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.

My paper will begin by reading Breton’s experimental novella The Communicating Vessels (1932) as just the kind of “refunctioned” works Benjamin called for, ruthlessly interrogating and exploding the poetic subject as the site of collective dreaming and revolutionary awakening. If, however, Breton’s refunctioned genre depended on its critique of the revolutionary “subject of history” as univocal, historical, and material—a response to the subject of history advocated by socialist realism—what would an analogous “refunctioning” of the work and, of necessity, the subject of political agency look like in our global, digital, material, precarious present?

“Gaslighting Poetics: Unreality Effects in/as Ideology Critique,” The Louisville Conference, February 2019.

At the late end of language-centered poetics, the gap between part and whole results in an accelerated foregrounding of material self-evidence, thematic uncertainty, and hyper-self-consciousness as a poetics. A kind of “unreality effect” results, beginning with the materiality of signification but intersecting, in often wildly unpredictable ways, with cognitive, everyday, and public frames in a way that radically decenters them. Whether such a poetics can be seen to be critical or symptomatic—whether the “unreality effect” it unleashes provides a basis for a politics of counterdiscursive critique—is the task of this paper.

“Ashbery Alpha and Omega: Presentism, Historicism, and Vice Versa,” The Louisville Conference , February 2018.

This reading of a single poem from the last collection of verse John Ashbery published before his death in 2017 sees it as an example of a concept of “presentism” that differs from modernist or postmodern accounts of the “present” associated with abstraction or immanence. Rather, Ashbery’s presentism is historical in being based on overlapping and discontinuous linguistic and experiential frames. [. . .] Ashbery’s poetry does not represent a fully present consciousness but relies on forms of cognition and information processing that are nonconscious, operating in the background and informed by decades of his practice as a poet.

Publication: “Ashbery Alpha and Omega: Presentism, Historicism, and Vice Versa.” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (Changsha, China), no. 3 (2019).

“Poetics as Knowledge Base: The Example of ‘Plan B,’” The Louisville Conference, February 2017.

How a poetics of inference and action—as the end-uses of poetics as a form of knowledge—differ from poetry as mere language or data will be the crux of my argument. In reading my poem “Plan B” in relation to a knowledge base that I created to represent “facts about the world” the poem draws on, I want to show how a poetic knowledge base is a crucial horizon of the meaning and use of poetry and its interpretive discourses. Poetics, as a “discourse of the making of the work” and a mediation of knowledge, leads to ways of making poetry itself.

“The Millennial Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” Wittreich Family Endowment Lecture, University of Louisville, October 2016.

The millennial condition emerges at an intersection where three roads meet: technology, history, and the combined and uneven development of the resulting self-understanding. Millennial presentism is thus a form of self-understanding constituted by contingent, historically evolving contexts. Every presentism is a historicism, and vice versa. My account of the millennial condition is based on the literature and culture that emerged since 2000, but my thesis is that it cannot be understood apart from the historical construction of millennials themselves.

“Poetics and the Question of Value; or, What Is a Philosophical Poet?,” The Louisville Conference, February 2014

Value is not an overturning of factual conditions but their transvaluation into another order, one that could have been latent in them all along. The world as we know it conceals and produces another world, the future, from which this world appears to be different than it is. At the same time, the world we perceive in this way just is the one that we have lived in, as industrious people with our street signs, parks, and institutions. The new world is latent in the old, and the hurricane of transvaluation—so ardently desired, so confusing when it arrives—is what gets us there.

Publication: “Poetics and the Question of Value; or, What Is a Philosophical Poet,” Wallace Stevens Review 39, no. 1 (Spring 2015).

“Accessing the Global Archive: dOCUMENTA 13 and the Future of Poetics,” The Louisville Conference, February 2013.

dOCUMENTA 13 presents an “imaginary museum” of a vast range of conceptual, site-specific, multimedia, and performance art, along with work in painting, sculpture, and cinema, at four global sites. [. . .] The Global Archive is thus a present-based but future-oriented (material or virtual) organization of documents, images, and objects that reinterprets specific zones of history and region toward emerging global horizons. [. . .] This is a horizon I would like to see transferred to our discourses of poetics.

“After Literary Community: The Grand Piano and the Politics of Friendship,” The Louisville Conference, February 2012.

The crisis took place at a moment of instability of aesthetic community, of collective assumptions of multiauthorship, and finally of friendship. In writing on The Grand Piano now, I am called to reflect on its political negotiations, both during and after publication, of these terms in my reading of the work. I want to use this occasion to frame the changes in the nature of literary community that took place between two temporal frames for the work—the past in which we first met and wrote, and the present that succeeds the end of publication.

Publication: “Collective Autobiography: The Grand Piano and the Politics of Community,” chap. 4 of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa City: U Iowa Press, 2016).

“Global Exhibitions/Berlin: Destruction and Community in Tod—Kein Tod (Palast der Republik, 2005),” The Louisville Conference, February 2010.

Conceptual Art undertakes [. . .] the critique of universals, which begins by questioning the universality of “art” but takes on numerous nonaesthetic universals like time, space, matter, number, logic, and causality. Global conceptualism was also linked, from the outset, with the political horizons of anti-imperialist and, later, popular democratic struggles, so that cognitive and aesthetic universals were continually aligned with the liberationist perspectives and open antagonisms of the Vietnam War and labor struggles, the oppression of women, racism, authoritarianism, and so on.

“Sampling Fachsprachen: Ulf Stolterfoht’s Lingos as Transnational Region,” The Louisville Conference, February 2009.

In Stolterfoht’s Fachsprachen [. . .] I want to construct a dialectical frame of cultural transmission, projection, and misunderstanding between Germany and America. In so doing, I would access the long tradition of displacements of “Europe” onto “America” as “not-Europe” from Locke’s vision of a tabula rasa to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, providing a view of “America” seen not through its exceptionalism but through German/European discourses on (economic) Americanization, (cultural) Americanness, and (political) Americanism.

“A Theory of Sampling: The Social Construction of Difficult Texts,” roundtable discussion, The Louisville Conference, February 2009.

Sampling techniques (inspired by improvisatory musical genres such as avant-garde jazz, techno, and noise) show how individual samples are “interpreted” in the course of being refunctioned in new musical environments. Information theory and Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of “thirdness” and “the interpretant,” as well as his discussion of probability in meaning construction, will be employed to support the legitimacy and nonarbitrariness of the resulting meaning constructions, seen as “nonindividual” readings.

“Critical Regions of Global Poetics: Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City,” The Louisville Conference, February 2008.

I read Shanxing Wang’s first book of experimental poetry, Mad Science in Imperial City, focusing on the ways Wang’s poetics of cultural displacement and cognitive remapping intersect with the political economy of the new China, leading to an economy of scale that connects “radical particularity” and the nonplace of global capitalism. Wang’s work thus offers a more reflexive, subject-centered account of the ravages of globalization than the ironic monumentalism of recently emerging Chinese avant-garde and post-avant artists such as Xu Bing, Ai Wei-Wei, Cai Guoqiang, Yue Mingjun, and Xing Danwen.

“Poetics in the Expanded Field: Literary, Visual, Digital . . . ,” Twenty-First Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 2003.

My first task in thinking through the question of poetics here has been to disclose a logic of genre that provides a genealogy of poetics and accounts for the range of its practice; my second is to extend this logic to forms of art that have emerged more recently. [. . .] Talan Memmott is originally a San Francisco new media writer (and editor of the hypertext journal Beehive) whose work explores the potential of the media through complex interactive web designs that incorporate a self-reflective distancing from or even destruction of the positivity of the medium.

Publication: “Poetics in the Expanded Field: Literary, Visual, Digital . . . ,” in New Media Poetics, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thom Swiss (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

“Difficult Images: Trauma, History, and the Avant-Garde,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 2002.

In 1991, in response to Jesse Helms’s attack on the trickling down of small amounts of federal funding to organizations that supported the avant-garde, New Langton Arts (a San Francisco artists’ space with which I was affiliated) curated a show titled “The Difficult Image.” With it, we meant to assert a public responsibility: to show work that might be unpopular or difficult to look at but that challenged basic assumptions, responded to a wide range of aesthetic concerns—and was protected by the First Amendment.

“Zizekian Negativity and Modernist Poetics,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 2000.

In the realm of art, nothing could be more satisfying than the mastery of psychological analysis and figuration demonstrated in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) [. . . .] On a somewhat wider screen, nothing could be more unsettling than the idea of a kind of “dark matter” that we can barely detect and that passes through everything, that fills up 80 percent of the universe but that until recently has gone undetected. This contrast, between the pleasure of guided fantasy and the uneasiness of deep speculation about nature, I will call “Zizekian.”

Publication: “Negativity” and “Dark Matter,” in “Negative Examples: Theories of Negativity in the Avant-Garde,” chap. 6 of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 2003).

“The Panoptical Matrix: From Multiauthors to the Listserve,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 1998.

Avant-gardes, in breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous author in favor of both the work and its immediate reception within its community, frequently employ strategies of “multiple authorship,” in which the work is position between the authorial intentions of two or more authors, toward the horizon of collective practice or politics. I want to investigate the formal dynamics of three instances of avant-garde multiauthorship, and use them to establish critical terms for an approach to the politics of community in the recent instance of the “poetics listserve,” itself a form of multiauthorship.

Publication: “Multiauthors and the Listserv,” in “The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse and Text,” chap. 2 of The Constructivist Moment.

“Antagonism in The New American Poetry: Culture, Mastery, and the Genre of Poetics,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 1998.

As a genre of writing, poetics has been intensively pursued in American literature in the second half of this century, with important precursors in earlier periods. It is surprising that the companion volume to The New American Poetry (1960), entirely devoted to statements of poetics in the modern and “postmodern” eras, appeared as early as 1974[,] given the degree to which the Language School’s foregrounding of the genre is a distinctive feature of that movement[.] A genealogical inquiry is overdue that would focus on the continuities as well as discontinuities of the genre in relation to a larger cultural poetics.

Publication: “What I See in ‘How I Became Hettie Jones,'” in Poetics Journal Digital Archive, ed. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 2015).

“An Epic of Subjectivation: From Oedipal Narration to Social Typology in Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 1996.

Socially reflexive subjectivity is what The Making of Americans is about and what it makes as well; Stein’s “masterpiece,” in her terms and arguably as well in ours, is a social text in which processes of identification and loss are worked through in a narrative of family history. What results are not only Stein’s famous style of metalinguistic repetition but also a poetics of identity as a construction in which, as in her title, Americans are made.

Publication: “An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans,” Modernism/Modernity 5, no. 2 (Spring 1998).

“Theory and Expressive Subjectivity in Laura (Riding) Jackson,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, Louisville, February 1995.

Taken “in the whole,” as Laura [Riding] Jackson wants us to do, the systematic elaboration as well as the redundancy of her work proposes new terms for the consideration of modernism as a cultural production. Riding’s work meant to push aesthetic expression to the “finality” of its ethical consequences; if her work enacts the psychological dynamics of her statement that “the unreal is poetry,” it also provides a basis for theorizing a subject of modernity for whom aesthetic subjectivity and historical agency are linked.

Publication: “Modernist Posthistoire: Laura Riding as Finality,” chap. 3 of Horizon Shift: Progress and Negativity in American Modernism (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995).

Panel organization

Panel organizer, “The Poetics of Refunctioning,” canceled February 2020; with Tyrone Williams and Ronald E. Day.

The concept of “Refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) stems from Walter Benjamin, via Bertolt Brecht, in his keystone essay “The Author as Producer” (1934). How can new forms, genres, and media of poetics and information be seen as “refunctioning” prior modes of art and knowledge as political? Refunctioning Benjamin’s 1934 essay in the present, the panel asks, what does “refunctioning” the literary work and organization of knowledge, mean now?

Panel organizer, “Eviscerating the Public Sphere: The Poetics of Unreason,” February 2019; with Johannes Göransson and Jill Darling.

The dynamics of language as politics has taken a dramatic turn toward inflated rhetoric, lying and dissimulation, mystification, delusion, racism, denial, and ultimately conceptual and literal violence since the catastrophe of 2016. Poetry and poetics, from Surrealism and Negritude to the contemporary range of counterdiscursive practices, have anticipated this phenomenon and sought to counter it by foregrounding unreason per se.

Panel organizer, “Social Readings of John Ashbery,” February 2018; with David Kellogg and Sandra Simonds.

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Panel organizer, “The New Archive,” February 2013; with Kaplan Harris and Adalaide Morris.

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Panel organizer, “Regions of Practice: American Poetics of Relational Space,” February 2011; with Ondrea Ackerman and George Hart.

As a “region of practice,” poetry takes place within a range of national, global, digital, and environmental forms that are in a continuous state of development and differentiation. Poetry’s value as a “region of practice” is its capacity to develop transformative agency in terms of its historical specificity and spatial location that is equally a form of cultural practice. Poetic form may thus be redefined as relational in terms of specific spatial and temporal forms of cultural development, from modernism to the emerging global order.

Image: Tony Tasset, Angry Sun, 2018