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February 18, 2020

Document 83: @ Louisville


Ahead of our “nonsite” event in Louisville Friday, I wanted to put the record of my contributions to the Louisville Conference up, to point to the critical and poetic work that has scarcely been considered in this instance. Content—not just projection—matters. I have added a sentence or two to each title, along with publication history, to give a sense of what my path through Louisville has been. The Louisville Conference has indeed been important for me, and I am deeply grateful for and committed to it. But I never shouted anyone down at this conference, though I did go on too long a couple of times early on.

Nonsite event

“Cancel Culture as Unfree Speech: Parrhesia @ The Louisville Conference,” independently organized, The Brown Hotel, Louisville, February 2020.

A brutal rationalization takes place in the neoliberal university beyond the wildest dreams of Mario Savio; the degradation of speech we have suffered is its symptomatic manifestation. The university has achieved a condition of unfree speech that has spread, in viral fashion, from the central core of the administration to the department and classroom, each internalizing and performing its version of the paranoia and defensiveness of the larger polity, where it reigns unchecked.

Lectures and panel presentations

“Refunctioning Surrealism: Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs and Karen An-hwei Lee’s Maze of Transparencies,” The Louisville Conference on Literature After 1900, canceled February 2020. … More

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January 20, 2020

Document 82: Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour

CALL FOR PAPERS

Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour:
Destruction and New Meaning

“Crisis”: 7th Biennial Conference of the European
Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies
University of Leuven, Belgium
17–19 September 2020

My proposed session(s) stem from on-going work on literary and visual modernism at the “moment” of destruction in 1945: Stunde Null or Zero Hour. I focus on the epochal date of 1945 (Stunde Null or Zero Hour, in its divergent forms across the global territories) as both the end of World War II and an inaugural moment of transition to the global order we now live. For one or more sessions at EAM, I propose to recover and theorize the avant-garde to interpret the “zero hour” of 1945 and explore the historical moment of crisis of 1945—of European destruction, the end of colonial empires, the origins of our global order—as progenitor of new forms of avant-garde writing, visual art, and thinking. I want to access key examples, or a larger overview, of how avant-gardes in Europe, the Americas, and globally gained new impetus from several related projects: overturning the cultural violence of fascism; finding an ethical imperative in “bare life” in the forms of destruction; and resisting recuperation into already existing historical and artistic narratives. What was “new” in 1945 was not “new” in the sense of modernist innovation; rather, it was to see the world as it had never been, as a locus of destruction and creation with historical possibility but also with the undoing of progressive narratives. In this sense 1945 is no longer only an epochal date for the avant-garde per se but a defining moment of modernity, at which its aesthetic, ethical, and historical horizons coincide uniquely. Creation and destruction in modernity at 1945 can be comprehended through the work of a number of avant-garde writers and artists, particularly in their dialectic between “particulars,” unique and intractable values and forms, and “universals,” values and forms as applicable universally, across languages and cultures. Send proposals for interrogating the work of post-1945 avant-gardes, seen in relation to the form of historical crisis of 1945 and its challenge to progressive historicism, by Thursday, January 30, for submission by Saturday, February 1, to:

Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
b.watten@wayne.edu or barrett.watten@gmail.com

Image: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, No. 877, May 30, 1960.

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December 2, 2019

Document 81: An Example

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow. … More

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January 19, 2019

Document 77: Reviews of QP

There is now a good handful of reviews of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (and a recent theoretical article on Language writing that discusses my early work), from remarkably different perspectives. When time permits, I hope to continue the dialogue on the issues raised and texts discussed in the book. For now, I am grateful to the authors for the time and commitment it takes to write critically on others’ work.

2019

Jeanne Heuving, review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences and Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins. American Literature 91, no. 4 (December): 905–7. PDF here.

Timothy Kreiner, “The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History.” In Annie McClanahan, ed., special issue on “Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work.” Post45 no. 1 (1 January). Link here.

Tyrone Williams, “Examples Of: On Barrett Watten’s Questions.” Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Jacket2 (18 January). Link here.

2018

Luke Harley, “Searchlight Intelligence.: Barrett Watten’s Critical Poetics.” Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. Journal of Poetics Research no. 9 (31 August). Link here.

Daniel Morris, “History and/as Language Poetry: Remembering Literary Community through Negation in Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Talisman 46 (2018). Link here.

2017

Grant Matthew Jenkins. Review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1. Link here.

2016

Barry Schwabsky. “Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Hyperallergic (6 November 2016). Link here; for see the notice on Harriet link here.

Don Wellman, “Cows Nostrils Are Blue: An Essay on Practice with Comments on Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics.” Immanent Occasions (20 September); link here.

To order Questions of Poetics online, click here (discount options coming).

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July 4, 2018

Document 76: On Negativity

no pessimism or negativity think positive stop negative thinking having pessimistic thoughts be positive and optimistic thinking makes you happy

no pessimism or negativity think positive stop negative thinking having pessimistic thoughts be positive and optimistic thinking makes you happy

Negativity, my fourth keyword from Questions of Poetics, is a rich term whose usage far outstrips its dictionary definitions or thesaurus synonyms. Searching for an image for this post, I encountered a raft of popular maxims on the disadvantages of negativity, on how negative thoughts, feelings, actions only hinder us in the quest for happiness, becoming a detriment to any sort of sociality or belonging. The first results for a Google Advanced Image search for negativity reveals: an image of a glass half full or half empty; “7 Signs That Someone’s Negativity Is Toxic“; a “no negativity” logo; a cartoon image of a fighting couple; “Don’t let anyone’s ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be”; “Good things happen when you distance yourself from negativity and those who create it”; a personal training manual for “Beating Negativity“; a cartoon image of three happy-faced “blocks” outweighed by a black, negative “block”; “5 Ways You Are Spreading Negativity Without Knowing It”; “How to Deal with Negativity (6 Mindful Strategies); “Negativity Is a Thief, It Steals Happiness,” and so on. While “the power of positive thinking” is as American as apple pie, this result shows nothing less than a cultural logic that forbids the expression of “negative” thoughts, emotions, or actions, insofar as they are seen as a threat to “our” forms of positivity. Negativity has become a social threat, a thought crime that may be punishable—a moment of social reinforcement that has everything to do with normalizing our current extreme circumstances.  … More

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June 23, 2018

Document 75: Radical Particularity

fv_williams

Throughout Questions of Poetics, I use radical particularity as a critical concept to discuss the making and interpretation of Language writing and other forms of art—but also its limits as a pre-given or “one-size-fits-all” concept. Language writing may be characterized, in almost every instance, by the foregrounding or highlighting of the “radical particular,” but this does not simply guarantee the success of its aesthetics or politics, nor does it distinguish its use of the radical particular from other art practices. I see the focus on the “radical particular” as common to the avant-garde, as having a critical potential that is the beginning, not the end, of its politics:

Radical particularity has a long history in avant-garde practice—indeed, it may be the formal feature most characteristic of the manifold histories of the avant-garde, from Dada’s cut-ups to surrealism’s found objects to imagism’s direct treatment to Language writing’s parataxis, continuing in myriad ways in present poetry and art. The priority of parataxis (or principle of equivalence) over hypotaxis (or principle of subordination) has, in itself, even been taken as the key principle of Language writing’s claim to a politics, as if the mere foregrounding of the materiality of language would overturn the Symbolic Order, mirroring or subverting the equivalence of the commodity form and exchange value by bringing material social relations to consciousness and thus negating them. What remains to be shown are the precise relations between materiality, signification, criticality, and form such that the agency of the work is not reduced to a universal effect, good for every occasion. (8)

… More

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June 17, 2018

Document 74: Critical Art Practice

kosuth definition

Unlike period style, which has a specific meaning in art history going back to Winckelmann, the term critical art practice has a contemporary but less defined usage, among left art educators for one (see its current Wikipedia stub). It appears in Questions of Poetics primarily in the introduction, and with a larger range of inference. Even so, the distinction between period style and critical art practice is crucial: the former is a set of static attributes, associated with fixed aesthetic or literary periodization, and the latter the real-time engagement with fundamental assumptions of language, style, form, genre, medium, person, identity, discourse, reception, history, and so on: … More

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June 15, 2018

Document 73: Period Style

period style

An online commentator, I have heard, has just described my critical work Questions of Poetics as imperialist and hegemonic—strong language indeed! While my book does make strong claims, they are in the context of critiquing, and revising, the history of Language writing after 2000, among many topics. One of its major polemical goals is to defend Language writing from the charge of being a “period style”—a term first used by Marjorie Perloff and taken up by others to dismiss Language writing’s continuing relevance. I argue that Language writing has been widely influential, among many tendencies; it is a part of the literary history and poetic resources of the present. That does not make it the Third Rome, no.  … More

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June 10, 2018

Document 72: Book Quest DE (2018)

lokanandi books

Adorno, Theodor W. Night Music: Essays on Music, 1928–1962. Trans. Wieland Hoban. London: Seagull, 2017.
artiCHOKE, no. 12. Feat. Fabiana Faleiros, Birgit Kreipe, Samuel Solomon, and Jackie Wang. Berlin: Vierte Welt, 2018.
Avermaete, Tom, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten. Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future. Exhibition catalogue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010.
The Beatles. “Michelle” b/w “Girl.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 152.
———. ““No Reply” b/w “Eight Days a Week.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 22 893.
———. “We Can Work It Out” b/w “Day Tripper.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 122.
Detroit—Berlin: One Circle, 30.5–2.6.2018. Program catalogue. Berlin: HAU, 2018.
Flaßpöhler, Svenja. Die potente Frau: Für eine neue Weiblichkeit. Berlin: Ullstein, 2018.
Franke, Melanie, Silke Krohn, and Dieter Scholz, eds. The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection Berlin. Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Prestel, 2008.
Fuchs, Von Konrad, and Heribert Raab. Wörterbuch Geschichte. 13th ed. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.
… More

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May 24, 2018

Document 71: Purloined Letters

The recent unfriendly publication of my email exchange with Nathaniel Mackey, along with fragments of a Facebook thread that I had removed—both without permission, as is customary and a sign of respect among authors and publishers—demands some comment and explanation. I have asked that the material be taken down, as it is framed as an act of theft, intended to humiliate, and circulated to recreate the adversarial dynamics of the “poetry wars” of the 1980s. As such it is an extension of what I have called “The Duncan Thing” and have written about previously here.

Perhaps the best way to respond is to change the framework of this discussion, since the material is out there, and attempt to reframe it from my own perspective. Readers may read what I wrote differently in a context that does not evoke literary theft or online flaming. I have had a long-term, friendly, and collegial relationship with Mackey, and have seen and interacted with him many times over several decades—and have often done things that support his work in ways great or small. I will begin, then, with an email I sent to Mackey on March 30, 2017, asking if would be interested in being part of a panel on “Generation and the Arts of the Present” at the ASAP conference in Oakland that fall. … More

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