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March 13, 2022

Event 92: I Met/I Heard (Louisville)

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The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture since 1900
24–26 February 2017
University of Louisville

Joseph Donahue
Adeena Karasick
Mark Scroggins
Alan Golding
Matthew Biberman
Lauri Scheyer
Judith Roof
Lynn Keller
Aldon Nielsen
Joseph Shafer
Joe Safdie
Jeff Davis
Lisa Shapiro
Norman Finkelstein
Alice Finkelstein
Joshua Corey
Robert Archambeau
Sally Connolly
David Kellogg
Tyrone Williams
Laura Vrana
Johnny Payne
V. Joshua Adams
Charles Altieri
Robert von Hallberg
Oren Izenberg
Rosanna Warren
Richard Strier
John Beer
Brenda Hillman
Kristi Maxwell
Brendan Johnston
W. Scott Howard
Addie Hopes
Peter O’Leary
Stephen Williams
Shannon Tharp
Alicia Wright
Justin Wymer
Leah Nieboer
Benjamin Lee
Karen Hadley
Ali Altaf Mian
Suzette Henke
Ann Hall

 

Notes and links

Photos: Matthew Biberman

[t/k]

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January 7, 2022

Document 95: Global Parataxis

CFP FOR PROPOSED SESSION(S)
“Global Parataxis and the Avant-Garde:
Rethinking Histories on a Planetary Scale”

“Globalizing the Avant-Garde”
European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Instituto de História da Arte, IHA/FCSH–Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal, 1–3 September 2022

The conference proposal for EAM’s eighth biannual conference, reconvening in Lisbon after a two-year hiatus in 2020, clearly calls for a critical reassessment of the Eurocentric history of the avant-garde, given the multiple writers, artists, styles, and movements that bear similarities and links to the historical avant-gardes as they develop culturally but also regionally specific projects that challenge the given accounts of what is “avant-garde.” Otherwise put, if global avant-gardes overall conduct a “systemic detotalization” of the global system through radical formal means, what does that mean if the “global” is open, not yet determined, always in process, even violently contested across multiple regions. An open horizon of the avant-garde may indeed be the project of global exhibitions such as Documenta, the Venice and São Paolo Biennales, and others, often involving conceptual, site-specific, performative strategies but also new forms of positive representation. The recent handbook Global Art by Jessica Lack (2020) summarizes a compelling range of multiple movements and styles, from anti-Imperialist and revolutionary movements to movements founded at moments of independence, as acts of resistance, as interrogations of identity and collectivity, and as overtly political artistic practices. In literature, the shift of comparative literature away from Eurocentric literariness and toward a more complex account of multiple languages, diasporic histories, and possibilities of translation create opportunities for rethinking the avant-garde as always addressing cultural displacement as much as metropolitan location; here the convulsive growth of global cities comes into view in work from East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa in particular. This Call for Papers seeks to establish a multiple, decentered, global or planetary frame for the avant-garde(s), in the present, recent past, or longer history. Presentations on specific writers, artists, styles, or movements as sites of inquiry; or rethinking of what terms such as “global,” “planetary,” or “world” mean for the avant-garde in an era of pandemics and climate change, as well as political antagonism and the aporias of global capitalism will be most welcome. At the intersection of radical particularity and detotalized globality may arise new approaches that augment and depart from the historical avant-gardes.

The conference proposal deadline is Saturday, January 15. Please submit an abstract and bio for consideration by Friday, January 14 to Barrett Watten, barrett.watten@gmail.com.

Links and Notes

For PDF flyer, click here; for EAM conference site, click here.

Image: Gordon Bennett, untitled, 1989; from Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum, 1999.

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December 18, 2021

Event 90: I Met (en España)

I first got to know Claudia Franken through academic channels; she is a Europe-based scholar of Gertrude Stein and Arno Schmidt, a less-well-known prose writer who anticipates American postmoderns such as Thomas Pynchon. As his Wikipedia entry states, “Arno Schmidt (1914–79) was a German author and translator. He is little known outside of German-speaking areas, in part because his works present a formidable challenge to translators.” Claudia’s proposal for a session on “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour” took up Schmidt’s early “trilogy” of novellas focusing on cultural displacement after 1945, pursued by analogies to Egyptian and Phoenician antiquity—as if the two time frames were disturbingly (felicitously) co-present (see John E. Woods’s unequaled translation). The conference itself was canceled due to COVID but was revived as a webinar in March 2021, where Claudia presented her work on Schmidt—in a form, on first hearing, that was as allegorically complex as Schmidt’s work itself. I then engaged Claudia’s essay editorially, working toward publication in the Hunan, China-based Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, where it appears (here). All this is complicated, but is what it takes to get the work done in this era of travel restrictions and ideological blockage. What resulted is a fine literary essay that the editors selected to inaugurate their issue. … More

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September 26, 2021

Entry 44: Global Archives

About this time, on an every-other-year basis, I would be traveling to Berlin to further investigate the “Tag des offenen Denkmals”—the Day of Open Monuments (2021 program here). I see this event as a “global archive“—one of many I am engaged with, as also the documenta exhibitions in Germany since 1955, which I have written and just published on:

In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here I read in detail the archival strategies and form of dOCUMENTA 13, arguably a highpoint of this effort to archive globality as it emerges. “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5, no. 1 (June 2021): 94–108 [pdf here].

… More

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September 24, 2021

Document 93: Global Ideation

The global circulation of ideas advances with the publication of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, edited by Laurie Scheyer from Hunan Normal University. As with last year’s special forum on “Modernity @ Zero Hour,” this issue contains a set of papers—distributed through a capacious issue with numerous related themes—that developed in an online webinar, “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,” which took place during conditions of COVID in March 2021. The webinar itself, thanks to Zoom, was itself global and involved participants from seven time zones, from New Zealand to Moscow. It also could include a performance event, the in-time screening of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance,” originally proposed for the canceled EAM conference in Fall 2020. In this best of all possible worlds, our proposed event went forward; papers were presented, comments generated, drafts revised, and the results are now distributed to the world at large. Below I list the contents and link to the six papers that were the result of that effort, seen as part of a larger conversation in a global framework. Indeed my own contribution, “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” looks at the form of the global exhibition after the German documenta, but it easily applies to what we are doing here. … More

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June 26, 2021

Archive 12: Micropoetics

Thanks to the online research of C.V. Henriette, I now have a visual record of my second appearance in a literary magazine, Gum 2, ed. Dave Morice (Iowa City, September 1971). Morice’s goal as editor was to be small and sustainable—in both aesthetic and material terms—a reflection on the political economy of poetry at the time and a counter-cultural alternative. A protominimalism, at the intersection of concrete poetry, midwestern imagism, the New York school, and the not-yet-named Language school (as well as a first instance of “actualism,” the movement that was not one) was the result. The poem was written, likely, at Berkeley under the influence of Robert Grenier, and I gave a copy to Dave after I met him in Iowa City. No title, no capitalization, no regular stanzas, no persona, no narrative, but with the use of asterisks in the mode of Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and later Anselm Hollo.

“obliged to Dumbarton / Dumbarton Bridge / and his oaks” is a triangular pun on the Dumbarton Bridge, a relic of the times and one of the most ungainly bridges ever, crossing the southern San Francisco Bay, and Dumbarton Oaks, the site of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, the progenitor of the United Nations. Also, there are many oaks in the South Bay, as the poem notes.

In the late summer and early fall of 1944, at the height of the Second World War, a series of important diplomatic meetings took place at Dumbarton Oaks, officially known as the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization. Delegations from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States deliberated over proposals for the establishment of an organization to maintain peace and security in the world. Their meetings resulted in the United Nations Charter that was adopted in San Francisco in 1945. [Wikipedia]

… More

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February 7, 2021

Archive 11: On Going Down Dignified

Working through has never had a clearer usage than to “work through an archive,” which is now my task virtually on a daily basis. Things emerge from files and folders with breathtaking immediacy, though in actuality they have been there all along—a form of latency that is also a structure of the present. An archive, in my experience, is not a thing of the past; we are constituted in the present by our archives. This notion of archive is distinct from memory—a memory can pop up at any time, prompted by as little as a similarity in sound or image or even a proximity in neural networking. I remember walking to our black Chevrolet in a San Leandro parking lot coming out of a Five and Dime store with my mother in 1956. An archive is more logically or interpretively or thematically structured; it has a filing system that is a product of labor, vertically organizing materials in their lateral connections to form a network that begins in the archived past but extends to the present. Just so, I was organizing a set of files to be accessed under subhead 5.3.3.1 “Discussions and controversies: literary/artistic,” of which I have seen many. I open the file marked “Georgia Review” to organize/distribute its contents in three records:

5.3.3.1. controversy (1981). NEA/Georgia Review
letters following publication of “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships” [see also 5.2.2.1981.1–1982.1]
MASTERS and WILK articles, w introduction, xer, 14 pp.
D’SOUZA article, sent by FRANK CONROY to MARY MACARTHUR and LYN HEJINIAN, xer w notes, 9 pp.
BW > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb, 5 ppl.; drafts, tcb, 3 pp.; > BILL HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb, 1 p., 1 cp.; > JEANETTA JONES MILLER (SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION), tcb, 1 p.; > BILL BERKSON, 2 tcb, 3 pp.; > THOMAS M. MEYER (attorney), tcb, 1 p.; DAVID WILK, tcb, 1 p.; FRANK CONROY (NEA), tcb, 2 pp.; STANLEY W. LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), tcb, 3 pp., 2 cp.
BERKSON > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb w BW edits, 10 pp.; > LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), 2 tlx, 5 pp.; > BW, als and tls, 2 pp.
LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW) > BW, tls, 1 p.; > BERKSON, 2 tlx, 3 pp.
WILK > BW, tlx, 2 pp.
HEJINIAN > HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb w hm note, 1 p.
HENDERSON > BW, tls, 1 p.
JENNIFER MOYER (CCLM) > BERKSON, tlx, 1 p.
MARY MACARTHUR (NEA) > BW, tls, 1 p.
BW notes, hm, 1 p.; mailing rects, 5 pcs.

… More

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September 26, 2020

Archive 07: The Hegemony of Language

Twenty years on, it is timely to reread the kind of discourse—or brazen publicity—that was circulated about Language writing and the academy, and indeed the entire project of poetics that was imagined as their synthesis, about 2000. In the two decades that followed, everything has changed in terms of the “horizon of expectation” that led to this premature discussion of the dominance of Language writing in the academy; in 2020, I will say confidently from my experience, and what I know of others’, that such a thing never happened. Perhaps it was meant not to happen, and the provocative title page to the September 2000 article in Lingua Franca by Andrew Epstein may be the reason why. As I work through my archive, I am finding numerous such signposts to futurity that did not arrive, while at the time I was caught up in the process, let us charitably say, of negotiating the “stakes at the table” of the future of Language writing. Why this discourse was misdirected, and for whose interests, will be the substance of my reading below; those interested may find, in the interest of time travel, the full text of the article here.  … More

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September 12, 2020

Archive 06: Leningrad/ATD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a proliferation of anniversary dates this time of year. This one remembers our Summer School in Leningrad, August 1989, during the last days of Perestroika and the Soviet Union itself—thirty-one years ago. An international conference of avant-garde poets would not have been possible previously, and its meaning took part in that nearly evacuated moment—which we record in our nonnarrative history, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. The grandiosity of our monumental title betrays the actual import of the event, which was all in the details—an occurrence that could happen once only, as its effective history. Which is always potential, always about to have an effect. Arkadii and I are pictured above, at the reading where I read in English followed by his translation. I would now say that it is the distance between the two figures that is most active and alive with possibility.

Today I saw Zinaida Dragomoshchenko’s post on, I assume, the scattering of Arkadii’s ashes in 2012, which adds to the historical prompt for my post. At another moment of distance, I want to read Zina’s tribute in Russian, which I screen capture without translating (and as the Cyrillic alphabet does not work on my site). Zina recalls the scattering of Arkadii’s ashes near the lighthouse at Kronstadt, in the Baltic off Petersburg, which has since closed, “but all the beacons of the world are available.” I wonder if the line in quotes, “Vossoyedineniye potoka,” translated as “stream reunion,” is from Arkadii’s works. Streams are coming together, converging. She returns to Petersburg and, speaking to herself, imagines the sun’s closing of a circle and a return “endless swimming” in the stream of Okeanos. She ends, in convergence across the space of eight years, “Svetlaya pamyat’!,” “Bright memory!”

Notes

Photographs: BW and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, International Summer School, Leningrad, August 1989. Photographer: t/k.
Permission to reproduce screen shot.

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July 9, 2020

Document 87: Symposium @ Zero Hour

Announcing publication of

Modernity @ Zero Hour:
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order

Barrett Watten (Guest editor)

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures
Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
vol. 4, no. 1 (June 2020)

Table of contents [here]

Barrett Watten, introduction [here]
“Modernity @ Zero Hour: Three Women
(Lee Miller, Hannah Höch, Anonyma)” [here]

Maggie Rosenau
“Universality and the Zero Hour:
Interrelationship Between the Avant-Garde, Denazification,
and German-Language Literatures” [here]

Herman Rapaport
“The Ethical Break: Marguerite Duras, Jorie Graham,
and M. NourbeSe Philip” [here]

Lauri Scheyer
“Zero Hour and the Changing Same: Aesthetic Modernism
and Black Nationalist Identity” [here]

David Kellogg
“Modernist Non-Events: Disappearing Modernisms
in New York and Singapore” [here]

Parvinder Mehta
“Fractured Feminine Selves, Autospecular Affect, and Global Modernity:
Meena Alexander and the Postcolonial Artist as a Woman” [here]

Gary Huafan He
“Entropy and Utopia @ Zero Hour:
Modernity and the Manhattan Project” [here] … More

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