Scaffolding Repetition: Gertrude Stein,
Language Writing, Electronic Dance Music (online here)
eLyra 22, special issue on “Poetics and Politics
of Repetition,” ed. Bruno Ministro, 25 December 2023 (online here)

Abstract: This essay takes up the critique of repetition in Gertrude Stein, her claim to have written a “continuous present” that “begins again and again” and “includes everything” versus her later qualification that repetition is always shifting in terms of “insistence” and “emphasis”. Even so, Stein focuses on the unfolding of the verbal material primarily in a linear fashion, though resonances and overtones abound. In Electronic Dance Music, from Detroit to Berlin techno, one finds more vertical layerings and “scaffolding”—a term taken from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky—as a way of building up sonic elements in pleasurable and meaning-bearing ways. Using these two contrasting models of repetition, I read three language-centered poets—Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Marjorie Welish—in terms of their complex forms of temporality in poetic form, seen in terms of Stein’s often repeated framework of “beginnings, middles, and ends”. I conclude with a discussion of ”vital movement” in the electronic dance music of Berlin DJ Ellen Allien.

Keywords: Modernism, avant-garde, repetition, language writing, poetry, electronic music, American, Berlin

Arriving at the dark end of the year, announcing the onset of the new and its shapeless ambiguity, comes the welcome publication of “The Poetics and Politics of Repetition” with my essay on Stein, Language writing, and Electronic Dance Music from Detroit to Berlin. For the conference itself, under the rubric “Expanded Poetry” and sponsored by the University of Porto, Portugal, in November 2022, I had organized a two-session panel on the topic of “Repetition and the Turn to Language.” I recall, when seeing the CFP circulated, that I came up my sketch for a proposal within fifteen minutes; the responses of co-presenters (Lauri Scheyer, Vladimir Feshchenko, Ivan Sokolov, Dubravka Djuric, and Claudia Franken) were equally immediate, and the proposals were assembled and sent off to the organizers in less than 48 hours. That immediacy continued across the range of presentations in our sessions and over the two-day conference itself, from which this online assemblage makes a representative sample. That immediacy ranged from sophisticated work in recent aesthetics to  larger questions of repetition in politics, culture, and everyday life—for which I attempted to construct a platform of sorts, from the modernist aesthetics of Stein’s repetition to later historical examples, from Language writing to evolving forms of electronic music. But there is something larger here, which I want to continue to approach: repetition in everyday life as laid bare by works of art.

We believe we are caught within repetition, and our agency is thereby annulled. Every day greets us with the news; every day it is worse. Not only “I read the news today” but “who wants yesterday’s papers” is the pile-up of horror and boredom that results. From Joyce, Stein, and Williams to Left writers like Langston Hughes, Kenneth Fearing, and John Dos Passos, modern authors put this issue at the center of their concerns, so much so that one would hardly notice. By the time my generation emerged, the countercultural consensus during the Vietnam War was that the daily media was nothing but a form of toxic paralysis—as bombs rained down on Hanoi and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The same toxic paralysis exists today with the overkill of horror now being downloaded on a daily basis. This very day (December 31, 2023) it is sexual violence in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, juxtaposed with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, whole families underneath, in Gaza as the response. We know no middle ground between incommensurates, each testifying to their own degree of collective barbarity and criminality. There is no position available that is individuated as a response; collective positions cannot speak to the element of truth they deny. Against this anguish, a theoretical essay on the politics and poetics of repetition is another matter altogether—but to what end or effect? Something else comes through in the poetics of repetition, which is the crux. It is the mediacy of everyday life.

With Stein, the stakes are no less than the construction of the subject, across the duration in which the subject persists. Every element that can go together to “make anyone one” is organized in that series of production; it is the platform on which all else depends. With the writers of my generation taken up here—Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Marjorie Welish—there is an effort to turn the poetics of repetition and seriality to ends that simply do not reproduce their continuing orders. For Silliman, this becomes an open-ended series of acts of assemblage, each element of which is brought from an exterior “outside” (even of language itself) to an immanent and future-oriented place. In Scalapino, repetition alternately involves a movement toward disclosure and disturbance; it is not possible just to “keep going” when one can only be shocked and appalled by what one experiences and sees. This could be “bums” on the street, in the Tenderloin of San Francisco or panhandlers in Berkeley. Repetition here is a kind of subtraction of continuity, a pulling up short that brings everything else into question—as the writing insists. For Welish, repetition is an end stop that keeps returning, an ending “which is not one” and can never be. A kind of temporal heroism is the result, in which the dreadful can never be understood as more than itself and thus becomes an act of recognizing and processing. We are complexly made up by these repetitive drives, centrifugal <> centripetal.

Thus my final trope, the pleasure machines of Detroit and Berlin techno. Here an art has emerged, from two locations known for their historical distress, that is both danceable and life-affirming. For the originary pioneers of techno, the horizon seemed endless: out of the basements and garages of the damaged and unemployed lifeworld, amateur electronics genius compounded basic sequences to produce transcendent affects of power and loss. In Berlin, the no-man’s-land of the former death strip became the grounds for affirmation that perpetuated the destruction of the Wall: “In interviews, Allien speaks of the moment of reunification as ‘the happiest moment of her life’, and recalls the early days of clubs like Tresor and UFO as continuing that moment.” What I see (and at times dismiss) as Berlin’s “life is good” aesthetic is in fact a substantial counter to repetitive aporia. As an example of this effect, I chose one of Ellen Allien’s COVID-era mixes, which she performed in emptied spaces of parking lots, music stores without customers, balconies overlooking apartment blocks. The form and content of Allien’s samples—kewpie doll bleeps to gangster talk and schizo language—reverses the disturbance of the everyday in a total work of art that synthesizes knowledge and pleasure. The solidarity is among us, if only we can access it in this way. 

Notes

Image: Ellen Allien, “Boiler Room x Dommune x Technics: A Celebration of 50 Years of the SL-1200”, live set from Hard Wax Records, Berlin, 8 April 2022; live streamed by Dommune, Tokyo, 7 April 2022. The livecast celebrates the Technics SL-1200 turntable but also responds to the war in Ukraine: “This month, Boiler Room was due to broadcast from Kyiv but we are instead now diverting our efforts to urgently raise funds to help refugees fleeing Ukraine”; available here.