interplay between media technology and contemporary lyric poetry. The works of Perelman and Bernstein often attest to the emplacement of the subject within the new technological settings and portray the lyric self as assaulted by speedy flows of unassimilable images and information. In Perelman’s “Virtual Reality,” for instance, the “setting of the story/of our [the lyric heroes’] life”16 is fully technological in nature—they are described amidst the noise of radio waves, against the landscape of routes, cars, and continually changing billboards. Inside, the “car radios were displaying/the body of our song, marked/with static from Pacific storms. Outside/was the setting for the story/of our life: Route 80 near/Emeryville— fence, frontage road, bay, hills,/billboards changing every couple of months.”17 It is both the ubiquity of the new media environment and the velocity at which it is presented to the mind that are of interest to the author. “In the billboard culture of the late twentieth century, the ‘successful’ text is one that combines high-speed communication with maximum information,” Perloff explains.18 At an uncommonly accelerated pace, the media-engendered icons, portrayed in “Virtual Reality,” whiz by the cast of actors in the car, as they remain completely unequipped to catch and, even less, to apprehend them. “Virtual Reality” also introduces the theme of the present that has been abruptly “stopped short,”19 as a technologically determined future redefines the life of the subject: “It was the present—there was nothing to contradict this—but it/seemed stopped short, a careless afterthought,/with the background impossible to keep/in focus.”20 Perelman describes the unexpected arrival of the highly advanced technological future as an unavoidable and psychically traumatic experience. He implies the figure of a subject who is trying to get hold of and make sense of the rapidly changing technological landscape only to find out that the technological “background [is] impossible to keep/ in focus”21 and he will soon be fully overrun by it. “We could almost see/our hands seizing towers, chains, dealerships,/the structures that drew the maps,” the lyric self reminisces in the poem’s finale, “but there was no time to/read them, only to react … the

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global information net had become/obsessed with our body’s every move…”22 The lyric hero reaches for the countless images that surround him but remains unable to capture, let alone integrate them into his present experience. This all-encompassing condition of “cognitive overstimulation”23 emerges as the rationale behind Virilio’s updating of Marshall McLuhan’s catch phrase “the medium is the message” referring to the late stage of our Information Age. Nowadays, Virilio proclaims, it is no longer the medium per se but rather the “velocity of the medium”24 that is the message. Likewise, the meaning of information is no longer contained in its material substrate but rather in “the rapidity of its feedback.”25 When an accident occurs, it is equally unlikely that information has inflicted it; instead, it is in information’s unprecedented velocity that we find the basic cause: “When one raises the question about the risks of accidents on the information (super) highways, the point is not about the information in itself, the point is about the absolute velocity of electronic data,” Virilio contends.26 “More and faster: better graphics and faster action, so/fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it’s/realer than real” is how Bernstein describes the feel of new technologies.27 The “velocity of electronic data” along the information superhighways has likewise turned into the subject of video and installation art. Paik’s “The Electronic Superhighway”28 is among the artist’s noted commentaries on the topic.29 In fact, Paik claims to be the inventor of the term “electronic superhighway,” which he asserts to have coined back in the early 1970s. His work, “The Electronic Superhighway,” features thirty-eight video sculptures, including twenty-five new works, utilizing more than 650 television sets programmed to display Paik’s video images. They reveal how incredibly fast and far-reaching the changes brought by the Information Revolution have been. Cyberspace has gone local, invading the most remote corners of the world. As Paik’s work uncovers, cyber-town is where small-town America meets the information superhighway and is populated by Internet travelers surfing through oceans of digital information. Paik’s “Electronic Superhighway” comments in eloquent ways on the allencompassing power of the new informational networks and the fast pace at which they are presented to the mind. Evocative is the artist’s choice to transform the U.S. map into a huge neon video installation. A network of bright lights outlines the boundary of the country, while TV screens flash with the sights and sounds of the fifty states. Paik undertakes to present each state through what he believes is most typical of it. While all states are seen as partaking of one common electronic superhighway, some of them seem capable of racing along the information highway faster. Iowa, a “primary state,” is presented by a computer-generated montage of candidates that flicker by. A lot of presidential images—of Carter and Nixon, of JFK, Eisenhower, and Truman—flash by at a pace with which the eyes can barely catch up. Oulined in vibrant colors, California is another state presented through a screen that flashes images at hectic speeds. The frenetic pace of the images and their immobilizing effects on the mind stand out as the most distinctive feature of California and of the video work as a whole. “The images are moving really fast,” Lynn Neary of NPR observes in an interview with Betsy Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “You can’t event look at those images,” she adds. “California is very hallucinogenic. You see a lot of 0s and 1s. He

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[Paik] is very aware of the digital revolution. You see a lot of Golden Gate Bridge—that kind of flashes by really quickly…,” Broun concurs (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental United States., Alaska, Hawaii Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist ©Nam June Paik Estate

Like the “Electronic Superhighway,” Paik’s video sculpture “Megatron” (1995) displays fast-paced video images that fleet across a wall of 150 TV screens in a continually changing sequence. Exhibited at the entrance of the Guggenheim Soho’s exhibition “Mediascape” (1997), “Megatron” stuns the visitor with a jumble of indiscriminate video clips that range from art history to sports events, from Eastern to Western traditions and culture. This visual chaos is periodically interrupted by the recurring patterns of a bird or fish flowing across the wall of screens or the erotic images of a bare-breasted woman. The video images of “Megatron” reflect the hectic and choppedup nature of mainstream television, on which the brief segments of sensational news have thoroughly displaced all meaningful, in-depth reporting. Similarly to Paik, Dara Birnbaum, a New York video artist with one-person exhibitions at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Kunsthalle Wien, characterizes her artistic goal as an attempt to slow down the overwhelming speed of technology. Birnbaum’s work undertakes to arrest the rapid flow of media images and then repeat them continuously, thus estranging them from their habitual context and allowing the viewer to assimilate and assign meaning to them. While this is hardly a new practice (estrangement [ostranenie] dates back to Russian Formalism and the writings of Viktor Shklovsky),30 its use within the medium of video and television is highly innovative and creative. To achieve the desired reconstruction of the television imagery, Birnbaum employs video as her main tool. In the video work “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” she arrests the fast-paced flow of images from the action TV series of the same name, popular in the late 70s. Through repeating and fragmenting key scenes, in which the real female protagonist transforms herself from a simple office employee into a sexy superhero,

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Birnbaum punctuates essential moments and gives the viewer a chance to master and interpret them. Deferring, cutting, and repeating the same shots or televised images thus enables Birnbaum to counter their assault on the mind by allowing the latter the time to register, process, and fathom them. As Birnbaum puts it in her Artist’s Statement, “Talking Back to the Media,” the goal of her art is “to slow down the ‘technological speed’ attributed to this medium, thus ‘arresting’ moments of TV-time for the viewer. For it is the speed at which issues are absorbed and consumed by the medium of video/television, without examination and without self-questioning, which at present still remains astonishing.”31 It is in this way that Birnbaum hopes to initiate a “talking back” to the media, “rather than a deletion of the issues and numbness, due to the constant ‘bombardment,’ which this medium can all too easily maintain.”32

2. The spasms of Language poetry: Parataxis as recording cognitive disruptions and the impacts of trauma The impact of electronic technology on our lives is now the object of intense study, but what remains obscure is the role, if any, this technology has in shaping the ostensibly private language of poetry. Current thinking is sharply divided on this question but few of the answers are optimistic.33 Marjorie Perloff The theme of the subject’s bombardment in the Information Age with currents of competing data recurs with striking consistency in the works of poets and critics alike. In “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” Bernstein outlines the position of the subject in post-industrial reality, depicting him as a powerless victim in a world of countless and aggressively encroaching media events, “…a world where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events.”34 From the perspective of French critical thought, Baudrillard re-echoes the motif of our subjugation to the bombardments of the technologically advanced regimes: “We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day…,”35 “…we whom the screens submit to the same violence, that of the battered, manipulated and powerless prisoner, that of forced voyeurism in response to the forced exhibitionism of the images.”36 Overpowered by “that other form of sepulchre, the chattering television screens,” we all become “hostages of media intoxication…”37 On a similar note, in his analysis of the impacts of late twentiethcentury mass media revolution, Robert Jay Lifton ironically remarks that “the staggering array of images and ideas coming from all media—television, radio, and the press—and bombarding us from all sides,” have made McLuhan declare, “with a characteristically serious put-on,… that he had changed his thinking, would no longer say that the medium is the message; he was now convinced instead that ‘the medium is the massage,’ meaning that ‘all media work us over completely, … leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.’ ”38

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Technology, in late capitalist conditions, thus comes forth as the ruthless alien who bombards, subjugates, and, I will argue, traumatizes us, and whom we no longer can hold back and constrain. “But isn’t the computer really the alien—the robot—that is bombarding us with its world picture (not view), its operating environment; that is always faster and more accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only pretend to protect ourselves from…,”39 Bernstein reflects. The bombardment with overloads of new information that assault the subject at unprecedented speeds thus obstructs his/her ability to process and transform them into a cognitive experience. This incapacity of the individual in late capitalist society to make sense of the numerous stimuli engendered by technology appears as analogous to the condition of the Russian subject who proved completely unequipped to master the sudden shift from Soviet to post-Soviet reality. In the section on Russian conceptualism, we have already seen that psychological trauma is always the result of a sudden and unanticipated event that is registered, though not assimilated, by the structures of the mind. This definition of trauma strikingly evokes the experience of the postmodern subject in the West as well. I would thus like to propose that, similarly to his/her Russian counterpart, overwhelmed by the shocks of ideological changeover, the individual in post-industrial, Information society became the unsuspecting victim of a mass-scale psychological trauma. Indeed, my analysis in the preceding section reveals that the impact that technology caused on the subject contains all the characteristics of a traumatic experience. As Caruth describes it, based on Freud’s understanding of trauma, the “wound of the mind … is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that … is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly…”40 The recurrent replications, in Language verses, of the media babble, overpowering the subject with too much information, at a speed too fast for the mind to prepare for it, fathom it, and experience it fully evoke, I propose, the ramifications of psychic trauma.41 Unanticipated, velocious, and overwhelming in nature, the bombardments with streams of technological data allow no time for adequate processing, thus remaining unavailable to the mind, that is, unassimilable. It is this assault on the mind by undigestible streams of paratactic information that, I argue, resulted in a cognitive disruption and, on the level of writing—in paratactic structures. As McCaffery remarks, “The dominant manifestation of narrative is now the media whose electronic circuitries have imposed a violent shift in cognitive and disseminative modes. Whereas the novel tended to operate under the notions of structure, closure and an ultimate (albeit often problematized) unity, the narrative of media is characterized by a differential implosion and a structurelessness.”42 Afflicted by numberless technological “excitations” that attacked him/her on an everyday basis, the subject in the Information Age proved capable of little more than living through these “excitations,” without converting them into a meaningful experience. It was in depicting the shock effects of modern life that Walter Benjamin used the term Erlebnis (literally, “living through”) to describe this process of going through and registering the impacts of the technological environment, without being able to assign to it the weight of an experience (Erfahrung). If I mention again

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Benjamin’s work here, it is because I find it exemplary in singling out technology as the agent behind the shift from Erfahrung to Erlebnis—a fundamental shift in the dominant mode of experience that characterized the age of modernity. Benjamin’s account of the destruction of experience by the shock effects of modern life represents one of the most prophetic preludes to the postmodern interplay between technology and trauma.43 Since the modern age, as Language poets attest, the speed of information production and image dissemination has been uncontrollably mounting, bereaving the mind of its capacity to comprehend the inflow of fragmented data and thereby producing a psychically traumatic experience. Turn around and you uncover a world that dialogues in racing fragments. We are surrounded by a media regime of parataxis. “ADS where fast cuts from all ‘walks of life’ demonstrate the ubiquity and omniscience of AT&T are paratactic,” Perelman explains.44 So are TV clips, commercials, and all forms of electronic data. In the preceding sections on technology, I have already proposed that the often non-sequential, paratactic design and illogical structure of Language writing unconsciously reflect the parataxis of postmodern information landscapes. While, as Perelman forewarns, “This does not automatically mean … that the parataxis of language writing is automatically equivalent to [media-related practices such as] … channel surfing…,”45 what it definitely means is that “[i]n the West, overloads of objects, viewpoints…, channels, typefaces, … create pressure which can make the sequential coherence … seem like Victorian coincidence.”46 Or, to phrase it in a slightly different manner, when the “overloads” of unassimilable information overwhelm the mind, they pour out in disconnected words and phrases—a parataxis of language that, while not “automatically equivalent” to the paratactic make-up of media reality, undoubtedly communicates key information about it. Literary parataxis is thus no longer limited to mimicking the parataxis in media society (as in poems such as “Comraderie Turns to Rivalry” that we have discussed in the preceding chapter). Such safe differentiation of the two (where one is distinct from and mirrors the other) appears impossible. We can no longer preserve the parameters of fiction and reality inviolable. Media parataxis inundates and onslaughts the mind, disrupts the cognitive system, and is then reinvented as an eruption of poetic paratactic structures. Notably, the paragraph below that comments on the link between the paratactic make-up of our lives and that of literature in media society abounds in flagrant trauma terminology: Parataxis of a more thorough and disorienting kind than anything the old handbooks could cite is the dominant if seemingly random mode of our time. It is hard to imagine escaping from atomized subject areas, projects, and errands into longer stretches of subjectively full narrative—not to mention a whole life. As targets of the media we are inundated by intense bursts of narrative-effect: a few seconds of heart-jerk in a life insurance AD (the wife looks longingly at the dead husband’s smiling picture as she and the kids sadly leave the now-empty house), blockbuster miniseries four nights long, the six-month approach of the apotheosis of Jurassic Park or whatever major venture comes next. These sweeping affective

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beginnings and endings that shower upon us become visible as tightly managed packages when set against the corporate background that produces them … These obsessive spasms of narrative are symptoms of just how divided the present is. … The kind of literary parataxis I will be discussing can be totalizing, too, but since its broken surface is antinarrative it can seem to be a mere symptom of contemporary atomization.47

Perelman’s observation reveals once again that the tension between symptom and critique will be constant here. As much as literary parataxis could be seen as a response to and a commentary on the paratactic make-up of media society, it can also be read as, what I argue, records the inception of a widespread trauma—as a “spasm” of its time, a “symptom” of a present “broken” and “divided”—“a symptom of contemporary atomization” of the “whole life” of the subject who has turned into a “target of the media,” “shower[ed]” and “inundated by intense [thus traumatizing] bursts of narrative-effect[s]” and radically “disorienting” parataxis.

3. Poetic testimonies to the genesis of technological trauma Bernstein’s “Lift Off,”48 a much analyzed poem from his Poetic Justice, is one such example of a radically “disorienting parataxis” that is no longer confined to the loss of coordination between clauses and sentences but presents a fragmentation of a much more thoroughgoing nature. This fragmentation does more than just mirror the parataxis of the technological environment, as technology is no longer safely detached from the subject. The poem exemplifies the symbiosis of man and machine, of the lyric self and the typewriter. Technology has formed a rhizome with the human body and has enabled the writer, via the click of a key, to control (and correct) any mistake he/ she makes. Let us pause for a moment and delve into the poem. What strikes us at first, visually, in Berstein’s “Lift Off ” is the wide variety of unrelated symbols annexed to each other in no particular pattern, with random spacing and unrecognizable word structure. Apart from a few legible words on the page (“whatever,” “old,” “windows,” “upward,” “apply”), the poem looks more like some kind of visual conundrum than a textual object. ongelvmilYw T le’WHATEVER      etectiveck o mAoasP” (line 7) nLL     W*ol hOLD     dowsa ppiwtfyslkwrnyjmolsu (31) ng TUS?OFWINDOWSSoration(i’llnagioa---!5 (40) =fe.ll .ps; . .t. anUPWARDEvay,vvRonalsh (42)

As we start reading the poem, our initial impression is confirmed. Indeed, the text abounds in signifiers and pre-lexical groupings that never culminate in any kind of semantic unity. The reader is denied the comfort of any complete word or sentence:

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LIFT OFF HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv i iibalfmgmMw er,, me”ius ieigorcy¢jeuvine+pee.)a/na.t” ihl”n,s ortnsihcldseløøpitemoBruce-oOiwvewaa39osoanfJ++,r”P rHIDftppnee”eantsanegcintineoep emfnemtn t‘e‘w‘aswen toTT      pr’ -kkePPyrrr/ L   E   l   C=   muuu7ssidor      3nois N lbef ongelvmilYw T le’WHATEVER      etectiveck o mAoasP” power oavMaybeitwe v      So h‘e‘emo‘uphkRV JARLSE E ““ hrdfowbMO ‘D E TO THEBEE28T dy”ah” hsld 33ditoroneo3rpcraytnicadal”y     en am” cepwkanjhw! n=er;9991ireinli N NaRUM ahfleiuinina

At first sight, the only intelligible word on the page is the poem’s title, “Lift Off,” which challenges the reader to find any way of relating it to the incongruous compilation of signifiers that follows suit. The poem’s opening line, “HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv i iibalfmgmMw,” seems almost conventional compared to the typography of the following verses. Alongside its arbitrary and irrational spacing, the line showcases the use of uncalled-for capitalization that works to disrupt all coherent meaning. Indeed, the capitalization appears fully fortuitous—what grammatical purpose would a capital “V” serve in the middle of the indiscriminate sound structure “obVrsxr;atjrn,” “M” in the midst of the last group in this verse “iibalfmgmMw” or, most glaringly, the “HH” as the opening letter group of the poem? While “lift off ” has a strictly technical sense in this poem, its semantic charge seems to evoke an event of fiery launch and eruption—much in line with the alphabetic explosion produced by the capitals, soaring high above the lowercase typeface. As McCaffery sees it, “Capitalization has neither grammatical nor anagramic intent but is a pure register of eruption at the meeting of the linguistic sign with the pre-linguistic drive.”49 Indeed, we would be hard pressed to find any rational meaning behind the broken-by-capitals sound constellations of Bernstein’s illegible “Lift Off ”: YaLLy F varfoimsimsimv tho MriPloSkidowhacansaDehc (line 33) ouOWaScanuard aotIdi8thuuc      lvox      tt (34)                                   puaNegemropsirlrunwayv&th (35)

Along with the capital letters, the attempt to decipher the poem’s textual meaning is obstructed by the use of a full assortment of non-verbal symbols. The work abounds in mathematical and numeric inscriptions (“1/2,” “=,” “%( =55==9S,” “muuu7ssidor”/, “1000,” “ck40…,” etc.), in orthographic signs ( #, *, ( ), /), punctuation devices (!, ?, etc.), monetary designations (c, $), and letters that come from an array of alphabets. Other verses explode in a hodgepodge of unalike notations:

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w.aiM A!$¢$..wHp!! )))@$$¢”pfspIWERIS9 %( =55==9S” (line 24) Abeireeccmd 1/2”X      11”Ws2n”frewli spat)=1/2p(****vb (25) pshm”:alut      nsytu visio lts    # *;Q% elecae (26)

As we proceed reading “Lift Off,” our interaction with the text lays bare new and highly unorthodox poetic realities. Alongside the consistent use of truncated words and syllables, the poem displays a peculiar placement of spatial patterns on the page, as the white spaces act to subvert standardized meaning any time its emergence appears conceivable. The range of the blank spaces in “Lift Off ” varies from inexistent, as in line 3 of the poem: (ortnsihcldseløøpitemoBruce-oOiwvewaa39osoanfJ++,r”P (line 3)

to full-blown, in the poem’s finale: (=fe.ll .ps;                 .                 .t. anUPWARDEvay,vvRonalsh (line 42)

The setting of black letters on the white page in illogical rather than uniform patterns underscores the importance of the element of in-betweenness and reveals the striking visuality of Bernstein’s poem. But what are we to make of this peculiar figuration and the eruption of linguistic and numeric material? Are we to delve deeper into the text in search of any coherent meaning or accept the work at its face value? The verdict in Bernstein’s final utterance “llle?WSrrrrrrrrr” seems to lean in favor of the latter. Indeed, the quest for any depth in this Language work does not promise to be a gratifying experience. Known as Bernstein’s “typewriter correction ribbon” poem,50 “Lift Off ” is a text transcribed from a typewriter tape. The lines of apparent nonsense often resemble computer code gibberish. All the linguistic noise that we see on the page is thus generated by a machine and simply re-enacted by the author. The author has ceded his place as an unequaled creator of governing, transcendent meanings and has, instead, engaged with a typewriter in a machinic, cyborg-like commonality. Importantly, the typewriter that Bernstein forms a shared body with (and which he has used to type all of Poetic Justice and, previously, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) is not an ordinary one—it is an IBM Selectric II that holds the magic power to spur into action at the press of a key and “lift off ” any mistake a writer who uses it makes. All that the writer has to do is back up and hit the self-correcting key and the machine would instantly obliterate the error and make it vanish forever. Thus, in a scenario that eliminates the need for a writer to “white out” the mistakes himself/herself or use any typewriter erasers, a machine takes over and promptly assumes charge. Its operation remains hidden and unknown to the writer who can see no more than the astounding results the typewriter yields on the page. While a piece of technology that has long been discontinued and displaced by generations of intelligent machines, the IBM Selectric II anticipates the appearance of the first smart typewriters with check spelling and word processing “minds.” Endowed with the power to fix any

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error or gap in a person’s spelling skills, these machines will outsmart the performance of man via covert functional codes the writer can no longer grasp, let alone stay in charge of. With the advance of such machines, the process of conscious creation will soon be taken over by the unconsciousness of a machine. The scenario will be similar to the one that later on Katherine Hayles describes in her analysis of the computer and of the Windows interface, which conceals the real workings of this smart device: “Windows, if not exactly evil, is profoundly misleading because it hides the operations of the machine behind an interface that discourages the user from understanding how the actions of a mouse, for example, get translated into binary code—or even that they do get so translated.”51 Importantly, Hayles describes the user’s “staying on the surface” and not knowing “what is going in the guts of the machine” by directly referring to psychological trauma. “Stephenson,” she relates, referring to Neal Stephenson, “tells of the day his Macintosh PowerBook ‘broke my heart,’ destroying a large document so thoroughly that not even a powerful utilities program could recover it. Since the document was too large to put on a single floppy, Stephenson had stored the only complete copy on the hard drive, so the loss was traumatic.”52 In “Behind Happy Interface, More Complex Reality,” John Markoff remarks on the same incident that “the event was clearly traumatizing [to Stephenson] and it undermined his trust in the Macintosh operating system forever.”53 The typewriter correction ribbon, with the inscribed strings of random sounds, symbols, and numbers, thus bears witness to the nascence of an age when a machine will take precedence over the subject and overpower him/her with its hidden regimes and remote operational systems. The transcribed letters and signs on Bernstein’s typewriter tape forewarn of the imminence of this all-pervasive experience. I would thus suggest that, apart from being led by purely experimental motivation, it is with a premonition for the looming moment of ceding control to technology and failure of assimilation that the poet re-enacts, transcribes, and presents on the page, in its opaqueness and materiality, the rubble of linguistic signifiers. In this, he seeks to master the impenetrable langue of codes and integrate this moment in the structures of the mind as a semantically meaningful experience.                        ‘ sfrum*)[email protected](ed)***i=2Tsi o ?accTogather inether.nesoiSS.em;,utipektoeironkes;neuartingoiame (line 13)               mvlin6inridaette,t thiendsr’nfauoorniiaeal( I (14)              3;;;eTnaadn? VVSTVXGVIAgyifkr emewmsbfguf C !fmalc (15)              cn+     2!      !))@$MlOreeal. ====kd—(16)

The paratactic syntax generated by Bernstein’s machine and its cognitive inaccessibility erupt into disruptive shifts and structurelessness on the level of “Lift Off.” As Kenneth Goldsmith suggests, this is a poem that “foregrounds the workings of a machine, rather than the sentiments of a human”; it is “code posing as a poem.”54 The lines record the very first encounters with technological “code” that soon, in its true manifestations employed in the computer, will overpower the self by “a kind of thinking without thinkers.”55 As Hayles explains, from the vantage point of a later stage in the evolution

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of Information society, “ ‘Matter thinks. Language thinks’…‘Thinking is conducted by entities we don’t know, wouldn’t recognize on the street.’ ”56 Users, computers, and texts—all participate in the thinking process and the creation of “flickering signifiers.”57 As he/she gradually cedes the control over his or her own writing (to a machine that magically wipes out writers’ errors; then to one that has the power to correct them, and, ultimately, to the hidden mind of the computer that knows all, but conceals the ways in which it generates knowledge), the subject is overwhelmed by a peculiar anxiety. As Hayles attests to its origins in the advanced technologies succeeding the typewriter: The easy flow of writing and reading human-only languages on computers … is regularly interrupted by indications that unseen forces are interacting with the language flow, shaping, disrupting, redirecting it. I mistype a word, and my word processing program rearranges the letters. I think I am making the keystroke that will start a new paragraph and instead the previous paragraph disappears. I type a URL into the browser and am taken to a destination I do not expect.58

In “Lift Off,” the clash between the human writer and the fathomless technological script is manifested in the poem’s emphatic visuality. Very important as a visual object, Berntein’s work evokes the pictorial significance of testimonies to events that have remained secluded from cognition. Commenting on the visual design of the poem as “underscore[ing] the way in which letters ‘accTogather/inether.nesoiss’ (act together in their noises) to create meaning in the ‘sytu visio’ (visible site),” Craig Dworkin, who studies the impact of medial technologies on visual prosody, draws a parallel with the experiments of the analogue-influenced “readies.”59 Similarly to Bernstein’s typewriter, the reading machine that Bob Brown created in the late 1920s, could, “at the press of a button”60 alter texts’ visual surface. It could control the reading page, i.e., adjust the font, speed, and direction of the text that it scrolled mechanically before a reader (not by chance, Jennifer Schuessler of The New York Times calls him “The Godfather of the E-Reader”).61 While still in its embryotic stages, the direct, immediate contact between the lyric self and technology, as presented by a typewriter that emends a writer’s spelling or a machine that governs the process of reading, anticipates the growingly aggressive penetration of technology into the human body and mind, and the accompanying, often psychically traumatic, aftermaths. The result of this interpenetration is a poetry that abounds in fractured words, sub-lexemic elements, and disjunct verses, which resist any attempt at a semantically coherent construal. Instead, the poems record the breakup of language through re-enacting its disjointed and crippled structures. Uncannily reminiscent of the dissipation of matter and language in the conceptualist art of Grisha Bruskin, Andrews’s “PIEC,”62 for example, announces the crumbling of linguistic and semantic material in a poem whose title both enacts and signifies rupture. Demanding to be recognized as a visual object, the poem itself resembles a piece, broken off the formerly inviolable language (Figure 7.2): A close look at Andrews’s work reveals that the word fragments on the page are not fully unrecognizable and random. They are prefixes, suffixes, and remnants of roots of

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Figure 7.2 Bruce Andrews, “PIEC.” Copyright: Bruce Andrews

formerly meaningful words that have remained unmastered by the lyric I’s mind and are now re-enacted in their original, crude materiality. We are thus able to discern: variations of suffixes: “tory” (as in “explanatory,” “satisfactory”), “bined” (as in “combined”), “ving” (as in “striving”), “neys” (as in “kidneys,” “chimneys”), “pean” (as in “European”), “tooed” (as in “tattooed”), etc. roots or remnants of roots: “swer” (as in “swerve”), “priv” (as in “private,” “privilege”), “hyst” (as in “hysteria”), “trem” (as in “tremble”), “coar” (as in “coarse”), “voca” (as in “vocal,” “vocabulary”), “overla” (as in “overlap”), etc., fragments of idioms or grammatical parts, as “by g” (“by god”), “eras” (Pluperfect Indicative /Indicativus Plusquamperfecti/), and many others.

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The reader is overtaken by the eerie feeling that he/she stands witness to the struggles of the mind to come to terms with a reality advancing too fast to be properly assimilated and steadily taking control of the subject—a struggle that would hopefully recapture the missing segments of the words and make their meanings available to the lyric I. For now, however, the “piec”-es on the page are nothing more than shattered fragments—linguistic artifacts of an impenetrable world that has unsuspectedly overtaken the subject. Refusing to present the reader with just this final result—the heap of irreparably broken pieces, Andrews makes him/her a witness to the process of linguistic disruption. The first pages of his poem “ULIANOV,” for instance (whose title evokes the name of the forerunner of Russia’s Socialist Revolution and Premier of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—Lenin) outline in discrete digital ciphers a figure (perhaps, the mock body of the Leader).63 This disciplined use of language, however, soon gives way to an amorphous, barely contained succession of graphemes, which transport us in peculiar ways to the traumas of the communist dream (Figures 7.3–7.5). Similarly disrupted and pictorially active is Andrews’s unnamed “Ca ja a th an…”64 Evoking a connection to the digitalized technological landscape, Andrews’s graphemic square, composed of binary couplings of letters, forms a grid of non-semantic cipheralities that is immediately recognized as a visual object. Its unorthodox syntax foregoes the linearity of conventional verse structure in favor of a balanced shape that effectively blocks the verse’s full-blown rupture (Figure 7.6).

Figure 7.3 Bruce Andrews, “ULIANOV.” Copyright: Bruce Andrews

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Figure 7.4 Bruce Andrews, “ULIANOV.” Copyright: Bruce Andrews

Figure 7.5 Bruce Andrews, “ULIANOV.” Copyright: Bruce Andrews

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Figure 7.6 From Bruce Andrews’s Acappella. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

The pronounced visual syntax defines many of Andrews’s works in Factura. The texts abound in fractured words and disparate protosemantic elements, divided by randomly placed white spacing interspersed with black lettering. The discreteness of sound and the differential oppositions between words and disconnected phrases are in extreme cognitive dissonance and refuse any semantic integration. Meaning pulverizes and leaves a multiplicity of reading paths open. While the heteroglossia is there, however, no distinct lyric selves can be identified. In the absence of any coherent verbal syntax, the visual syntax of the poems takes over. Consider the following examples (Figure 7.7 and Figure 7.8). In the chapter on Russian conceptualism, we have already discussed the relationship between visuality and trauma. We have observed that when the mind becomes overwhelmed by unfathomable cataclysmic changes, it compensates for the inability to decode them semantically via a recourse to a visually built testimony. Similar is the response of the Language poets to the overloads of information assaulting the subject in the post-industrial era. The late twentieth century produced a variety of texts, akin to McCaffery’s The Black Debt,65 which, in Perloff ’s mind, forms “[o]ne of the most interesting examples of such ‘information overload.’ ”66 Such works present a testimony to the subject’s overcoming by an indigestible flow of media-engendered signals that, because of his/her inability to translate into meaningful language, attain an emphatically pictorial representation. “Certainly The Black Debt cannot be read ‘normally,’ ” Perloff argues. “The typeface and continuous print call to mind signboards, tickertape, and electronic mail.”67 With the proliferation of texts that replicate the

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Figure 7.7 From Bruce Andrews’s Factura. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

Figure 7.8 From Bruce Andrews’s Factura. Copyright: Bruce Andrews

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visuality of billboards, as well as video and television discourse, the “look” of the poetic work becomes increasingly important. Similarly to our reading of the conversion of media noise into pictorial poetry as triggered by events of media-engendered, information trauma, Perloff sees the transformation of noise into images, both in real life and in poetry, as a response to a disconcerting anxiety. In an anecdote, she recounts John Cage’s attempts to cope with his sleep-deprivation caused by the ceaseless noise of traffic under his NY apartment window—a case that she then parallels to the noise-image transpositions in late twentieth-century poetry. “Asked by an interviewer how he tolerates the incessant traffic noise below his fourth-floor window in lower Manhattan,” Perloff writes, “Cage responded, ‘At first I thought I couldn’t sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered into my dreams without waking me.’ Of such transpositions [of sounds into images] we might say, the poetry of late twentieth-century America is made.”68 The analysis of the visual poetics of the Language works suggests that, despite the fact that in Language poetry the creation of nonsense and speaking in non-words appeared as a most deliberate tactics for the production of non-instrumental discourses, at times, the Language verses slip fully out of conscious control and unwittingly record the lyric self ’s failure to grasp his technologically governed reality. Still, even when language disintegrates fully and leaves behind nothing but pictorial traces, the reader shows a tendency to look for meaning and make sense of the text he/she engages with. Despite the pronounced randomness and semantic inaccessibility that we have seen to define the typewriter’s tape transcript in Bernstein’s “Lift Off,” for instance, the jumbled poem also falls prey to the urge to be semantically appropriated. As Dworkin observes, “[t]he poem is notable not so much for its nonsense, but for how much meaning can be recovered from its text, which suggests the extent to which we are preconditioned to make connections and construct familiar narratives with the slightest amounts of information.”69 And, indeed, even when Language poetry appears to be full of noise and its meaning seems irredeemably compromised, some nuclei of semantic matter find a way to congeal, as even pure noise cannot help but produce residual meanings. It is at the bifurcation of these two tendencies—to create alternate meanings and cede control over anything meaningful, so the mind can inscribe its unmastered experience, that Language poetry can be seen to take place. The subtle and dynamic balance between these counteracting forces is at the basis of the Language poesis. The following section will explore its manifestation in David Melnick’s much discussed work with the provocative name Pcoet.

4. David Melnick’s “apocalypse of fragmentation.”70 Pcoet: a “conscious creation” or a “protosemantic delirium”?71 A collection of eighty-three short poems, many of which consist of a single line or one word only, Pcoet enacts the ultimate dissipation of structure and intentional meaning. At the same time, however, even a first look at the title reveals that the work has a contrived quality about it and can, at points, be seen as constructed in character. Indeed,

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the title resembles the word “poet,” with a peculiar “c” thrown in-between—perhaps to obstruct the poem’s facile assimilation and force us to revisit the conventional notion of “poet.” Despite such occasional hints at a meaning, however, any effort to find a common code and decipher the poem remains a wholly frustrating experience. “Pcoet’s” “poeticz”72 calls for a whole new approach to engaging with poetry and keeps interpretative mastery at bay, so the text could communicate its unspeakable realities. Similarly to Bernstein’s “Lift Off,” Melnick’s Pcoet is rendered in a nonsense language that only barely resembles English. In fact, some of its lines look as if they were just “lift[ed] off ” from Bernstein’s typewriter correction ribbon—the same jumbled patterns, crossed-out erroneous groupings, superimposed letters, and unreadable verses (Figure 7.9 and Figure 7.10).73 In a conversation with P. Inman about Pcoet, Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver call these clusters of sounds “non-words.”74 Indeed, it is impossible to recognize not only words but even morphemes in the random compilations of letters, as any coherent structure is broken down to its constituent elements. Still, at times, the reader’s efforts to arrest meaning (even if minimal) feel somewhat rewarded as, occasionally, a legible word would emerge out of the unreadable phonetic matter. We could, for example, recognize the idea of divinity either directly expressed, as in “god” (section 43) and “goddo” (5) or within such variations of some synonyms for “god”/“godlike” as “deitia” (31, from “deity”) or “theouase r1es” (50) and “thoeisu/ thoiea” (1) (from “Theos,” god in Greek). At other times, the author runs words into one another (as in “intrucktuaerhhimtoweobierar off,” for instance) or camouflages meaning via a pollution with phonetic noise and garbled alphabet material. To uncover the traces of embedded meanings, we are forced to parse out the words’ constituent parts or reshuffle the letter arrangements. We could thus come to identify the word “moon” within the phonetic clustering “phhhomoonhmhoy” (36), “ringing” within “ruignging” (40), “dream” within “dreagm” (51) or “fewd” when we rearrange “wedf ” (63). It is such moments that fuel the critics’ belief that, despite its radical linguistic disruption, the seemingly nonsensical language of Melnick’s Pcoet is often secondary or constructed in nature. As McCaffrey once wrote of Pcoet, its text “seems less like writing than incisions into the very surface of signification.”75 Refraining from

Figure 7.9 David Melnick, PCOET, from # 27 and # 30. Copyright: David Melnick

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Figure 7.10 David Melnick, PCOET, # 24. Copyright: David Melnick

granting Melnick’s work the status of writing, McCaffrey nonetheless refuses to dismiss the text’s dependence on signification. Pcoet’s linguistic rupture is, in his view, not fully accidental but a disruption of a foundation that is consistently meaningful. Critics of Pcoet have persistently scraped the work’s “surface of signification,” attempting to recover any remnants of meaning willfully imprinted on it. In his review of the American Tree, an Anthology of Language Poetry, Jerome McGann approaches the “unpleasant and difficult [Language] poetry” through no other but an excerpt from Pcoet, whose signification he seeks to decode. “[S]eta /colecc / puilse, i / canoe / it spear heieo / as Rea, cinct pp / pools we sly drosp / Geianto / (o sordea, o weedsea!),” reads stanza thirty-three of Pcoet. McGann sees this excerpt as an example of disrupted signification, a textual “ruin in which we glimpse pieces of a … world”76 once total and meaningful. We may take “seta,” for example, as pre-lexemic English or as common Italian, and the rest of the text sets up similar problems that call for the reader’s decision. The text might be read as a kind of ruin in which we glimpse pieces of an ancient world, hints of its most loved places and its gods and goddesses, as well as the linguistic/ poetical forms which once brought them into view.77

In his essay “Melnick’s Pin,” Silliman also refers to the fabricated language of Melnick’s verses: “Pcoet’s (G.A.W.K, 1975) constructed language—thoeisu/thoiea/ackorn woi

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cirtus locqvump—again reveals the materiality of the signifier as a mask, only this time with language itself lurking underneath the zaum text,” the critic avows.78 Silliman sees in Melnick’s work the contrived and loaded language of Joyce: “As a critique of sense, Pcoet is closer to Joyce’s later prose in its accumulation of linguistic strata than it is to the talking-in-tongues automatic writing of the Russian futurists.”79 Introducing Melnick’s Pcoet to his fellow writer Lyn Hejinian, Silliman again evokes the poetry of Russian futurists—however, not in relation to its “automatic” nature but with regard to Khlebnikov’s deliberate zaum technique. In an interview with Dworkin, Hejinian recalls how this work was first presented to her: “When I first started corresponding with Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten in the early 70’s, Ron sent me David Melnick’s Pcoet and in the accompanying letter mentioned Velimir Khlebnikov. That was the first I’d heard of Khlebnikov, but Ron was writing in a way that assumed I understood, and so I had to find out.”80 Though sometimes layered in the zaum fashion or seen as a carefully constructed field, at other times the meaning of Pcoet’s verses is radically compromised (Figure 7.11– 7.14):

Figure 7.12 David Melnick, PCOET, from # 12. Copyright: David Melnick

Figure 7.11 David Melnick, PCOET, # 21. Copyright: David Melnick

Figure 7.13 David Melnick, PCOET, from # 26. Copyright: David Melnick

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Figure 7.14 David Melnick, PCOET, # 58. Copyright: David Melnick

As we read on, we stumble on multiple verses that are reduced to no more than graphemes, indistinguishable as words and altogether unreadable: mrmyl lryk (51) m, ujne 72qoafu (23) o      g;erdled (l on top of first e) (59) asrg1rys (12) , sbot ihib c,      sr (21) a1skc      1eirpxoeb cneoicrn(10) ap rp vieot      je      jroas papei (19) rib 4 bg 1-zirgma (24) a dot su 4,      sohae qedr      o diru (28) ve u xxx ssowe (30) if krhyshwratrrrk (47) b rkjns kfoet 6i      3wit (49)

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It is at such moments that we find it impossible to recognize any purpose, let alone a consistent theory, behind the indiscriminate and random typing. “Melnick’s raw material here is not words or phrases, but the smallest building-blocks of language,”81 Mark Scroggins writes. “And not phonemes, sounds—that would imply a theory of language in which the spoken is prior or superior to the written word, in which the writing poet is merely transcriber of what she or he has already uttered, silently or aloud—but graphemes, letters, the fragments of the written word” that make any such theory impossible.82 The absence of an engagement with the creation of meaning is thoroughgoing and comprehensive. Melnick seems to be “simply typing as rapidly and sloppily as possible” producing an experience that may be “about as pleasant as a root canal.”83 Indeed, it would be hard to make an argument that there is any intentionality behind verses such as those quoted above. If we believed that “pcoet e reo,” such lines seriously undermine this belief. An easy explanation for the evasion of meaning would revolve around the power of disjunctive verses to undermine the governing discourse of capital, but the disruption in such lines is so all-embracing, reaching the point of unreadability and, furthermore, unpronounceability, that all paths for constructing an alternate discourse seem blocked and no longer viable. “Right, pronounceability or the lack of it. That’s what struck me when I first read Pcoet,…,” Inman recalls.84 This is a kind of poetry in which we are presented with “accumulations of alien phonemes or unspeakable, unpronounceable, graphical elements constituting a ‘pure music’ or ‘pure painting.’ ”85 This emphasis on the pictorial quality of the text, in lieu of its written and oral comprehensibility, again uncannily evokes testimonial literature. In it, the subject’s inability to tell coherently of an ungrasped reality is substituted by a testimony, which strikes with its insistent visuality. Likewise, as Inman observes about Melnick’s poem: “Large stretches of Pcoet seemed to escape speakability. Its text seemed to be situated totally on the surface of the page; it was more like painting…,” in which Melnick was not writing syllable by syllable or word by word, but drawing “letter by letter.”86 Impossible to voice, the graphemes in the poems below outline such a non-significative field and command the reader’s visual attention (Figure 7.15). Exhibiting the striking visuality defining testimonies to events of trauma, Melnick’s Pcoet, I would suggest, with its radically undetermined verses, unreadable arrangements of letters and recurrent pre-lexemic groupings, sounds as if reenacting the undigested jabber of the Information society it was conceived in. The overpowering currents of ungrasped particulized data resurface, on the textual level, as “clusters of letters that are almost words; clusters of almost-words that are almost phrases—apocalypse of fragmentation that offers both too little meaning to hold onto and too much meaning to take in at once.”87 It is at the crossroad of these two tendencies in Melnick’s Pcoet—to hint at some meanings and, at the same time, invalidate the possibility for anything coherent to shape out that Melnick’s work can be best understood. Indeed, it is hard to know when the author intended to play with established meanings and when the unconscious

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Figure 7.15 David Melnick’s PCOET, # 45. Copyright: David Melnick took over and spilt out a rubble of disjunct signifiers. Still, any time we look at the verses of Melnick, their random design uncannily evokes that of the media landscapes surrounding us. The author’s palpable lack of control over parts of the poems also suggests we may be witnessing a testimony to the impacts of the overwhelming media experience. The paradox of being both intentional and unconscious, of enabling the author to present and, at the same time, working toward a work’s unrepresentability, is likewise embedded in the duality of the paragram, a signature trope of Melnick’s work and all Language poetry.88 “Paragrams propose the paradox of an unrepresentability that serves as a necessary condition of writing’s capacity to present. Although assignable to a certain order of production, value, and meaning, the paragram does not derive necessarily from an intentionality…,” McCaffery asserts.89 “Not necessarily a latent content or hidden intention, the paragram is a subproductive sliding and slippage of meaning between the forces and intensities distributed throughout a text’s syntactic entirety. … [W]e admit that the paragram can be both fortuitous and intentional, a conscious creation and a transphenomenal infraproduction … protosemantic delirium”90—a double disposition that lies at the basis of much of Language poetry.

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5. Coping with the wrong tomorrow: Testimonies to the trauma of temporal dislocation in the age of media saturation Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart realities that otherwise go unregistered.91 Charles Bernstein Together with the build-up of information superhighways, we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation.92 Paul Virilio In the chapters so far, we have discussed the traumatic assault of the mind by flows of excessive media information and the subsequent loss of cognitive grip on reality caused by the velocity, abundance, and covert operations of the incoming data. But what are the manifestations of the psychically traumatic experience that we have portrayed in the previous sections? What are the peculiar ways in which it has affected the subject and his/her relationship to reality? These are some of the problems that I will tackle in the following section, as I pursue my analysis of Language poetry. Unable to catch up with and comprehend the changes of his rapidly transmuting technological environment, the lyric self, abiding in the Information era, experienced an unforeseen displacement. The highly evolved technological future had arrived too early, before he/she could adequately prepare for it. In an abnormal reversal of temporality, the subject saw his/her future happen—it overtook the present, blended with it, and made the concept of distinct temporal zones meaningless and “shattery.” In Perelman’s words, the lyric persona was left with “only a future/more shattery than ever but still/nearer to us than the present.”93 “[T]he future is now,” Paik famously declared. Prematurely achieved and, in a sense, abolished, the future seemed unwelcoming and “barely interested”: “…Our/machines filled the freeway with names/and desires, hurling aggressively streamlined messages/toward a future that seemed restless,/barely interested.”94 Unpredictedly, it was the present that acquired significance, the immediate time that had substance and meaning. The sudden collapse of the temporal perspectives into a single dimension—the contemporaneous—announced the end of teleology and the demise of history. With the precipitate realization of his technological future, the lyric self was confined to the “ ‘now’ time”—doomed to reside in an eternal present. As Bernstein renders the experience: “In the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of ‘now’ time.”95 Attesting to the deprivation of the subject of any existence beyond the present-day one, Virilio proclaims: “To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc … This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows.”96 As he/she is helpless to arrest the flow of time and give it more than momentary meaning, the subject unexpectedly falls prey to a bizarrely Baudrillardian experience—a

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strange sensation of perceiving his/her life unfold as if in the rear mirror of a car— always one moment too late, allowing no time for adequate processing. The prime result is a pervasive feeling of a missed and unabsorbed experience that overwhelms the lyric persona in many Language poems. Overtaken by the rapidly changing technological realities, the lyric self discerns he/she is unceasingly too late, arriving and locating himself/herself in these realities, and that immutable belatedness gives rise to a peculiar, disquieting uneasiness. As Bernstein describes it: “…What is this anxiety/ one feels in arriving late, not meeting/deadlines, desires, go-betweens.”97 Invariably in arrears, the subject loses the ability to comprehend the future he/she meets and assign a cognitive value to it. This failure to come to terms with the unanticipated displacement of temporality reflects the impacts of a psychically traumatic reality. In the words of the members of Anti-Trauma Inc., the question becomes: “How do you cope with tomorrow when/(a) it may not be like the real tomorrow but/(b) it’s arrived when you weren’t ready for it?98/Wrong tomorrow. It’s going to overtake you anyway … 99/…Wrong tomorrow. Ash longer, vita brevis.” The sudden eschatological displacement into a “wrong” and meaningless tomorrow becomes the cause of a severely disorienting feeling. “[U]nable to unify the past, present, and future of [his/her] own biographical experience or psychic life,”100 the lyric self suffers an unsettling and “fundamental loss of orientation.”101 In a virtual reality that far exceeds the speed of human thought and the capacity of our mind to integrate the overloads of information, he/she is mercilessly thrown off balance, doomed to perpetual drifting and fluctuation. As Bernstein attests, [46] … [The] structural metaphor that seems played out in video games… … revolves around “location.” Here it’s not loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being lost—dislocation—as in how to get from one place to another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make with the controls corresponds with what you see on the far-from-silver screen. Or else the intoxicating anxiety of disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling….102

As a result of this ungovernable dislocation, the future, to the lyric I, no longer seems imaginable or in any way predictable. No stable orienting points render help to the bewildered subject. He/she cannot conceive of what awaits him/her. “Anxious and waiting for something, but not/definable—amorphous” is how Bernstein describes the experience.103 No trusty guideline promises assistance in the attempt to forecast the future—the letters in the soup of Henrietta Hippo are as dependable as any social method. “Henrietta Hippo believes she can predict the future by reading the letters in her alphabet soup,” Bernstein recounts.104 And there seems to be no better means for getting hold of the elusive temporality. The unforeseen reconfiguration of the temporal dimension is particularly visible in Perelman’s The Future of Memory. Even a cursory glimpse at the titles of Perelman’s poems, comprising The Future of Memory, unveils the poet’s manifest preoccupation

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with the dimension of time. “To the Future,” “To the Past,” “Writing in Real Time,” and “Symmetry of Past and Future” are only a few of the works that demonstrate Perelman’s pronounced interest in the realm of temporality and that grapple to redefine, in a highly provocative way, the new scope of reality. A careful look into Perelman’s poems reveals that they stage with striking consistency two unnatural dislocations of poetic reality. Firstly, most poems present an anomalous flattening of the chronotope, defined by a future that retreats into the past and leaves an emptied temporal space ahead of the subject. Perelman’s poems also enact the traumatic displacement of the poet’s persona beyond his anticipated and cognitively recognizable future and testify to his existence in an estate after the future, in a meaningless and ambiguous post-futural modus vivendi. Furthermore, The Future of Memory records with disturbing exactitude the traumatic ramifications of both these disruptions of poetic reality. The shock inflicted on the lyrical persona is intimately linked, in Perelman’s collection, to the subject’s unforeseen encounter with a prematurely consumed and “pre-owned” future. A close examination of Perelman’s The Future of Memory reveals that it abounds in emphatically atypical depictions of a future reality that does not lie ahead of the subject, but is, instead, viewed as an already achieved and invalidated experience, as a precipitously realized and lived out “tomorrow.” Faced with the discovery that “America, [his] life, the page,/the academy of the future,/ … as it turns out,/[are] in the past,”105 the poet can no longer envision his life as a continued and meaningful biographic experience. Instead, as portrayed in Perelman’s “To the Future,” he senses the immanence of a shocking and apocalyptic collapse: “I always expected some kind of/indefinite continuance but … / … the world will end/up breaking apart … / … I’ll probably feel a bit shocked all the way through…”106 In a similarly peculiar stance, death is repositioned from its customary domain after the future to an abode markedly located in the subject’s past. “They will die/last night/We have lived/tomorrow,” Perelman proclaims in “The Womb of Avant-Garde Reason.”107 In the same work, he repeatedly forecasts that “the future will lie down/with the past.”108 Perelman’s work thus enacts a peculiar overlapping of the temporal zones of the future and the past. The two are often equated and loaded with equivalent semantic charge: “… a day that will/never die, since it only exists/in the past and the future…”109 The past and the future are in perfect symmetry, as implied in the very title of Perelman’s work “Symmetry of Past and Future.”110 Losing the future as a destination to direct one’s hopes, dreams and actions to, looking forward to a life that has already happened, and having nothing to expect but meaningless abysmal emptiness are the marks of a manifestly traumatic experience. As Hayles concurs, drawing parallels with Žižek’s views on trauma, the loss of human “teleological illusion” is a gravely psychopathological experience. Commenting on a story by Greg Egan, she observes: “[F]or humans, the teleological illusion is an essential defense necessary for human existence. Indeed, the teleological illusion … is precisely that which is necessary to prevent human psychopathology.”111 The loss of the subject’s teleological illusion as technology transports him/her beyond his/her foreseeable future, into an amorphous and meaningless temporality, has been likewise reflected in the visual arts. Leaving the 20th Century112 by Los

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Angeles-based artist Max Almy, for instance, comments on the violent disruption of the temporal dimension by relating, in the mode of science fiction, a televisual timetravel via the electronic circuit and computer chip. Staging a three-part transition— countdown, departure, arrival—to a technological future, foreclosed and emptied of meaning, Almy presents the liquefying of the subject’s points of reference brought about by the fathomless boom in contemporary technology. Almy uses video and computer techniques to simulate the hyperreality of a futuristic “landscape with no detail or points of reference,” a space without perspective or point of view.113 The liquefaction of the temporal perspective is also the object of Fabrizio Plessi’s signature work Liquid Time II (1993)114—a work that has become one of the most popular symbols of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the mecca of media art.115 Over the years, Plessi has been especially taken with the movement of water, a preoccupation he has pursued since the 1970s and evident in many of his works—most prominently, “Rome II” (1988) and “Liquid Crystals” (1993).116 “Tempo Liquido” (“Liquid Time”) presents a five-meter tall wheel that turns slowly above a long steel tank, along the base of which water flows in a gutter (Figure 7.16). It is easy to recognize that the structure is a mill wheel, but a rather peculiar one. In each of the scoops, the water we expect to find is replaced by a TV monitor whose screen shows video footage of a frenziedly cascading liquid. As the wheel turns, the

Figure 7.16 Fabrizio Plessi, Tempo Liquido, 1993, 1-channel video installation, 500 × 400 × 1800 cm, ZKM_Collection, Foto © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Foto: Franz Wamhof

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water shown on each of the twenty-one monitor screens briefly meets the surface of the real water that bubbles along the gutter in the tank. “There is a profound analogy,” Plessi believes, “between the two elements: water is the ancient element, ancestral, original. Video is an element of today, linked to our excited and telematic lives.… [F]or many years now I have thought of these two only apparently different elements as being practically mutually osmotic, or better, as living a secret life full of undisclosed complicity.…”117 The primal source of life and our world thus clash with the new information reality. History dissolves into the future. The ancient and the modern merge in one. Time liquefies, as the virtual blue liquid and the gurgling water flow together in the basin, forming a common uniform stream. The “impossible cohabitation”118 between the natural and the technological becomes the symbol of a history that meets the electronic future in a timeless, ceaselessly revolving present. Tumbling down the future and the past, the watermill produces the energy of a temporally indiscriminate present, which the subject has no way to navigate and where he can easily drown. Without any reference points beyond the homogenous present and with no horizon by which to orient himself, the subject feels powerless to unravel the riddle of his reality. “I find the nature and tone/of your questions to be/extremely discouraging, and to/reflect an alarming lack of/understanding…,” Bernstein reports.119 In another of his poems, tellingly named “Asylum,” Bernstein dwells on a motif consistently recurring throughout the works in Islets/Irritations, that of the lyric self ’s “failures of assimilation.”120 As the natural perspective is erased and all prospects collapse into a meaningless and amorphous continuum, language loses its power as a coherent representational medium. Instead, it crumbles down and falls apart. In Bernstein’s “was, rain, dish,” it breaks down into six pages of disjointed words, acronyms, numbers, and even signs for monetary values: “was, rain, dish/our, an, much/took, kid, stretch/well, real, didn’t/immersion, wanted, attractive/oooooo, my, served/&, see, so/ … summarily, $116, available/screaming, they, off/down, is, all…”121 Though not directly linked to the question of technology, the poem strikingly evokes the random patterns of the information environment it was conceived in.

6. “Play It Again, Pac-Man”: The referential power of re-enactment and “traumatic repetition”122 While at first sight nonsensical, the “blather and … displacement” of Bernstein’s poetics possesses a hidden representational power.123 As we have already suggested, the jumbled-up syntax and disjointed patterns are often the result of forces that act beyond authorial intentionality and thus reflect the structure and the impacts of mediasaturated Information society. Bernstein himself admits to the fact that his works often slip outside the scope of his personal skills and convictions, at times breaking down to the level of “gibberish” that he is powerless to govern: “Everything I write, in some mood, sounds/bad to me. It reads like gibberish –/unnecessary rhymes, repetitions, careless/constructions—a loss of conviction.”124 Immediately following these verses,

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the author makes a curious admission: the “gibberish” that he creates is not the product of his failed efforts; instead, it constitutes linguistic “orders” that Bernstein simply “finds” and lets “speak for themselves” what often may be an unmastered by the mind experience. Hence the uneasiness the poet feels as he embarks on documenting that linguistic “gibberish,” thus giving up his passion for composing lofty poetry that would assert his “lost recognition”: “Whether/I am content,” the author ponders, “to want to let those/orders I find speak for themselves, if/it is the orders as I make them that/I want to compel my own lost recognition.”125 Poetic gibberish seems more equipped to register the traumatizing shifts in temporality and the accompanying disruptions in cognition than any verbally coherent and linguistically sophisticated structure. As Bernstein fervently announces, “ ‘[B]ad grammar’ can speak more truthfully than correct grammar…”126 Syntactical and verbal fracturing can more reliably record the symptoms of eschatological disruption. “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made,” Deleuze and Guattari argue.127 Recording and registering come forth as just another means of representing—a viable alternative to telling about and interpreting. Not by accident, in an interview he gave at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman described the Language poets not as story-tellers but as “antennae of the race or social receptors,” responsible to listen to and “catch a whole spectrum of different voices.”128 Similarly sensitive must be the antennae that catch and feed the raw material of technical reality into the TV monitors of Bruce Nauman’s129 installation Raw Material: Brrr (1990). In it, the artist stages two monitors and a large screen that repeatedly shows the same image. This is the image of the artist’s face that appears deformed, as it convulsively shakes from one side to the other, reiterating the same meaningless monosyllable: “brrr” (which, interestingly, evokes the first name of the artist). The recurrence of the same nonsensical gesture uncannily slows down the viewer’s perception. It makes him/her move beyond the monotony of the re-emerging contortions and ponder the effects of the media that have caused them. The blurting of the continuous “brrr” testifies to the baffled and disoriented state of the subject, assaulted by aggressively encroaching and increasingly fast-paced media realities. In Freudian terms, it is essential that the psychically traumatic experience produced by this sudden excitation of the mind by stimuli (as the media ones) that the mind is not prepared to handle be assimilated and, eventually, disposed of. In the words of Freud, in events of trauma, “There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of.”130 To this end, their re-enactment becomes a must-be imperative. I would thus like to propose a reading of the Language verses as an attempt to harness the stream of technological excitations—an endeavor to “master the [traumatizing] stimulus retrospectively,”131 through re-enacting it in all its incomprehensibility until it finally makes sense and can be integrated in the structures of the mind semantically. Indeed, as the Language poems reveal, the lyric self ’s lack of control over his/her reality is often accompanied by a desperate striving to come to grips with it. As typical of

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psychological trauma, the attempt to recapture a missed and unregistered psychic experience is expressed in re-enacting the undigested event, or, in the words of Freud, in its “traumatic repetition.”132 Bernstein’s “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” for instance, alludes in its very title to the act of re-enactment (“playing it again”) as indicative of the hero’s endeavor to comprehend the structure of a self-governing (computerbased) regime, impossible to fathom and predict, through playing once again the allpowerful, invincible computer game. Or else, the lyric self will be besieged by paranoia. As Bernstein describes this predicament, [52]    Paranoia literally means being beside one’s mind. Operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie sensation of being next to something like a mind, something like a mind that is doing something like responding to your control. Yet one is not in control over the computer. That’s what’s scary. Unlike your relation to your own body, that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a small window of operator control. The real controller of the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core that goes under the name of Read Only Memory (ROM), that’s neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can change but “firmware.”133

All you can do is re-enact the incomprehensible game in a desperate (and doomed) attempt to grasp its hidden regime and avoid falling prey to traumatizing paranoias. Similarly, Language poetry can often be read as a re-enactment of the unmastered media babble of present-day Information society—a testimony to a moment in history when the subject became traumatized by floods of fathomless technological data, which he/she frantically struggled to come to terms with. In its paratactic and incoherent patterns, the language of these poetic re-enactments often eludes the grasp of representational thought. Nevertheless, it emerges as no less “meaningful” and significant than the semantically coherent and transparent language. It is just that this fractured poetic parlance asserts its meaning in a wholly new manner—beyond the conceptual and semiotic mastery of our experience that we are accustomed to finding in it. Indeed, the alogical (prelogical) reality of trauma cannot be communicated in a representational language, but language still necessarily serves as the vehicle that refers us to this reality. “Such a world is defined without us,” Wlad Godzich argues. “It is the world without us, a world altogether other, with coordinates that do not come from us … We are now inhabited by images that we have not drawn from ourselves, images from external impression that we do not master and that retain all their agential capability without being mediated by us.”134 We can do little to represent in coherent terms the experience of technology that afflicted the mind but never became part of its structures. What the poet can do is re-enact and repeat it as unmediated reality, which, while non-representational, remains untarnished by the mind and thus intrinsically referential.

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It is by means of such unmediated re-enactments, that Language poetry provides a glimpse into the psychological profile of post-industrial reality. Indeed, conditions such as neurotics and schizophrenia have often been used to describe the subject in late capitalist society. As Jameson, however, suggests in his discussion of postmodernism, what we observe in postmodern reality is no longer an individual experience of “hysterics and neurotics“ or a “Van Gogh-type madness,” similar to those encountered in high modernist society.135 This is a collective psychological experience, an all-embracing cultural pathology, which can no longer be confined to any individual subject. In the words of Jameson, …[T]he great dominant experience of … schizophrenia would seem to have little enough in common any more either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud’s own day or with those canonical experiences of … Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated the period of high modernism. This shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation.136

Among the Language works most openly eliciting the ways in which contemporary verse records the subject’s schizophrenic fragmentation and derangement is a piece John Ensslin has aptly entitled “Schizophrenic Writing.” In it, after presenting letters by two clinically diagnosed schizophrenics, Ensslin makes the uncanny theoretical point that contemporary poetry and schizophrenic speech share “certain common patterns in the way language is used.”137 “In fact this commonality [of schizophrenic speech] with poetic language has been one of the chief stumbling blocks to attempts to isolate the schizophrenic speaker from other kinds of language users.”138 In a society developing at speedily accelerated rates and overloading the human subject with excessive information, schizophrenic behavior and speech increasingly resemble those observed in normal subjects. “[T]he breakdown of human performance under heavy information loads may be related to psychopathology in ways we have not yet begun to explore,” Alvin Toffler suggests by referring to the psychologist L. J. Chapman.139 “Schizophrenics,” Miller specifies, “… have difficulties in coping with information inputs at standard rates like the difficulties experienced by normals at rapid rates. As a result, schizophrenics make errors at standard rates like those made by normals under fast, forced-input rates.”140 It is important to note as we deliberate on the quotes that it is the “heavy information loads,” which assault the subject at abnormally “fast, forced-input rates,” that they identify as responsible for the genesis of cultural psychopathology. Still, while the statements above may be theoretically elucidative, it is essential to remember that terms such as “schizophrenia,” “psychopathology,” and “trauma” have been employed in them as an aesthetic rather than clinical model, and in a way that concurs with Robert Jay Lifton’s “prefer[ence] to speak of psychohistory— rather than, say, social psychiatry—because it suggests an intellectual area of concern much wider than that of mental illness …”141

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The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma

1. “Traumas of Code”:1 The affinities of codework and Language poetry In our analysis so far, we have looked at the ways in which Language poetry testifies to the psychological trauma of the subject’s overpowering by information technology. This chapter will zoom in on the principal unit of information technology—technological code, and reveal its relationship to and, oddly, manifestation as, psychological trauma. Indeed, in its overarching impacts, technological code, in the age of unlimited information, has become ubiquitous and uncannily analogous to trauma. In her perceptive work “Traumas of Code,” Hayles observes the peculiar affinity of trauma and code. “Experienced consciously, but remembered nonlinguistically, trauma has structural affinities with code,” Hayles contends.2 “Like code, it is linked with narrative without itself being narrative. Like code, it is somewhere other than on the linguistic surface, while having power to influence that surface.”3 Technological code has afflicted our human language, which, as Hayles observes, is nowadays computermediated. “Language isn’t what it used to be. In computer-mediated communication, including cell phone conversations, email, chat room dialogues, blogs, and all documents written on a computer, the language we learned at mother’s knee is generated by computer code.”4 In a reality produced by code, the subject has witnessed the ways in which “Derrida’s famous aphorism, ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ [there is nothing outside of the text] has been replaced by its computational equivalent Il n’y a pas de hors-code (there is no outside to code).”5 Abiding in a dense and multilayered cognisphere, the human body has become enmeshed within a net of optic fibers, data flows, and smart environments. In this computationally intensive present, the entwining of trauma and code has become increasingly common and far-reaching. Extending beyond the bounds of the psyche, the traumas of code have affected the physical and material body. The following section will dwell on the traumatic impacts of code, while also suggesting that the latter’s rechanneling can have a healing, therapeutic power and open ways to overcoming trauma.

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To examine this hypothesis, I will focus on a practice that lately has become known under the name “codework.”6 As Rita Raley defines it, codework is a contemporary idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital media experimental writing, or [net.writing].7 Some of the prominent practitioners of codework include Alan Sondheim (who has given the practice and genre its name), Talan Memmott, Mary-Anne Breeze (Mez), Ted Warnell, Brian Lennon, and John Cayley. These writers use different terms to refer to their codework: Mez composes in a neologistic “net. wurked” language that she has termed “m[ez]ang.elle”; Memmott uses the term “rich.lit”; Warnell names some of his JavaScript poems “codepoetry”; Lennon refers to “digital visual poetics,” and Cayley produces algorithmic, generative texts or “programmable poetry.” Writers and artists who have adopted the general practice of codework are led by the motto—“use the computer; it is not a television.” They strive to conceptualize the relations between interface and machine and reveal the ways in which the networked environment constitutes and is constituted by a digital text. Although the specific techniques may differ, the result is invariably a text-object or a text-event that uncovers its own programming, mechanism, and materiality. Though not immediately apparent, the commonalities of codework and Language poetry are multitudinous. Stephanie Strickland, for instance, compares mezengelle to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry with its “fluid spacing, bracketing, and ambiguous punctuation to obtain a simultaneity of reference that tests fixed neuronal patterns.”8 Just as Language poetry aims to disrupt conventional grammar and liberate the subject from the control of late capitalist discourses, code poetry strives to topple the authoritarian system of technological rule and prevent the subject from taking his/her pre-assigned “respondent” positions in the networks of information technology. “Like ideology, ROM is out of sight/only to control more efficiently,” Bernstein forewarns in “Play it Again, Pac-Man”: [53].… And even if we could rewrite [its] deep structures, the systems are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering. In computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data: it is something to avoid at all costs. Playing video games, like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to fixed systems of control. All the adapting is ours. No wonder it’s called good vocational training—but not just for Air Force Mission Control or, more likely, the word processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line without an off switch. After that we didn’t call it anything.9

Similarly, codework, as Allen Feldman contends (referring to Mez’s, in particular), is “concerned with the force of surplus information that can counter the process by which the escalating neural density of the net situates the end user into increasingly

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fixed respondent positions…”10 Much as in Language poetry, the introduction of surplus information in codework is seen as a strategy aimed at the undermining of an instrumental discourse (in particular, that of technology), for, as Hayles contends, “[C]omputers are no longer merely tools (if they ever were) but are complex systems that increasingly produce the conditions, ideologies, assumptions, and practices that help to constitute what we call reality.”11 I will, however, venture to extend the analogy even a step further and suggest that, just as in Language poetry, alongside its positive potential to mess up and, ultimately, subvert the established structure of information within which we obediently function, the unrestrained and ungoverned proliferation of meanings in the technological texture of codework may be seen to reflect nervous anxiety or, at times, full-fledged psychological trauma. The ensuing pages will study the ways in which the traumatic overwhelming of the mind and body with excessive loads of information transpires in the often incoherent structure of codework and reflects the impacts of coding technology. I will seek to reveal that such texts bear witness to a moment when the online environment and its “net.wurk” practices turned into an autonomous and self-sufficient force, endowed with logic of its own that human minds could no longer follow and control. Alan Sondheim, a New York-based artist and essayist, describes this autopoetic function of code by tracing the interaction of a writer and a program he wrote (called “Julu”): exit(0); } sleep(1); print “Are you satisfied with your $name?\n”; chop($answer=); if ($answer eq “no”) {print “You’re written with $a[10+$pre]!\n”;} if ($answer eq “yes”) {print “A $a[10+$pre] and $a[15+$pre] nightmare!\n”;} print “Your inscription finished, you have created thing.”, “\n\n” if 3 < $g; print “$name $pid is the perfect solution.”, “\n\n” if 3==$g; print “... $a[$non] $name $$ - the beginning of flesh.”, “\n\n” if 6==$g; print “Your $name $diff text is your final enunciation.”, “\n\n” if 4==$g; print “You wrote for $time hours?”, “\n” if 2==$g; sleep(1); print “$name and $$ and $pid - another entity named and made!”, “\n\n” if 2==$g; sleep(1); print “Wait! $name and $pid are written.”, “\n\n” if 1==$g; FINAL: { $d = int((gmtime)[6]); $gen3 = 48 - int(20*rand); print “For $d $a[$gen2] days, we have been $a[$gen3].”; print “\n”; $u = (time - $t)/60;

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printf “and it has taken you %2.3f minutes to swallow your last ...”, “$u”; print “\n\n”; print ‘rev .trace’, “\n\n”; } exit(0);12

Explaining the ways, in which the running code is used to create a text and develop a theme, Sondheim writes: “When the program runs, it asks me to enter lines, gives me material in return—and I write in and out of the material it gives; it then rearranges the lines according to its own internal logic, and gives me a text at the end.”13 Code is thus self-generative and capable of withstanding the author’s attempts to take charge of it. It can produce realities beyond our grasp and cognition and as such is often the source of a disturbing, traumatic condition. “[C]ode scares me” is how Jessica Loseby has named a work of hers, which she describes in the following manner: As an artist who is fascinated by words, the prospect of a language that is both hidden and alien to me haunts my work on the net. Like most prejudices, it is born out of fear. I am afraid of what lies buried within the under texts—I imagine it unlocking itself in my absence/to the initiated visitor who understands its depths/ and betraying my secrets. To the poetic mind, even the vocabulary associated with code disturbs. Search engines “crawl” through it. Code “tags,” “scripts” and “values” suggesting the possibility of imprisonment, categorisation and invalidity.14

Loseby’s installation focuses on the fear of concealed and unknowable code, disturbing because she considers it to be out of her control, “a language that is both hidden and alien to me.”15 It can “unlock” at any time, even in the author’s absence, and act on its own—govern itself and generate its own realities. Indeed, when one hit of a key can erase all we have created or make it disappear in the unseen world of codes and programming operations, the author can do little more than stare at the screen in a complete lack of comprehension. “Anxieties can arise,” Hayles concurs, “when the operations of the computer are mystified to the extent that users lose sight of (or never know) how the software actually works…”16 Code is unknown but capable of giving birth to new realities, hidden beneath textual surface, yet unable to converse with the text. As Raley observes, commenting on Loseby’s installation, “For Loseby, code is initially understandable only in terms of impenetrable darkness. It lurks beneath the surface of the text, but it is not in direct dialogue with that text: it is read and yet not read at the same time … [It] compil[es] itself, generating its own output and moving toward self-organization.”17 Loseby’s anxiety is uncannily reminiscent of the fear of hidden and unpredictable disasters lurking in each of our encounters with the impenetrable regimes of the computer. Discussing “the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems,”18 Bernstein notes: [45] The pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your hard drive from “crashing”: “Why your hard disk may be only

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seconds away from total failure! … Solve hard disk torture and grief.” … How much these errors already cost you in “unrecoverable” data, time, torture, money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance, damage to business reputation, etc.19

To discuss the traumas of code and the function of code in overcoming trauma, I will look at an author whose work has been compared to that of Language poets but, in itself, presents a much purer illustration of the interlocking of language, technological code, and human agency. A code in itself, “Mez” is the name used by the Australian code poet Mary-Anne Breeze whose invented language, “mezengelle,” has been seen by critics as “certainly an extension of the last big phenomenon of poetry, parataxis within lines of poetry as characterised by the work of the language poets in the 1970s and 1980s…”20 My analysis will focus on Mez’s the data][h!][bleeding texts.21 I will argue that the bleeding of data in these unorthodox texts records an event of corporal destruction and testifies to the traumatic impacts of coding technology on the body. I will also analyze the ways in which the lyric self rechannels the excessive information and data as a strategy for overcoming trauma and healing the body.

2. Salvaging the body from the structures of information: Mez’s the data][h!][bleeding texts As the “Introduction to the Datableede” (Piece 1) opens, Mez alludes to the roots of the collective trauma caused by the overwhelming excesses of technological data. “Have you ever checked your email inbox to find annoyingly regular junk/advertising type mails [otherwise known as Spam] reaching critical mass?”22 Mez inquires of the reader. The reader turns into a witness to the process of data accumulation—his/her body a victim of the traumatizing impacts caused by the overloads of surplus information. “[T]he data][h!][bleeding texts are concerned with damaged and fragmented bodies, bodies deafened, drowned and wounded by information…,” Feldman observes in “The Digital Miniature: Private Perceptions in a Public Space.”23 Commenting on “the power of code to create digital art,” Hayles “wonders if that power has exceeded the capacity of humans to understand—and by implication, control—the parasitical ability of machine cognition not merely to penetrate but to usurp human cognition.”24 The power of coding technologies to transmit and communicate instantly unimaginable loads of information is thus both a blessing and a trauma-causing force, opening wounds that necessitate healing. Hence, it is only natural that “[f]or Mez the ressemblage of the wounds, the rearrangement of the code is the only possible response to automated image proliferations, the only way to salvage the experiential body from the structure of information.”25 It is this creative intervention in and utilization of the glut of electronic information that Mez conceptualizes as “datableeding”: “[The] alternative type of communication & art production [that you may see disseminated through various email byways] is what I call Data]h![bleeding … Datableede, it involves

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taking various textual-based networked elements and manipulating them into a quasi theoretical/fiction based format, then using this as the raw material for email performance work.”26 Initiated by the author, “datableeding” is designed to reach and be semantically rechanneled by the reader. “You, dear co-author and reader, are the nodepoint,” Mez proclaims. “The point in the fluid. The point that flows between, behind, before….comprehension critical/crucial.”27 Mez often restates the importance of readerly participation in the textual creation and manipulation, disavowing the authority of the author or of the self-proliferating text. “[The nodes /readers/ must decide],” Mez insists, urging readers to give their brain and blood to the creation of fictional narratives: “Are you starting to assign your phrases to square brackets? Go on, read it again … / It’s all there, isn’t it? Just as you pepper your thoughts and verbal sentence strings with tangents, memories, the future—so the data bleeds into itself, breaking down the linear, the expected.”28 It is through such creative rechanneling performed by the reader that the traumatic overloads of information can be mastered and even further transformed into meaningful and socially significant messages. The “Datableeding: Results” reveals the salvaging of the subject from the traumatic oppression of data: “me flips, again. Rejoicing in the ebb. /me swarms action as time, datacondensing around the pulse point. Converge/diverge, constrict/expand; the data moves, a-live.”29 To respond to the automated data proliferations, the reader has thus performed a task of major significance—he/she has taken the excessive information that had “drowned” and traumatized the body, somatized it (which, as Feldman explains, “is to draw information back into its material origins, its primordial conditions”)30 and then rechanneled it (“rearranging the code”) in order to salvage the body from the overpowering regimes of information. Once rearranged, the code is bloodlet into the net again, thus making human blood flow into the electronic organs from which the overloads of data had previously bled. Indeed, Mez has often made an analogy between the Web and the human blood system. In the beginning of the navigation through “the data][h!][bleeding texts,” for instance, Mez takes a symbolic blood sample from the viewer, who is then invited to submit more personal information—his or her childhood nickname. At the same time, data bleeds out of the digital tissue of the Web. “But the digitized body is one without organs, without body parts,”31 Feldman reflects. “Sensory organs that endowed the body with agency have been seconded to the machinery of data production. We may ask from where does the data bleed, from what wound and who can lay claim to this trauma? For the images Mez presents are ultimately wounds in search of a whole body from whence they came.”32

3. “fleshwords by Ms Post Modemism”: The therapeutic function of code Mez’s “Cutting Spaces”33—a text in which blood, flesh, wounds, and mutilation function on multiple levels—provides some evocative answers about the origin and

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function of blood in the creation of narratives that heal the wounds and salvage the body from the grips of technological trauma. The main character of “Cutting Spaces” is Ms Post Modemism (alluding both to post-modernism and to a technological age superseding that of the modem). Importantly, she speaks in fleshwords. Her story “reaches far back into bloodbloated pasts … /and mixes cutting blood-let space and fleshtense narrative.”34 It is, however, a story with “aborted storylines”—one with “jilted meanings and a touch of modem static” that cannot transcend the bounds of its virtual, e-mailed life. (fleshwords by Ms Post Modemism) 1. Ms Post Modemism has no history Ms Post Modemism has a herstory the story is long it reaches far back into bloodbloated pasts and snags it way into a viscous future and mixes cutting blood-let space and fleshtense narrative (jigsawing) it has aborted storylines (which?when?where?what to follow?) jilted meanings and a touch of modem static (word processor blurrs into an e-mailed life)35

As the subtitle of the poem suggests, these are the “fleshwords” of “Ms Post Modemism.” Ms Post Modemism appears as just one of the multiple avatars of the author in the poem. Indeed, Mez creates multiple identities for her lyric persona—she situates herself within “mezengelle” or reappears under different names or in messages that recur with only a slight alteration and for which she is no more than a mediating nodal point, “a sysadmin with only partial write permissions.”36 I would argue that these different authorial personae, emerging in the network poetry of Mez, serve to re-enact the author’s unmastered technological experience. Unable to attain control over the inexplicable data, the lyric self is stuck in the phase of re-enactment, accomplished through the creation of multiple narrative avatars. While it is often this repetitive mechanism that makes it possible to, ultimately, come to terms with the experience of technological trauma, Hayles contends that code also possesses the unique power to heal without the mediation of such recurring relivings. “Code [in this view] acts as the conduit through which traumatic experience can pass from its repressed position in the traumatic aconscious to conscious expression, without being trapped within the involuntary reenactments and obsessive repetitions that typically constitute the acting out of traumatic experience.”37 It plays a “crucial role … in allowing trauma to be released from the grip of obsessive repetition, emotional disconnection, and aconscious reenactment so it can achieve narrative expression.”38 It thus appears plausible that code, as the interface between humans and programmable media, can have a therapeutic potential and be used as a vehicle to understand, represent, and intervene in trauma. Code seems able to influence and entrain both human conscious and aconscious cognition, and provide pathways for the articulation of traumatic experience. If, as Hayles argues, “code can be appropriated

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as a resource to deal with trauma,”39 it appears that the reader is the one destined to embrace this therapeutic assignment. Indeed, in the mind of Mez, it is the reader, acting as a nodepoint, who can contribute to and transform the electronic “fleshwords.” “*[C]ontributors [are] needed/bleeded/welcomed,*”40 Mez exhorts. To modify the story, the reader needs to take in the abundant data streams of “e-mailed life,” to somatize them via blood-letting in the electronic narrative system and then return the narrative to its materiality by entrapping his/her own flesh and meanings in it. In the words of Ms Post Modemism, “My red will have to do till u/Decide/To blood-let too./yes u the reader bound by white sheaf leaved safety catches/u neva thought I’d trap yr flesh in here did u?”41 As Strickland explains, “Mez’s work is conceptual and, like that of many digital and minimalist artists alike, in its web-based, javascript-enhanced form, it requires a somatically engaged mode of perception. That is, the movement and activity of the viewer produces the meaning of the work and the work itself.”42 As in the data][h!][bleeding texts, the blood and flesh of the reader become part of the narrative that is “mix[ed] and match[ed] cut and paste[d]” in the electronic flesh of the “voidwhitescreen”: “Emerging from my voidwhitescreen i mix and match cut and paste puke and/rant inside the dwindling narrative…”43 “Text-flesh longing drives all”—the textual attraction is as strong as the appeal of the flesh. The reader needs to submit his/her blood and body to the flesh of the electronic corpus in order to convert its “aborted storylines” and overflowing story pieces into a healthy fiction work. It is in this context that Ms Post Modemism confides: “I’m trying like crazy to convert Blood Letting into an acceptable fiction piece.” Not surprisingly, in “4. Currencies of Ms Post ModemismMezMeaning,”44 it is both the quantity of blood and the way in which it is used that make for a good story. “[W]ould.more.blood.make.it.a.story?,” Ms Post ModemismMezMeaning asks and then decrees: “cut/and/paste/ the/ space/without/making/the/body/blood/and/ bits/disappear/into/bland trite stories.” And, “Remember to tell me if you need more blood,/peace.luv.and quantum fiction,/Ms Psychosis Metem.”45 Through letting his/her blood into the text and somatizing the narrative, the reader is not only rechanneling the information and coming to terms with his/her trauma but also disrupting the logic of the net and endowing it with his/her own meanings. This strategy is greatly reminiscent of that of the Language poets whose main agenda was to unsettle the pre-established system of meanings by violating standard syntax/ grammar and engaging with parataxis. “Software is ideology,” Hayles quotes Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s take on Althusser’s definition of ideology.46 “As it is true for other forms of ideology, the interpolation of the user into the machinic system does not require his or her conscious recognition of how he or she is being disciplined by the machine to become a certain kind of subject. As we know, interpolation is most effective when it is largely unconscious.”47 It is this clandestine disciplining of the mind that code poetry endeavors to topple. Disobeying the rules of normative grammar, linear language in the data][h!][bleeding texts goes out of control and splinters into words and codes governed by a new and unconventional syntax. The use of the Internet is a practice that is able to spawn idiomatic expressions of its own.48 Utilizing this power of computer programs and codes is what enables Mez to communicate

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her message in a way consistent with the new media environment. To process the meaning, the reader also needs to work with elements of code such as operators and instructions as well as master the conventions of a new shorthand language. Despite the shift in poetic devices, however, the gist of Mez’s code poetry remains the same as that of the Language writings—to oppose and subvert the dictatorial power of dominant discourses and arouse the quiescent but potent kernels of new meanings. As Rita Raley remarks: In the interest of facilitating a kind of oppositional literacy,… the practice of mezangelle aims to jam the overloaded lines and awaken those that lie dormant; or, as Mez herself declares, it moves “through the neural in waves, swarming into active channels, critically hitting inactive potentials” (“Puzzle Pieces of a Datableede Jigsaw”). Codework languages, for Mez and other writers, thus have both artistic and political potential. Part of the mezangelle codework project is to awaken us to—also to comment upon and recompile—the varied and various data streams that we engage, filter, and disregard while multi-tasking…. If “net.wurked” life requires a cognitive adaptation and naturalization to the machine, her “net.wurk” aims to disrupt its disciplinary and regulatory “sensory reverberations” and offer instead an “infoalert”: informatic reverberations that shock and thus gesture toward new, and potentially liberatory, modes of cognition. Within its specific online environment, then, digital media experimental writing, and specifically Mez’s codework, offers us a glimpse of a mode of reading, cognition, consciousness, and even pedagogical praxis that is not yet fully available to us.49

The unexpected reference to a reality that is “not fully available to us” hints that beside the use of code to create new semantic channels and worlds, there is a non-apparent relationship that code bears to our unconscious. Closely related to somatic states below the level of consciousness, code acts, as what Hayles, in “Traumas of Code,” terms as the “textual unconscious.”50 In the words of Hayles, Enmeshed within this flow of data, human behavior is increasingly integrated with the technological nonconscious through somatic responses, haptic feedback, gestural interactions, and a wide variety of other cognitive activities that are habitual and repetitive and that therefore fall below the threshold of conscious awareness. Mediating between these habits and the intelligent machines that entrain them are layers of code…51

We have already discussed the importance of the corporeal effects of trauma. What we see here again is that the trauma induced by technology (code) is not only registrable through the psyche, but also exerts an impact on the body. While we may have some awareness of technology’s imprints on our bodies (as the works of Mez attest), the body registers many more technological impacts that never make it to the psyche and can thus attain no verbal expression. These impacts occur before the domain of language—on a

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material, molecular, pre-verbal level that only the body can feel and testify to. Writing does not have the capacity to register and communicate this traumatic experience. We can, therefore, conclude that the referential capacity of Language poetry, alongside that of Mez’s code writing, remains limited to documenting the traumatic signals that make it to the psyche—that effect a breach through the (corporeal) layer that first encounters the shocks of technology but fail to be stopped by it. While strongest in their traumatic potential, these signals, however, do not exhaust the full experiential impact of technology. Despite the fact that code and Language poetry record the traumatizing over-excitation of the mind inflicted by the unrestrained proliferation of information, there is a whole (corporeal) dimension of technology that remains beyond the scope of the psyche and beyond the realm of discursivity and writing.

4. The experiential impact of technological trauma: Retooling Freud’s notion of the dead cortical layer In his studies on trauma, Freud remains primarily focused on the impacts that trauma exerts on the psyche. For him, trauma is first and foremost a psychic phenomenon resulting from the organism’s inability to cope with a stimulus it was unprepared for and, therefore, unable to assign semantic weight to. Still, Freud does not fail to acknowledge another, material, manifestation of the intricate impacts of trauma. He recognizes that, even though unable to integrate the traumatic experience into its cognitive structures, the traumatized still finds a way to register the shocks delivered to the human nervous system—not as meaningful information, but, instead, as a purely material experience. This corporeal means of recording the impact of technology is effected through the so-called dead cortical layer whose initial conceptualization is to be found in the pioneering writing of Freud. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the dead cortical layer becomes a critical element in Freud’s account of external experience, in which he elaborates on the protective function of the layer and its role in safeguarding the mind against the influx of traumatic stimuli: [W]e have more to say of the living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer. This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate…52

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As Freud contends, the outermost cortical layer functions as a protective corporeal cover warding off the external stimuli that could cause psychic trauma. While Freud’s elaboration of the dead cortical layer acknowledges it as a critical corporeal agent that would allow us to experience and be in constant contact with the evolving technological environment, his emphasis on this layer’s protective role and on the need to shield, rather than open, the body to the direct experiential impact of the outside world (of technology), inflicting the trauma, has often been viewed as reductive. Technology could (and, in the mind of critics such as Mark Hansen, should) be experienced unimpededly and directly, and this could only occur after a rupture in the dead cortical layer. In his work Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, Hansen, influenced by Walter Benjamin’s effort to account for the material impact of technology, undertakes to challenge the reduction of exteriority, which he sees as the underlying attribute of Freud’s theory on trauma. According to Hansen, Freud discounts the direct experiential impact of technology. Unable to account for the psychic system’s interaction with its environment, Freud, in Hansen’s mind, has, instead, postulated a further internal drive—the death drive, to help him explain the phenomena that violate the equilibrium of the psyche. Elaborating on the ontogenetic reduction he sees in Freud’s theory, Hansen writes: [R]ather than opening the psyche to exteriority, the sampling of external stimuli serves to isolate the psychic system and protect it against the harsh outside world. “The main purpose of the reception of stimuli,” says Freud, “is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens from the external world, to sample it in small quantities” (1961, 21). On this model, perception is reductively determined as a mechanism for psychic defense: the information it yields helps the psyche determine how great a store of cathected energy it will need to master incoming stimuli and thus preserve its equilibrium against the threat of trauma.53

To rehabilitate external experience from its Freudian (psychic) reduction, Hansen redirects his attention from Freud’s principle of the psychic neutralization of external stimuli to a view of the dead cortical layer that allows our direct contact with exteriority and is thus the basis for a new way of experiencing outer reality. His analysis seems to suggest that it may, in fact, be beneficial to be directly exposed to technology and experience it fully rather than deny the experience via the mechanisms sheltering the psyche and mind from trauma. The dead cortical layer is of particular interest in Hansen’s study since he views it as “a system function that evolves through interaction with an increasingly technologized environment … a historically specific form of experiential agency.”54 It therefore allows us to record in faithful ways the impacts of technology at a particular moment of history. Stating his agenda, Hansen writes: “By reconstructing Freud’s inchoate notion of perceptual consciousness …, I have sought to retool the dead cortical layer into a ‘faculty’ correlated to the experiential impact of modern and contemporary technologies. As a corporeal agency of experience, the

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cortical layer would seem capable of registering technology’s molecular impact on our bodies—the impact it makes without leaving traces.”55 This molecular impact, according to Hansen, exists because, in addition to the task that Freud assigns to the dead cortical layer—protecting the psyche by filtering stimuli– it acquires the function of absorbing external stimuli corporeally. Trauma is thus not necessarily a psychic phenomenon—its shocks are first recorded corporeally, in all their materiality as a lived, somatic experience. Such an experience comes prior to meaning and language and cannot be presented through a recourse to discursivity. As Kittler has argued in his pioneering work of media studies,56 language has long lost its privileged status as the main conveyor of information about the material universe. It has, instead, turned into just one medium among multiple others that provide no less significant access to external reality. Literature has likewise become medially (vs. linguistically) constructed—it is best understood as a means for the processing, storage, and transmission of data. It thus surprises little that we have consistently placed the poetry we have studied in the context of mediality, that is, within systems of media codes and regimes, determined by the technological possibilities of postmodern society. When “[s]o-called man becomes physiology on one hand and information technology on the other,”57 the poet as a creator gives way to a passionless body—the site upon which the various technologies inscribe themselves.58 Similarly, Hansen redirects the focus of his study to include a whole array of material practices of which language, while critical, is not the only or even the most significant one. In Hansen’s own words, his theoretical gesture is not “a turn away from language as such but … a far less grandiose break with the tyranny that discursivity has exercised in twentieth-century literary and cultural criticism and in Western philosophy more generally.”59 As Godzich also notes in “Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament,” coherent “[l]anguage simply can no longer assert its claim to be the exclusive or privileged faculty of experience.”60 It therefore becomes incumbent to acknowledge the existence of a nondiscursive (or, better, mimetic) basis of our experience. This demands a reconceptualization and broadening of our notion of experience to realms that lie beyond what we can humanly feel and account for.

5. Reconceptualizing the notions of cognition and experience Hansen reveals that a whole realm of experience exists that precedes linguistic expression and, in his mind, legitimately counts as cognition. Calling for a reconceptualization of the notions of cognition and perception, Hansen proposes that cognition extends beyond the limits of the mind to reveal itself as knowledge registered through the human body. The corporeal can thus provide nonverbal venues through which humans experience technology in its robust materiality. By attending to the technological shocks afflicting the body, we can understand technology as an experience that goes beyond the ways in which it is represented in language. Hansen describes this experience as “a process of embodied reception—of reception as embodiment—that culminates in a nonrepresentational experience of embodied

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physiological sensation.”61 Cognition furthermore extends beyond the body—to the realms of capital and technology. As Eugene Holland remarks, “Conscious, subjective responses become increasingly irrelevant as the axioms of high-speed capital plug more and more directly into the body…, creating ever-new artificial organs to respond to the objects it has produced to satisfy them…”62 Plugged into the body, the “[n]ew technologies comprise what Lyotard calls a ‘supplementary cortex.’ ”63 Lyotard contends that as a stand-in for our perceptual faculty, the technological cortex enables an extension of the range of our collective perception and thus fundamentally alters the nature of experience: “These [new] technologies show in their own way that there is no break between matter and mind, at least in its reactive functions, which we call performance-functions. They have a cortex, or a cortex-element, which has the property of being collective, precisely because it is physical and not biological.”64 “By submitting matter to a deindividualized spirit, the new technologies expand the range of perception,” Hansen argues.65 Technology, in this view, “eclipses the minimum and maximum thresholds of perception … an expansion of language’s domain well beyond the bounds of what is humanly experientiable”66 (and assimilable). Thus, as the human mind becomes inadequate to perceive and process the ceaselessly proliferating information produced by modern technology, we recognize that nature alone can no longer determine the ways in which we perceive and know the world. This can only be done via a symbiosis of the human and technological formed, as we have revealed, when cognition extends to the realm of technology. In our Information society, “human cognition does not stand apart from the world of technical objects but remains deeply immersed in it,” Hayles remarks.67 “Cognition, in this view, does not issue from the mind alone…,” she expounds. “Cognition also reaches out into the techno-environment, dissolving the boundary between inside and outside into fluid assemblages that incorporate technical artifacts into the human cognitive system…”68 Such a concept of a common cognitive structure between the human (biological) environment and the technological one—of a rhizome between the interior of the mind and the exteriority of technological systems—forces us to reconceptualize the very notion of experience. As Hansen proposes, we need to broaden the domain of the experiential beyond knowledge (in the conventional sense) production, to deterritorialize experience beyond what our sense organs register as knowledge: We must, in short, open our embodiment to the robust tactile and sensory dimensions of experience “beyond” the culturally relative threshold(s) built into our sense organs through the process of their technically supported, historical articulation and formation. Only such a radical deterritorialization of experience will allow us to overcome our tradition’s narrow determination of the senses as organs designed to register sense stimuli directly and exclusively as knowledge.69

It thus appears that in our technological world we do know, but we don’t learn only (not even exclusively) through language. What technology kills in the dead cortical layer, designed to shelter the mind and the psyche from the experience of trauma,

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constitutes the most valuable (corporeal) imprint—a testimony to the impact of modern technology. As we open our senses to the realm of technology and allow experience to embrace the material, not just semantically coherent knowledge, we may finally get the chance to learn more about (even when not making sense of) the experiential impacts of technology. It seems that the Language poets are also keenly aware of the existence of a whole range of experiences that lies beyond our comprehension (though, in Hayles’s terms, not necessarily beyond cognition). Of note, in this respect, is the dichotomy of “actuality— reality” that Bernstein posits in his verse essay “Artifice of Absorption.” Formulating the responsibilities of Language writers, Bernstein introduces the distinction between these terms, which have been commonly conceived as synonymous: [S]he or he [the poet] must somehow find a way to concentrate the attention beam on areas of experience that were hitherto … not apprehendable. … [T]he poet must find some way of directing the gaze of consciousness onto literally inconceivably complex and entangled linkages between various modes of experience…. Such a conception of poetics would be a call for actuality over reality, actuality consisting not only of the area of experience now available to the attentional focus, but all actualities which can be felt and sensed in the total experiential process.70

This manifesto-like observation on the tasks of Language writers reveals the same preoccupation with the need to broaden our notion of cognition and experience to areas that have so far been discounted, but which nonetheless define our “actual” existence. Indeed, our awareness of the world and our overall experiential knowledge extend far beyond “the area of experience now available to the attentional focus” (or, as Bernstein earlier described it, the realm of the “unmediated (immediate) experience of facts”).71 They encompass everything “which can be felt and sensed in the total experiential process” and which thus constitutes what Bernstein has defined by using the term “actuality.” A quintessential part in the totality of this experiential process undoubtedly belongs to the experience of psychic trauma—one of the diverse “areas of experience that were hitherto … not apprehendable.”72 It thus becomes evident that the dismissal of the writings of the Language poets as being cut off from reality and non-referential in nature could only have been grounded in the poets’ adamant refusal to refer to the events that constitute empirical reality. Such efforts to confine the multitude of intricate realities to the restricted, narrow realm of what is apparent and immediately perceptible by the senses seem ill-advised and totally improper. While Language writing could be seen as “anti-realist” in nature, it certainly resists a definition as “anti-actualist” in character. “Actuality” incorporates a comprehensive spectrum of diverse realities, of which empirical “reality” is only one and not, by any means, the principal ingredient. There is the deep and hidden world of trauma-born realities, which postmodern writing and the Language poets, in particular, strive to bring forth and come to terms with. Acknowledging the multifarious dimensions of reality, Caruth discerningly exposes the inadequacy of the criticism that denies the referentiality of postmodern writing, based on its reluctance to establish

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reference with the empirical (perceptual, phenomenal) world: “[D]econstruction does not deny reference,” Caruth contends, “but denies that reference can be modeled on the laws of perception or of understanding.”73 As if to put this belief to the test, Bernstein probes into the realm beyond phenomenal, perceptible, and cognitively knowable realities and introduces Jerome Rothenberg’s differentiation between the empirical (observable) and the nonperceptual (hidden) worlds: “So there really are two things here, conceivable as two realities: (1) the empirical world of naïve realists, etc. (what Buber and the hasidim call ‘shell’ or ‘husk’), and (2) the hidden (floating) world, yet to be discovered or brought into being: the ‘kernel’ or ‘sparks.’ ”74 The first, Charlotte Delbo would argue, gives birth to what, in her insightful study Days and Memory, she terms “external” or “reflective/ thinking/intellectual memory”; the latter—hidden, undiscovered yet, and oftentimes traumatic in its origin reality—to what Delbo defines as “m’emoire des sens” (or “deep/ sense memory”).75 Language poetry can thus be seen as archiving the “deep memory” of the subject’s traumatic late capitalist experience. Language writers themselves repeatedly point to the potential of their verses to provide a peculiar mode of key historical testimony. As Bernstein perceptively notes, they are committed to report the world they are a part of in the way they experience it rather than create coherent representations that readers can look out onto: “The poem/enacts an ‘impossible’ preference not to represent/the world or look at it as if it were a/representation—that is, something one can/look out onto—but to dwell in, on, be of.”76 The Language poem is thus a performance, a re-enactment of deep and often unintelligibly rendered memories— not a consistent, hermeneutically sound representation, preoccupied with arresting a definitive signified. It appears that Language poets employ the same poetic strategy that Bernstein recognizes in the works of P. Inman. Similarly to Inman, “[b]y fully semanticizing/the so-called nonsemantic features of language,” the Language writers “create a dialectic of the recuperable &/the unreclaimable, where what cannot be claimed is/nonetheless most manifest.”77 Unassimilable to the mind and frequently unmastered by cognition, the traumatic nature of the baffling late capitalist experience cannot be lucidly and rationally claimed. It is in the very loss of meaning per se, however, that the “unreclaimable” becomes “most manifest.” “Loss is as much a part of the semantic process as/discharge is a part of the biological process,” Bernstein keenly observes.78 Or, as he remarks elsewhere, “…[P]oetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss …”79

9

Conclusion: Trauma and History

In the preceding chapters, I have argued that rather than evincing the ways in which postmodernism precludes our capacity to refer to the world, Language poetry has forced us to reconceptualize the notions of referentiality and reality. If we conceive of reference as limited to the semantically coherent portrayal of our immediate, perceptual, and empirically knowable world then, indeed, Language poems can often be devoid of it. If we, however, expand the definition of this term to encompass the jumbled-up syntax and incoherent grammar that Language works at times display, we would uncover the poems’ exceptional power to testify to a whole new, unassimilated by the mind, dimension of reality. My analysis has sought to reveal the ways in which, in our postmodern age, poetry has ceased to enjoy a position of sovereignty and has, instead, become closely connected with multiple media systems. In lieu of functioning only through the medium of language, it is now mixing very different regimes of signs and making use of exchanges that are asignifying as opposed to homogenous and semiotic. Postmodern poetry has thus become part of a hybrid machinic assemblage that operates within an information (and not solely discursive) formation and establishes a new relationship between the practice of writing and information technology. This, we have seen, has resulted in the death of the godlike creator, formerly endowed with the power to “represent” the world and pin it down for the reader—such comfortable boundary between the inner content of the poem and the external world around it has ceased to exist in the Information era. As the two are rhizomatically connected, the poem functions as much more than the reflection of authorial intentions. Instead, it operates as an Aufschreibesystem,1 empowered to translate the discourse of the media outside the text into internal poetic realities. Such an interpretation of poetry as a machine that reads and rewrites the effects of media marks the transition from a hermeneutic to a medial understanding of referentiality. In an age in which these media effects are often traumatic, as they overwhelm the subject with far more information than he/she is able to digest semantically, the Language poem performs the critical task of recording the lyric self ’s strive to come to grips with it. While resisting the traditional definition of representation, this mode of archiving reality fulfills a key historical function, providing faithful testimonies to a moment when the overabundance of media stimuli, coupled with the hectic pace at which they bombarded the mind, inflicted psychic trauma on the individual. My analysis of Russian and American postmodern poetry has thus endeavored to advance the belief that, rather than denying our access to reality, postmodernism

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documents the historical impact of the past decades, when, overcome by a grand-scale ideological or technological system of control, surpassing the mind’s capacity to master and come to terms with it, the subject experienced an unsuspected psychological trauma. Inquiring into Russian conceptualism, I have revealed in it a testimony to the subject’s unforeseen and traumatizing temporal displacement beyond the estate of an already possessed and consummated (communist) future. My discussion of metarealist poetry has sought to demonstrate the ways in which it testifies to the endeavor of the self to recuperate his/her capacity to refer to the various levels of reality and converse with the cosmic infinitude of the universe. The analysis of the paratactic design of Language writings has theorized them as a powerful poetic testimony to the traumatizing shifts that marked the outset of late capitalist society—a testimony to the subject’s overriding by media technology domination, as well as all-embracing cultural commodification. Having revealed the ways in which the decomposition of language—the demise of its capacity to refer to phenomenal reality and endow it with meaning—records the unmastered experience of historical crises, I have proclaimed as unwarranted the mourning over the postmodern eclipse of reality and the subject’s inability to arrest it. While the beginning of my book called for discerning the multiple ways in which reality speaks in postmodern literature, I close it moved by the story of history’s unspeakable cataclysms and assured that there is much more that postmodernism yearns to relate about the vicissitudes of reality, if we would only embrace the responsibility of historical listening.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

Jacques Derrida, “The Exorbitant Question of Method,” in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. Derrida, “The Exorbitant Question of Method,” 158. Derrida, “The Exorbitant Question of Method,” 163. “[T]o refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases…,” Roland Barthes wrote. See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 147. To illustrate the intuitive, natural attitude to speech, in his discussion of Derrida’s criticism of Hegelian logic, Christopher Norris uses the French phrase “s’entendreparler,” which he translates as “hearing oneself speak and immediately grasping the sense of one’s own utterance.” (Christopher Norris, “Speech, Presence, Origins: from Hegel to Saussure,” in Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 71.) Rey Chow, “The Interruption of Referentiality, Or, Poststructuralism’s Outside,” in The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 47. While acknowledging as indisputable the “substantial impact made by poststructuralism’s landmark desacralization of referentiality,” Chow also calls for “reopen[ing] the poststructuralist foreclosure of this issue.” He writes: But rather than using the banalized and bankrupt language of resistance, it would be much more productive to let the problematic of referentiality interrupt—to reopen the poststructuralist foreclosure of this issue, to acknowledge the inevitability of reference even in the most avant-garde of theoretical undertakings, and to make way for a thorough reassessment of an originary act of repudiation and repulsion (of referentiality). (Chow, 2006, 69)

8

I will use “American” to define Language poetry to conform to the common designation of this school by both the Language poets and critics of their work as well as to account for the non-U.S. citizenship of some of the members associated with this group. This term, however, by no means implies an attempt to reduce American poetry to that of the United States, and should not be seen as imperial and hegemonial in any way. 9 Let me make the provision that psychic trauma will not be used in my study in the sense of a clinical diagnosis, but as an aesthetic model for the cultural condition of Russian post-totalitarian society and the post-industrial Information era. 10 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: The Insistence of Reference,” in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 3.

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Notes

11 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11. 12 Geoffrey Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History, 26 (3) (1995): 544. 13 This is also the title of Dominick LaCapra’s book Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001). 14 Mummacra (the plural of mummacrum) derives from mummy, an embalmed body that, in the years of communist rule, simulated the eternal reality of both the corporal aspect of a certain leader and the ideological platform incarnated by him—see Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995), 126–47. 15 See Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology, ed. Peggy McInerny (Washington, D.C.: The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1991). 16 With the metabole, a new literary trope defined by Mikhail Epstein, “[o]ne thing is not simply similar or corresponding to another, which presupposes an indestructible border between them, the artistic predication and illusory quality of such juxtaposition; rather one thing becomes the other” (Mikhail Epstein, “Afterward: Metamorphosis,” in Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 282). See also Epstein’s discussion of the metabole in “From Metaphor to Metabole,” in After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 43–46. 17 Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 15. 18 Charles Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture 2 (1) (1991), http:// pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/pop-cult.991: “In the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of ‘now’ time” (italics added). 19 See N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006).

Chapter 1 Parts of this section appeared in the following publication: Albena Vassileva, (2005), “Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualist Poetry.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 59 (1): 43–55, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis LLC (http://www.tandfonline.com). 1

2

I remember Andrei Bitov’s sincere amazement when, in the discussion following a talk he gave at Emory University about his novel Pushkin House (Pushkinskii Dom), he learned that his work was considered one of the epitomes of Russian postmodernism and that many believed he himself was one of postmodernism’s forefathers. For a discussion of the origins of the conceptualist school, see S. B. Dzhimbinov, Literaturnye manifesty: ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei (Moscow : XXI vek—Soglasie, 2000), 528.

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Conceptualism spread all over the world even earlier—in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Boris Groys differentiates between “conceptualism and the ‘analytical approach,’ on the one hand, and the rebellious mood of the 1960s on the other” (Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 164). He also relates conceptualism to the death of the author as unequaled creator and guarantor of universal truths and knowledge. Groys writes: Belief in the unique status of the artist as a privileged person, and in his ability to rebuild life in keeping with the dictates of creative freedom, proved illusory. In the 1970s the collapse of this belief prompted conceptualists to cling to a notion of artistic creativity as belonging to a specific profession, possessing its own techniques, purposes and confines alongside other professions. (Groys, 164)

4

Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 210. 5 Epstein, After the Future, 210. 6 Ilya Kabakov is the author of numerous theoretical writings on conceptualist art, some of which reflect his close cooperation with Boris Groys. He has been also renowned for his provocative artistic installations. Among Kabakov’s best known installations are Life of Flies (Cologne 1992), Ten Characters (Institute of Contemporary Art, London/Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York 1989), He Lost His Mind, Undressed, and Ran Away Naked (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York 1990), Dislocations (Museum of Modern Art, New York 1991), Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties (Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 1991), Monument to the Lost Glove (Corner of Broadway and 23rd Street, New York 1996), and so on. 7 Epstein, for example, speaks of “the two separate phases of Russian postmodernism: socialist realism and conceptualism” (After the Future, 210). 8 “Что касается соц-арта, то он понимается нами достаточно просто: как вариант концептуализма…” See “А что такое соц-арт?” [“What is soc-art?”], in Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm (Moscow: OGI, 2000), 93–94. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations of the citations and poems included in the book are mine. 9 Mark Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” Twentieth Century Russian Literature: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995, ed. Karen L. Ryan and Barry P. Scherr (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2000), 321. This organic culture broke into such trends as “Socialist Realism with a human face,” the tradition of the Silver Age, the avant-garde tradition, naturalism, Village Prose, and others. 10 While antithetical in their origins, Western and Russian postmodernism, Lipovetskii believes, converge at the close of the twentieth century: “Yet American and Russian post-modernisms, which developed in opposite directions from the 1960s on … come together at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s; moreover, it is telling that the processes of post-modernism’s poetic and aesthetic self-deconstruction are symmetrical” (Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” 329). 11 Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” 320–21.

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12 Mark Lipovetskii, “Izzhivanie smerti: spetsifika russkogo postmodernizma” Znamia 8 (1995): 204. The title is translated as “Overcoming Death: The Specifics of Russian Postmodernism.” In the original, the line I have quoted reads: “вполне радикальн(ый) вариант отечественного постмодерна.” 13 It has been variously referred to as “NOMA,” “MANI Circle,” and “Moscow Conceptualism.” 14 The paper was presented at the seminar “New Languages in Art” held at Moscow State University in January 1988. 15 The idea of conceptualism as nominal in nature—as a temple of the word as such— is represented in Kabakov’s installation NOMA or The Moscow Conceptual Circle (1993). See Ilya Kabakov, Installations Catalogue Raisonné 1983–2000, ed. Toni Stooss (Düsseldorf, Germany: Richter Verlag, 2004), 489.

Figure 1 Ilya Kabakov, NOMA. Copyright: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov In this installation, Kabakov undertakes to represent “clearly and ‘materially’ that work and that concept which actually really existed under various names: ‘NOMA,’ ‘MANI Circle,’ ‘Moscow Conceptualism,’ etc.” See Ilya Kabakov, Installations 1983– 2000. Catalogue Raisonné, 487. A central part in the Exhibit-Installation (the first structure of what Kabakov, borrowing a term from physics, terms the synchrophasatron) is occupied by a “temple.” Each one of the pedestals standing in the center of the “temple” is devoted to one of the key “word-concepts” that are in circulation in this circle: “artistprotagonist,” “kolobok,” “absence,” “empty action,” and so on. Every word is on its own pedestal with an interpretation (or a pseudo-interpretation) of its meaning.

Notes

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19 20

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It is clear that this community, like any other, has elaborated its own key words, and they should be in the center of the cosmos, which is verbal in its essence. The general impression created by this installation is that of a sea of texts, a sea of glued paper—there is nothing to look at, only words and words. The visual perception is supplemented by an auditory one. We hear the sounds of muffled voices speaking over a microphone. These are the voices of Prigov and Rubinshtein, reading their own works and involved in various dialogues (488). Kabakov’s list of participants in the second structure of the Exhibit-Installation, The Book, identifies the following figures as forming the circle of NOMA—Boris Groys, Joseph Bakshtein, Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vladimir Sorokin, “Medical Hermeneutics” (Sergei Anufriev, Pavel Pepperstein, Vladimir Fedorov); Yuri Leiderman, Andrei Monastyrsky, “Collective Actions” (N. Aleksejev, Andrej Monastyrsky, Nikolai Panitkov, Georgi Kizevalter, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina); Nikita Alekseev, Vadim Zakharov, and Ilya Kabakov. Alexei Parshchikov and Andrew Wachtel, “Introduction,” in Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 4. Epstein, After the Future, 31. Still, one may argue that conceptualism possesses a revolutionary potential. Staging a play with the banal clichés of communist reality, conceptualists show the arbitrariness of these constructions as well as that of their link with the surrounding world. Since, as modern philosophy has revealed, reality is not fixed and unchangeable but is shaped by our own views of the world, through estranging the clichés from their common environment and placing them in unexpected contexts, conceptualists aim to change our way of thinking and, consequently, change the world. Epstein, After the Future, 21. Epstein, After the Future, 20. Conceptualism has also been linked to the tradition of the Oberiuts. Sergei Kuznetsov, among other critics, recognizes in conceptualist writers “spiritual heirs” to the Oberiuts and claims that the conceptualist school, the “largest and most influential school of unofficial Russian literature,” evolved “from the community of poets and artists ‘Lianozovo’ that took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s and included such poets as Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Yan Satunovsky, and Eduard Limonov.… In the 1970s,” Kuznetsov explains, “interest in this problem was continued within the framework of conceptualism, especially in the work by Andrei Monastyrsky, Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein” (Sergei Kuznetsov, “Postmodernism in Russia,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Co and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America, 1997), 456). S. B. Dzhimbinov, “Kontseptualizm,” 528. “Понятие ‘концепт’ означает для концептуалистов то, что мы называем ‘клише,’ то есть избитые, затертые словосочетания типа ‘навстречу жизни,’ ‘борьба за мир,’ ‘в свете решений’ и т. п.” Sergei Kuznetsov, “Postmodernism in Russia,” 456. The bend toward banality is typical of conceptualist works. Similarly to the Russian conceptualists, Goran Trbuljak of Croatia, for his 1971 exhibition, used posters, in which he declared: “I do not wish to show anything new and original” (E37). For more on the subject, see Ken Johnson’s “Once Upon a Time in Central Europe, When Unruly Was the Rule”—art review

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27 28 29 30

Notes of “Parallel Actions: Conceptual Tendencies in Central European Art from 1965 to 1980” (an exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in March 2004). Ilya Kabakov, Das Leben der Fliegen, Life of Flies, Zhizn’ much (Köln/Stuttgart, Germany, Kölnischer Kunstverein/Edition Cantz, 1992), 247. For more on the subject, see Ilya Kabakov, Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism, ed. David A. Ross (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 99: “произведения поп-арта демонстрируют рекламы чего-то и этим ‘витринам’ что-то соответствует ‘внутри’ магазина, они рекламируют, обещают ‘что-то реальное,’ на самом деле существующее. Нашим рекламам, призывам, объяснениям, указаниям,— все это знают—никогда, нигде и ничто не соответствует в реальности. Это очень чистое, завершенное в себе высказывание, ‘ТЕКСТ’ в точном смысле этого слова. Этот ТЕКСТ, о котором заведомо известно, что он ни к кому не обращяется, ничего не означает, ничему не соответствует—тем не менее очень много значит сам по себе.” Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 93, italics added: “утверждает наблюдения как пустого и пустотного акта, не относимого ни к какому возможномы референту.” Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 93. Dmitry Prigov, “Screaming Cantata (Who Killed Stalin),” in Third Wave, ed. Johnson and Ashby, 108. Prigov, “Screaming Cantata (Who Killed Stalin),” 109–15. The superiority of ideas to material nature and the belief in the power of ideas to beget, dictate, and control communist reality are major premises of socialist realism, the official art of totalitarian Russia. With this in mind, Abram Tertz (Andrei Siniavskii) argues, it is altogether absurd to define this art as belonging to the school of realism. For more on the subject, see Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960). Tertz recommends that socialist realism “give up the realism” and “abandon its effort to achieve verisimilitude” (91) as a way out of its arrogant practice of “combin[ing] the uncombinable” (90), that is, “a high ideal with truthful representation of life” (91). The result of this practice is “a loathsome literary salad,” Tertz contends. This is neither classicism nor realism. It is a half-classicist half-art, which is none too socialist and not at all realist. It seems that the very term “socialist realism” contains an insoluble contradiction. A socialist, i.e., a purposeful, a religious, art cannot be produced with the literary method of the nineteenth century called realism. And a really faithful representation of life cannot be achieved in a language based on teleological concepts. (Tertz, 91)

31 The importance of ideas as control models for reality is similarly revealed in a poem included in Kabakov’s installation The Red Corner (Kabakov, Installations Catalogue Raisonné 1983–2000, 2004)). The author plays with the cliché of exuberance and uninhibited abundance (any given, specific reality is totally unimportant—the only thing that matters is that there be plenty of it—plenty of weddings, plenty of stars, plenty of birds, plenty of seas, plenty of anything: “May there be more of/everything without hesitation!” 61). Prominent are also the archetypes of light, sun, progress, flames, and birds in flight—all of those, of course, suggesting the impending bliss of

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communism. We are witnessing a world of progress and ascent—one born with the sunrise and moving toward the bright sun and stars. It is an ideal universe, in which profuse celebration, procreation, and happiness reign: May there be more weddings and births,/May there be more sunny days,/ May there be more take-offs and ascents,/May there be more stars and flames, / May there be more morning sunrises,/May there be more birds in flight, / May there be more seas, less grief,/May there be more of / everything without hesitation! (61) 32 Grisha Bruskin was born in 1945 in Moscow, Russia. Since 1988, he has lived and worked in New York, where some of his most important art is exhibited. Bruskin has found a welcoming home for his works at the Marlborough Gallery of Manhattan, New York, which hosted the exhibitions I discuss in this essay: Life is Everywhere (September 14–October 5, 1999), Modern Archeology (March 10–April 3, 2004) as well as his most recent solo exhition, H-Hour (February 12, 2014–March 15, 2014). In 2004, I also had the chance to see Bruskin’s work at Yeshiva University Museum in New York, where he took part in the exhibition Remembrance: Russian Post-Modern Nostalgia (September 10, 2003–February 2, 2004). 33 The title of one of Bruskin’s best known exhibitions is Modern Archeology. 34 In 2003, such a setting was a fifteenth-century mikvah bathhouse excavated in Frankfurt. 35 Hans-Peter Riese, “The Dialectic of Time and Space in the Work of Grisha Bruskin,” trans. John Brogden, in Modern Archeology, 4. 36 Indeed, many of Bruskin’s works from his most recent exhibitions were displayed (or performed) way back in the years of late communism. Bruskin’s The Birth of the Hero, for instance (which reveals the artist’s close cooperation with the conceptualist poet Rubinshtein, one of whose works has the same title), was displayed in 1988 (Moscow, Exhibition Hall at Milliontshikov Street Kashirka) accompanied by a performance of Rubinshtein’s verse. Years later, after the fall of communism, this work of Bruskin was restaged as a solo exhibition in the contextual environment of Zurick, Switzerland (1997, Birth of the Hero, Galerie Andy Jllien). The same archetypes that we encounter in Birth of the Hero reappear in some of the later works of Bruskin (e.g., Life is Everywhere, 1999 and Archeologist’s Collection, 2001–2003). While most of the images remain the same (after all, they claim to be historically accurate), the artist plays with different visual material—his works in Life is Everywhere feature enamel and silver, while Bruskin’s Archeologist’s Collection is fully made of painted bronze. In fact, the recasting of Birth of the Hero in bronze was a dream that Bruskin had still in his native Russia, a dream he seized the opportunity to realize once he immigrated to the United States. “Yes, I defected,” Bruskin relates. “And I took with me all fifteen plasters for Birth of the Hero because it presented an opportunity to make these into bronzes which I could not do in Russia” (Grisha Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” interviewed by Robert T. Buck, in Grisha Bruskin: Life is Everywhere (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1999), 3). 37 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 8. 38 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 7. 39 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 12. 40 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 12.

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41 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 9. 42 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 10. 43 Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 10. These images of Life Is Everywhere reappear in the Archeologist’s Collection (Modern Archeology 9–13), this time, however, in pieces—severely disarticulated, broken up. What has remained of the doctor, the officer, and of the incognito in gas mask are just their torsos, which, while relentlessly crumbling down, refuse to let go of the blood circulation diagram, the missile, and the gas mask. The bride and groom are separated and, just as the couple in love, have fallen apart. The gymnast has also been disarticulated. His arms are missing; gone as well are the rings of the pommel horse he played. They are exhibited alone and, presently, contain no functionality and meaning (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Grisha Bruskin, Archeologist’s Collection, 2001-2003, dimensions vary, height: approx. 6-36 in. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin The dismemberment of the body is a central theme in the art of conceptualists. For a fuller discussion, see section in this chapter: “Conceptualism, Corpora, and History. The Body-Aggregate and the Disarticulated Body.” 44 Many of these sculptures were later on buried in Tuscany, Italy, and excavated in 2009 (Figures 3–5).

Figure 3 Grisha Bruskin, Excavations 1. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 4 Grisha Bruskin, Excavations 2. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 5 Grisha Bruskin, Excavations 3. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

45 Kabakov, We Are Living Here, Installations, 77. 46 Kabakov, The Red Wagon, Installations, 29. 47 Vladimir Aristov, “Observations on Meta,” in Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, ed. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 220.

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48 Vladislav Todorov, “Introduction to the Political Aesthetics of Communism,” in PostTheory, Games, and Discursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case, ed. Alexander Kiossev (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995), 66. 49 Kabakov, Golden River, Installations, 109. 50 Václav Havel, quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 1993), 213. 51 Lev Rubinshtein, “Regular Writing,” in Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinshtein, trans. Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), index-card poem, n.p. 52 Rubinshtein, “Regular Writing,” n.p., italics added. 53 Another critic, Thomas Epstein, observes: “By the mid-1970s,… the Soviet Union slipped into the Communist utopia of ‘post-history’ now less kindly looked back upon as a period of social and political ‘stagnation’…” (Thomas Epstein, “Metarealism,” in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, ed. John High et al. (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000), 87)). 54 Epstein, After the Future, 71. 55 Instead of acknowledging the collapse of communism, however, the Party instructed the subject to accelerate his pace of striving toward the Ideal, to rush even faster from one period to another and never fall behind the honorable race. See Kabakov’s Falling behind the Race (or, Catching the Rabbit) in the section “Witnessing a Catastrophe: The Sudden Breakdown of Communism.” The text in it is accompanied by an intriguing painting—an unassuming picture of a man who rushes after a rabbit. Even at first sight, the painting creates the feeling that, no matter how great the speed of the runner is, he can never get hold of the dashing rabbit. It would pull tricks on him— quickly appear, then disappear—and repeatedly dupe the more awkward runner. In the context of Kabakov’s installation, it seems evocative to read the image of the rabbit as a metaphor for late communist reality, where, one after another, historical periods appeared and vanished, and attempted to fool the temporal sense of the subject. Racing as fast as he could to attain the goals of “actual socialism,” the subject realized he had unexpectedly set foot into its “developed” stage and then, even before this stage had acquired any meaning to him—into “perestroika” and “post-communism.” Though all of these periods, flying before the eyes of the subject, remained senseless and impossible to tell apart, he nonetheless strove to keep up with the pace that the Party commanded and never “fall behind the race.” 56 Lev Rubinshtein, “From Thursday to Friday,” in Third Wave, ed. Johnson and Ashby, 150: “Мне приснилось, что если сказано ‘сегодня четверг’ в четверг, то это и значит, что сегодня четверг. Если же сказано ‘сегодня четверг’ в пятницу, то это уже либо ложь, либо заблуждение, либо еще что-нибудь;…” 57 Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1995), 87, italics added. 58 On these grounds, Robinson draws a provocative parallel between the circumventing of communist construction in the Stalinist years and in the 1980s: “By the start of the 1980s, then, the construction of communism as an active imperative for the party had been sidestepped almost as effectively as under Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s” (89– 90). Thus, Robinson sees the periods 1917–1953 and 1953–1985 as “alike in many respects. In each, the teleological compulsion driving the system led from a period of rapid change, or attempted rapid change, to a period of stasis and formalism” (94).

Notes 59 60 61 62

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Ilya Kabakov, We Are Living Here, Installations, 77. Kabakov, We Are Living Here, 83. Ilya Kabakov, The Red Wagon, Installations, 292, italics added. Here is the course that this linguistic maneuvering took: At the end of 1984, Gorbachev began to manipulate the concept of “acceleration” (uskorenie) and shift its focus “so that it [uskorenie] could be used as a counterweight to the concept of ‘developed socialism’ ” (Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System, 97). As Robinson notes, “Gorbachev did this by changing the referents and the aim of ‘acceleration.’ He called for an acceleration of socio-economic progress (uskorenie sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo progressa) in addition to the acceleration of scientific and technical progress to ensure what he referred to as social justice (sotsial’naya spravedlivost’)” (Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System, 97–98). Thus, instead of coining a new term that might put into question the objectives of “developed socialism,” Gorbachev expanded one of its constitutive idea—that of uskorenie—endorsing both uskorenie nauchno-teknicheskogo progresa and uskorenie sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo progressa, while gradually shifting the emphasis onto the latter. Only under the guise of an already familiar and relatively friendly term, Gorbachev could introduce the new concepts of glasnost’ (openness), samoupravlenie (self-management), and greater autonomy for economic enterprises (Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System, 101). However, all of these ideas were still under the umbrella of “developed socialism.” Not until the introduction of the new party Program at the Twenty-seventh CPSU Congress in February 1986, through calling for the perfection of “socialism” rather than “developed socialism” (Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System, 102–03), Gorbachev could finally complete the displacement of “developed socialism.” It was then that the concept of perestroika was articulated for the first time. 63 Lev Rubinshtein, “S chetverga na piatnitsu,” Lichnoe delo No: Literaturnokhudozhestvenny al’manakh (Moskva: V/O “Soiuzteatr,” 1991), 159–66. 64 Rubinshtein, “From Thursday to Friday,” trans. Gerald Janecek, in Third Wave, 148–49, italics added. 65 It is this salient pictography of conceptualist poetics that alludes in yet another way to the traumatic nature of the reported experience. As demonstrated by numerous studies of the neuroanatomy of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), psychic trauma is associated with a decrease in the relative regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the left inferior frontal cortex (home of the speech centers) and a manifest deactivation in Broca’s area (responsible for cognitively structuring the incoming experiences). On the other hand, the reexperiencing phenomena in PTSD produce a substantial increase in rCBF in the visual cortex (right hemisphere). This has given grounds for conceptualizing the relivings of trauma as events of speechless terror, events denying the survivor the solace of words, while overwhelming him/her with a surplus of visuality. As Drs. Rauch, van der Kolk, et al. argue in their PTSD symptom provocation study, “It has been suggested that traumatic memories tend to be organized on a perceptual and affective level with limited semantic representation, and tend to intrude as emotional or sensory fragments related to the original event, with stability over time” (Scott Rauch et al., “A Symptom Provocation Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Using Positron Emission Tomography and Script-Driven Imagery,” Archives of General Psychiatry 53(1996): 386, italics added). In its conclusions, the study validates the preferential role of the right hemisphere and visual memory in PTSD

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reexperiencing phenomena: “The results suggest that emotions associated with the PTSD symptomatic state are mediated by the … right hemisphere. Activation of visual cortex may correspond to the visual component of PTSD reexperiencing phenomena” (Rauch, “A Symptom Provocation Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Using Positron Emission Tomography and Script-Driven Imagery,” 380, italics added). 66 Indeed, the research on trauma has clearly demonstrated that testimonies to trauma-born psychic experiences display a fundamentally perceptual, rather than semantically and verbally coherent organization. Elizabeth Brett and Robert Ostroff, in their study titled “Imagery and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” emphasize precisely this explicit prevalence of visual over verbal imagery as a distinctive feature of traumatic memory par excellence: “Images are mental contents that possess sensory qualities. They are distinguished from mental activity that is purely verbal or abstract. While images can have qualities associated with any of the sensory modalities, visual imagery [in posttraumatic stress disorder] is believed to be most common” (“Imagery and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Overview,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 142 (1985): 417, italics added). 67 The professional tandem between the two Russian artists is in no way a mere coincidence. Bruskin and Rubinshtein have been close friends for years, maintaining their relationship in both Moscow and New York. We find pictures of the two artists together and stories of the personal moments they shared. In his autobiographical book Proshedshee vremia nesovershennogo vida, Bruskin presents a picture of himself and Rubinshtein in a warm friendly embrace. The picture was taken in 1993 in Moscow and serves as the backdrop for a humorous story. As Bruskin relates it, when Rubinshtein visited him in New York, he requested that Bruskin name his dog in honor of his favorite uncle, Moses, whom he most dearly loved. Bruskin respected his friend’s wish and named the dog Moses. When half a year later, over the phone, Bruskin mentioned the name Moses, his friend inquired with great curiosity who this new character was. It turned out that Rubinshtein had no recollection of either his naming request or, more strikingly, of any uncle of his who was called Moses (361) (Figure 6). As some pictures in Proshedshee vremia attest, Bruskin has also been close to the conceptualists Kabakov and Prigov (Figure 7 and Figure 8). The book provides a valuable insight into the early days of Bruskin’s art career (Figure 9).

Figure 6 Lev Rubinshtein and Grisha Bruskin, Moscow, 1993. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 7 Grisha Bruskin and Ilya Kabakov, Kashirka, February, 1987. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

Figure 8 D. A. Prigov reads his verses in the studio of Grisha Bruskin in Moscow. Copyright Grisha Bruskin

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Figure 9 Opening of Grisha Bruskin’s Exhibition in the Central House of Workers in the Arts, Moscow, 1984. Copyright: Grisha Bruskin

68 There are two versions of On the Edge—one created in 1998 and the other in 2003. 69 The haziness and indistinctness of both artistic works may also be alluding to the loss of the subject’s ability to think and see clearly, to comprehend the world around him and give semantic weight to it. Similarly, in Rubinshtein’s “Who’s That in the Yellow Fog,” the hero struggles to make out the contours of a silhouette, only to find out that everything has been enveloped in an impenetrable haze: Who’s that in the yellow fog                    1 Coming closer and closer Who’s that in the yellow fog                    3 Rushing forward, rushing headlong Is he trapped in a nirvana                       4 Does he even know himself? Who’s that in the yellow fog                    7 Dreaming with his eyes wide open? Who’s that in the yellow fog                    9 Talking, talking like a madman? (Lev Rubinshtein, “Who’s that in the Yellow Fog,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, index-card poem, n. p.) Strikingly, the same semantic nuclei emerge: a “dreaming” man (though “with his eyes wide open”) is enveloped in fog (i.e., deceived) and thus unable to see clearly and make out the truth. Instead of recognizing the absurdity of continuing to run, “trapped in a nirvana,” he “rush[es] forward, rush[es] headlong” and “talk[s] like a madman.” 70 Grisha Bruskin, “I Dreamed Of … #1” (Monument), in Modern Archeology (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2004), 34. 71 Here is how Bruskin explains his choice of the porcelain medium for this collection:

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My concept is that there are very good porcelain factories in Russia, among the oldest in Europe, which always did very good porcelain. And in the beginning of the century, in the 1920’s, a lot of famous Russian artists, not just decorative artists but sculptors and painters like Kandinsky, Malevich, Souhetin, Bakst, and many others used the porcelain medium. And they did beautiful porcelains and very important, they have become like artifacts in art history. Yet since that time, nobody has done them. Later on, the authorities decided that porcelain was kitsch and they stopped doing it. At a certain point in time, the Soviets diminished the quality of the porcelain plate. After the Revolution, they thought that it would be enough to have two plates in production: a bowl for soup, and another small size plate. This almost destroyed a significant and inventive industry. My idea, as a personal effort, is to renew the porcelain medium as an artistic tradition. RB: Is this a first for you, using porcelain? GB: Yes. Both sculptures and plates. RB: Are the porcelain sculptures also made in Russia? GB: Yes, in the same factory where the plates are produced: Kuznetsovsky Porcelains, between Moscow and Vladimir. (Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 5) 72 In addition to the two renditions of the image of a man who, having been dethroned, steps down his pedestal (the image on the porcelain plate from 1998 and the “I dreamed of … #1 /Monument/” from 2003), Bruskin has created a third one—a painted bronze sculpture of the same figure, to which he has given the name “Step” (2001–2003). See On the Edge, Modern Archeology, p. 20. 73 Grisha Bruskin, “Fragment,” Life Is Everywhere, 33. 74 Grisha Bruskin, “I Dreamed Of … #2” (Couple, 2003), On the Edge, Modern Archeology, 35. 75 Grisha Bruskin, “Blue Sky,” Modern Archeology, 15. 76 The translation comes from the description of the plate with the same image in On the Edge, Life Is Everywhere, 21. In the Russian original, the text reads: “Мне приснилась неба пустота. В неи с тобои мы потериались оба. Ты сказала: ‘Ласточка вон та будет помнить нас теперь до гроба’ ” (Bruskin, Modern Archeology, 15). 77 Bruskin, On the Edge, Life is Everywhere, 21. The couple is also recreated as a threedimensional composition—a bronze sculpture, entitled “Moonlight” and dated 2001–2003 (Bruskin, On the Edge, Modern Archeology, 16). 78 Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 126. 79 Bruskin, H-Hour, 145, italics added. 80 Ilya Kabakov, Ten Albums, Installations, 78. 81 Ilya Kabakov, I Will Return on April 12, Installations, 267. 82 Dmitry Prigov, “A Raven-Bird Hangs in the Sky,” in Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Gerald Stanton Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 131. 83 The Biennale was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Graphic Arts, the National Museum of Slovenia, the Cankarjev Dom, and various public sites in Ljubljana, Slovenia (June 23–September 24). Further information can be found on the Manifesta Web site: www.manifesta.org. 84 Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘Pathological Narcissus’ as a Socially Mandatory Form of Subjectivity,” in Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence (Ljubljana: Cankarjev Dom, 2000), 253. 85 It was published in 1975.

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96 97

98 99 100 101

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Notes Kathrin Rhomberg, “Borderline Syndrome as a Metaphor for Present-Day Europe,” in Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence, ed. Igor Zabel, exhibition catalogue of Manifesta 3 (Ljubljana: Cankarjev Dom, 2000), 21. Snodgrass, Susan. “Manifesta 3: Diagnosing Europe,” book review in Art in America (November 2000), n. p. Kathrin Rhomberg, “Borderline Syndrome as a Metaphor for Present-Day Europe,” in Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence, 21, italics added. Rhomberg, “Borderline Syndrome as a Metaphor for Present-Day Europe,” 21. Lev Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” Lichnoe delo No, 77: “Некто, устремленный в вечность, поскользнулся и падает. На него падает яркий свет. Довольно жалкое зрелище…” Kenneth Anderson et al., eds. Mosby’s Medical, Nursing, and Allied Health Dictionary, 4th edition (St. Louis: Mosby-Year Book, 1994), 1297. “Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory),” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91. Epstein, After the Future, 71. Grisha Bruskin, Archeologist’s Collection (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 141. Bruskin, Archeologist’s Collection, 137. In Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour, Robert Stor describes the experience of being “spun out into a black hole where historical time collapses” (Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 16). Lev Rubinshtein, “Unnamed Events,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, n.p., italics added. As Agnes Heller remarks, the new democracies were prematurely and unexpectedly born—“without a proper time of pregnancy, but rather only a short period of incubation” (Sorin Antohi, in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, ed. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2000), 5). Bruskin, “A Conversation with the Artist,” 3. Grisha Bruskin, Archeologist’s Collection (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 136. Robert Weiner, Change in Eastern Europe (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994), 3. Elie Abel, The Shattered Bloc: Behind the Upheaval in Eastern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 4. Halina Janaszek-Ivaničková also discusses the event in terms of an “earthquake,” “shock,” and “chaos” (see “Postmodern Literature and the Cultural Identity of Central and Eastern Europe,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 22 (4) (1995): 805). Eva Hoffman, “History in the Making,” After the Fall. Media Studies Journal, 13 (1) (1999): 30. Jacek Szmatka, “Introduction: In Search of the Syndrome of Threshold Situation,” in Eastern European Societies on the Threshold of Change, ed. Jacek Szmatka, Zdzislaw Mach and Janusz Mucha (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1993), 1. Peter Laufer, Iron Curtain Rising: A Personal Journey through the Changing Landscape of Eastern Europe (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), xi. Abel, The Shattered Bloc, 4. Abel, The Shattered Bloc, 4. From the perspective of the Czech “revolutionary” experience, Jan Urban remarks: “Ten years ago the Czechoslovak dissidents were just about to take power. They did not know until they had to do it. They were

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absolutely unprepared for the task. They had no plans and no expectations. Being on the defensive for too long, they did not really see that the other side’s defensive line was crumbling until it ran off the playing field” (Jan Urban, “Until Old Cats Learn How to Bark,” After the Fall. Media Studies Journal, 13 (1) (1999): 16, italics added). Just as it was impossible to plan the overthrow of communism, it was equally impossible to be prepared for the social and economical transformation to come. The unlikelihood of the first seemed to predicate the superfluity of the second. As Kovács observes in “Planning the Transformation?,” social scientists never went beyond envisioning “limited (simulated) liberalization,” since “they did not dare dream that one could think of first-best solutions in the near future” (János Mátyás Kovács, “Planning the Transformation?” Transition to Capitalism?: The Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 21–46). They never prepared for the event of real transformation, since they always “constructed their reform proposals in terms of … compromises” (Mátyás Kovács, “Planning the Transformation? (Notes about the Legacy of the Reform Economists),” 21–46). Among these compromises were the following: “The Soviet-type system cannot be overthrown but it can be undermined. The nomenklatura cannot be dismissed but it can be confused and corrupted. State property cannot be privatized but it can be decentralized and informally appropriated. The mono-party cannot be rivaled but it can be pluralized internally. The planned economy cannot be dismantled but it can be marketized.…” (Mátyás Kovács, “Planning the Transformation?,” 21). In the blink of an eye, all these truisms became invalid. Unprepared to look beyond them, theory proved completely unequipped to register and adequately respond to the changes. It was stunned, immobilized, taken by surprise. As Eberwein remarks, “Sometimes historical developments take theory and conventional wisdom by surprise. This is definitely the case with the breakdown of Communism. Neither economics nor political science had been prepared to face the theoretical challenge of the transformation phenomenon” (Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, Transformation Processes in Eastern Europe: Perspectives from the Modelling Laboratory (Frankfurt am Main, Germany : Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1992), 3). “Neither the pessimistic totalitarianism theorists nor their more optimistic convergence theory counterparts had anticipated these dramatic changes … [R]egime breakdown was never considered a vital theoretical issue…” (Eberwein, Transformation Processes in Eastern Europe, 8). Even when it happened, it remained a puzzle “why the former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe broke down so quickly, and, in most cases, without resort to violence. Conventional wisdom assumed the centrality of repression and social control, could not imagine how these systems could be subject to abrupt and nonviolent change, and anticipated only an incremental process of adaptation, adjustment, and liberalization” (Eberwein, Transformation Processes in Eastern Europe, 8–9). For more on the subject, see Steven Tötosy de Zepetnek ed., Comparative Central European Culture (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002) and Ken Johnson, “Once upon a Time in Central Europe, When Unruly Was the Rule,” The New York Times, February 6, 2004, sec. E37 (see Goran Trbuljak). 107 Rubinshtein, “Questions of Literature,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, index card 3. 108 Rubinshtein, “Questions of Literature,” n.p.

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125

126 127

Notes Rubinshtein, “Questions of Literature,” n.p. Lichnoe delo 39, italics added. Ilya Kabakov, Falling behind the Race (Catching the Rabbit, 1998), Installations. Kabakov, Falling behind the Race, 301. Kabakov, Falling behind the Race, 301, italics added. Kabakov, Falling behind the Race, 301. Rubinshtein, “Regular Writing,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, n. p., index card 69, italics added. Rubinshtein, “Here I Am,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, n. p., index card 71. The images of apocalypse and catastrophe reappear in the most recent works of Grisha Bruskin, such as his H-Hour project (2012), as a testimony to a “world overwhelmed with the fear of new signs of global crisis” (Olga Sviblova, in Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 9). In his introduction to H-Hour, Robert Storr underscores the significance of the theme of “End Time” (Robert Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” in H-Hour, 13) in Bruskin’s art by choosing as his essay’s title the name of Bob Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” “Composed at the height of the Cold War, shortly before the Cuban missile crisis, and full of apocalyptic imagery, it [the name of Dylan’s song] was seen as a prediction of imminent nuclear catastrophe” (Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 12). Catastrophe thus functions not only in the present context but reconnects us with the traumas of the past—in Bruskin’s art—the Soviet past. As Hans-Peter Riese points out, “Looking at Bruskin’s latest works, especially the current cycle of works in his oeuvre, the themes of which are the ‘Catastrophe’… we realize that he has again taken a step backwards in his life, that he is processing a theme that he can still clearly remember from his childhood” (Hans-Peter Riese, “Working on the Mythology of Life. The New Sculptures of Grisha Bruskin,” in Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour, 55). Kabakov, Fallen Sky, Installations. Kabakov, Fallen Sky, Installations, 89. The detailed description of the installation appears in Kabakov, Fallen Sky, pp. 88–89. Kabakov, Fallen Sky, Installations, 89. Kabakov, For Sale, Installations, 27, italics added. Kabakov, For Sale, Installations, 24. Rubinshtein, Reguliarnoe Pis’mo (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivana Limbakha, 1996), 114–20. “From Thursday to Friday,” in Third Wave, trans. Gerald Janecek, 148: “Пойдем и мы туда, куда не хочет течь вода. Где осыпаются мозги, где визги и ни зги … Предполагали жить себе, а вот тебе и на…” Mikhail Ryklin, “Budushchee kak vozmozhnost” (1993), Iskusstvo kak prepiatstvie (Moskva: Ad Marginem, 1997), 27–28: “Только самым грубым мечтателям будущее открывается здесь (в Москве) в модусе здравого смысля; я завиду их умениe отлетать от собственного тела, но не могу им в этом подражать … Так что даже кумулятивное будущее, по идее своей наиболее предсказуемое, здесь и теперь наиболее ускользающе и многозначно…” My emphasis. The complete title of Epstein’s book reads After the Future. The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Epstein, After the Future, 71.

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128 Discussing his work The Birth of the Hero in an interview with Robert Buck, Bruskin provides a personal perspective on the unforeseen arrival of the future: When I was doing these Birth of the Hero sculptures, they had a very different social context.… My idea was to create a kind of message to the future, to the future man. I tried to show what kind of society it was, to send them a strong message which would affect people just like I am always affected when I go to see the art of Ancient Egypt. (“A Conversation with the Artist,” 3, italics added). However, what Bruskin meant to be a message to the future became, in fact, a message to himself. In the words of the artist, “I am the person from this future which I was wondering about. I am already the future; I send the message to myself because I never thought that it could happen” (3, italics added). On a similar note, in “Working on the Mythology of Life. The New Sculptures of Grisha Bruskin,” Riese observes: When Bruskin declares that he is a “man from the future” and sends himself messages there from the future’s past, we must naturally ask ourselves whether he has not in fact meanwhile—viewed historically—arrived in the reality of what was formerly only an imagined future, and perhaps as early as the time of his emigration in late 1980s. (Riese, in Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour, 55, italics added) 129 Rubinshtein, Lichnoe delo, 44. “Наша жизнь кончается/вон у того столба/а ваша где кончается?/Ах ваша навсегда!/Поздравляем с вашей жизнью!/ Как прекрасна ваша жизнь!/А как прекрасна мы не знаем/поскольку наша кончилось уже.” 130 Rubinshtein, “Catalogue of Comedic Novelties,” index-card poem, n. p. 131 Dmitry Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (Moskva: Tekst, 1995), 20: “Происходят суровые и значительные споры и схватки по поводу будущего…” 132 Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti, 100. 133 Ilya Kabakov, The Unhappened Dialogue, Installations, 428. 134 Dmitry Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (Moskva: Tekst, 1995), 103. 135 Lev Rubinshtein, “Here I am,” Catalogue, n. p. The abnormal invalidation of teleology and loss of all longings, illusions, and dreams for the future have led to traumatic fears and anxieties. In his essay on Bruskin’s H-Hour, Storr offers a broader view on the subject, correlating the loss of illusions to psychopathology: Consult such accounts like an encyclopedia of lost illusions, … an index of an anthropological textbook devoted to a lost tribe, a manual on the psychopathology of disappointed longing.… Do this and you will know most of what you need to know about any group or generation which—as all have done—once hoped for but also dreaded the future.… (Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 13–15) 136 Kabakov, The Underground Golden River (1985), Installations, 108. 137 Kabakov, Installations, 303. 138 Kabakov, Installations, 303.

228 139 140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147

148 149

150 151 152

Notes Kabakov, The Underground Golden River, 110. Kabakov, The Underground Golden River, 110. Rubinshtein, Reguliarnoe Pis’mo, 115–20. Rubinshtein, “Melankholicheskii al’bom” (1993), Reguliarnoe Pis’mo, 115–20: “Если говорить вполне серьезно,/То уже поздно…/Не понять ничего…/ Спать в одиночестве…/Левое с правым спутать/Мертвое тело на дороге/ Спичка сломается/Черный кобель/Пришел кого не ждал/Пока с душой играешь в прятки, протоколируя судьбу,… без оглядки… в гробу/Черный таракан/Забудешь, чего хотел/В темное проснешься/В зеркале себя не узнал/ Не с кем и поговорить будет/Смерти не миновать/Надеешься неизвестно на что/Бороться с мучительными сомнениями/Цепляться за жалкие остатки собственных представлений/Фатально приблизишься к тому моменту, когда все это решительно потеряет всякий смысл/Не заметил как ветер утих и погасли последние звезды/Позабудешь, что все позади и что время ушло безвозвратно/Изчезаешь куда-то, затем возникаешь нежданно-незванно/ Вдруг поймешь, что пора уходить. Но куда?/Ничего не понятно.” Kabakov, The Underground Golden River, 108. Timur Kibirov. “When Lenin Was Young,” in Third Wave, trans. Paul Graves and Carol Ueland, 227. Rubinshtein, “Poiavlenie geroia,” Reguliarnoe pis’mo, 55: “…Времена то сужаются, то растягиваются, и уже не поймешь, что когда…” Rubinshtein, “Catalogue of Comedic Novelties,” index-card poem, n. p. Rubinshtein, “Poiavlenie geroia,” 157–58: “…ученик ушел и стал думать./ Вначале он подумал: ‘Куда смотреть? Ведь во все стороны: вперед и назад, направо и налево, вверх и вниз, вширь и вглубь разворачивается бестолковое пространство наших аритмических усилий и притязаний. Куда же смотреть?’…/ Потом он подумал: ‘очерчен круг, и некуда’…/ Потом он подумал: ‘Постепенно становясь все ближе к неопровержимому пределу, пора бы уже, кажется, и взяться за ум в то время, как причины и следствия то и дело меняются местами, и уже не поймешь, где что…’/ Потом он подумал: ‘Все ближе постепенно становясь к описываемому рубежу, вдруг как не хватит на последнее усилье в то время, как я пробую ухватиться за ускользающие нити то ли мыслей, то ли воспоминаний и не могу, не могу, не могу..’ ” Bruskin, Life Is Everywhere, 19. Bruskin, Life is Everywhere, 19. Notably, blindness is a chronic condition of the personages in On the Edge. Sometimes it is obvious—as in the image of the man wearing dark glasses and feeling around with his cane (porcelain collection, 1998) or in that of the “blind musician” playing the accordion, his one foot overhanging the menacing void (26). But most often blindness is internal—a trauma-caused state of existence, in which the person has eyes but is unable to see. A careful examination reveals that all the characters of On the Edge suffer from this severe impairment—they are either blind or portrayed with their eyes closed and only their eyelids exposed to the public. The lack of vision and orientation in Rubinshtein’s and Bruskin’s work acquires a greatly metaphorical meaning as it evokes the traumatic condition of the subject in Russia’s new post-communist reality. Lev Rubinshtein, “This Time,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, 55. Rubinshtein, “This Time,” 55. Rubinshtein, “What Can One Say?,” in Re-Entering the Sign, 213, italics added.

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153 Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 77, italics added: “некто пытается провести отчетливую линию между прошедшим и предстоящим. Его просто не замечают;…” 154 Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 77–79. 155 Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 77–79. 156 Kabakov’s The Underground Golden River, 108. 157 Kabakov’s The Underground Golden River, 108. 158 Both installations are autobiographical. 159 Ilya Kabakov, The Rope of Life, Installations, 83. 160 Kabakov, The Rope of Life, 83. 161 Ilya Kabakov, The Boat of My Life, Installations, 464, italics added. 162 Kabakov, The Rope of Life, 82. 163 Viktor Krivulin, we will see in the chapter on metarealism, makes a strikingly similar (poetic) observation. 164 Kabakov, The Rope of Life, 82, italics added. 165 Kabakov, The Rope of Life, 82. 166 The preoccupation of Kabakov with almost identical problematics in The Rope of Life (1985) and the Boat of my Life (1993) once again suggests the analogousness of the two historical periods—the 1980s and the early 1990s. As we have already discussed, both of these periods witnessed a rupturing of the historical paradigm— the unforeseen attainment of communism in the 1980s and its final collapse as an ideological system at the outset of the 1990s. Using the terminology that Kabakov employs in Fallen Sky, we can indeed assert that, at the close of the twentieth century, the sky in Russia fell not once but twice. The specifics the artist provides in explaining the origin and temporal parameters of the fallen sky allude to the relevance of placing the mid-1980s and early 1990s in the same contextual framework. Just like the utopian communist heaven fell down in the 1980s, but this was not perceived before 1989–1990, the piece of sky fell in the park near Lake Geneva as early as in 1986, but meaning to this fall was not attributed before the year 1991. As the story goes, “This scrap of ‘sky’ glided in and fell on the territory of the park on April 12, 1986 during a severe hurricane, having broken the tops of trees.… Park employees were able to determine the story of this ‘scrap’ in 1991” (Kabakov, Fallen Sky, 88). It is impossible to overlook the analogy between the fallen piece of sky and the fall of communism in the East European bloc. Kabakov reinforces it though giving literal dimensions to the fallen sky and carefully detailing its origin. The sky becomes the concrete picture of a sky drawn on the ceiling of a top-floor room, in which a Russian pilot lived while he resided in Czechoslovakia. The storm, though rich in metaphorical allusions, becomes a concrete storm that raged on a specific date (April 12) at a historical moment of paramount significance (the year 1986; April 12 is, coincidentally, the day of cosmonautics—the day when the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, flew into and conquered space). Importantly, the storm came from not just anywhere but, as Kabakov specifies, from what comprised the communist domain of Europe: “A severe storm moving across Eastern and Southern Europe during the night of April 12, 1986 destroyed the structure and carried away these walls decorated by him [the pilot]. One of the parts, most likely the entire ceiling of the room, turned up on that night in the park near Lake Geneva” (Kabakov, Fallen Sky, 89).

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167 Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties (Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 1991), He Lost His Mind, Undressed, and Ran Away Naked (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York 1990), Dislocations (Museum of Modern Art, New York 1991). 168 V. Nabokov, Gift (from P. Smirnovsky, “The Russian Grammar Book”), in Bruskin, Life Is Everywhere, 26–31. 169 Hans-Peter Riese, “Working on the Mythology of Life. The New Sculptures of Grisha Bruskin,” in Grisha Bruskin, H-Hour (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 62. 170 Riese, “Working on the Mythology of Life,” 65. 171 Mark Lipovetskii, “Izzhivanie smerti: spetsifika russkogo postmodernizma,” Znamia, 8 (1995): 199: “…смерть становится интегральным символом русского постмодернизма.” 172 Lipovetskii, “Izzhivanie smerti: spetsifika russkogo postmodernizma,” 199–200: “Постмодернизм, рожденний предельно глубоким осознанием культурного кризиса—а у нас в полной мере безысходным переживанием тупика советской цивилизации…” 173 Mark Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” in TwentiethCentury Russian Literature: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, ed. Karen L. Ryan and Barry P. Scherr, 327. 174 Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” 328. 175 Arrière-garde literature, according to Epstein, emerged at the end of the 1980s and represents “the rear guard of all art, where it is sustained by the barest minimum before it must break down and give way to the cruder and fresher forces of a new socialization” (After the Future, 89). Epstein further defines arrière-garde art as “an art of amorphousness…, of an all-encompassing and accepting bottom, the last gurgling crater into which the overdone excrements of the earlier majestic forms and grandiose ideas are to fall. Garbage and excrement: this is the overarching metaphor in the art of the end” (After the Future, 89). Epstein sees “the movement from conceptualism to the arrière-garde [as] a retreat to the rear of literature, to its graves and smoldering ruins: handfuls of gray dust instead of decked-out skeletons. The hard, bony state of death is replaced by a pulverization of posthumousness” (After the Future, 91). 176 Both Lipovetskii and Epstein foresee the rebirth of literature and seek to define the art that comes after postmodernism, be it as “post-postmodernism” or as a “proto” development (see Epstein, After the Future, 334). While Prigov speaks of “postconceptualism” (or “shimmering aesthetics”) and Epstein envisions a sentimental phase he calls “the new sincerity” (Epstein, After the Future, 336), Lipovetskii sees in the realist tradition the successor of postmodernism: “A survey of Russian literature of the late 1980s and the early 1990s reveals an analogous phenomenon: just as the crisis of post-modernism intensifies, another kind of fiction is gaining ground, a movement which is clearly rooted in the realistic tradition, but which just as clearly has learned from the experience of post-modern art” (Lipovetskii, “On the Nature of Russian Post-modernism,” 331). Emphasizing the experience of death as a necessary precondition for the new development, Lipovetskii argues that Russian literary postmodernism has fashioned a rite of passage: at the expense of temporary death, Russian post-modernism has shifted culture from a paradigm based on freedom’s

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constant struggle with order and harmony to a paradigm of chaos. What is happening today in Russian and world culture can be viewed as an attempt to reconstruct the edifice of humanism in the space of chaos.… And everything begins once again with the most elementary ideas: pity, sentimentality, tenderness towards humanity, the search for a sincere tone. Let us not argue about the terminology—call it the “new autobiography” (Vera Chaikovskaya, Dmitrii Bykov), “neo-sentimentalism” (Natal’ya Ivanova), the “new sincerity” (Mikhail Epstein), actualism, or post-realism. Let us only understand that against the backdrop of chaos and in the context of chaos all these simple feelings and states truly cannot fail to be reinterpreted, for the experience of death has deprived them of their right to monological imperatives.… And the ideal of the new humanism will probably not be man’s harmony with the universe for a long time to come, but rather chaosmos, “dissipative structures,” born within the chaos of being and culture. (Lipovetskii, 335–36) 177 Dmitry Prigov, “Forty-ninth Alphabet Poem (tsa-tsa),” trans. Gerald Janecek, in Third Wave. 178 Prigov, “Forty-ninth Alphabet Poem (tsa-tsa),” 106. 179 Prigov, “Forty-ninth Alphabet Poem (tsa-tsa),” 107–08. 180 Mikhail Iampolski, “Fetishes of Impoverished Experience,” in Grisha Bruskin, Archeologist’s Collection (Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld/Berlin, 2013), 57. 181 Iampolski, “Fetishes of Impoverished Experience,” 59. 182 Iampolski, “Fetishes of Impoverished Experience,” 59. 183 Iampolski, “Fetishes of Impoverished Experience,” 57. 184 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11, italics added. 185 In Russian, the verses of Prigov’s poem are arranged in an alphabetical order. 186 Dmitry Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (Moskva: Tekst, 1995), 12, italics added. 187 Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti, 106. 188 Prigov, Iavlenie, 18: “Все слушают внимательно, а потом оказывается, что это бред сумасшедшего”. 189 Epstein, After the Future, 72. 190 Victor Erofeyev, “Introduction: Russia’s Fleurs du Mal,” in The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing: Russia’s Fleurs du Mal., ed. V. Erofeyev and A. Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), xv. 191 Erofeyev, “Introduction: Russia’s Fleurs du Mal,” xv. 192 Kabakov, NOMA, 489. 193 My reading of the incomprehensibility of conceptualist verses as the result of psychological trauma should not be taken to deny the fact that many conceptualist works are deliberately made incomprehensible. In fact, incomprehensibility has been so closely linked to the ideas of conceptualism that it has become a habit to label all inexplicable works of art as simply “conceptualist.” In Ripped Off Landscape (1991), for example, Kabakov recreates, on a rather humorous note, the comments of several viewers standing in front of some unintelligible works of art: Of course, something happens when I am here … some sort of vague sensation of the space with strange conversations all around …

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Notes I know what this is, it’s conceptualism … There’s nothing comprehensible here … What tedium … This type of artist always has cosmic pretensions … I don’t understand anything here … (Kabakov, Ripped Off Landscape, Installations, 327)

194 Lev Rubinshtein, “What Can One Say?,” in Re-Entering the Sign, 213. 195 It should be noted that the term “schizophrenia” is used in my work not in the sense of a diagnosis claiming to have any clinical accuracy but only as an aesthetic model. 196 Erofeyev, “Introduction: Russia’s Fleurs du Mal,” xv, italics added. 197 Richard Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 13. 198 Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 13. 199 Storr, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 15. 200 Cathy Caruth, “The Claims of Reference,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4 (1) (1990): 199. 201 In section “Sots-Art Lives through the Body” (“Концептуализм и соц-арт: тела и ностальгии,” “Соц-арт живет телом”), in Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm. 202 Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 112: “В первую очередь литература это продукт тела … Социалистический реализм с его манией вала сделал важный шаг в сторону телесного понимания письма: здесь очень большое значение имело чистое количество литературы, некая вещь из бумаги и букв, символизирующая национальный приоритет в области духа … Постмодернизм овнешняет латентную проблематику телесности в соцреализме, делает ее поверхностной и актуальной.” 203 Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 119: “подчеркива(ют) весомая материальность поэтического слова.” 204 Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 119: “Б. Гройс подчеркивает материальное измерение творчества Рубинштейна: ‘Такое впечатление, что от карточки к карточке что-то происходит: что-то глухо скрежещет, мигает, разворачивается и меняет и окружающий мир.’ ” 205 Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 120–21: “…вернемся к телесности. Для текста Рубинштейна важна категория паузы … Перерыв в речи предполагает не рассредоточение внимания воспринимающего, а сосредоточение его на себе, на собственных впечатлениях, на своей телесности. Мы можем предположить, что есть шанс обрести нетотальность внутри своей телесности.” 206 Dmitry Prigov, interview, in Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 104: “Для меня стихотворение—то же самое, как каждая тонна угля есть малый вклад в валовое производство при плановой экономике.” 207 “24 000 стихов к 2000-му году!” 208 Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 104: “Пригов производит на свет божий чудовищное количество стихов. ‘Я … хотел написать 20 тысяч стихов к 2000 году … ’ Но поскольку ‘встречный’ план был принят довольно поздно, пришлось повысить дневную норму.” 209 Mark Lipovetskii, “Patogenez i lechenie glukhonemoty: poety i postmodernizm,” Novy mir, 7 (807) (1992): 223: “Постмодернизм..вырастает из исскреннего и

Notes

210 211 212 213

214 215 216 217

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масштабного с т р а д а н и я. Там, где нет страдания, нет и исскусства. Игровое исскуство отнюдь не исключение.” Rubinshtein, “Regular Writing,” Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, n. p. Rubinshtein, “Regular Writing,” index card poem, n. p. Dmitry Prigov, Piat’desiat kapelek krovi (Moscow : Tekst, 1993). Dmitry Prigov, Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (Moskva: Tekst, 1995), 40–62: “Я почему-то вдруг представил/Что умер наподобье волка/Но так мучительно и долго/умирал … (40)/Я … представил что умер наподобье голубя (41)/Я … представил что умер наподобье краба (42)/ … умер наподобье вздрагивающей твари (49)/ … умер наподобье уже до этого, заранее умершего (61)/Я умер наподобье умер/Когда всех прочих понесли/А у меня еще росли/ Волосы, ногти/И я сказал себе: ‘Не думай/Об этом!’ ” (62) Prigov, Iavlenie, 30. Prigov, Iavlenie, 104. Prigov, Iavlenie, 105. Prigov, Iavlenie, 105; The poem proceeds by enumerating different parts severed from the organic wholeness of the body: My healthy leg … went for a walk in the street … (66) Here I have this very tooth … (67) Thus, you see, I am your thigh! - … (67) And I, and I—I am your scrotum! - … (68) With the will of a necromancer I ask my liver… (70), etc.

218 219

220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

As Paul de Man has argued, the mutilated body heralds the advent of a respectful recognition of “what Montaigne cheerfully called ‘Monsieur ma partie’ [Mister Member],” of the disparate constituents of reality as meaningful and referential in themselves, as capable of enacting by themselves their innermost nature: “We must, in short, consider our limbs, hands, toes, breasts,… in themselves, severed from the organic unity of the body.… We must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body.…” (142). It is in the naming of the body, in the meticulous enumeration of its parts that the specificity of the body arises. Caruth, “The Claims of Reference,” 103. Prigov, Iavlenie, 65: “В наше время кризиса политических и идеологических систем…, это являет собой, может быть, верхний, симптомологический слой более глубинного краха старой антропологии.” Bruskin, On the Edge, Modern Archeology, 14–35. “Moonlight” (2003) is also the title of this work in Bruskin, “On the Edge,” 16. Bruskin, “Broken Love,” On the Edge, 17. Bruskin, “Accomplices,” On the Edge, 18. Bruskin, “Tête-à-Tête,” On the Edge, 19. Bruskin, “Step,” On the Edge, 20. Bruskin, “Silentium,” On the Edge, 22. Bruskin, “Collapse,” On the Edge, 23. Bruskin, “Blind Musician,” On the Edge, 26. Bruskin, “Improvisator,” On the Edge, 27. Bruskin, “Echo,” On the Edge, 28. Bruskin, “Happy Childhood,” On the Edge, 30.

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236 237 238

239 240 241

242

243 244 245 246

Notes Bruskin, “Reconstruction,” On the Edge, 31. Bruskin, “Dangerous Games,” On the Edge, 32. Bruskin, “Dramatic Art,” On the Edge, 33. Vladislav Todorov, “Introduction to the Political Aesthetics of Communism,” PostTheory, Games, and Discursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case, ed. Alexander Kiossev (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995), 83. Todorov, “Introduction to the Political Aesthetics of Communism,” 77. Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995), 50. Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 48–49. Human metabolism, physiology, biomechanics, and physique become methods for creating the communal body of the Mass Man and a leading principle in the theory of Soviet theater (Evreinov, Meyerhold, Stanislavskii); (Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 105–13). The unparalleled “fusion of biological with creative function of human being” materializes the ideologists’ “major idea … that the political performance is immediately rooted in the biological transformance of mankind” (Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 108). Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 54. Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 61, italics added. Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 60, italics added. From the perspective of Russian political studies, Todorov uncovers in Fyodorov’s project an arrogant endeavor to overcome the body’s anatomy and conceive a collective, morphologically new, genderless, and immortal human breed, inhabiting outer cosmic space. Fyodorov’s Philosophy of the Common Cause thus constitutes an epitome of the Russian dream of “a sublime form of liturgical public life” (Todorov, Red Square, Black Square, 59). This idea has been advanced by the Bulgarian writer and theorist Alexander Kiossev in his provocative work “An Essay on Terror” (Alexander Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” Post-Theory, ed. Alexander Kiossev). Going back in history, the overthrow of Russian tsarism was another event signified by a radical bodily mutilation. It is interesting to note that while the totality of communism was guaranteed by the post-mortem wholeness of the body (Lenin’s mummy), the end of the Russian Emperor’s power was ascertained by the acid–drenched, dismembered, decomposed body of Nicholas II (for more on the event of Nicholas II’s death, see Ivan Kristev, “The Guillotine and Acid,” in “From Anatomy of the Political Body,” Post-Theory, ed. Alexander Kiossev, 97–101). In both cases, the body is seminal in its literalness and corporeality. It is not sufficient to glorify any symbolic image of Lenin or to liquidate the symbolic power of Nicholas Romanoff. There is the vital necessity to preserve the intactness of Lenin’s body as a referent to the intact, invincible body of communism, and to mutilate, devastate Nicholas Romanoff ’s body as an act of annulling the reference to the body and institution of emperorship in Russia. Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 137. Lev Rubinshtein, “What Can One Say?,” in Re-Entering the Sign, ed. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar, 214. Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 144–45. For a discussion of the body in post-communism, see also Ellen Berry, ed., Postcommunism and the Body Politic (New York: New York University Press, 1995) and Vitaly Komar, “Body and the East,” The New York Times (March 2, 2001).

Notes 247 248 249 250

251 252

253 254 255

235

Epstein, After the Future, 46. Epstein, After the Future, 31. Epstein, After the Future, 77, italics added. Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 84: “…по внезапно наступившей тишине ясно, что в жизни героя наступает едва ли не самый решительный момент. Однако родившийся в недрах абсолютной тишины шум незаметно нарастает. Он все нарастает и нарастает, постепенно становясь невыносимым.” Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 81: “ходит тихий такой, благостный. Все чему-то улыбается…” Rubinshtein, “Vse dal’she i dal’she,” 78: “Вот некто, поддавшийся на удочку бытия, плачет о своей судьбе и ни о чем не подозревает; некто полузадушенным голосом говорит о том, как он счастлив. Все незаметно переглядываются;” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 29, italics added. Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 145. Epstein, After the Future, 29.

Chapter 2 Parts of this section appeared in the following publication: Albena LutzkanovaVassileva. “Testimonial Poetry in East European Post-Totalitarian Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 3(1) (2001): . 1 2

3 4 5

Bojko Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans (Sofia: The PAN Publishing House, 1991). All Bulgarian texts have been translated by me. The superior position that ideals held in relation to material nature and the belief in the power of ideas to engender and mandate communist reality comprise the main thematic thrust of “The Beautiful Cliché,” a poem by one of Bulgaria’s foremost socialist realists, Khristo Radevsky (Khristo Radevsky, Poems (Sofia: Balgarski Pisatel, 1971), 164). The poem tells of a writer set on composing a chestnut-tree ode. While pondering over a rhyme that is unique, a prosody—truly original, and an image no one has ever drawn, the chestnut-trees burst out in blossom. They blossomed in just the same way they did the previous year and all years before, obeying the same, longestablished by nature, cliché. Implying a straightforward parallelism between natural and ideological clichés, the poem concludes by asserting that beautiful clichés possess an incontestable right of existence: “But no one criticizes them [the chestnut-trees] for following the same cliché to blossom / … Because their cliché is beautiful!” (164). Epitomizing the cliché-based method at the core of socialist realism, Radevsky’s poem reveals that, paragons for reality, the pompous ideological constructs defined the only road to a truly communist poetics. Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5. All the quotes from the Bulgarian poems analyzed in this chapter have been translated by me. Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5: “чавдарчето е примерно дете”; “винаги готов”; “аз съм Тимур и неговата команда”; “аз съм Най-малкият син на Партията”; “Аз съм Елате хиляди младежи.”

236 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

Notes Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5: “аз съм котето, обесено в името на народа,” “аз съм пролетариат за диктатура,” “аз съм Европа, по която броди призракът/смел реактор под съветски флаг.” Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5: “аз съм тотоЛитарната шизофрения/аз съм тотЕлитарният шизоиден тип.” Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5: “аз съм отляво отдясно отдолу отгоре и отстрани.” Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 4–5: “IVD KMR CUM SGNS /AONSU AUAKS SIV NATO/SBP UBO SDS ASO BSP ALF/PETAK 13/& 22/○”39”/681–1944/99,99% za!/N 00856331/EGN 6003136922/∞ ≈ 0.” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11, italics added. Epstein, After the Future, 71. Stefan Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite [Steps on the Clouds] (Sofia: Biblioteka 48, 1997), 18, “Като колос от пясък/се сгромоляса/великият експеримент на века.” Ani Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite: pesni i umotvoreniya na Ani Ilkov [Изворът на грознохубавите, The Spring of the Ugly-Beautiful: Songs and Creations of Ani Ilkov] (Sofia: Anubis, 1994), 44: “Нещо страшно/било казват/станало…” Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 44: “без/да помниш да мислиш да знаеш.” Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 42: “та … Та какво/исках да кажа? Кого/исках да моля? Къде/исках да ида? Защо?” Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 43: “… Може би мен са/убили? И не съм вече жив/а само така си мисля …” Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 156, emphasis added. Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” 156. Ilkov, Izvorut, 65. Ilkov, Izvorut, 65: “аз няма никога да мог’ да се измъкна.” Ilkov, Izvorut, 65: “ти не мог’ да се измъкнеш.” Ilkov, Izvorut, 65: “И знам че няма бог да се измъкна.” Ilkov, Izvorut, 65: “в града съм паднал кон в небето … /летя с уши надолу о, съм гарван.” Ivajlo Ditchev, “The Post-Paranoid Condition,” in Post-Theory, ed. Alexander Kiossev, 110. Tsanev, Stupki, 29–30: “Къде съм? … /В друг някой свят ли?/В друг някой век?” Tsanev, Stupki, 32. Yordan Eftimov, Metametafizika (Sofia: Svobodno poetichesko obshtestvo, 1993), 11: “На една планета хората нямали вестибуларни/апарати. Не можели да различават горе и долу,/нито напред/и назад,/а още по-малко встрани./Просто си летели.” Ditchev, “The Post-Paranoid Condition,” 117, italics added. Eftimov, Metametafizika, 15, “С котка си играя аз/или играе си със мене тя/или играта си играе с нас/или езикът си играе със играта/или (пък аз) играя си с езика/или езикът си играе с котката…” Eftimov, Metametafizika, 15: “или на языке играет кошка…” Georgi Gospodinov, “P-R-A-S-K-O-V-A,” Phonetics, 61: “Каква огромна и закръглена/до пръсване/е тази дума /а-о-а/ п-р-с-к хрупти нагризана от някой/ случаен като лятото.”

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32 Tsanev, Stupki, 13–14: “Ний мислехме че комунизмът ще е вечен/Другият изход/ бе трета световна война/Но това означаваше/заедно с комунизма/да изчезне и човечеството … / Ш-ш-ш-ш-т!/На-ни-на!/На-ни-на/На” 33 Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 30–32. 34 Lambovsky, Alen Dekadans, 31.“Стоя на върха. Въртя очи./Сега какво, накъде?/ Мълчи планината.” 35 Kiril Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat (Tiresias the Blind), playscript, 25: “Но като Слънцето/и времето стои застинало!” 36 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 3: “…Избледняло и застинало, … / Стоеше и не си отиваше -/И беше видимо … но сякаш вече бе преминало -/стоеше и не си отиваше./Не заслепяваше да виждаме така,/тъй както виждахме … / Преди или сега … / Не зная … винаги…” 37 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 5: “Антигона: Татко!/Исмена: Мамо!/Антигона: Слънцето го няма!/Исмена: Там е, но го няма! … / Антигона: Стои!” 38 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 4: “А то стои … не си отива,/изглежда се е уморило -/ изгубило е и желанието да се движи./И вече ясно … все по-ясно виждаме/как ужаса застива по унилите лица…” 39 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 6: “Много рано се смрачи.” 40 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 12: “Погледнах Слънцето—то беше там … / ала изпразнено,/ уж свети, а не осветява … / виси си там -/и не изгрява, не залязва …” 41 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 18: “ ‘Към бъдещето плаваме … Така ли?’/‘Да, за бъдещето’—отговарям -/‘Отивам да узная,/Слънцето ни докога ще си стои така … /и няма да залязва … да изгрява?’ ” 42 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 14: “а то виси … виси като обесено … / и ви се плези … да, то ви се присмива …” 43 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 17, italics added: “…и няма вече бъдеще … / нещо … нещо там необратимо се е случило … /някъде … там горе … /тук вече нищо няма пак да бъде същото …” 44 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 20, italics added: “…Слънцето стои … /стои … и гасне … /и всички са уплашени …” 45 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 23: “Избягали са сенките,/отплавали са птиците/ от непрогледното небе -/очите искат … искат да избягат,/но няма … няма накъде …” 46 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 28: “Стоят и хората. Те искат да избягат,/но няма … няма накъде … /Избягали са сенките,/отплавали са птиците/във непрогледното небе.” 47 Merdjanski, Tirezij slepiyat, 29–30: “Потегляйки от този бряг,/към бъдещето всички искат да отплават,/но върху него се завръщат пак/и отговора получават.” 48 Kiril Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya (Sofia: c/o Jusautor, 1992), 5: “И както се изкачваше/към стаята си пийнал,/подхлъзна ли се, стъпи ли накриво,/главата си удари в перилата и -/преди да разберем какво му е— почина.” 49 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 10: “След тежкия работен ден, когато за отмора бродех напосоки из гората, настъпих в шумата змия, която ме ухапа.” 50 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 5: “Къде какво очаква ни, кой може да предвиди?”

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51 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 27: “…нещо … така безмилостно за гърлото ме хвана, че аз крака изпружих начаса/и на мозайката се проснах бездиханен … А бях достигнал на живота си полвината едва …” 52 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 28: “[К]ар най-подло ме прониза с меча си в гърба,… очите ми покри червена пелена и аз поех към мрачните селения на Прозерпина …” 53 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 28: “А след смъртта ми станала една … В безреда почнали да се избиват …” 54 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 14: “Макар от възлияния да е подгизнала едва ли не пръстта над мен/и с почести да бях погребан и оплакан …” 55 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 7: “…Сега, когато съм от вятъра подгонен прах, полепнал върху пиниите, кипарисите, липите, ви питам с шумоленето им пак и пак, и пак …” 56 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 16: “Загадъчно необяснима е единствено смъртта ми …” 57 Merdjanski, Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na rimskata imperiya, 16: “… Покрай пътя аз видях—една потънала в зеленина дъбрава:/а вътре ромол на поток, прохлада … /И както бях протегнал трепетна ръка/към животворната кристално бистра влага, подхлъзнах се ………/……фатално по тила ……/в един голям заострен камък./Така и не можах да разбера … /за глътка изворна вода.” 58 Ditchev, “The Post-Paranoid Condition,” 110, italics added. 59 Kiril Merdjansky, Oblachna zemia [A Cloudy Earth] (Sofia: Svobodno poetichesko obshtestvo, 1995), 27. 60 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 25: “Стигнах до тинестото дъно на отчаянието …” 61 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 29. 62 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 17: “Човечеството изтрезнява, омръзна му от идеали … / Сега е друго. Свърши тая./Не вярвам в утре ни във вчера …/ Напразно във очите ни се взират черните зеници на черепите/пълни вместо с мозък—с пръст./ Кръжат над нас сенките на неизвестни птици,/чертаейки над всичко черен кръст.” 63 Georgi Gospodinov, Lapidarium (Sofia: modus Stoianov, 1993), 53: оби ите гр ща

Събарят ста р

ст Булдозерите ри ат кръ ове Н 64 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 53: “Череп с ужасени очни кухини” 65 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 53: italics added. 66 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 56, italics added: “Пазачът на гробища е седнал на един каменен кръст и си маже филия със залез.” 67 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 56: “Какво пазиш, Пазачо на гробища?” 68 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 7–8. 69 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 7: “Ние се наричаме мъртви, защото преди това сме живели, ами тия, които не са живели, тях защо наричате мъртви?”

Notes

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70 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 7. 71 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 7. While played out in a family setting, another work by Ilkov, his incisive 1990 collage “Our Escapes” (9–12), enhances the social apprehension of the subject’s post-mortem predicament. A blind girl, Ilkov relates, goes to sleep with a miraculous pill and her mom’s unequivocal promise that she will regain vision by next day. Having dreamed the most beautiful dreams, however, the girl wakes up to find out she is still blind and hear her mother announce: “Happy fool’s day, dear daughter!” (Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 12). The story readily yields to a socially operative contextualization. Assuaged with the beautiful promise that, newly freed from the tyranny of a regime that denied man the right to individual vision and blinded him/her with the only vision allowed—that of the Party, the post-totalitarian subject will succeed in regaining his/her unique vision, the girl wakes with the unbearable discovery that she is still blind, with the bitter realization that the miraculous vision recovery has failed to occur. The cheerful voices she hears proclaim that this has been a long premeditated lie. 72 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 19. 73 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 27: “Няма надежда/Няма спасение/Амин!” 74 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 22. 75 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 22. 76 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 32. 77 Ilkov, Izvorut na groznokhubavite, 32. 78 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 53. 79 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 17. 80 Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 57. 81 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 17. 82 Merdjansky, Oblachna zemia, 15. 83 Yordan Eftimov, Metametafizika 37: “В тази част на книгата всичко е камъни/ уши носове устни глави крака—това са камъни, камъните също са камъни …” 84 Tsanev, Stupki po oblatsite, 7. 85 For more on the subject, see Todorov’s discussion of the means of engineering and referential functions of the unified body of the Mass man in Russian communist society, introduced in the section “Conceptualism, Corpora, and History. The BodyAggregate and the Disarticulated Body” of my chapter on conceptualism. 86 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 140. 87 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 143. 88 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 144. 89 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 144. 90 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 143. 91 Kiossev, “An Essay on Terror,” 140. Because of its radical, thoroughgoing nature, “[t]he collapse of state socialism Eastern Europe in 1989 seemed like a revolution … But, as Dahrendorf…, following the French historian, Furet, quickly pointed out, the revolution in Eastern Europe was always an odd one in so far as there was no new revolutionary idea whose time had come. Indeed insistent demands for liberal democracy, and rather less insistent demands for a capitalist economy, might have been thought more a counterrevolutionary demand for the restoration of pre-communist tradition—except that,

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92 93 94 95 96 97

Notes Czechoslovakia apart, there was no tradition of democracy and little tradition of bourgeois capitalism to restore. Revolutions … are also ‘accompanied by and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’. In Eastern Europe, however, one could speak variously of civil society against the party-state, popular demonstrations, even national liberation, but not properly of class-based revolts” (G.A. Christopher Bryant and Edmund Mokrzycki, eds., The New Great Transformation? Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 1). Because the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe was so quick and so complete, references to revolution will no doubt continue. Critics have used different variations of the term “revolution” to define the events of 1989. “Bruszt (1990) refers to the ‘negotiated revolution’ in Hungary, a more euphonious term than Garton Ash’s ‘refolution.’ Many Hungarians speak even less dramatically of rendszerváltás, an exchange of systems. Similarly, the common description of a ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia recalls a tradition of non-violence in that country” (Bruszt (1990), 1–2). Weiner uses yet another term to designate the shift from communist to post-communist society—he calls it the “great transformation” (Robert Weiner, Change in Eastern Europe (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994), 3), recalling Polanyi’s celebrated work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; see Bryant and Mokrzycki, The New Great Transformation?, 4). “Transformation” has often been employed interchangeably with “transition,” but Bryant and Mokrzycki argue that there is a good reason to prefer the former term. They write: “The very language of transition assumes an outcome which in reality is far from guaranteed” (Bryant and Mokrzycki, 3). It hides “ ‘teleological constructs in which concepts are driven by hypothesized end-states. Presentist history finds its counterpart here in futurist transitology.’ Like Stark we prefer to speak not of transitions, with the emphasis on destinations, but rather of transformations, with the emphasis on actual processes ‘in which the introduction of new elements takes place most typically in combination with adaptations, rearrangements, permutations, and reconfigurations of already existing institutional forms’ ” (Bryant and Mokrzycki, 3–4). Todorov, Red Square, 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xii. See Gospodinov, Lapidarium, contents. Todorov, Red Square, 3. Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 6, italics added: “Искаш ли да станеш дума—пита камъкът. Аз съм дума—казах каменно и потънах в него …” Gospodinov, Lapidarium, 22: “ULTIMUS LAPIS: Който от вас е по-жив от лежащия тук, нека положи камъка.”

Chapter 3 Parts of this chapter appeared in “Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry.” Studies in Twentieth and TwentyFirst Century Literature 29, no. 2 (2005): 246–281.

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See Dzhimbinov, Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei (Literary Manifestoes from Symbolism to Nowadays), 508. The literary manifestoes of metarealism can also be found in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (Mikhail Epstein, with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka VladivGlover, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999)) and, in the Russian original, in Mikhail Epstein’s Postmodern v Rossii. Literatura i teoriya (Mikhail Epstein, Postmodern v Rossii. Literatura i teoriya (Moscow : Izdanie R. Elinina, 2000), 106–40). It should be noted that the metarealist manifestoes were written by Mikhail Epstein, a literary scholar, not by any of the poets themselves. An exception is Konstantin Kedrov, another author of a metarealist manifesto, also known as a writer of both poetry and criticism, but he has not had a particularly vast influence. It seems important to acknowledge that even before having any manifestoes or being recognized as belonging to a common school (still in the 1970s), the authors later known as “metarealists” were creating a significant body of poetic production. “By the mid 1970s,” Thomas Epstein observes referring to the metarealist poets, “…a new generation of poets burrowed underground, creating a body of texts whose significance only became apparent in the early 1990s” (Thomas Epstein, “Metarealism,” in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, ed. John High, et al. (Jersey City : Talisman House, 2000), 87). While most critics agree on using the term “metarealism” or “metametaphorism” to designate the new poetic school, they differ largely when it comes to naming its representatives and major poets. Critics such as Kuritsyn and Dzhimbinov, for example, who call the school “metametaphorism,” see as its leading representatives Zhdanov, Parshchikov, and Eremenko (see Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 133, and Dzhimbinov, Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, 508). In the same work, however, Dzhimbinov admits: “Inogda k metametaforistam, bez dostatochnykh na to osnovanii, prichisliaiut poetessu Ol’gu Sedakovu” “Sometimes, without much basis for this, Ol’ga Sedakova is reckoned among the metametaphorist group” (Dzhimbinov, Literaturnye manifesty, 508). In his “Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism” (1983), Epstein makes a much stronger assertion about Sedakova’s alliance with the metarealist school: “An example of the most consistent and extreme metarealism is the poetry of Ol’ga Sedakova, whose images are pure religious archetypes and as such form almost transparent signs” (Mikhail Epstein, “Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism,” in Russian Postmodernism, 108). Other critics, such as Vladimir Aristov, Thomas Epstein, and Mikhail Epstein, who choose to use the term “metarealism” rather than “metametaphorism” (though, in “Observations on meta,” Aristov acknowledges both terms, which he often replaces with the less specific “meta movement” or “meta type of poetry” (Vladimir Aristov, “Observations on meta,” in Re-Entering the Sign, ed. Berry and Miller-Pogacar), view as much larger the group of metarealist poets: for Aristov it includes Ivan Zhdanov, Alexei Parshchikov, Alexander Eremenko, Ilya Kutik, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Yuri Arabov, Evgenii Daenin, and others (Aristov, “Observations on meta,” 221–22); for Thomas Epstein—Zhdanov, Krivulin, Sedakova, Aristov, Shvarts, Eremenko, Parshchikov, Kutik, Kondakova, and Dragomoshchenko (Epstein, “Metarealism,” in Crossing Centuries, 87–88), and for Mikhail Epstein—Sedakova, Shvarts, Zhdanov, Krivulin, Aristov, Dragomoshchenko, and Dmitrii Shchedrovitskii (Epstein, After the Future, 38). In “What is Metarealism? Facts and Hypotheses,” Mikhail Epstein also

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Notes mentions Parshchikov, Kutik, and Eremenko (Mikhail Epstein, “What is Metarealism? Facts and Hypotheses,” in Russian Postmodernism, 118). None of the classifications of metarealist poets, however, has been fully accepted by the poets, who have often felt that their works contain distinct and singular religious underpinnings, as well as by the critics themselves, who have discerned the problems of grouping thoroughly unique artistic talents under a common denominator. Thomas Epstein, for example, gives voice to the unease that critics feel about the inclusion of distinctly different poets within the same poetic school, which he prefers to call metarealism. “To talk about these poets as a ‘group’ is something of a misnomer,” Thomas Epstein argues. “[T]hey wrote no manifestoes, marched under no banner, created no single linguistic or symbolic code” (Epstein, “Metarealism,” 87). To account more accurately for the specificities of their writing, the critic divides these poets into two sub-groups. The first, in his opinion, includes the writers Eremenko, Parshchikov, Kutik, Kondakova, and Dragomoshchenko, who “explore the limits and powers of language to name the real and of metaphor to link disparate level of experience” (Epstein, “Metarealism,” 87). The second sub-group, Thomas Epstein argues, consists of Zhdanov, Krivulin, Sedakova, Aristov, and Shvarts, “poets whose works could never be mistaken one for the other, [but who] nevertheless share an abiding faith in the lyric voice, in the myth-making powers of language, in the presence of the past in the present, and of the spiritual mystery of life and death” (Epstein, “Metarealism,” 88). In a similar vein, speaking of the poets Parshchikov, Eremenko, and Zhdanov, Kuritsyn remarks: “эти авторы настолько разные, что соединять их под одной плохоспецифицированной вывеской ‘метаметафоризма’ совсем неправильно” “these authors are so different that to unite them under one, ill-defined rubric— ‘metametaphorism’—is altogether erroneous” (Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 133). Still, Kuritsyn discerns a common ground within the works of these three writers: “это, видимо, так, но есть по крайней мере один признак, по которому эти поэты оказываются близки друг другу: каждый в своей стилистике, все они воспроизводили схожие ‘виртуальные’ фигуры” “This appears to be the case, but there is at least one sign that brings these poets close to one another: each and all of them, in their stylistics, have reproduced similar ‘virtual’ figures” (Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 133). Discussing the poetry of Zhdanov, Kuritsyn gives the following definition of a “virtual figure”: Одна из популярных и еффектных “виртуальных” фигур—овеществление абстракций и наделение сущностей свойствами других сущностей. “И птица, и полет в ней слиты воедино”—полет абстрагируется от субъекта и предстает самостоятельной сущностью, способной быть грамматически однородной птице. В другом месте: “летит полет без птиц”. Еще в другом такой способностью вести себя как величины, обладающие физическим телом, обладают еще две абстракции: “плывет глубина по осенней воде и тяжесть течет, омывая предметы.” One of the popular and effective “virtual” figures is the substantiation of abstraction and the endowment of essences with the properties of other essences. “Both the bird and the flight in it are merged in one”—the flight is

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abstracted from the subject and presents an independent entity that is capable of being a grammatically homogenous bird. In another place: “the flight flies without a bird.” In yet another, such an ability to behave like a property, possessed by a physical object, is owned by two other abstractions: “depth swims in the autumn water and weight flows, washing objects.” (Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm, 133) Unless otherwise indicated, all works from the Russian collections have been translated by me. 2

Many critics, such as Stephanie Sandler and Catriona Kelly, for example, have discussed Sedakova and Shvarts together. “Critics often mention her [Shvarts’s] name in the same breath as that of Ol’ga Sedakova,” Sandler observes (Stephanie Sandler, “Elena Shvarts,” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Christine D. Tomei (New York: Garland Press, 1999), 1459). Kelly traces the historical formation of both poets and claims that Sedakova, along with Shvarts, “is probably the most important woman poet in the post-Stalinist tradition of ‘internal emigration’ ” (Catriona Kelly, “Ol’ga Sedakova (1949–),” A History of Russian Women’s Writing (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1994), 423). To Sandler, on the other hand, the most visible commonality between the poetry of Shvarts and Sedakova resides in the emphatically spiritual dimension of their work, in the aspirations of both poets to transcend the concrete historical moment and conquer new spiritual realms. In Sandler’s words, “[s]ome of the best recent poetry, including that of Elena Shvarts and Ol’ga Sedakova, sidesteps historical realia to reinvent Russia’s poetry of the spirit” (Stephanie Sandler, “Women’s Poetry since the Sixties,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 264). Despite acknowledging the similarities between the poetry of Sedakova and Shvarts, however, Sandler alerts us to the inappropriateness of linking Sedakova’s name exclusively to that of Shvarts. “[T]he similarity [between Sedakova and Shvarts] seems largely that of age group and gender,” Sandler remarks (Sandler, “Elena Shvarts,” 1459). In “Women’s Poetry since the Sixties,” she gives us a compelling reason for eschewing the seemingly apparent and automatic pairing of Shvarts with Sedakova: Few would like being grouped as “women poets” (the derogatory sting of the term poetessa remains offensive) … Shvarts [shares more] with Viktor Krivulin, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Nikolai Zabolotskii, than they do with each other. Women poets’ primary allegiance is not to other women poets, and none of them makes genuine and complete sense outside the context of their male contemporaries and precursors. (Sandler, “Women’s Poetry since the Sixties,” 265) Other critics, such as Vladislav Kulakov, for example, have also considered the poetry of Shvarts closer to that of Krivulin (the two of them being the leading figures in the “unofficial,” samizdat poetry of Leningrad and having a similar poetic style). Kulakov has argued, “The poems of I. Zhdanov and O. Sedakova, with their personal, maximally subjective mythology, are one thing; the more analytical poetry of the St. Petersburg poets E. Shvarts and V. Krivulin, with their pull toward play and stylization, is quite another” (Vladislav Kulakov, “What’s Needed in Lyricism. The

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3

4

5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12

13

Notes Poetry of the ‘New Wave,’ ” Znamia, 12 (1991), Russian Studies in Literature, 29(4) (1993): 88). It is of note that Sedakova and Shvarts themselves recognize the great affinity of their work, and feel a profound closeness and extreme respect for one another. In her interview with Valentina Polukhina, for instance, Sedakova has commented on numerous occasions on the immediate and intimate connection that bonds her world to the poetic world of Shvarts: Polukhina: “Who do you feel closest to among the poets who are getting published?” Sedakova: “First and foremost there is Elena Shvarts, a powerful poet with rare gifts” (Ol’ga Sedakova, interview by Valentina Polukhina, “Conform not to this Age: An Interview with Ol’ga Sedakova,” in Reconstructing the Canon: Russian Writing in the 1980s, ed. Arnold B. McMillin (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 35). Speaking of “those poets who are closest to me [her],” Sedakova mentions first the name of Shvarts (Sedakova, 43). She is quick to acknowledge “the shattering effect” that Shvarts’s poetry produced on her when she first read it (Sedakova, 72). “I got to know Elena Shvarts’s poetry in 1975 or 1976 and it made me extremely jealous,” Sedakova remarks (Sedakova, 48). “A great poet and she is alive? I sensed her poetic primacy, the purity of her tone. But I knew it was another world and, though I felt less pleasure in mine, I could not follow in her footsteps. I am deeply grateful for having met her. She made me feel freer in my own world….” (Sedakova, 48). Viktor Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam: tri knigi stikhov trekh poslednikh let, 1990– 1992 [A Pre-Commissioned Concert: Three Books with Verses from the Last Three Years, 1990–1992, Концерт по заявкам] (Series: Peterburgskoe selo. Unknown binding, 1993). Viktor Krivulin, Novoe zrenie. Stikhi [New Vision. Poems; Новое зрение] (LeningradParis: Beseda, 1988). Kontsert po zaiavkam, 41: “…покачнулся мир—и только что не рухнет” Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 136, italics added: “Переменился климат в одночасье,/ пошло, поэхало … /Пойдем,/пойдем куда-нибудь, куда и не глядят/мои глаза, куда не видно входа,/где снег лежит, как белая свобода/на дне земли, не превращенной в сад.” Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 74, italics added: “клубится пар, сияет позолота/ середь зимы -/внезапная свобода.” Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 23, italics added: “…но в одну/минуту все, действительно, смешалось/Какие-то пришли, рассыпали набор -/и вдребезги очки! О чем я? эта жалость -/куда ее? Обрыв. Колеблющийся бор/слабей травы. Растерянность…” Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 136, italics added: “Время не остановилось/нет, как речка на морозе,/отвердело, заискрилось,/радуясь метаморфозе./эхали или стояли -/время выскользнуло, да и нас перенесло/за границу состояний/через Красное Число.” Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 63: “мы живем—ты говоришь—после истории/в поле где стоят одни названия/в чистом поле…” Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 12: “верхний свет и непреодолимый/усильем времени удержанный порыв/сюда/навстречу -/если мы войдем/и остановимся как будто пережив/самих себя.” Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 138: “есть на это переломная эпоха,/недопрожитый закат позавчерашный.”

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14 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 145: “Я знаю: мы давно уже не там/живем, где значимся, … /где знают нас и очно и заглазно…” 15 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 137: “Я похож на графический лист, не сумевший снести/ грандиозного замысла.” 16 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 87: “где он теперь, если все наконец разрешили?” 17 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 139: “Той правды, какую хотелось бы всем,/не знаю и знать не хочу … /и не пожелал бы другому/такой оголенности и недоуменья…” 18 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 32: “и все же/мне жаль многозначительных темнот/полутонов и тех полусвобод -/свобода полная, она их уничтожит.” 19 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 5, italics added. 20 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 5: “чистую ноту взятую там, на сцене … /под искусственным ветром она достигает цели/ускользающей от моего сознанья.” 21 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 139, italics added: “Приказано трезветь. Печальнее приказа/не знаю.” 22 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 134: “Нет, не пьянит меня воздух, отпущенный сверху!/ Да, я дышу, но когда отовсюду я слышу:/Ну-ка вдохни этот воздух, отпущенный сверху!/Слышишь—дыши!/а иначе … иначе я слышу./Что остается еще, как не слышать, когда отовсюду/жирная брызжет свобода пудовыми каплями нефти,/ аж задыхаешься—как бы уйти отовсюду,/где я живу и дышу, задыхаясь под запахом нефти.” 23 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 81. 24 Krivulin, Novoe zrenie, 140: “… шизофреник/является ко мне разбитым на куски,/ без дела крепкого без денег … /Ввалилась множественность в облике одном,/в убитом нейролептиками теле/сокрытый Бог на языке родном/залепетал несвязанно, без цели…” 25 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 96. 26 Krivulin, Kontsert po zaiavkam, 88. 27 Ol’ga Sedakova, “Zakliuchenie (‘Conclusion’),” in Vrata, Okna, Arki, ed. Ol’ga Sedakova (Paris: YMCA Press, 1986), 112. 28 Valentina Polukhina, “Ol’ga Sedakova,” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Christine D. Tomei (New York: Garland Press, 1999), 1449. 29 Sedakova, in “Conform Not to this Age,” 45. 30 Sedakova, in “Conform Not to this Age,” 49. 31 Sedakova, in “Conform Not to this Age,” 49. 32 Andrew Wachtel and Alexei Parshchikov, “Introduction,” in Third Wave, 5. 33 Wachtel and Parshchikov, “Introduction,” 5. 34 Russian Symbolism developed in the period 1892–1910. 35 Interestingly, Sedakova also stresses the vatic element in poetry: “I think that the primordial nature of poetry, the hierophantic and the vatical (in Latic vates meant poet and prophet) does not vanish till the end…” (Sedakova, in “Conform Not to this Age,” 63). 36 Epstein, After the Future, 37–38. 37 Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79–80. 38 Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79. 39 Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79. 40 Polukhina, “Conform Not to this Age,” Introduction, 33. 41 Kelly, “Ol’ga Sedakova,” 424. 42 Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79.

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43 Mikhail Epstein, “Afterward: Metamorphosis,” in Third Wave, ed. Johnson and Ashby, 282. While the critics who prefer the term “metarealism” pronounce the birth of the “metabole” (the term was coined in December 1982, following the Exhibition of Hyperrealists and the ensuing debate at the House of Artists—see Mikhail Epstein, Russian Postmodernism, 118), those who have called the school “metametaphorism” postulate another novel literary trope: the “metametaphor.” In 1983, Kedrov defined the metametaphor in the following manner: Метаметафора—это метафора, где каждая вещь—вселенная. Такой метафоры раньше не было. Раньше все сравнивали. Поэт как солнце, или как река, или как трамвай. Человек и есть все то, о чем пишет. Здесь нет дерева отдельно от земли, земли отдельно от неба, неба отдельно от космоса, космоса отдельно от человека. Это зрение человека вселенной. Это метаметафора. Метаметафора отличается от метафоры как метагалактика от галактики. Привыкайте к метаметафорическому зрению, и глаз ваш увидит в тысячу раз больше, чем видел раньше. (The metametaphor—this is a metaphor where every object is a universe. This kind of metaphor has not existed so far. Before now, everything has been compared. The poet—like the sun, or like a river, or like a tram. People, in fact, are all of what they write about. There is no tree separate from the earth, no earth separate from the sky, no sky separate from the cosmos, no cosmos separate from humans. This is the universal vision of people. This is the metametaphor. The metametaphor differs from the metaphor the way a metagalaxy differs from a galaxy. Get used to the metametaphoric vision, and your eyes will see a thousand times more than they used to see before). (Konstantin Kedrov, “Rozhdenie Metametafory,” ‘The Birth of the Metametaphor,’ in Literaturnye manifesty, ed. S.B. Dzhimbinov, 509) Kedrov, the main theoretician of the metametaphor, “that is, of the condensed, total metaphor, compared to which the common metaphor must look partial and timid” (“то есть сгущенной, тотальной метафоры, по сравнению с которой обычная метафора должна выглядеть частичной и робкой,” Kedrov, “Rozhdenie Metametafory,” 508), exemplifies this literary trope in a poem which, according to Dzhimbinov, can be regarded as the artistic manifesto of metametaphorism. The name of the poem is “Komp’iuter liubvi” (“The Computer of Love,” 1990) and what follows is a short excerpt from it: Небо—это ширина взгляда/взгляд—это глубина неба/боль—это прикосновенье Бога/Бог—это прикосновенье боли/сон—это ширина души/душа—это глубина сна … /мысль—это немота души/душа— это нагота мысли/нагота—это мысль души … /печаль—это пустота пространства/радость—это полнота времени/время—это печаль пространства/пространство—это полнота времени…. (The sky—that is the breadth of sight/sight—that is the depth of the sky/pain— that is the touch of God/God—that is the touch of pain/Sleep—that is the

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breadth of the soul/the soul—that is the depth of sleep … /thought—that is the muteness of the soul/the soul—that is the nakedness of thought/nakedness— that is the thought of the soul … /grief—that is the emptiness of space/joy— that is the fullness of time/time—that is the grief of space/space—that is the fullness of time … Kedrov, “Rozhdenie Metametafory,” 509–10). Based on the poem by Kedrov, with the metametaphor, one thing is no longer similar to another—rather it IS this other. Such a definition of the metametaphor is very close to Mikhail Epstein’s definition of the metabole, the only difference being that, with the metabole, one thing not simply IS another, but rather, constantly BECOMES this other. The emphasis is on the transformational activity and metamorphic processes defining our universe, rather than, as it seems with Kedrov, on the resultant of these processes. The more process-oriented approach of Epstein transpires in the very term he coins, “metabole,” which, as he explains, comes from the Greek word metabole (“change,” “turn,” “shift”) and literally means “to cross over,” “to throw over,” “change of place,” “change of direction” (Epstein, Russian Postmodernism, 119). 44 Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79. 45 Epstein, “Afterward: Metamorphosis,” 283. 46 In its unlimited transfigurational capacity and in the effort to transcend the “figurative vs. literal” dichotomy, the metabole invokes the manner, in which a rhizome (as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) functions. As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, the rhizome is a non-centered, multidimensional, and dynamic structure, displaying radical defiance to all binary logic in favor of multiple entrywayexit configurations. Delineating the main characteristics of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari postulate: [U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point…. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills…. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature…. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21)

47 48 49 50

It is in their openness to new connections and in their becoming capacity that the rhizome and the metabole are most remarkable. Metaphors remain just rudimentary tropes, “only the signs of metamorphoses that have not taken place and in the course of which things really, not apparently, exchange their essences” (Epstein, “Afterward: Metamorphosis,” 282). Russian metarealist poems, as Mikhail Epstein remarks, intently seek “that reality wherein metaphor is again revealed as metamorphosis, as an authentic intercommonality, rather than the symbolic similarity of two phenomena” (Epstein, “Afterward: Metamorphosis,” 282). Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 79. Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 80. Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 80. Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 80.

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56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

66 67 68

Notes Sedakova, Vrata, Okna, Arki, 80. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. Ol’ga Sedakova, “Kolybel’naia” (“A Lullaby”), Vrata, Okna, Arki, 105. Valentina Polukhina, “Ol’ga Sedakova,” 1450. The works of Sedakova exhibit a wonderful quality of purity and inner depth. The poet withdraws with utmost humility, refusing to assert herself in any way and leaving space for the only meaningful voice—that of the spirit. “Over the years she [Sedakova] developed her own inner theme and purity of tone,” Polukhina observes. “She never was attracted by an emphatic style with willfully deformed imagery and staccato movements. Her style is inward, elusive and simple. ‘The expurgation of intentions’ (T. S. Eliot) is her major concern: not to succumb to the temptation of creating something unnecessary” (Polukhina, “Ol’ga Sedakova,” 1448). In contrast to the carefully chiseled out and measured style of Sedakova, the style of Shvarts at times exhibits a tint of superfluity and pretentiousness. As Kelly remarks, other poets have attacked Shvarts for being a “ ‘graphomaniac’ (an evocative Russian term suggesting pretentious logorrhea)” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 416). Such attacks, in Kelly’s mind, “cannot be entirely discounted. Shvarts is not the most consistent of poets, and her less successful poetry can seem lurid and excessive” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 416). Mark Lipovetskii, “Patogenez i lechenie glukhonemoty: poety i postmodernizm,” Novy mir, 7(807) (1992): 216: “Gran, otdeliaiushchaia kipiashchii zhizn’iu khaos ot bezdny nebytiia, nezametna—‘my stoim na poroge, ne znaia, chto eto porog.’ ” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 508. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 509. Elena Shvarts, “Simbioz,” Lotsiya nochi: Kniga poem, 41–42. Shvarts, “Simbioz,” 41. Darra Goldstein, “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” in Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo (Armonk, New York; London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 264. Viacheslav Kuritsyn, “Prekrasnoe iazycheskoe bormotanie,” Oktiabr’: Literaturnokhudozhestvennyi i obshchestvenno-politicheskii zhurnal, 2(1990): 207. Goldstein, “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” 246. Most memorable are the images of oak-trees in Pushkin’s “Брожу ли я вдоль улиц шумных” and “Когда за городом, задумчив я брожу”; Lermontov’s “Выхожу один я на дорогу”; Tiutchev’s “От жизни той, что бушевала здесь”; Zabolotskii’s “Завещание,” etc. Shvarts, “Simbioz,” 42, italics added. Elena Shvarts, “Kh’iumbi: Prakticheskii ocherk evoliutsionnogo alkhimizma,” Lotsiya nochi: Kniga poem, 21. The rhizomatic interrelation of various beings within the bounds of one common body is frequently observed in Shvarts’s poetry. In “Zver’-tsvetok” (“Beast-Flower” 1976), for instance, Shvarts invents a poetic persona that is neither an animal nor a plant, but is, instead, conjoined in a rhizomatic way with both of these poetic entities. As Sandler observes in her essay on Shvarts, included in Russian Women Writers, the poet “describ[es] how her body will send forth shoots of a new entity once she is dead

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and buried. In ‘Beast-Flower’ Shvarts blurs the boundaries between life and death, animal and plant, object and person….” (Sandler, “Elena Shvarts,” 1460). Elena Shvarts, “Temnyi angel,” Lotsiya nochi: Kniga poem, 32. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. Shvarts, “Temnyi angel,” 32. Kuritsyn, “Prekrasnoe iazycheskoe bormotanie” [A Beautiful Heathen Muttering], 206. Kuritsyn, “Prekrasnoe iazycheskoe bormotanie,” 207. Critics, such as Sandler and Kelly, have also commented on the radically transfigurational character of Shvarts’s poetry, on the “extraordinary instance[s] of Shvarts’s border crossings” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 414). The deterritorializing processes that take place in the verse of Shvarts are sometimes so inclusive and far-reaching that it is difficult to pin down the very identity of the speaker. In her analysis of “Sale of a Historian’s Library,” for instance, Kelly sees the protagonist as “floating from man to woman and back again” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 415). Kelly reveals that the historian becomes in turn Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and Marat. Furthermore, she demonstrates that “[f]rom female victim, he becomes female aggressor, and then male aggressor as victim” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 415). Shvarts’s works, however, go beyond transgressing the concept of gender and attempt the even more astounding transmutation of the human into the divine. In a poem from the cycle “Horror Eroticus,” the heroine speaks in the words of Adam and implores God to create a new angelic being from her rib. Apart from suggesting the transcendence of the human essence in the act of making a divine creature from the body of a mortal, Shvarts denies the new being any fixed identity and permanent characteristics: it is “not a man, not a woman, not something in between”: “Я бы вынула ребро свое тонкое,/из живого вырезала бы тела я./Сотвори из него мне только Ты/друга верного, мелкого, белого./Нe мужа, нe жену, нe среднего,/a скорлупою одетого ангела….” “I would pull out my slender rib,/would tear it from my living body,/if You would only make from it/a faithful friend for me, small, gleaming white./Not a man, not a woman, not something in between,/but an angel dressed in mother-of-pearl….” (Elena Shvarts, Tantsuiushchii David: Stikhi raznykh let [The Dancing David: Poems from Different Years] 53, trans. by Catriona Kelly, in Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 414). Beside problematizing the binary oppositions of male/female, human/divine, Shvarts’s works stage a radical conversion of the human speaker in an inanimate, non-human entity. As Sandler observes in her discussion of “Zemlia, zemlia, ty esh’ liudei” (“Earth, earth, you eat people,” 1981), “The poet, in her ingestion of the earth, becomes earth, and when she describes the chewing, thinking and food-producing earth she is also describing herself ” (Stephanie Sandler, “Elena Shvarts and the Distances of Self-Disclosure,” in Reconstructing the Canon: Russian Writing in the 1980s, 95). In fact, it is this willingness of the poet to blend with the non-human universe, to become a part of the divine or simply reunite with mother earth, that Sandler uses to explain a paradox she finds in Shvarts’s work. In Sandler’s mind, this paradox consists in Shvarts’s eagerness to launch communication with her readers, while, at the same time, actively frustrating their efforts to enter her intensely private world (see Sandler’s “Elena Shvarts and the Distance of Self-Disclosure”). But how could Shvarts confide in other human beings when, in her poems, she describes herself as altogether different from them? Nothing about the poet is human and

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76 77

78

79

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Notes ordinary. The food she desires “is not a material substance in her poems; … it is … a symbol of spiritual sustenance much as Christ’s body and blood are imagined in the ritual of the eucharist” (Sandler’s “Elena Shvarts and the Distance of Self-Disclosure,” 91); the friend’s breast milk that she tastes in “Vospominanie o strannom ugoshchenii” (“Memory of a Strange Treat,” 1976) is “taken not to quench thirst, but to satisfy the soul” (Sandler’s “Elena Shvarts and the Distance of Self-Disclosure,” 92). Indeed, neither the lyric speaker in the works of Shvarts nor anything in her transgressive poetry can be reduced to any strict identity. Even the most banal and commonplace realities partake of an incessant process of transfiguration and becoming. In “The Elder Nun” from Trudy i dni Lavinii, for example, the needle that the heroine engulfs as she consumes her soup miraculously turns into a sting the moment that she spits it out (Elena Shvarts, Trudy i dni Lavinii, monakhini ordena Obrezaniia serdtsa (ot Rozhdestva do Paskhi) (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987), 76). Elena Shvarts, qtd. in Stephanie Sandler, “Cultural Memory and Self-Expression in a Poem by Elena Shvarts,” Rereading Russian Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 268. Elena Shvarts, “Statement,” trans. Barbara Heldt, in Third Wave, ed. Johnson and Ashby, 211. Michael Molnar, “Introduction,” in Paradise: Selected Poems. By Elena Shvarts, intro. and trans. Michael Molnar (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993), 11. Among the works of Shvarts that show extensive use of theological and sacral imagery is her cycle of 79 short poems, entitled Trudy i dni Lavinii, monakhini iz ordena Obrezaniia serdtsa (Ot Rozhdestva do Paskhi) [The Works and Days of Lavinia, Nun from the Order of the Circumcision of the Heart, From Christmas to Easter, 1987]. As Goldstein reveals in her analysis of this work, the heart in it becomes the organ that negotiates between the concrete, everyday world and the intangible, religious universe (“the world of the unseen, with its spirits and demons”—Goldstein, “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” 239). The heart is populated with inhabitants who are endowed with the potential to span the gap between these two worlds. Moreover, Goldstein notes, “the heart’s inhabitants take their place amid larger edifices. The body that houses them is no longer merely a body but a church (‘Kak budto ia stala sama/miagkoiu beloiu tserkov’iu’ ‘As if I myself had become/a soft white church’ [Shvarts, Trudy, 44]), or even a city” (Goldstein, “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” 244–45). The task of the poet becomes to enclose all the suffering of the world within this holy city and then transform the earthly anguish into a universe of harmony and ecstasy. In the mind of Goldstein, this is quite possible to achieve, for, as she puts it, “anguish brings insight” (Goldstein, “The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts,” 249). Sedakova’s first collection in Russia, composed of three separate short books of verse (The Chinese Journey. Steles and Epigraphs. Old Songs), appeared in 1990, and Shvarts did not publish her first book in the USSR before 1989. Sandler also notes the emotional and psychological intensity of Shvarts’s work. In her words, “Unlike Sedakova’s acerbic metaphysical musings, Shvarts writes with the emotional violence of Tsvetaeva and the psychological urgency of Dostoevsky” (Sandler, “Elena Shvarts,” 1459). A number of critics, such as Sandler, Goldstein, Kuritsyn, Molnar, and Kelly, have commented on the dynamic and surprising variations defining Shvarts’s style. “Shvarts appears to take pleasure in shifting themes and rhythms unexpectedly,

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and she produces paradox at all levels of her work—theme, form, diction, and tone,” Sandler observes (“Cultural Memory and Self-Expression in a Poem by Elena Shvarts,” 256). “Much of her [Shvarts’s] poetry relies on a rapid shifting of rhythm and rhyme, creating tension and dynamism in the poems…. Shvarts subjects her verse lines to often jarring alternations, inducing a poetic arhythmia that heightens the discord of the heart” (Sandler, “Cultural Memory and Self-Expression in a Poem by Elena Shvarts,” 243–44). In a similar stance, Molnar comments on the style of Shvarts: “Avoiding fixed schemes and structures, she continually changes speed, rhythm and line length” (Molnar, “Introduction,” 12). Kelly is even more specific in outlining the experimental quality of Shvarts’s work, pointing to the poet’s creation of “the approximate rhyme” as an instance of it: “Shvarts showed great originality in terms of imagery, and also in terms of metrics, her use of approximate rhyme being especially novel and ingenious” (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 411). In a peculiarly insightful manner, Kuritsyn suggests a connection between the poetic world of Shvarts, bursting with new energy and creation, and the rhythm and structure of her verse, constantly changing to reflect it: “Takovo kipenie suverennogo mira Shvarts—kakie uzh tut strogie ritmy! Struktura stikha [Shvarts] nikogda pochti ne mozhet byt tochno opredelena,—ona vsia—izmenchivost, vsia—v dvizheniie.” “Such is the boiling of Shvarts’s sovereign world—what strict rhythms could we speak of here! The structure of [Svarts’s] verse could almost never be accurately determined,—it is all mutability, all—in movement” (Kuritsyn, “Prekrasnoe iazycheskoe bormotanie,” 206). 81 In the words of Kelly, If Ol’ga Sedakova is an exceptional instance of a Russian poet who is a modernist in the Western sense, then, by contrast, Shvarts’s eclecticism, humour, and vitality make her perhaps the Russian woman poet who would be best fitted by the label “post-modernist,” assuming that these denominations are taken to refer to distinct but coexisting and complementary types of sensibility in twentieth-century tradition, rather than to successive phases in literary history’s linear progression. (Kelly, “Elena Shvarts,” 422) In his essay “The Youngest Archaists: Kutik, Sedakova, Kibirov, and Parshchikov,” Andrew Wachtel aligns Sedakova with the postmodernist rather than the modernist school due to the neoclassical tendencies he discovers in her work. Discussing poems by Kutik, Sedakova, Kibirov, and Parshchikov, Wachtel observes that these authors revive “primarily ‘outmoded’ genres last popular in Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as the solemn ode, the mock epic, and the lyrical epic poema” (Andrew Wachtel, “The Youngest Archaists: Kutik, Sedakova, Kibirov, and Parshchikov,” in Rereading Russian Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 271). In his analysis of Sedakova’s “Gornaia oda” (“Mountain Ode,” 1986), Wachtel reveals that, apart from appearing in the neoclassical form of the solemn ode, the poem exhibits a prominent citationality—a borrowing of archaizing forms from neoclassical discourse which, to Wachtel, accounts for the peculiar posmodernist flavor of this work. As the critic remarks, “Citationality, although abundantly present in the works of all the modernists, tends to be veiled. In postmodernist practice, citationality tends to be more flamboyant, and the neoclassical dialogues that we have examined here fit well with this trend” (“Mountain Ode,” 1986, 286).

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4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19

Steve McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books, 2000), 113. A small group of poets wrote out of Washington, DC. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E produced fifteen issues, the last of which appeared as a special issue of Open Letter (Winter 1982). In 1984, an anthology was compiled and appeared from Southern Illinois University Press under the title The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Perelman’s way to refer to the school in The Marginalization of Poetry, 12. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 12. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 16. When employing for convenience the designation “movement” to refer to this phenomenon, I will also be using it in the sense that Perelman invests in the term: “a movement without specific manifestos or official membership.” He himself refers to Language writing by dubbing it a “movement” in poetry: “The poetic movement known as language writing or language poetry.…” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 11). Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 12–13. McCaffery, North of Intention, 144. McCaffery, North of Intention, 144. See Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 174. Alan Golding, “New, Newer, and Newest American Poetry,” Talisman, 23–26 (2001–2002): 692. Golding, “New, Newer, and Newest American Poetry,” 692. Lyn Hejinian, “The Eternal Repository,” interview by Dodie Bellamy, Chain, 2 (Spring 1995): 21. Golding, “New, Newer, and Newest American Poetry,” 693. Golding saw the quote in a newspaper while travelling to present the talk from which his essay “New, Newer, and Newest American Poetry” derived. See his North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986. See, for example, Barrett Watten’s “The Secret History of the Equal Sign. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse and Text,” The Constructivist Moment (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003): 50–51. McCaffery, North of Intention, 110. Interestingly, the agenda of Language writers has been seen to resemble such earlier developments in Russian culture as the project of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915 (Roman Jakobson and Osip Brik—its major figures) and the formalist theory produced by the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) in St. Petersburg (Boris Eichenbaum, Lev Yakubinsky, and Viktor Shklovsky). Critics, such as Mikhail Epstein and Walter Kalaidjian, have observed a connection between the late avant-garde school of Language poetry and the early avant-garde trend of Russian Futurism, whose foremost representatives are the poets Vladimir Maiakovsky and Velemir Khlebnikov. For more on the subject, see Epstein’s After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture and Kalaidjian’s “Transpersonal Poetics: Language Writing and the Historical Avant-Gardes in Postmodern Culture.” Marjorie Perloff, “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?” Postmodern Culture, 3 (2) (1993), http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.193/sympos-2.193.

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20 In the face of this similarity, however, Perelman calls for acknowledging the differences between Language poetry and Russian postmodernism. Describing Hejinian’s novel Oxota, he writes: “But while Oxota is more or less paratactic from line to line, the lines themselves gesture toward a continuity with their Russian surroundings in a spirit that is much different from the new sentence” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 74). He further recounts: “Leningrad, a collaborative account of a prior trip to the Soviet Union written by Hejinian, Silliman, Barrett Watten, and Michael Davidson, records a Russian saying to Silliman: ‘You speak as one who comes from a land of objects, therefore it is easy for you to conceive of language as an object, as objective, whereas we do not’ ” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 75). Indeed, in contrast to the West’s overproduction of objects in a culture of consumerism, “[i]n the world of Oxota…, there is not enough of anything: chickens, paper, living space are constantly being sought; connection itself becomes a luxury and metaphorical extravaganzas fill the gaps between things: ‘Ostap pointed toward a slab of frying spam and said, that organism is what we call fruit’ (47)” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 75). While making use of the same devices (parataxis, the new sentence, etc.) that the Language poets employ, Oxota, Perelman reveals, “demonstrates one way parataxis operates in a context of scarcity” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 75). On the grounds of this distinction, Perelman concludes: “Oxota seems poised between the West’s late capitalism and the peculiar status of Russia in 1990, where there is no settled social system: hence rhetoric and genre are not fixed either” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 76). 21 Vitaly Chernetsky, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Mikhail Epstein, Lyn Hejinian, Jerome McGann, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, symposiasts. “Symposium on Russian Postmodernism,” Postmodern Culture, 3(2) (1993), http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/textonly/issue.193/sympos-1.193. 22 Chernetsky, Dragomoshchenko, Epstein, Hejinian, Gann, Perelman and Perloff, symposiasts. “Symposium on Russian Postmodernism,” http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/ text-only/issue.193/sympos-1.193. 23 Chernetsky, Dragomoshchenko, Epstein, Hejinian, Gann, Perelman and Perloff, symposiasts. “Symposium on Russian Postmodernism,” http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/ text-only/issue.193/sympos-1.193. 24 Chernetsky, Dragomoshchenko, Epstein, Hejinian, Gann, Perelman and Perloff, symposiasts. “Symposium on Russian Postmodernism,” http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/ text-only/issue.193/sympos-1.193. 25 Andrew Wachtel and Alexei Parshchikov, The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby, 9. 26 Video art was born in the 1960s to reflect the artists’ disappointment with television’s drifting into the arms of the entertainment industry. It is for this reason that the first efforts in video are related to a bitter mockery of TV. “Best television is no television at all,” Nam June Paik used to shout in his historical performances of the early 1960s. 27 Watten, The Constructivist Moment, 50. 28 For a concise outline of the historical function of Language writing as referential critique, see Ronald Silliman, “from aRB,” Open Letter, 3 (7) (1977): 89–93. 29 McCaffery, North of Intention, 20. 30 Watten, The Constructivist Moment, 51. 31 Eliot Weinberger, “A Note on Montemora, America and the World,” Sulfur, 20 (Fall 1987): 197.

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32 Linda Reinfeld, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 55. 33 See Reinfeld, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, 55, italics added. 34 Bob Perelman, “Language Writing and Literary History,” The Marginalization of Poetry, 17. 35 Weinberger, “A Note on Montemora, America and the World,” 197, italics added. 36 Bob Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” The Marginalization of Poetry, 63, italics added. 37 Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 63. 38 Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 69. 39 Perloff points to these features as the most distinctive characteristics of Language poetry, which she defines in the following manner: “[a]ntisyntactical and antireferential lyric that goes by the name of Language poetry” (Marjorie Perloff, “The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing,” Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 45). 40 Golding, “New, Newer, Newest American Poetry,” 688. 41 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 15. 42 Jed Rasula, “The Politics of the Referent,” Open Letter, Third Series, (7) (Summer 1977): 89–93. 43 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 15. 44 Ronald Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 122. 45 See Reinfeld, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, 33. 46 McCaffery, North of Intention, 152. 47 McCaffery, North of Intention, 151. 48 Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 76. 49 McCaffery, North of Intention, 14. 50 McCaffery, North of Intention, 150. 51 McCaffery, North of Intention, 226. 52 Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), 36. 53 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 26. 54 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 26. 55 Andrews and Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, x. As McCaffery attests, “the return of ‘meaning,’ … to a productive rather than a consumptional zone of action, entailed a political gesture of the deepest and most contemporaneous urgency…” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 124). 56 McCaffery, North of Intention, 123.

Chapter 5 1 2 3

Qtd. in McCaffery’s Prior to Meaning, 75. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 60. “The Poetry Man: Interview with Bob Perelman,” May 19, 2005, http://www.dept. english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/bobp-interview.html.

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Charles Bernstein, “Bought off,” in Stigma (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), n. pag. Susan Howe, Singularities (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 68. Charles Bernstein, “Emotions of Normal People,” in Dark City (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994), 93. Perelman, “The Poetry Man: Interview with Bob Perelman,” n. pag. Bernstein, Dark City, 94, italics added. Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 57, italics added. Charles Bernstein, Disfrutes (Needham, MA: Potes and Poets, 1981), 9. Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 57. Bob Perelman, “Love and Probability,” in The Future of Memory (New York: Roof Books, 1998), 78–79. “To the Past,” The Future of Memory, 63. “Symmetry of Past and Future,” The Future of Memory, 112. “Ideal Poem,” The Future of Memory, 91. “To the Past,” The Future of Memory, 63. Bob Perelman, a.k.a. (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1979), 48–49. Bob Perelman, “An Alphabet of Literary History,” The Marginalization of Poetry, 148. “Artifice of Absorption,” A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9. Bob Perelman, “The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake,” The Future of Memory, 32. Charles Bernstein, “Palukaville,” in Poetic Justice (Baltimore, MD: Pod Books, 1979), 9. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 9. Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 59. Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 59. Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 59–60. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 12. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 10. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 12. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 9. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 10. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 10. Contrary to Fredric Jameson, who sees the disruption of signification and structure as producing “schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 26), Silliman (who coined the term and conceptualized the new sentence) discovers in this same rubble of poetic language, in the silence of blank spaces between linguistic constituents, the most genuine source of interaction and meaningfulness. In the words of Silliman himself, “The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. Its effects occur as much between as within sentences. Thus it reveals that the blank space, between words or sentences, is much more than the 27th letter of the alphabet” (Ronald Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1987), 92, italics added). The logic Silliman expounds is one of in-betweenness and exteriority, and not of inwardness and hidden meanings. “Truth” is no longer in the word itself. In the opinion of Edmond Jabès, quoted in Bernstein’s verse essay “Artifice of Absorption,” truth is “in the burning space between one letter and the next” (Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Yael, Elya, Aely, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 7). Language poetry thus

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Notes sets the stage for post-hermeneutic literary criticism—a criticism that dismantles the belief in literature as a domain of finite meanings and transcendental signifieds. While hermeneutics rests on the assumption that texts are what they are by virtue of our acts of exegesis and interpretation, post-hermeneutic criticism invalidates the search for meanings within the inner corpus of the text and practices, in Foucault’s terms, a thinking of the outside. Importantly, as Silliman remarks, “It [the new sentence] is the first prose technique to identify the signifier (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signified….” (Silliman, The New Sentence, 93). Paramount for the effect of the new sentence is not its capacity for conveying a definitive message or meaning, but, on the contrary, its ability to undermine any possibility for singular interpretation and articulation. Instead of pining after transcendental signifieds, the Language poet orchestrates an interplay of signifiers that operate in highly unconventional manner. The meaning of a Language poem is thus completely unpredictable and changeful, as it depends on the position of the signifiers, on their paratactic link with the adjacent words and sentences, on the distinctive spatial figures circumscribed by them. Bernstein, “Palukaville,” 11. Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative,” 61. Charles Bernstein, illustrations by Susan Howe, Log Rhythms (Granary Books, 1998), n. pag. Silliman, The New Sentence, 150. Bernstein, Log Rhythms, n. pag. Marjorie Perloff, “Signs are taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space,” Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, 108. Perloff, “Signs are taken for Wonders,” 109. Silliman, The New Sentence, 87. Silliman, The New Sentence, 91. Charles Bernstein, Islets/Irritations (New York: Jordan Davis, 1983), 61–69. See Silliman, The New Sentence, 92. Silliman, The New Sentence, 92. Silliman, The New Sentence, 92. Bernstein, A Poetics, 60. McCaffery, North of Intention, 26. Vicki Mistacco’s term, qtd. in McCaffery’s North of Intention, 149. Bernstein, Poetic Justice, 27. See McCaffery, North of Intention, 149. Bruce Andrews, Acappella (Ghost Dance Press, no. 17, 1973), n. pag. David Melnick, PCOET (San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975), section 37, n. pag. Bob Perelman, “Sense,” Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1985), 73. Perelman, “Sense,” 75. Joel Nickels, “Post-Avant-Gardism: Bob Perelman and the Dialectic of Futural Memory,” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, 11 (3) (2001): paragraph 8, http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/11/16/post-avantgardism-bob-perelman-and-the-dialectic-of-futural-memory-2. Quoted in Walter Kalaidjian, “Transpersonal Poetics: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing and the Historical Avant-Gardes,” in American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism & Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 198.

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57 Epstein, After the Future, 93–94. 58 Charles Bernstein, “The Dollar Value of Poetry,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. ed. Andrews and Bernstein, 140. 59 Marjorie Perloff, “The Coming of Age of Language Poetry,” Contemporary Literature, 38 (3) (Autumn 1997): 563. 60 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 9. 61 See Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 78. 62 Jerome McGann, “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes,” Critical Inquiry, 13 (Spring 1987), 636. 63 Reinfeld, Language Poetry, 34. 64 See McGann, “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes.” 65 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 41. 66 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 39. 67 Bernstein, Disfrutes, n. pag. 68 Andrews, “Text and Context,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews and Bernstein, 34. 69 Andrews, “Text and Context,” 34. 70 Bernstein, Disfrutes, n. pag., second poem on first page. 71 Steve McCaffery, Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 87. 72 Aleksei Kruchenykh, qtd. in Vladimir Markov’s “Cubo-Futurism,” in Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 128. 73 Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 10. 74 Bernstein, “Substance Abuse,” Islets/Irritations, 85. 75 Melnick, PCOET, # 77. 76 Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption” 12, italics added. 77 Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 13, italics added. 78 This phase occurred prior to the 1940s. 79 McCaffery, North of Intention, 177, italics added. He further observes: “… [W]hile the works of the Dadaists and futurists served to free the word from semantic mandates (purified the word of its cultural bondage to meaning), redirecting a sensed energy from themes and ‘message’ to matter and force, their work nevertheless preserved a morphological patterning that still upheld the aural presence of the word” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 177). 80 To develop the audio-poème, McCaffery explains, Chopin utilized “microphones of high amplification to capture vocal sounds on the threshold of audition” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 177). Evocative, in light of our discussion in the following chapters, is the fact that it was technology, or in particular the tape recorder, that made possible this historical leap from structured enunciation to prelinguistic vocal emission. “Tape,” McCaffery explains, “provided the revolutionary capability to finally transcend the biological limits of human bodily expression.” As Chopin, the creator of the “the first-ever poetry to be entirely dependent on the tape recorder” proclaims: “Without this machine, sound poetry would not exist” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 177). And this would have been a major setback, as sound poetry executed “a much more radical break with the tradition of Western poetics than anything before” (Prior to Meaning, 177).

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81 Charles Bernstein, “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic, or the Parts are Greater than the Sum of the Whole,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17. 82 Steve McCaffery, “From the Notebooks,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews and Bernstein, 159. 83 See Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews and Bernstein. 84 Marcel Cornis-Pope, “3.2.3 Self-referentiality,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe W. Fokkema (Utrecht, the Netherlands: University of Utrecht, 1997), 262. 85 Epstein, After the Future, 64–65. 86 Cornis-Pope, “Self-referentiality,” 262. 87 See Kalaidjian’s “Transpersonal Poetics,” 188–99. 88 Epstein, After the Future, 19. 89 Epstein, After the Future, 19. 90 Kalaidjian, “Transpersonal Poetics: Kenneth Fearing’s Textual Recordings,” in American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 210. 91 Bernstein, Dark City, 89–90. 92 Epstein, After the Future, 65. 93 Jackson Mac Low, in Steve McCaffery’s “Jackson Mac Low,” Prior to Meaning, 188. 94 Mac Low, in Steve McCaffery’s “Jackson Mac Low,” 189. 95 Bernstein, “Lapidary Entropy,” Islets/Irritations, 68. 96 Bernstein, “Lapidary Entropy,” 64. 97 Quoted in McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 35. 98 Lev Rubinshtein, in Re-Entering the Sign, ed. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar, 214–15, italics added. 99 Lev Rubinshtein, “A Little Nighttime Serenade,” in Third Wave, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby, 144–45.

Chapter 6 Parts of the following two chapters (“The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments” and “Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma”) were originally published in “Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in Postmodern American Poetry: The Testimonies of Language Writing.” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Available http://www. psyartjournal.com/article/show/vassileva-trauma_reference_and_media_technology_ in. Published: November 1, 2010. 1 2 3

Perloff, Radical Artifice, xiii. Bruce Andrews, “Writing Social Work & Political Practice,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, 135. Charles Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail: The Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Technology,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 74.

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Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems, 14. Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems, 15. Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems, 15. Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems, 15. There is a palpitating urgency in Bernstein’s verdict on this status quo and in his call for reversing the menacing commodification of the last strongholds of public voice and opinion: With the instigation of media consultants and large foundation, the noncommercial sector has too often copied the worst features of the commercial sector … It is commendable for noncommercial venues to try to get the largest possible audience for the programming they produce. However, it is destructive to determine your programming primarily on the audience it is able to get. So what I am advocating, then, is the production of public cultural work in unpopular modes and on unfamiliar subjects. (Bernstein, “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 16) Similarly, when Jed Rasula plots poetic strategies to resist the encroachments of commodification, he chooses electronic technology as his principal target. In “Politics of the Referent,” Rasula aims at the commercial reality “promoted by property developers, [but also] television advertisements, feature writers for popular newspapers, and politicians with the common touch.” He comes to recognize that the best way of subverting it is by resisting the “low mimetic realism” that “deliberately compromises itself by submitting to the only common, available language that we have, [that of] the submerged and mortgaged middle class” (Rasula, “The Politics of the Referent,” 393). Rasula, however, acknowledges that the ultimate “accommodational” argument would be that the discourse he is trying to subvert is “absolutely consistent with the dominant culture of movies, records, and television; [and] as such, it has its proper historical role to play as an unwitting chronicler of its time” (Rasula, “The Politics of the Referent,” 393). Moreover, as Bernstein contends in “I Don’t Take Voice Mail. The Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Technology,” the resistance to technological discourses may lead to rather dubious results, as he won’t be the last to note that capitalism transcends the technologies through which it operates. So just as today’s art world is dominated by marketing, sales, and promotion, so the object of art in the age of electronic technology will continue to be profit; and the values most typically promoted by the art world will continue to be governed by market, rather than aesthetic, formal, philosophical, or ethical, values. (Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail,” 73)

8 Perloff, Radical Artifice, xiii. 9 See Friedrich A. Kittler, “Preface,” in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 ), xxxix. 10 Kittler, “Preface,” xl. Technology has always been an instrumental force in determining the ways in which we produce and receive literary texts. This accounts for the fact that the study of literature and, in general, writing has evolved hand in hand with exploring the specific technologies that took part in creating them. Back in the mid-1980s, Kittler inquired into the impacts of the technological environments

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Notes on shaping the “discourse networks of 1800–1900s.” (He defines these networks as “technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 369)). While at that time, Kittler contends, the gramophone, film, and typewriter conditioned the subject to a new way of generating and interpreting writing, in the late twentieth century, it was the computer and the digitalized electronic technologies that emerged as the major discursive determinants. See Perloff, “Avant-garde or End Game?,”18. Richard Lanham,“The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution,” New Literary History, 20 (Winter 1989): 273. Lanham,“The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution,” 279. Perloff, Radical Artifice, xii. Lev Manovich, The Language of Media (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), 18. Quoted in N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” Critical Inquiry, 33 (2006): 147. Radical Artifice, 19, italics added. Charles Bernstein, quoted in “Through Fogged and Fumbling Shallows” (a review of Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems), by Stephen Ross, The Wolf Magazine, (24) (March 2011): n. pag. Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www. wolfmagazine.co.uk/24review.php. Stephen Ross, “Through Fogged and Fumbling Shallows,” The Wolf Magazine, (24) (March 2011): n. pag. Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www.wolfmagazine. co.uk/24review.php. McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 177. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 80. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 76, emphasis added. Bernstein, “Emotions of Normal People,” Dark City, 85–86. Bernstein, “Emotions of Normal People,” 87. The term is used in the sense with which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari imbue it. See their definition of a rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus, 3–25. Bob Perelman, “Oedipus Rex,” in The First World (Great Barrington, MA: Figures, 1986), 53. Bob Perelman, “Motion,” in Face Value (New York: Roof Books, 1988), 11, italics added. Bob Perelman, “Sex,” Face Value, 25. Perelman, “Sex,” 26. Bernstein, Log Rhythms, n. pag. Visual poetics initially became important to the concrete poets who recognized that, “given the sophisticated print media, computer graphics, sign posts, and advertising formats of our culture, all writing—and certainly all poetic writing—is ‘seen’ as well as ‘seen through’ or heard” (Perloff, Radical Artifice). “Indeed, by the eighties,” Perloff observes, “when home laser printing, with its availability of letter sizes, appearances, and fonts, had become a reality, visual poetics could turn its attention to ways of foregrounding the materiality of the text without sacrificing semantic complexity or cultural critique” (Perloff, Radical Artifice, 120). Perloff points to McCaffery’s The Black Debt as “a case in point…” (Perloff, Radical Artifice, 120).

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32 For more on the subject, see Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 33 Bob Perelman, “The View from the Dollar Bill,” Face Value, 23–24. 34 Bob Perelman, “Streets,” in The First World (Great Barrington, MA: Figures, 1986), 18. 35 Bernstein, Log Rhythms, n. pag. 36 Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, and educated at the University of Tokyo and the University of Munich, Paik settled in the United States in 1964 and, in the 1960s, became involved with the avant-garde New York City group known as Fluxus. Paik is considered to be the first video artist. 37 Bob Perelman, “Untitlable,” The First World, 30. 38 The work was exhibited in the retrospective “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” at the Guggenheim in 2000. 39 Bob Perelman, “Ode,” in IFLIFE (New York, NY: Roof Books, 2006), 41. 40 The opera was originally performed in 1990 at New York’s American Opera Projects. 41 “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan famously states. 42 McCaffery, North of Intention, 42. 43 McCaffery, North of Intention, 42. 44 McCaffery, North of Intention, 42–43. As a result, rather than “create more of the social … [media’s] effect is to neutralize all social relations. Interviews, talk shows … are all micro-narratives which posture as social reciprocation but are, in fact, entirely co-opted by the media model itself ” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 42). 45 Quoted in Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 62. 46 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 62, italics added.We will later on confront and problematize the claim that this similarity between television (in general, the media) and Language writing predicates the non-referentiality and ahistoricity of Language poetics. 47 Paul Virilio’s term. See Paul Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” Ctheory, trans. Patrice Riemans. Online posting. August 27, 1995. 48 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 47. 49 Perloff, Radical Artifice, xiii. It is of note that Perloff borrows the term “radical artifice” from Richard A. Lanham who uses it in reference to the emerging possibilities for working with texts provided by the digital revolution (for more on the subject, see Lanham’s essay “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution”). 50 Craig Dworkin,“ ‘Seeing Words Machinewise’: Technology and Visual Prosody,” Sagetrieb, 18(1) (Spring 1999): 74. 51 Similarly, in Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Perloff argues: “Given the overproduction of such instrumental discourses in late-20th-century America (advertising, video coercion, signboards…), poetry is coming to see its role as the production of what we might call an alternate language system. Hence the name, pretentious but essentially accurate, Language poetry…” (Perloff, Radical Artifice, 49). 52 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 187. 53 Media scholars have long emphasized the importance of noise in rethinking the notions of language, information, and knowledge. Of special note is Kittler’s use of the media approach and the concept of noise, in particular, in his efforts to subvert the rule of alphabetism and the authority of literary language that have defined the modern period. “By reading the materiality of language as noise in the cybernetic sense,” Mark Hansen explains,

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Notes Kittler demonstrates the reductive presupposition underlying the institutions of poetics and hermeneutics: both rely on a graphic-phonetic model whose own condition of possibility lies in the reductive bracketing of noise. With the appearance of modern communication technologies like the gramophone and film, noise asserts itself with a vengeance: it functions as the material background in whose absence communication would be impossible. (“Breaking with the System: Technology beyond Semiotics,” Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2000), 221)

54 Charles Bernstein, “Azoot D’Puund,” Poetic Justice, 25–26. 55 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 94. 56 “Let the use of words teach you their meaning,” Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations. 57 The process explains why Wittgenstein undertakes to transform semantics from a science of meanings into a science of signifying activity (see McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 87). 58 Bernstein, A Poetics, 60. 59 Bernstein, A Poetics, 60. 60 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 87. 61 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, xxiii. 62 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, xix. 63 N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 137. 64 Alcheringa (1975). 65 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 197. 66 Charles Bernstein, “An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 70–71, italics added. Indeed, what better way to theorize the Language poetic practice than in the words of Bernstein—Language poets “sound” the media environments. 67 Bernstein, “Weak Links,” My Way: Speeches and Poems, 81–82. 68 Bernstein, “Weak Links,” 70–71. 69 Bernstein, “Weak Links,” 81. “Weeks is poetic homeopathy,” Bernstein concludes, “a week dose of the virus to immunize our systems—let’s say consciousnesses—against it” (Bernstein, “Weak Links,” 81). 70 Bernstein, Islets/Irritations, 25–26. 71 McCaffery, North of Intention, 42. 72 McCaffery, North of Intention, 198. 73 McCaffery, North of Intention, 199. 74 Jacques Derrida, “The Exorbitant Question of Method,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 75 Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 43. 76 “Computer unconscious” is the term Bernstein uses (see Charles Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture 2.1 (September, 1991): n. pag., http://pmc.iath. virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/pop-cult.991). 77 N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 137. 78 N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 139. 79 N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 138. 80 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 174. 81 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 194.

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82 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: The Insistence of Reference,” in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 3, italics added. 83 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 186–87, italics added. 84 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 201. 85 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 201. 86 McCaffery, North of Intention, 157. 87 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 157. 88 Nickels, “Post-Avant-Gardism,” n. pag., # 37. 89 Nickels, “Post-Avant-Gardism,” # 4. 90 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 124, italics added. 91 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 187. 92 McCaffery comments on the need to create “complications within the vectors of reference” in North of Intention, 161. 93 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 442. 94 Bernstein, A Poetics, 141. 95 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 173. 96 Ron Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, 131. 97 Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” 130. To further complicate his understanding of reference, Silliman employs an array of similarly sounding, but, in their essence, radically divergent concepts. To him, for example, “reference” is a term that contains positive connotations, while “referentiality” is imbued with distinctly negative nuances. In an emblematic statement, Silliman proclaims that “reference in language, … under capitalism is transformed (deformed) into referentiality” (Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” 125). Attempting to formulate a cogent political program, Silliman introduces yet another innovative concept—that of “post-referential” language. “By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language,” the critic states, “poetry can work to search out the preconditions of post-referential language within the existing social fact” (Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” 131, italics added). It is in this sense that Language poetry does not announce the demise of the notion of reference, but sets out to produce new “complications within the vectors of reference” (McCaffery, North of Intention, 161) to the point of creating a socially meaningful “post-referential language” (Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word,” 131). 98 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 15. 99 Jameson, Postmodernism, 69. 100 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry 61, italics added. 101 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 69. 102 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 69, italics added. 103 Kalaidjian, “Transpersonal Poetics,” 198. 104 Kalaidjian, “Transpersonal Poetics,” 190. 105 Reinfeld, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, 35. 106 Bernstein, A Poetics, 85, italics added. 107 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 194. 108 Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, “Repossessing the Word,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, x. 109 McCaffery, North of Intention, 24–25, emphasis added. 110 McCaffery, North of Intention, 25.

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111 McCaffery, North of Intention, 161. 112 Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 34. 113 Bruce Andrews, “Text and Context,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, 34. 114 Andrews and Bernstein, “Repossessing the Word,” x. 115 Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” 125. 116 McGann, “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes,” 640. 117 Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” 131. 118 See “Making Words Visible.” Talk by Charles Bernstein at the University of California, Santa Barbara, February 9, 2004. Accessed March 28, 2014. http:// writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein-talks.html. 119 Perelman explains the essence of parataxis as a deliberate destruction of totality and wholeness, resulting in a state of fragmentation and schizophrenia: “PARATAXIS has been yoked together with a host of cultural-literary terms in a basic controversy between parts and whole. On one side, there is narrative, totality, the subject, presence, depth, affect; and on the other, fragmentation, simulacra, schizophrenia, surface, pastiche, and, standing side by side with its allies (as it should, etymologically), parataxis” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 63). 120 Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 62.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5

Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. McCaffery, “North of Intention,” 25. He refers to TV, ads, etc. Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail,” 75. While not the topic of this study, the emplacement of the subject in the information-saturated environments has had its indisputably positive impacts. Language poets themselves have made use of the unprecedented possibilities that technology offers for online collaboration and experimentation with language. One of the Language poets’ most recent collections, The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography; San Francisco, 1975–1980, is an example of such a teamwork conducted first via an interactive web site and later through a list-serv. The participants in the experiment—ten writers originally identified with Language poetry in San Francisco (Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson) use the electronic media to launch an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography (The Grand Piano was begun in 1998 and is planned to appear at three-month intervals. It will comprise ten volumes when complete). The Grand Piano (the name is that of a coffeehouse where these Language poets met and organized readings of their works between 1976 and 1979) follows the method of organization of the environment that has produced it—it is nonlinear, rhizomatic, non-hierarchical in character—developed as a complex network of interpersonal communication, where each author responds to a theme suggested by the previous without adhering to any temporal sequence. In a setting that makes it possible for all the poets to stay in touch, permanently

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connected, it is easy to jump into the conversation at different points and interject thoughts and ideas. As Bernstein comments on the potential for connectedness and multivocal enunciation offered by the new media, “The most radical characteristic of the internet as a medium is its interconnectivity. At every point receivers are also transmitters. It is a medium defined by exchange rather than delivery; the medium is interactive and dialogic rather than unidirectional and monologic” (Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail,” 75). In an interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke, Bernstein points to the immense possibilities for collaboration, publishing, and distribution of poetry that the new electronic media offer: “It seems certain that the net will be a crucial site for the distribution of works of poetry…,” a potential Bernstein has seen realized through the Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo (http://wings.buffalo. edu/epc), (Bernstein, “An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,” 71). “Electronic publishing is radically altering the material, specifically visual, presentation of text,” Bernstein claims, making available the integration of visual and linguistic material anticipated by the great collage artists and visual poets of the century, but never before so easily fabricated or reproduced … The advent of audio on the net promises to make available the sound of poetry in a way that has been previously stymied by the dearth of readily available audio recordings. And, finally, the possibilities for conversation and collaboration among poets nationally and internationally, through electronic discussion groups, promises to open up scene- and regionally based enclaves to greater participation and new modes of exchange. (Bernstein, “An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,” 71–72) 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

See Robert J. Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 18–19. The paper was presented at the New School for Social Research (New York, 1994) and first published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G 16 (1994). Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail,” 73. What makes this statement particularly groundbreaking is that Bernstein pronounced it before the World Wide Web had became shaped and available in its current ubiquitous form. Using some of the concepts he developed in “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” the author thus peeks into the fast evolving technological future, while refusing to compete with it and “resist[ing] the tendency to revise [the] essay in the light of the often oppressively (or possibly exhilaratingly) fast changes in computer technology and the formats for using it” (Bernstein, “I Don’t Take Voice Mail,” 73). Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. The essays were written between 1936 and 1939. See Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974). Jameson, Postmodernism, 36. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. Bob Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” Virtual Reality (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 7. Perelman,“Virtual Reality,” 7.

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

Notes Perloff, “Signs are Taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space,” 93. Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” 7. Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” 7. Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” 7. Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” 10, italics added. Alvin Toffler uses the term in Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London and New York: Verso Books, 2000), 141. Virilio, The Information Bomb, 143. Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag., 5. Paik’s 1995 piece “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii” was given to the American Art Museum in the summer of 2006 at its grand reopening and is on permanent display at the Lincoln Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among his other important works are The Information Wall, exhibited at Chase Manhattan Bank’s Metrotech Center in Brooklyn, New York, Fin de Siecle II (1989– 90) - Whitney Museum, New York, etc. See Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24. Dara Birnbaum, “Talking Back to the Media,” Stichting de Appel, 3(4) (November 1985): 52. Birnbaum, “Talking Back to the Media,” 56. Perloff, Radical Artifice, 2–3. Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” 138, italics added. Charles Bernstein, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 25, italics added. Bernstein, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 39, italics added. Bernstein, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 63. Lifton, The Protean Self, 19, italics added. Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” 141, italics added. Caruth, “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,” Unclaimed Experience, 4, italics added. Before I embark on tracing the ways in which the Language works testify to this traumatic experience, I would like to reiterate that I will use the term “psychic trauma” (much as “schizophrenia” in Jameson’s analysis of late capitalism) not in the sense of a clinical diagnosis, but as an aesthetic model for the cultural condition of the postmodern Information era, whose unprecedentedly swift and all-pervasive regimes of technological power have overwhelmed the subject with excessive and undigestible amounts of information. McCaffery, North of Intention, 40, italics added. In a world where the overabundance of information invalidates the very possibility of assimilated experience, Benjamin comes up with specific strategies to make up for the subject’s failure to experience the world coherently. Studying Baudelaire’s poetry and Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, Benjamin proposes that the traumatic loss of assimilated and meaningful experience could be neutralized by way of “produc[ing] experience synthetically” (e.g., via Baudelaire’s correspondences and

Notes

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56 57 58

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Proust’s mémoire involuntaire) (Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 157). Benjamin goes as far as to define the poetry of Baudelaire on the basis of the tools it invents for giving the weight of experience (Erfahrung) to something that has merely been lived through (Erlebnis), specifically, the high-speed and fragmentary life of urban Paris. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 62. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 75. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 75, italics added. Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 60–61, italics added. Charles Bernstein, “Lift Off,” Poetic Justice, 35–36. McCaffery, North of Intention, 155. Dworkin, “ ‘Seeing Words Machinewise,’ ” 75. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 125. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 125 John Markoff, “Behind Happy Interface, More Complex Reality” The New York Times (June 3, 1999), http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/03/technology/behind-happyinterface-more-complex-reality.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm>, italics added. Kenneth Goldsmith, “What Happens when Sense is not Foregrounded as Being of Primary Importance?” The Believer (October 2011): n. pag. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 157. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 157–58. For more on the “flickering signifiers,” see Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 158. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 137. Interestingly, Bernstein himself, in a section of “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” tellingly entitled “The Anxiety of Control/The Control of Anxiety,” shares the psychic distress he experienced with the technologies succeeding his Selectric typewriter—the video games and the personal computer: [53] We live in a computer age in which the systems that         control the formats that determine the genres of our         everyday life are inaccessible to us. It’s not that we         can’t “know” a computer’s mind in some metaphysical sense;         computers don’t have minds. Rather, we are structurally         excluded from having access to the command structure: very         few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. (Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag., # 53) As a result, Bernstein claims, “Many people using computers and video games experience a surprisingly high level of anxiety” (Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag., # 42). He describes “the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems” (Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” # 43) in the following manner: [43] … Consider the catastrophic nature of numerous PC error         messages: Invalid sector, allocation error, sector not         found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error,         divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive         specification, data error, format failure, incompatible

268

Notes         system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general         failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not         found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error;         or the ubiquitous screen prompts: “Are you sure?” and         “Abort, Retry, Ignore?” [47] What’s going on? The dark side of uniformity and          control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of          disaster, of down time. Of not getting it right, of getting          lost, of losing control. Since the computer doesn’t make          mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in          you. (Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag., # 43 and # 47)

59 Dworkin, “ ‘Seeing Words Machinewise,’ ” 75. 60 Dworkin, “ ‘Seeing Words Machinewise,’ ” 59. 61 Jennifer Schuessler, “The Godfather of the E-Reader,” The New York Times (April 8, 2010), n. pag. . The reading machine of Bob Brown resembled a hybrid between the recently invented microfilm reader and MS Word fifty years before it appeared. While the machine never became popular, a prototype was constructed and some important writers, at Brown’s solicitation, contributed short pieces (dubbed “readies”) for his new device—among them Gertude Stein, Robert McAlmon, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Paul Bowles, and others (for more information, see the anthology Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine). Anticipating the growing role of technology in the practice of reading and writing, Brown prophetically avowed: “Writing has been bottled up in books since the start. It is time to pull out the stopper.” 62 Andrews, “PIEC,” Acappella, p. 19. 63 Bruce Andrews, Factura (1987, repr., LaFarge, WI: Xexoxial Editions, 2008), n. pag. Factura is a collection of poems whose earlier versions appeared in Acappella, Alcheringa, Baloney Street, Ghost Dance, Intermedia, Telephone, and others. 64 Andrews, Factura, n. pag. 65 McCaffery, The Black Debt (Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1989). 66 Perloff, “Signs are taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space,” 104. 67 Perloff, “Signs are taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space,” 105. 68 Perloff, Radical Artifice, xiv. 69 Dworkin, “ ‘Seeing Words Machinewise,’ ” 75. 70 Mark Scroggins, “A Fragmentary Poetics,” n. pag. 71 Steve McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 198. 72 David Melnick, PCOET, n. pag. section # 43. 73 David Melnick, PCOET, n. pag. 74 See Peter Inman, “A Different Table Altogether” (P. Inman in Conversation with Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver), Documents in Poetics #4 (Vancouver, BC: Thuja Books, June 2003): 24. 75 Quoted in Jerome McGann, “Language Writing,” London Review of Books, 9 (18) (1987): 6 (also available at ).

Notes

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76 McGann, “Language Writing,” 6. 77 McGann, “Language Writing,” 6. 78 Ron Silliman, “Melnick’s Pin,” 1, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/melnick/Silliman-onMelnick.pdf. 79 Ron Silliman, “Melnick’s Pin,” 1. 80 Lyn Hejinian, “An interview with Lyn Hejinian by Craig Dworkin,” n. pag. http:// epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/roughly.html, originally published in Idiom #3 (Berkeley, CA, 1995). 81 Scroggins “A Fragmentary Poetics,” n. pag. 82 Scroggins “A Fragmentary Poetics,” n. pag. 83 Mark Scroggins, “Culture Industry,” April 20, 2005, n. pag., 84 Inman, “A Different Table Altogether,” 29. 85 Inman, “A Different Table Altogether,” 29. 86 Inman, “A Different Table Altogether,” 29. 87 Scroggins, “A Fragmentary Poetics,” n. pag. 88 “A text is paragrammatic, writes Leon S. Roudiez, ‘in the sense that its organization of words (and their denotations), grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinite possibilities provided by letters or phonemes combining to form networks of signification not accessible through conventional reading habits’ ” (qtd. in McCaffery’s North of Intention, 63). 89 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 197. 90 McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 198, italics added. 91 Charles Bernstein, “The Second War and Postmodern Memory,” A Poetics, 213. 92 Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. Excerpts of this section appeared in “ ‘They Will Die Last Night/We Have Lived Tomorrow’: Traumatic Displacements of the Avant-Garde in Bob Perelman’s The Future of Memory.” Studies in the Humanities 31, n. 1 (2004):1–24. 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Perelman, “From the Front,” Virtual Reality, 26, italics added. Perelman, “Virtual Reality,” Virtual Reality, 10. Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” 139, italics added. Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. “Looking About,” Islets/Irritations, 74, italics added. John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1975), 227, italics added. Brunner, The Shockwave Rider, 229, italics added. Jameson, Postmodernism, 27. Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag. Bernstein, “Substance Abuse,” Islets/Irritations, 87. Bernstein, “Comraderie Turns to Rivalry,” Islets/Irritations, 26. Perelman, “The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake,” 32. Perelman, “To the Future,” The Future of Memory, 39. Bob Perelman, “The Womb of Avant-Garde Reason,” The Future of Memory, 102. Perelman, “The Womb of Avant-Garde Reason,” 96. Perelman, “Symmetry of Past and Future,” 113, italics added. “A day that will never die” is from the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Nutting”—in the words of Perelman,

270

110 111 112

113

114

115

116

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

Notes “a weird great poem about earthly destruction equalling poetic eternity” (email correspondence with the author, 3 September 2004). Perelman, “Symmetry of Past and Future,” 103. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 227. Max Almy, Leaving the 20th Century (1982, 10:17 min, color, sound), ed. Jim Haygood; music: Gregory Jones; with Susanne Nessim, Glen Scantlebury, and Max Almy, http://www.vdb.org/titles/leaving-20th-century. Almy, Leaving the 20th Century, n. pag. With the liquefying of time and the liquidation of the natural temporal perspective, cyberspace becomes the new form of perspective. It is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference. It also differs from the audio-visual perspective that we know by being, instead, a tactile perspective. We cannot only see and hear at a distance, but also reach at a distance, feel at a distance. Virilio describes this phenomenon as “shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact” (Virilio, “Speed and Information,” n. pag.). This work derives from an installation “Tempo Liquido,” first shown in 1989 at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy. A much-acclaimed retrospective was devoted to Fabrizio Plessi in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Building in the spring of 2004. The work was first presented in the United States at Plessi’s 1998 New York debut, “Fabrizio Plessi, the inaugural exhibition in ‘European Perspectives on the Media Arts,’ ” at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM). Lucy Bowditch describes the ZKM as an umbrella foundation, still in formation, that brings together artists, technicians, and scientists with a common goal: to combine traditional art forms with the new digital technologies. She sees the ZKM as a cross between New York’s International Center of Photography and Germany’s Bauhaus in a twentyfirst century multi-media setting. In the U.S., MassMoCA in North Hampton, Massachusetts, might be the closest comparison (Lucy Bowditch, Afterimage (January–February, 1997), n. pag.). The work was first presented in the United States at Plessi’s 1998 New York debut, “Fabrizio Plessi, the inaugural exhibition in ‘European Perspectives on the Media Arts,’ ” at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. Fabrizio Plessi, Catalogue Museum Ludwig, Köln. 1993. See http://www.insideinstallations.org/artworks/artwork.php?r_id=111. Plessi, Catalogue Museum Ludwig, n. pag. Bernstein, “Substance Abuse,” 82. Charles Bernstein, “Asylum,” Islets/Irritations, 36. Charles Bernstein, “was, rain, dish,” Islets/Irritations, 12–13. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 26. Bernstein, “An Interview with Hannah Mockel-Rieke,” 71. Bernstein, “Substance Abuse,” 79. Bernstein, “Substance Abuse,” 79, italics added. Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. See “The Poetry Man: Interview with Bob Perelman,” 2. Bruce Nauman is an American video artist. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 23–24.

Notes 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

271

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 26. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 26. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” n. pag. Wlad Godzich, “Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament” (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994), 368–69. Jameson, Postmodernism, 14. Jameson, Postmodernism, 14. John Ensslin, “Schizophrenic Writing,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews and Bernstein, 98. Ensslin, “Schizophrenic Writing,” 98. Toffler, Future Shock, 354, italics added. Quoted in Toffler’s Future Shock, 354. Robert Jay Lifton, History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory (New York: Random House), 1970), 5. Indeed, Language verses have often described the psycho-historical profile of late capitalist reality, which, despite its distinctly different foundation, emerges as strikingly similar to that of Russian post-communist society. Parallel to the borderline character that we have discussed as the protagonist of the East European Manifesta, Bernstein depicts the “borderline character structure” that has been shaped in the West, within post-industrial conditions. Here is how Bernstein sees the subject’s psychic disorganization: All of a sudden all deserted. Neurological impairment, speech delay, psychomotor difficulties with wide discrepancies and fluctuations, excessive neurotic fears and compulsive behavior, a diffuse hostile attitude, general clumsiness, confused dominance, poor fine motor coordination, asymmetrical reflexes, aggressive, callous, arrogant, excessive inhibitions, rebellious, suspicious, attention seeking, erratic friendship pattern, overexcitable in normal situations. … The end result was a gradual neurosis superimposed upon a pre-existing borderline character structure. … …Delirium tyrannizes the approximate moment. To vanish outside the circuit. (Bernstein, Content’s Dream, 436–37) The poem comes from Content’s Dream and conveys an obtrusively dark feeling of entrapment and inescapability. Confined to a socially oppressive system, the lyric self feels impotent to “vanish/outside/the circuit” and, with no hope for salvation, becomes “tyrannize[d]” by delirium.

272

Notes The same mood pervades Bernstein’s poem “Asylum” (reprinted in Islets/ Irritations 1983, 36–45). It comes from Bernstein’s eponymous 1975 first collection, set on a manual typewriter, staple-bound, and circulated in very limited numbers. Like the preceding poem from Content’s Dream, “Asylum” provides a glimpse in the psychological profile of the postmodern subject, whom we once again see as the prey of claustrophobic enclosedness. As Bernstein observed in an interview, the poem “establishes an ongoing motif for the book, which has to do with closed systems— socially closed systems as well as linguistically closed systems…” (Thom Donovan, “Interview with Charles Bernstein,” The Poetry Foundation, March 19, 2010, n. pag., http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/interview-with-charles-bernsteinpart-i/). “Asylum” reads: rooms, suite of rooms, buildings, plants in line. Their encompassing total character intercourse with the outside and to departure such as locked doors, high walls barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, moors conflicts, discreditings, failures of assimilation. If cultural change the outside. (Bernstein, “Asylum,” 36) The fractured pattern of the poem entails multiple “failures of assimilation.” They seem to reflect the subject’s psychological condition—a premise further supported by the close association of the book with Erving Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Anchor, 1961).

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5

6

“Traumas of Code” is the title of an essay by N. Katherine Hayles. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 141. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 141. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 136. For more on the subject, see Hayles’s provocative study, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 152. The idea of the conversion of our physical world into a Computational Universe is advanced by Hayles in her discussion of “[Stephen] Wolfram’s cultural situation—his location at a moment in human history when computer technology is widely available and exponentially increasing in memory capacity and processor speed—and his belief that physical reality is computational in nature” (Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 219). The possibility that we reside in a computer simulation has been both intriguing and, admittedly, disconcerting but, at any rate, intellectually stimulating. “Are you living in a computer simulation?” has become an increasingly pertinent and provocative question, chosen as the title of an essay by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of the Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute (Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211) (2003): 243–255). Broadly, codework makes visible the covert functions of the computer. This externalization of the computer’s interior operations aims to reveal the multiple

Notes

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

273

layers of code behind the language displayed on the screen. All events of codework necessarily incorporate some elements of code, whether executable or not. Rita Raley, “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework” (September 8, 2002), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/net.writing. Stephanie Strickland, “Dali Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia,” The Electronic Book Review 11 (January 2001): n. pag., http://altx.com/ebr/ebr11/11str.htm. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag. Allen Feldman, “The Digital Miniature: Private Perceptions in a Public Space” (May 2, 2007): n. pag., http://knott404.blogspot.com/2007/02/mezs-datahbleeding-texts-likework-of.html. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 60. Alan Sondheim, “Writing Online,” TEXT, 5(2) (October 2001): n. pag.,http://www. textjournal.com.au/oct01/sondheim.htm. Sondheim, “Writing Online,” n. pag. Jessica Loseby, “code scares me” (2001): n. pag. http://www.kanonmedia.com/news/ nml/code.htm. Loseby, “code scares me” n. pag. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 60. Raley, “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework,” n. pag. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture, n. pag., [43]. Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” n. pag., [45]. Komninos Zervos, Lecturer in poetry and cyber studies, Griffith University, n.pag., http://darkofritz.net/projects/204/zervos.htm. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), the data][h!][bleeding texts (2000), n. pag., http:// netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), the data][h!][bleeding texts, n. pag. Feldman, “The Digital Miniature,” n. pag. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 155, italics added. Feldman, “The Digital Miniature,” n. pag. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), the data][h!][bleeding texts, (“Introduction to the Datableede,” Piece 1), n. pag. Mez, the data][h!][bleeding texts,“Datableeding: Methodology,” n. pag. Mez, the data][h!][bleeding texts, “Introduction to the Datableede,” Piece 1, n. pag. Mez, the data][h!][bleeding texts, “Datableeding: Results,” n. pag. Feldman, “The Digital Miniature,” n. pag. Feldman, “The Digital Miniature,” n. pag. Feldman, “The Digital Miniature,” n. pag. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Cutting Spaces (1995), n. pag., http://www.hotkey.net. au/~netwurker/cutspace.htm. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Cutting Spaces, n. pag. Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Cutting Spaces, n. pag. Raley, “Interferences,” n. pag. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 141. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 147. Hayles, “Traumas of Code,” 142. Mez, Cutting Spaces, n. pag. Mez, Cutting Spaces, n. pag. Quoted in Raley, “Interferences,” n. pag. Mez, Cutting Spaces, n. pag.

274 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Notes Mez, Cutting Spaces, n. pag. Mez, Cutting Spaces, n. pag. See Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 60. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 61. Rossitza Daskalova,“Language Transformed by the Machine,” CIAC Magazine, 13th ed., n. pag. Raley, “Interferences,” n. pag. Hayles, in “Traumas of Code,” 141. Hayles, in “Traumas of Code,” 140. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 21. Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 156. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 154, italics added. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 170, italics added. See Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,” “There is No Software,” etc. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 34. Kittler does not ignore subjectivities, but positions them as being constituted by the technological media they use. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 234. Godzich, “Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament,” 14. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 261, italics added. Eugene Holland, Schizoanalysis: The Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis (Nelson and Grossberg, 1991), 63. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 167. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 43. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 167, italics added. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 222. N. Katherine Hayles, “Foreword: Clearing the Ground,” Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, vi. Hayles, “Foreword: Clearing the Ground,” vi. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 224. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 77–78, italics added. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 9. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 77. Caruth, “Introduction: The Insistence of Reference,” 2. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 88. Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1990), 3. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 25, italics added. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 16. Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” 17. Bernstein, “The Second War and Postmodern Memory,” 217.

Conclusion 1

Writing-down machine. The term is used by Kittler in his Discourse Networks 1800/1900.

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Index Note: Locators followed by the letter “n” refer to notes. Acmeist 81 Andrews, Bruce 4, 98, 102, 118–20, 122, 124–5, 152–4, 169–74 Aristov, Vladimir 18, 241–2n. 1 avant-garde 10, 97–9, 111, 120, 127–9, 149, 152, 184, 209n. 7, 211n. 9, 252n. 18, 261n. 36 Barthes, Roland 11, 209n. 4 Bateson, Gregory 86 Baudrillard, Jean 120, 139, 153, 162 Benjamin, Walter 158, 163–4, 201, 267n. 43 Bernstein, Charles 4–5, 98, 102, 107, 109–18, 121–30, 136–49, 152–4, 157–69, 175–6, 182–3, 186–8, 192, 194, 204–5, 259n. 7, 262nn. 69, 76, 264–5n. 5, 265n. 8, 267–8n. 58, 271–2n. 141 Bitov, Andrei 10, 210n. 1 blind (blindness) and conceptualism 19, 41–2, 54–6, 60, 94, 228n. 149 in Information Age 141 and post-totalitarian Bulgarian literature 67–8, 239n. 71 see also trauma body and disarticulated 49, 56, 58, 74, 216n. 43, 233n. 217, 239n. 85 and dismembered (dismemberment) 10, 51–5, 58, 72–4, 89, 216n. 43, 234n. 242 and mutilated 49, 50–1, 58, 72, 85, 196, 233n. 217, 234n. 242 and postcommunism 234n. 246 see also corpus borderline and conceptualism 25–6, 29, 41, 44, 46; see also edge (in conceptualism); marginality

and late capitalism 271n. 141; and metarealism (or, border) 77, 84, 86–7, 210n. 16, 249n. 74 and syndrome 30–1 see also threshold boundary 28, 30, 92, 160, 203, 207 see also threshold Bruskin, Grisha 3, 9, 14–18, 24–9, 32, 41–2, 46–7, 52–7, 169, 215n. 32–6, 216n. 43, 216–17n. 44, 220–2n. 67, 222–3n. 71, 226n. 117, 227nn. 128, 135, 228n. 149 Caruth, Cathy 2, 31, 47, 51, 63–4, 149, 163, 204–5 catastrophe 3, 5, 11, 16, 26, 31, 36–7, 39, 40, 46, 226n. 117 see also crisis cliché and communist 11–16, 20–1, 59, 62 and empty 12, 13, 20 and ideological 12, 62–3, 65, 235n. 2 and totalitarian 14, 61, 62 code poetry 5, 102, 192, 198–9 see also codework codework 191–3, 199 see also technology (coding technology, technological code) communism and achieved 20, 38, 66 and attained 19, 20, 31, 36, 38, 66, 77, 218n. 55, 229n. 166 and impending 19, 38, 66–7, 214n. 31 communist communist dream 19, 34, 38, 68 communist future 19, 20, 23, 38, 63, 208 communist reality 11–12, 14–16, 32, 37, 59, 61, 67–8, 77, 213n. 18, 214n. 30, 214–15n. 31, 218n. 55, 235n. 2

292

Index

communist society 23, 58, 64, 67, 240n. 91 and ideal 14–15, 20–1, 32, 38, 62, 66, 70–1, 80, 214n. 30, 214–15n. 31, 218n. 55, 235n. 2 conceptualism and history 2–3, 5, 11, 47, 49, 60, 94, 208 and reference 2–3, 9, 11, 13, 47, 49, 58, 76, 94, 97 and testimony 2, 5, 11, 60, 76, 208 and trauma 2, 3, 5, 11, 19, 31, 33, 37, 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 50–1, 58–9, 60– 1, 73, 94, 208; see also trauma and witnessing 5, 31, 76 corpus 53, 56 corpora (corporeality, corporal, corporeal) 49, 52, 56, 58, 64, 72–4, 86, 89, 90, 102, 191, 195, 199, 200–5, 210, 234n. 242 see also body crisis 5, 11, 16, 46, 51, 74, 87 identity crisis 43, 71 see also catastrophe; trauma dead cortical layer 200–3 deconstruction 1, 148 see also poststructuralist Deleuze, Gilles 74, 87, 91, 151, 187, 247n. 46 Derrida, Jacques 1, 136, 148, 191, 209n. 5 deterritorialization and experience 203 and Metarealism 3, 69, 75, 87, 89, 90–4, 247n. 46 see also reterritorialization; rhizome digital revolution 161, 261n. 49 see also Information Revolution Ditchev, Ivajlo 64–5, 69 Dworkin, Craig 142, 169, 175, 178 Dzhimbinov, S. B. 12, 75, 241n. 1, 246n. 43 edge in conceptualism 26–7, 28–9, 42, 52 see also threshold empirical reality (world) 4, 16, 102, 204–5, 207 see also perceptual; phenomenal reality

Epstein, Mikhail 9, 12, 20, 32, 38, 46, 64, 75, 82, 84–5, 121, 126–9, 230n. 175, 230–1n. 176, 241–2n. 1, 246–7n. 43, 247n. 46, 252n. 18 eternal “today” 39 see also present Felman, Shoshana 2 fetishism commodity fetishism 101, 104–7, 109, 111, 135, 143, 153–4 fetishism of language 105; and grammar 106, 107, 111 “referential fetish” 152 see also referentiality Freud (Freudian) 163, 187–9, 200–2 future and communism and post-totalitarian poetry: and accomplished 20, 46, 68, 70; and achieved 20, 38, 66; and attained (attainment of) 11, 19, 36, 66–7; and consummated 3, 60, 66, 208; and imagined 227n. 128; and post-futural (post-futurity) 37, 40, 43–4, 58, 79; and unforeseen (premature) arrival 20, 37, 224n. 97, 227n. 128 and technology: and achieved 182, 184; and post-futural 5, 184; technological future 5, 157, 159, 182, 185; and unexpected arrival 159, 182; wrong tomorrow 182–3 futurism 12, 127, 252n. 18 Groys, Boris 10, 21, 49, 211n. 3 Guattari, Félix 74, 87, 91, 151, 187, 247n. 46 Hartman, Geoffrey 2 Havel, Václav 19 Hayles, N. Katherine 148–9, 168–9, 184, 191, 193–5, 197–9, 203–4 hermeneutic (hermeneusis) 12, 122, 149, 205, 207, 256n. 32, 262n. 53 see also transcendental signified heteroglossia 130, 173 Howe, Susan 4, 98, 109

Index ideological deception 19, 20, 68 implosion 116, 120, 163 imploded sentence 116, 144 in-betweenness 30, 85, 167, 256 and peripherality 30 see also threshold information and bombardment 162–3, 207 excessive information 189, 195–6 Information Age 4, 101, 136–7, 141, 148–9, 160, 162–3; Age of Media 182, 254n. 39; Information era 182, 207, 209n. 9, 266n. 41 information discourse 4, 101, 135–6, 142–3, 146; see also discourse of (media) technology information network(s) 4–5, 101–2, 160, 192 information overload 4–5, 101–2, 157–8, 163–4, 173, 183, 189, 195–6 Information Revolution 4, 160; see also digital revolution information society 97, 101, 135, 143, 148–9, 155, 158, 163, 169, 180, 186, 188, 203 information superhighway 158, 160 information technology 135–6, 143, 191–2, 202, 207; see also media technology information trauma 175 surplus information 192–3, 195 and unassimilable 159, 163–4 unlimited information 157–8, 191 instrumental discourse 1, 4, 101, 104, 110–11, 136, 142–3, 146, 149, 154–5, 175, 193, 261n. 51 see also instrumentality instrumentality 105, 135, 148, 153 see also instrumental discourse Jameson, Fredric 59, 100, 103, 115, 152, 158, 189, 255n. 32, 266n. 41 Kabakov, Ilya 3, 9–10, 12, 18–19, 21–2, 30, 35–7, 39–40, 43–5, 48, 211n. 6, 212–13n. 15, 214n. 31, 218n. 55, 220–1n. 67, 229n. 166, 231n. 193

293

Kibirov, Timur 3, 9, 40 Kiossev, Alexander 58, 73–4, 234n. 242 Kittler, Friedrich 136, 202, 259–60n. 10, 261–2n. 53, 274n. 58, 274n. 1 Krivulin, Viktor 3, 75–80, 93, 241–2n. 1, 243n. 2 Kuritsyn, Viacheslav 9, 12–13, 49, 88, 91, 241–3n. 1, 250–1n. 80 Kuznetsov, Sergei 12, 213n. 20 LaCapra, Dominick 2, 210n. 13 Language poetry and history 2, 5, 103–4, 142, 152–3, 182, 188, 205, 207 and reference 2, 97, 99, 102–7, 111, 113, 126–7, 143, 146, 148–9, 150–3, 192, 205, 207; Language writing and reference 99, 104–5, 111, 143, 150–3 and testimony 2, 4–5, 101, 188, 204–5 and trauma 2, 4, 5, 97, 101–2, 155, 157, 159, 162–5, 182–3, 187–9, 191, 200, 205, 207 see also trauma Lanham, Richard 137, 261n. 49 late capitalist 2, 4, 48, 104–5, 110, 127, 135–6, 152, 155, 159, 163, 189, 192, 205, 208 Laub, Dori 2 Lifton, Robert Jay 2, 162, 189 liminality (liminal) 25, 30, 46, 87 see also threshold Lipovetskii, Mark 10, 46, 50, 86, 211n. 10, 230–1n. 176 ludism 116, 118 marginality 25 see also threshold Marxist 98, 105 McCaffery, Steve 4, 97–9, 102, 105–6, 114, 123, 125–6, 129–30, 138, 142, 144–6, 148–50, 153, 157, 163, 166, 173, 176–7, 181 McGann, Jerome 99, 121, 154, 177 McLuhan, Marshall 142, 158, 160, 162, 261n. 41 media saturation 182 Melnick, David 4, 98, 119, 123–4, 175–81

294 memory 11, 24, 31, 33, 47, 142, 183, 205, 219–20n. 65 Merdjansky, Kiril 67–9, 70 metabole 84–5, 92, 210n. 16, 246–7n. 43, 247n. 46 metaphysical 3, 46, 75–6, 82–3, 89, 93–4, 250n. 79 Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) 5, 192, 195–200 mezengelle 192, 195, 197 modernism 9, 97, 111, 127, 142, 189 modernist 10, 94, 111, 147, 189, 251n. 81 monad 130 monism 3, 82 mummacra (mummacrum) 210n. 14 Nekrasov, Vsevolod 3, 9, 213n. 20 new sentence 103, 113–14, 116–17, 121, 138, 142, 152, 253n. 20, 255–6n. 32 noise 116, 142–51, 167, 169, 175–6, 261–2n. 53 Paik, Nam June 139, 140–1, 160–1, 182, 253n. 26, 261n. 36, 266n. 28 paragram 181 parataxis 103, 112–13, 155, 162, 164–5, 195, 198, 253n. 20, 264n. 119 Parshchikov, Alexei 3, 11, 75, 81, 99, 101 perceptual 3, 5, 11, 13, 16, 24, 63, 75, 201, 203, 205, 207, 219–20n. 65, 220n. 66 see also empirical reality; phenomenal reality Perelman, Bob 4, 98–100, 103, 109–13, 120, 138–9, 141–2, 151–2, 155, 159, 164–5, 182–4, 187, 252nn. 4, 6, 253n. 20, 264n. 119, 269–70n. 109 Perloff, Marjorie 4, 98–100, 114, 121, 135, 137, 142, 147, 149–50, 159, 162, 173, 175, 254n. 39, 261nn. 49, 51 phenomenal reality (world) 3–5, 11, 16, 75–6, 94, 205, 208 see also empirical reality; perceptual

Index plateau 86 see also deterritorialization post-communist 3–4, 25, 30, 44, 61, 63, 65, 70–3, 76, 78, 97, 228n. 149, 234n. 246, 271n. 141 post-industrial 2, 4–5, 97, 101–2, 152, 158, 162–3, 173, 189, 271n. 141 postmodernism 1–3, 5, 9, 10–11, 46, 49, 50, 59, 76, 100, 103–4, 126–7, 152, 189, 207–8, 230n. 176, 253n. 20 post-Soviet society 3, 11, 16, 18, 93, 101, 163 poststructuralist 1, 98, 148, 209n. 7 see also deconstruction post-totalitarian 3, 14, 31, 34, 41, 58, 62, 65–8, 70–1, 73–4, 78, 101–2, 209n. 9, 239n. 71 present continuous present 39, 41 eternal present 20, 23, 31, 182; see also eternal “today” see also future; temporal displacement Prigov, Dmitry 3, 9–10, 13–14, 30, 39, 46–51, 213nn. 15, 20, 220–1n. 67, 230n. 176 psychic trauma 11, 31, 46–8, 59, 63, 65, 71, 163, 175, 201, 204, 207, 209, 219n. 65, 220n. 66, 266n. 41 see also psychological trauma psychological trauma 2, 5, 24, 31, 38, 59, 63, 68, 163, 168, 188, 191, 193, 208, 231n. 193 see also psychic trauma; trauma referentiality 1–2, 4–5, 75, 82, 94, 97, 100, 102, 104, 113, 116, 126, 143, 149, 152–4, 204, 207, 263n. 97 antireferential 104, 146, 149, 254n. 39 non-referential (non-referentiality) 60, 103–4, 146, 149, 152, 204, 261n. 46 post-referential language 154, 263n. 97 referential 47, 48, 51, 56, 58, 60, 73, 76, 94, 103, 111, 113, 122, 126, 149, 150–5, 186, 188, 200, 233n. 217, 239n. 85, 253n. 28

Index self-referential 1–3, 5, 11, 31, 97, 101–2, 126, 258n. 84 see also conceptualism and reference; Language poetry and reference Reinfeld, Linda 122, 153 reterritorialization and Metarealism 87, 90, 92 and protosemantics 145 of reference 116 see also deterritorialization reversal of temporality (temporal reversal) 4, 42–3, 47, 66, 78 temporal 20, 41, 60, 64, 66–7, 151, 182–6, 218n. 55, 229n. 166, 270n. 113 temporal shift (shifts in temporality) 38, 40, 44, 187 see also temporal displacement rhizome (rhizomatic) 4, 69, 85, 88, 90, 94, 138, 165, 203, 207, 247n. 46, 248n. 68, 264n. 5 Riese, Hans-Peter 14, 46, 226n. 117, 227n. 128 Rubinshtein, Lev 3, 9–10, 20, 23–5, 28–9, 31–41, 43, 48–9, 58, 100, 130–3, 213nn. 15, 20, 215n. 36, 220n. 67, 222n. 69, 228n. 149 schizophrenia 48, 60, 62, 79, 103, 189, 232n. 195, 255n. 32, 264n. 119 Sedakova, Ol’ga 3, 75–6, 80–7, 93–4, 241n. 1, 243n. 2, 244n. 3, 248n. 55, 250nn. 78, 79, 251n. 81 Shvarts, Elena 3, 75–6, 86–94, 241n. 1, 243n. 2, 244n. 3, 248n. 55, 249nn. 68, 74, 250nn. 77–80, 251n. 81 Silliman, Ron 4, 98–100, 104–5, 114, 121, 126, 152, 154, 177–8, 253n. 20, 255–6n. 32, 263n. 97 socialist realism 9, 49, 61, 80, 211nn. 7, 9, 214n. 30, 235n. 2 Sorokin, Vladimir 9, 10, 213n. 15 Soviet and rule 11–12, 46 and society 11, 23, 32, 56

295

symbolism (symbolist) 3, 82–3, 245n. 34 and “transcendental” 83 technology coding technology 193, 195 discourse of (media) technology 4, 135–7, 142–3, 149, 155; see also information discourse; information technology media technology 4, 101, 136–7, 142, 147, 157, 159, 208 and speed 157–9, 162–3, 183 technological code 102, 191, 195; and therapeutic 102, 191, 196–8 technological future 5, 157, 159, 182, 185 and unprecedented 135, 158, 160, 163, 264n. 5, 266n. 41 and velocity 159, 160, 182 see also trauma temporal displacement (displacement of temporality) in Information society and Language poetry 182–3, 184, 186, 208 in post-communist society and poetry 24, 38, 44, 60, 64, 66, 68, 76–7 temporal dislocation 182 see also reversal of temporality; trauma Tertz, Abram (Andrei Siniavskii) 214n. 30 threshold and conceptualism 18, 25–8, 32; see also edge (in conceptualism); marginality and metarealism 80, 85–7 and technology 199, 203 see also boundary; borderline (border); in-betweenness; liminality Todorov, Vladislav 19, 58, 74, 234nn. 238, 241 transcendental signified 1, 12, 256n. 32 see also hermeneutic; truth transcendental (transcendent) world (reality, realm) and Metarealism 3, 37, 75, 80, 82, 85, 94

296

Index

symbolism 83 see also metaphysical trauma of code 5, 191, 195, 199 and disorient 19, 41, 62, 64, 164–5, 183, 187 and overwhelming 4, 19, 24, 31, 63, 74, 102, 161, 163, 181, 193, 195, 219n. 65 and pictorial 2, 24, 50, 70, 169, 171, 173, 180; see also trauma and visuality post-communist trauma 63 and re-enactment 12, 31, 77, 92, 110, 167–9, 170, 186–9, 197, 205; and traumatic repetition 186, 188, 197 and sudden 2, 3, 5, 11, 26, 31–41, 44–5, 50, 58–9, 63–4, 66, 68–9, 71, 76–7, 101, 163, 182–3, 187; see also catastrophe and technological future 182–3, 185; see also temporal displacement; future

and technology 2, 4, 5, 101–2, 157, 159, 162–3, 165, 187, 191, 193, 195, 197, 200–3, 208 and unanticipated 2, 19, 31, 50, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76, 79, 163, 183 and unassimilated 19, 94, 207; see also information and unassimilable and unmastered 5, 31, 175, 187–8, 197, 205, 208 and visuality 167, 169, 173, 175, 180, 219n. 65, 220n. 66 see also psychological trauma; psychic trauma truth 1, 112–13, 130, 133, 146, 150, 187, 211, 255n. 32 see also transcendental signified Tsanev, Stefan 64–6, 70–3 Virilio, Paul 157, 160, 182, 270n. 113 Wachtel, Andrew 11, 81, 101, 251n. 81 Žižek, Slavoj 30