Poetry (and Teaching) as Resistance
Andrea Brady, responding to Bob Archambeau in the Cambridge Literary Review (PDF):
I’m perfectly aware that my poetry isn’t going to change the world because it is “far from a mass movement,” as I wrote somewhere: it’s not part of the class struggle, energized by direct action or likely to inspire it. I can carry on writing it if I think it will be available to future readers as a record of a peculiar dissidence. At times that in tself has seemed like a major accomplishment. At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers—who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement—to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism. As a reader myself, I’ve been inspired by poetry to do what else I have done; and I would include, among my political acts, teaching, conversation, and collaboration. I think I share with other Cambridge types the belief that engaging with 300 or more students every week in debates about literature, politics, rights and forms and language, is a political and ethical activity. When I teach difficult late modernist poetry (including the most recent poetry written by my peers) alongside the tweedy canon, I hope I am not being a hopelessly narcissistic self-advertising git. I consider it my pedagogical duty to those students, to examine with them the full range of alternatives to the regal discourses of jargon and bathos and greed. They can take what they want. I say this not because Archambeau has thrown the typical stink-bomb at the politicized poets who are also ghosts in the universities’ ivory machine, but because lecturers, who spend their working hours immersed in critique and negativity, can be a very masochistic bunch when it comes to describing the politics of their work. I think it’s worth proclaiming publicly that that work is a kind of activism, which promotes creative, intelligent, belligerent… well, yes, resistance.
Go Andrea!
Anybody see her new Salt book yet?
I find this issue of the relation between poetry & politics one of the hardest things to understand. I waver back & forth a lot. It seems to have the hallmarks of some kind of logical contradiction or conjunction of opposites : or maybe that’s just my excuse for not getting it.
I feel drawn to the views of Kenneth Burke, who proposes that poetry is a kind of symbolic action, within a larger social world which is also basically “dramatistic” (he’s close to Rene Girard’s theories on this). And as such poems inevitably are part of politics, & take a cultural “position” whether they like it or not, whether they are explicit or not.
ON THE OTHER HAND, it seems to me that the effect of the beautiful in art is somehow more basic & primitive than the practical, analytical & rational spheres of politics. It’s strangely disinterested.
Maybe the link has something to do with childhood. We don’t ask
“what’s in it for me” when we wonder at something awesome or beautiful.
This a-political dimension, nevertheless, doesn’t justify (morally, politically) a programmatic art-for-art’s-sake stance (which is usually self-defeating, anyway) – the radical anarchism of novelty-for-its-own sake. Let’s say there’s nothing inherently wrong with art-for-art’s sake : but it’s self-limiting & may not be the last word…
Just rambling here.
I’m glad Andrea thought my stinkbomb was atypical. It means the boys in my secret laboratory have been cooking up something special.
Seriously: Andrea is responding to an essay in which I said that certain claims for experimental poetry were overblown (that it “smashed the discourses of power” was one — I think those discourses remain pretty much unsmashed). I don’t think this in any way contradicts what she says.
“A critic might conveniently restrict his exhortations to the “morality beyond capitalism” if he chose, but the poet is tapping deeper levels of response. If he [sic] arose under conditions of pronounced moral duality, it is not likely that the flow of his imagery can be confined to whichever of the two moral channels he happens to consider preferable. This dilemma has in particular exposed him to the purist attacks of all rationalist criticism (of either the neo-Humanist or the neo-Marxist kind) which would programmatically suppress one or another aspect of this duality by critical fiat.
“As regards certain superficial manifestations such demands can possibly be met: for instance, if the poet is sufficiently impressed by some new critical canon, he might train himself to avoid the subject of Greek Isles and select the subject of workingmen instead…. But in the end, to a sharper eye, he will necessarily be found to symbolize the patterns of experience under which he was formed. At best, like the Lowland painters, he will depict Calvary among windmills. Nor may it always be possible to say when the poet formed by capitalist contradictions is exemplifying the *acquiescent* response and when the *corrective* one. When a wild animal grows heavier fur with the approach of winter, is it “resisting” the demands of the season or “acquiescing” to them?”
- Kenneth Burke, “War, Response, and criticism” (1941)
p.s. Keith Waldrop’s first book of poetry was titled “A Windmill near Calvary” (1968)
Though perennial, this seems to be in bloom *now*. Just the other day I did an incomprehensive CLR blog:
http://www.cambridgeliteraryreview.org/2010/05/on-message/
…based on the idea that cross-purposes disrupt what could be a progressive debate, stopping trains of thought in some cases and letting others run away elsewhere+into distance.
[But the real points were to a) quote that quote from Prynne, b) make Joseph Walton's video more widely known -- it's incomparable bathos caught me running marathons in the firm grip of Nick Clegg.]
But elsewhere some snips — such as http://tinyurl.com/3yq8m4g and http://tinyurl.com/37zx43d and http://tinyurl.com/37f49oz — can be taken in utopian moments to gesture toward an infolding of politics into poetry, with überwindung self-critique part of the (new) deal. Perhaps?
No doubt the pragmatics of engineering The Revolution are important too. But what if the formal language of politico-Theory was fired into the mouth of a monstrous single-poem anti-manifesto, then distributed like this:
http://waltonfemmes.blogspot.com/2010/05/easy-pamphlet.html
Hi Jasmine,
Thanks for the links. I think the subject’s evergreen because it’s one that not only every generation but every person has to work out for herself. For that reason, I’m not sure I trust that there could be “progressive debate” on the issue, though maybe that’s your point as well.
bb
The trouble is, as poetic discourse grows more rich & complex, it continually approaches the limit of the irreducible, the unparaphrasable, the incomparable – in other words, it becomes more like life & nature itself; whereas political discourse is continually reducing, comparing, paraphrasing, & otherwise oversimplifying things.
p.s. this is not to deny the necessity for both forms of discourse, nor the various overlaps (the flights of poetic rhetoric in political speech; the political force of some poetic representations). But I think the most powerful poetry does a paradoxical thing : on the one hand, it offers useful political insights & exempla; on the other hand, it makes itself unavailable (by means of its own integrity & complexity) to partisan manipulation (propaganda). It differentiates itself from propaganda more & more, as it approaches its own kind of objectivity.
I’m sure some of you will consider this sheer idealistic/humaniastic fantasy.
I’m hardly one to complain about complaints about the hyperbole that accompanies certain poetries into print. But what I like about Andrea’s response is that it doesn’t accede to the common reduction of politics to a restricted set of well-recognized actions (vote Democratic, march on Daley Plaza, donate to Amnesty International) that is carved out and set off from the rest of life.
With all sincere respect to Bob and the much-missed Reginald Shepherd, I think it’s dumb to suggest that there’s a bright line that divides a poet’s political and poetical existences. “Being political” is simply a way of saying “living in the world with other people.” I expect most of us here are political in the way most of us here are literary or intellectual.
Likewise, Oppen’s wrong to suggest that the test of a truly political poetry is whether it can “save people from suffering.” (Though of course poetry/literature/art alleviates suffering all the time, albeit not the material kind that Oppen likely meant.) Yes, avowedly political poets risk claiming too much, and yes, they risk too the narcissism of eternal disappointment (aka dysphoria). But the CS poets know these risks; in fact the risks are a theme of much of the work, which is hardly unsubtle in handling it. And as Andrea implicitly points out, the fact that we’re talking about this poetry at all, and that talking about this poetry almost requires one to ask these questions, is, in a way, proof that it’s working.
“But the CS poets know these risks; in fact the risks are a theme of much of the work, which is hardly unsubtle in handling it. And as Andrea implicitly points out, the fact that we’re talking about this poetry at all, and that talking about this poetry almost requires one to ask these questions, is, in a way, proof that it’s working.”
Sensible comments, Bobby; but isn’t there a difference between “being political” as you describe it, and being politically efficacious? In your closing passage quoted above, I’d have to ask, “working” – to achieve what, exactly? A larger readership? Often I sense a sort of superiority complex emanating from the fact that poets are sitting in judgment on contemporary society – & their judgment is based on unrealized & probably unachievable abstract standards of political righteousness, within which the elements of idealism and practicality are mutually exclusive as well as co-dependent, ie. in an inverse ratio to each other.
Hey Bobby
I also think it’s dumb to suggest that there’s “a bright line that divides a poet’s political and poetical existences.”
What I took issue with in the essay were a few very specific claims about how writing poetry (in this case, experimental poetry) has an enormous political impact. The point I was trying, perhaps poorly, to make is pretty similar to the point you agree with when you say “Yes, avowedly political poets risk claiming too much, and yes, they risk too the narcissism of eter nal disappointment.”
I’m sort of hoping not to be misunderstood here as the guy who said poetry and politics can/should have nothing to do with one another.
As for ‘politics’ “being another word for “living in the world with other people” — well, I suppose we differ on definitions. And it’s good to have realized that early, rather than wrangling with one another for a long time before realizing that we were using a word in different ways.
Best,
Bob
“I’m sort of hoping not to be misunderstood here as the guy who said poetry and politics can/should have nothing to do with one another.”
I don’t think anyone is saying this. What I suggest, though, is that poetry has an inherent dignity – & that you can & should draw a bright line between this mode of “speech” and the mode of political discourse. Because maintaining this distinction, is, paradoxically, one of the ways that poetry has been politically effective. Poetry shapes & expresses cultural norms which in turn shape political ideals & commitments. But it does this through being poetry, not through trying to replace political discourse (cf. Reginald Shepherd’s remarks).
Henry: asking “but isn’t there a difference between ‘being political’ as you describe it, and being politically efficacious?” seems just right.
There’s a distinction between existing around others, or expressing/embodying/sharing a position about existing around others, on the one hand, and making (pardon my dreadful prose here) a significant intervention in the field of power. I think it’s important not to lose that distinction.
None of which is to say that voting is the only politics. The Suffragettes couldn’t vote (that was the gist of their complaint) and they made a huge positive change in how power was distributed in America.
To come back to a point I think is always in danger of being lost when that essay of mine is discussed: the things I take issue with there are what are a few, to my mind a unsupportable, claims of political efficacy and power for a certain kind of poetry.
I’m not sure why that keeps slipping away.
Best,
Bob
Henry:
” Because maintaining this distinction [between poetry and politics], is, paradoxically, one of the ways that poetry has been politically effective.”
Okay. I know I sound like a jerk citing myself, but if you’re interested, I tried to trace the history of that idea back to guys like Swinburne in an essay called “The Aesthetic Anxiety,” which is in the book “Art and Life in Aestheticism,” (ed. Kelly Comfort, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). In fact, the big-ass book I’m working on now tries to trace the idea back to Shaftesbury, Locke, and a reaction to Hobbes.
Okay. Enough auto-citing. I hear it’s bad for your eyesight.
B.
I haven’t read Bob’s essay in Intimate Exposure, but I did read what he posted on his blog. I struggle to track the trajectory of Bob’s criticism “unsup¬port¬able, claims of polit¬i¬cal effi-cacy and power for a cer¬tain kind of poetry.” To me there is an oscillation between criticizing those who, in making hyperbolic claims about poetry that are already, presumably, neutralized by present social relations, substitute a “political wish for a political reality” and criticizing those who refuse to recognize poetry’s distance from political disputes and partisanship, that is to say, from ideology. (See, for instance, Bob’s endorsement at the end of his post of Reginald Sheperd’s claims, etc.).
I really wonder whether the claims Bob is critical of are symptomatic of the overreaching of poetry vis-à-vis politics or precisely the opposite. Tangentially, I happened to be reading Vallejo the other day and thinking about how far we are, at the moment, from Vallejo’s claims about politics and (if not poetry at least) intellectual writing in his essay “Función Revolucionaria del Pensamiento” (I’m in a rush now and so won’t translate. I think most of you read Spanish anyway, but in case someone doesn’t, I can do a quick translation later):
El intelectual revolucionario, por la naturaleza transformadora de su pensamiento y por su acción sobre la realidad inmediata, encarna un peligro para todas las formas de vida que le rozan y que él trata de derogar y de sustituir por otras nuevas, más justas y perfectas. Se convierte en un peligro para las leyes, costumbres y relaciones sociales reinantes. Resulta así el blanco por excelencia de las persucuciones y represalias de espíritu conservador. <>. Y—nosotros añadimos:—es Marx, vilipendiado y expulsado; Lenin, abaleado. El espíritu de heroicidad y sacrificio personal intelectual revolucionario, es, pues, esencial característica de su destino…La función política transformadora del intelectual reside en la naturaleza y trascendencia principalmente doctrinales de esa función y correspondientemente prácticas militante de ella. En otros términoes, el intelectual revolucionario debe serlo, simultáneamente, como creador de doctrina y como practicante de ésta. Buda, Jesús, Marx, Englels, Lenin, fueron, a un mismo tiempo, creadores y actores de la doctrina revolucionaria. El tipo perfecto del intelectual revolucionario es el hombre que lucha escribiendo y militando, simultáneamente.
Yeah, I agree with Boyd about the oscillation. I’m glad you agree with me on the bright line, Bob, but I don’t think Shepherd or Oppen did. And I’m curious what kind of distinction you’re talking about when you say:
Any such distinction, if it exists, is hard enough to sort out analytically; in the course of life as it’s lived I’d say (with a few exceptions) it’s impossible to hold apart.
I guess what I’m trying to get at, Bobby, is a distinction between those things that make a difference in how power is distributed and exercised and those that don’t.
Of course (to do a bit of a reductio ad absurdam), one could argue that if I gave you a jelly bean, you now have more power than you did before. You could use it to bribe some kid to do something. So I suppose what I really think matters is scale, and at some point (which I am totally unable to specify) quantity becomes quality.
I felt that the claims that were being made (say, by Wilkinson, by Kerridge and Reeve) made no distinction between the political scope of writing a chapbook and the political scope of total social transformation, and treated the transformation of political discourse in a poem as if it were the transformation of political discourse in society.
One might say “no one really believes in such an equation.” But I was responding to real statements, so someone believed that, or said they did. I thought they were wrong.
Best,
B.
Best,
B.
It appears that noble claims got caught in the net, while risible ones went free.
I will have to read the essay in question to know what else to say about the particular claims you’re talking about, Bob (Bobby makes a pretty good defense of Wilkinson below, though, despite the fact that he doesn’t know either exactly which passages he is meant to consider).
Even so, I don’t want to let go of this question of oscillation yet, not least because it is built into the distinctions you have drawn so far. (I should confess that I’m no fan of political fantasy masquerading as resistance either. But that is not what is—or not all that is—at stake here.) When you say that “There’s a distinction between existing around others, or expressing/embodying/sharing a position about existing around others…and making…a significant intervention in the field of power” you confound on one hand what you distinguish on the other. For the problem is that, whatever a “significant intervention in the field of power” would look like at the contemporary moment, it would absolutely be inconceivable if it existed apart from anyone’s “expressing/embodying/sharing a position” on it. The point is not as trivial as it might sound.
More importantly, the oscillation noted above allows you to criticize (rightly or wrongly) claims that celebrate the political achievements poetry has already made at the same time that you implicitly criticize poets like those of the CS for their refusal to accept that the minimal condition for realizing restructured social relations is the relinquishment of poetry. It may be that “the claims that were being made (say, by Wilkinson, by Kerridge and Reeve) made no distinction between the political scope of writing a chapbook and the political scope of total social transformation,” but it does not follow that that the claims necessarily identified those scopes as interchangeable. Predicating “total social transformation” on the idea that resistance operates only through a particular set of (already legitimated) conduits threatens to disqualify ex ante precisely the conflict it is supposed to promise.
Bob, I don’t have your article, so I can’t speak to your specific claims. But I know the primary sources well enough that I’m not going to let that hold me back. Here’s Wilkinson responding to Riley:
Isn’t that precisely the sense of scale you’re looking for?
Or look at how qualified he is a bit further down, in a line you even (partially) quote: “the poetry of Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady has got under my skin…their poetry is being written at a point of historical convergence where it might exercise an incidental political potency.”
Hedge that any further and JW’d have an SEC investigation on his hands.
Hey Boyd,
You say:
“you implicitly criticize poets like those of the CS for their refusal to accept that the minimal condition for realizing restructured social relations is the relinquishment of poetry” –
I appreciate you taking an interest, but really don’t believe one needs to give up poetry to be political. This isn’t what I say. (Oppen felt that for himself at one point, of course).
I do feel that in our current situation, poetry is a weak means of being politically effective. There are social conditions when that isn’t true — Declan Kiberd has written about the political power of poetry in certain conditions of dispossession, and I find him convincing.
I also don’t think that Oppen (or Reginald) felt there was a clear line between poetry and politics, -if- we define politics the way Bobby does (being with others). I mean, “Of Being Numerous” is a huge meditation on what it means to be with others, and so are many of the poems in Reginald’s book “Otherhood.” All this is different from having significant influence on power — though it is not different from having an influence on a few people, most of them already like-minded. (I talked a bit about the likeminded thing in the podcast I did for poetry magazine a while back, if you’re tenacious enough to listen to me blather for a while — I cite the Kiberd stuff there too). (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=622)
Anyway, I’m going to get back to working on this big-ass book on the history of the idea of aesthetic autonomy. But I’d be interested, Boyd, in hearing from you when you read the essay — shoot me an email and I’ll get back to you.
Best, and thanks for talking all this through,
Bob
I’m sorry if I’m misreading your argument. But you’ve slightly misstated mine too. I didn’t suggest that you “believe that one needs to give up poetry to be political.” I suggested that you neutralized the claims of some poets by oscillating between criticism of their particular claims and criticism of their refusal to recognize poetry’s distance from ideology. In other words, your criticism glances upon even if it does not explicitly claim the position that, in view of present social relations, the relinquishment of poetry is the minimal condition for “total social transformation”—a point (whether correct or not) that is a heck of a lot closer to the idea that the claims you’re talking are wrong because “in our current situation, poetry is a weak means of being politically effective” than it might at first seem. I really don’t think you and I or you and your targets of criticism would in any way disagree that poetry is a “weak means of being politically effective.” The disagreement I’m pointing to lies elsewhere.
In any case, I’ll try to get back to you when I’ve read your essay.
best,
B
http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/06/sprachlos.html
Yes, you’ve made that argument before and you will certainly make it again.
The problem is that you think of efficacy in terms of popular democratic elections. While it’s true that we live in a winner-take-all two flavors of capitalism society, despite the incredibly corroding influences of the last seventy years much of what happens still happens among small groups of contentious influential individuals. Who at some point usually study at colleges. And grad schools and law schools. Not so many of the contentious influentials have gotten MFAs yet, but that may change.
C.S. Lewis, thinking of the Chinese system, thought the only hope for poetry was if it ended up being part of some future civil service exam.
Popular democratic elections are important, but they’re really the last step of a much bigger process, the most recognizable feature in a very big picture.
Same thing with pop songs and hit movies.
I understand that you want everyone to feel bad because you feel bad. I’m just the same way.
You can investigate the political dimension within particular poems, a vast & interesting field of inquiry.
You can talk about the direct political impact of particular poets & poems, a rare but not unheard-of phenomenon.
You can explore the impact of a poet’s worldview, writings & actions on the “cultural politics” – the general cultural orientation – of a time & place : their influence. Another big topic.
& then you can talk about the political or ideological claims of schools or groups of poets on their own behalf, or the claims made by others about same. & this seems to me like mostly a waste of time.
I’m not at all against poets & poems being politically engaged, critical, outspoken. Vallejo is one of my heroes. But is anybody out there besides me disturbed by the over-politicization of art & poetry?
Here are some things I don’t like :
1. Flip, glib, self-righteous sloganeering & smears of the “other side”, slathered on daily, in every available medium, in order to bolster street-cred PR with your buddies & cheering section.
2. Tendentious branding & bracketing of poets based on political agendas, a formula diagramming supposed or presumed socio-political “attitudes” (for example, the Silliman binary).
3. The glorification of any bizarre mannerist weirdness in style, and its justification on political grounds (we have to shake up the status quo!).
4. The quick-sorting of poets based on ethnicity &/or presumed political affiliations; the “friending” of the politically like-minded or the (careerist) mutually-supportive.
5. The corresponding “quietude of the avant-garde” within their professional-academic career tubes. Silence is golden.
p.s., ironically, since one major result of all this cultural politicking is a lack of attention to poetry itself, there is a shortage of reviews & careful readings (we need more Constant Critics & the like)… & as a result, the necessary realm of evaluation is left to the few & the very connected (critics), to make their bland & pretentious quarterly or semi-annual anointings of the blessed few. Plus ca change.
She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I’ve never been there. It has a reputation as a kind arty place.
Not sure if that makes a difference to your point or not.
Bob
My bad!
Goldsmiths has a rep as a “kind of arty place,” I meant. Though I like the sound of a “kind arty place.” If you know of one, tell me about it. I’d like to visit.
B
The institutional effects of teaching at a university far outweigh whatever minuscule sparks of resistant consciousness she might manage to convince her students & herself she has succeeded in striking. Obviously I’m not suggesting that the academy cannot play a role in political change, but can we be less obtuse about its role in the perpetuation & reproduction of social conditions? I’m an academic too, but surely we know better by now than to repeat the canard that reading difficult poetry will equip us with ideology-penetrating tools.
And, quickly, @Henry: no one here is talking about that kind of political. Everyone involved with this discussion knows very well what’s wrong with that stuff; way back in the thread Boyd wrote that he’s “no fan of political fantasy masquerading as resistance, either.” You’d do well to read, say, Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry & Society” if you want to understand what the claims are, since it always comes back to that essay, & since as far as I know you haven’t read it. You’ll soon see nobody at all is talking about sloganeering or about idiotic separations of styles into tribes. I know you get all het up when we suggest you read something, but I hope you’ll take a quick stroll upstairs & look at the Adorno essay anyway.
MR, I’d be honored to read the Adorno essay, thank you for the suggestion. Maybe I’ll stop by & read Bourdieu, while I’m at it.
I think my points #3 & 4 address some of the phenomena represented by the CS poets (as they did the Language Poets before them). But since, according to you, “everyone” involved with this discussion is really talking about a different kind of politics – by which I suppose you mean the real serious important Marxist analysis, which transcends aesthetics – well, I guess I’m just talking to myself.
Love the patronizing tone, though. Plus ca change.
& MR, I think your remark leads back to my 1st & 2nd comments here (the K. Burke quote). To cut to the chase : does politics determine aesthetics? Of poetry?
You seem to be suggesting – tell me if I’m wrong – that social-political ccnditions – & the philosophy of same (ie. those conditions brought to consciousness) offer the ultimate explanatory structure (hermeneutics) for understanding the aesthetic. It’s this “real” politics (as interpreted by Adorno) that structures the productions of art. Have I got that right? & the differences between Bob Archambeau & the CS poets, their debate if you will, is framed by this basic assumption (which both sides affirm). It’s only a matter of determining who’s being more realistic about their place within the structures of cultural reproduction, right?
Given these positions – & again, tell me if I’m wrong about them – I would argue that what you are calling the “silly” (superficial, internal) cultural politics, and the “real” politics as outlined above, are one & the same. Both read aesthetics through a sociological lens. But we go to art & we make art according to an impulse which is prior to & more primitive than the human strategies of political striving. & it is not determined by them. That’s one of its attractions.
No, Henry, nothing you’ve said here is remotely in the neighborhood of what Adorno argues in that essay, but you’re obviously too busy being offended to actually read it. I’m curious though: what exactly do you get out of assuming, wrongly, that you know what the arguments are without having examined them? I’m not trying to be rude, I’m really baffled by the procedure. Read the essay, then I’ll be happy to talk.
Btw, the reason I keep suggesting you read Adorno (or Bourdieu) is that doing so would disabuse you of the idea that what such (very different) readings argue for is some reductive, “vulgar” Marxist caricature along the lines of “social-political conditions … offer the ultimate explanatory structure (hermeneutics) for understanding the aesthetic.” Since no one said that – since no one, as far as I know, believes it, certainly not Adorno or Bourdieu – I am understandably confused by yr persistent claims that this is what is being espoused.
& @ MR : why should you be confused? My comments about the relation between politics & aesthetics – ie., which determines which – were an attempt to puzzle out your own position, implied :
1) by your suggestion that the CS’s social situation in the academy automatically prohibited them from effecting social change;
and
2) your comment that the *real* claims about that relation originated in an essay by Adorno, a Marxist philosopher : which Marxism, as I understand it, entails – no matter how sophisticated, as opposed to vulgar – an interpretation of human behavior as defined by economic activity. That is, a fundamentally socio-political explanation of human experience.
Michael, I will certainly look at the Adorno article. But you have an interesting habit – with which I’m very familiar in these comment-box debates – of citing authorities in order to close off discussion. You don’t offer any actual arguments or information – you simply cite the Great Author whom anyone who dares to suggest anything should Go Read Immediately.
It’s boring & patronizing at the same time. It’s an easy way to dismiss whatever someone else is offering to this discussion, a sort of one-upmanship.
Yeah, right. And you have a habit of saying things like “Marxism, as I understand it, entails … an interpretation of human behavior as defined by economic activity.” Which is like saying, “Marxism, which I don’t understand …” So what else is anyone supposed to do but ask you to read the sources in order to clear up yr confusion?? I should give you a crash course in the history of Marxist debates about determinism? You could just look up the chapter on “Determinism” in Raymond Williams’s Marxism & Literature, which is very short indeed; learn that you don’t understand what you’re talking about; come back with something productive to contribute to the discussion that is not based on a willful ignorance of what is at stake. But instead, you accuse me of oneupmanship, which is silly. I’m trying to get you to one-up ME. I’m trying to get you to engage the ideas that we are actually discussing rather than yr fantasy version of them. I’m afraid you can’t do that without reading the authors in question.
If someone were arguing with you about Wordsworth, & this person kept referring to Wordsworth’s ideas, but it was clear that he had never read Wordsworth & consistently got Wordsworth completely wrong, would you refrain from recommending that he actually read Wordsworth before entering into discussion about him? Because you didn’t want to seem boring or patronizing? Let’s say you knew you would seem boring or patronizing: would that really be the important issue? Or would you recognize that there was simply no way discussion could lead anywhere if yr interlocutor continued to refuse to read Wordsworth while simultaneously confidently telling you what Wordsworth’s ideas were, although you knew perfectly well that Wordsworth never said anything of the kind – that, at best, yr interlocutor had read a caricature of Wordsworth’s ideas somewhere & decided to parrot that.
It is a little infuriating, yep.
@MR,
Michael – 1) I’ve studied Marxism. 2) Please tell me : what have you yourself contributed to this discussion, aside from your statement about academia & social change? & your effort to police my remarks?
Anybody else like to weigh in on this?
Michael, I really don’t mean to infuriate you. But when you write :
“If someone were arguing with you about Wordsworth, & this person kept referring to Wordsworth’s ideas, but it was clear that he had never read Wordsworth & consistently got Wordsworth completely wrong, would you refrain from recommending that he actually read Wordsworth before entering into discussion about him?”
I have to say : neither Marx nor Adorno came up in this thread before you mentioned them (aside from the quote in Spanish from Vallejo). Now if you had written here, “Art & poetry cannot be autonomous as you claim, Henry, because Marx & Adorno said they can’t” – well, then we might have a debate. Instead, you simply state, in so many words, that this entire discussion is framed by Adorno, & that’s an end to it, & I’m out of the loop. This is why I’d really like to hear from some other people here. Because if everyone here is operating on a mindset of shared assumptions about these relations (between art & politics, etc.), then all I can say is, I’m asserting something outside the framework of your precepts, your axioms. If such an assertion is automatically out of court here, well, that’s how it goes.
Okay. This is really a pointless and boneheaded thing to bother mentioning, but I just spent the last ten minutes wondering whether I said Brady taught at Goldsmiths-London or Queen Mary-London. She teaches at Queen Mary, I said Goldsmiths. I will now go and ask myself why that’s what I’m thinking about at 10:30 on a Wednesday night, and perhaps wonder where it all went so terribly, terribly wrong.
B.
I dont see the logic in your argument but I think you’ve painted your strokes
[shit, the robots have us beaten at our own game --bb]
1) The chapter in M&L is called “Determination,” not “Determinism,” sorry.
2) The point in bringing up Marx or whoever was that, in fact, the discussion was indeed operating on assumptions that those authors had clarified, while you were, irrelevantly, inveighing against political cheerleading or the coding of stylistic choices as political. Now you continue to insist that the question is a simple one of autonomy vs. determination in art. My point is that for all the authors I’ve mentioned, for me, for everyone else involved in this discussion, the question of art’s autonomy cannot be reduced to either “yes, it’s autonomous, with absolutely no dependence on sociohistorical conditions” (which is obviously ridiculous) or “no, art is determined solely by economic conditions” (which is obviously ridiculous).
God, doesn’t it make you miss show trials?
@Henry : take deep breath. Try to be clear.
@Michael : you write – “for everyone else involved in this discussion, the question of art’s autonomy cannot be reduced to either…”
OK, well, I guess that includes me. cf. my very first comment on this thread (following Jordan’s “Go Andrea”). So it seems strangely redundant for you to hammer me with this.
I can only try to interpret your remarks by analyzing & paraphrasing them. Forgive me if this comes across as reductive. That is not my intention. Here is how I read the design of your remarks directed to me :
The phenomena of what I called the “over-politicization” of poetry is really just that : superficial phenomena. What I called political factionalizing, political branding, political justifications of bizarre styles, politically-oriented group-think among poets, and politically-motivated professional silence, you defined as “silly”, or I suppose petty, peripheral. Why? Well, I suppose because you take it for granted that political & self-interested maneuvering is a given in all modes of human activity. And what is of real interest to you, is the boundary where art & poetry impinge on *actual* or structural social change. & I agree this seems to be the focus of both Bob A’s & Andrea Brady’s interest here.
But here’s what I’ve been trying to get at, and I do think it’s a relevant point. If the practice of contemporary poetry is already considered, by poets themselves, as primarily a mode of political expression – & is subsumed by the greater demands of political “speech”- then it seems to me that 1) poets have subsumed art to ideology, & have thereby lost touch with what poetry actually *is*; and 2) it follows from this that efforts to justify the engagement of such “poetry” with “real politics” is deluded from the start. Hence my comments above about the need to draw a bright (analytical) line between poetic discourse & political discourse. Hence my support for a notion of art-making which is understood as prior to rational political activity.
So, anyway… feel free to brush this aside, since I provide no citations.
While I would unhesitatingly agree with MR that one should RTFT, this has an odd history in Adorno’s case. Even those who read him with some care and applied intelligence have succeeded in either misunderstanding (or else merely misrepresenting) the work almost absolutely — Reginald was in fact one of these.
Adorno’s position that art (at mid-century at least) could — by refusing the atmospherics of the conventionally “political” — open up an autonomous space (he later fixes on “semi-autonomous,” famously), free from ideological determination…this has been taken over and over again as something like a claim of art for art’s sake (something not even Mallarmé argued for, finally). Reginald used to invoke Adorno, in all seriousness, as a defense of the lyric and even beauty as something anterior to the political.
Which may be something Reginald thought. Adorno did not. He was perfectly explicit that one should carve out this autonomous, undetermined space for the purposes of preserving a space of critique of ideology, instrumental reason, relations of production, and so on.
In short, the lyric can and ought struggle to disentangle itself from political and economic determination so that it could enter into a larger history of struggle in the political-economic spheres, the end goal of which would be the end of capitalist relations. One can be unsympathetic to this, but one shouldn’t misrepresent it — and taking only the first half, the autonomous-space half, while forgetting the second half, is a misrepresentation. Yet many readers have taken it just this way — wishful non-thinking, as it were.
& there you have it. RTFT, & Q.E.D. I think I should write an essay on the self-conscious politicization of contemporary poetry.
One can always do an analysis of art & poetry – specific poets & poems – grounded in political philosophy. Or any other kind of analytical approach. It’s like turning a 3-dimensional object, different aspects come into view.
But analysis is analysis, & art is art. Such analysis is a little different from a self-conscious grafting of poetry-making onto the rhetoric of an already-formed political ideology. There are those (probably right here) who will argue that the poet’s work is already predetermined by prior social disposition and worldview. But this is to favor the looking-glass over the thing looked-at. Of course our perceptive organs & conceptual tools influence the characteristics of what we are able to see; but as I understand it, the whole point of the labor of art-work is to shape a representation of something that has never before been visible in just such a light. To pretend that the analytical tools & the ideological predispositions have always already determined the character of what’s made – that seems to me like a self-defeating vicious circle.
Poetry is free.
I remember talking to Reginald about all this — if I remember correctly, he said that the autonomy of art wasn’t an opportunity for critique, but that the autonomy -was- the critique. This isn’t quite a “l’art pour l’art” position — nor is it quite the autonomy “or the pur poses of preserving a space of critique” position you outline, Jane (Joshua? I’m never sure, anymore, whether any Jane I meet online is Joshua Clover). Not sure how this lines up with what Reginald published.
On a totally hair-splitting note (and not with reference to Adorno, just to my own sense of definitions), I’m not sure autonomy-for-a-purpose is properly called autonomy at all. If it’s for-something-else, it’s heteronomy, or so my sociologist pal tells me.
Best, and in the spirit of heuristics, not eristics,
Bob
I never had the pleasure of speaking to Reginald face-to-face about this, but of course he did write about it. Here is one example. In a post that discusses autonomy and instrumentality, he says the following:
“Poetry is potentially liberating because its uselessness marks out a space not colonized by or valued by capital. Its ‘obsolescence’ is also its resistance to being easily consumable; its loss of ‘relevance’ is also a freedom to keep alive certain human possibilities. In this sense, the drive to make poetry ‘relevant’ is a concession or a surrender to instrumental values, to the imperative of use and functionality: poetry had better be good for something. And poetry simply isn’t politically efficacious; as W.H. Auden so perceptively noted, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ The conflation of the existence of social, political, and economic elites with muddled notions of intellectual or aesthetic ‘elitism’ is sheer obfuscation. The power elite in this country care nothing for art or culture; they care about money and power and the means to acquire and retain them. Art is not among those means.”
Which places him, as I read it (and I see no other way to read it), clearly within the camp that believes in the “bright light” BB identified above.
Sorry, bad link. This should work. If not, search for “A Note on Poetry and Politics” 10/1/07 on RS’s blog.
“Bright line.” The “bright light” is Taylor Swift.
You mean “bright line”? I myself don’t agree with Reginald’s dichotomy here, by the way. As I said, I identify more closely with K. Burke’s notion that art is a “symbolic action” with inevitable social consequences & meanings. Nor do I agree with Shepherd’s bleak & monochromatic view of (non-literary) power structures. In democracy, we are responsible for those structures, corrupted & betrayed as they may be.
Despite all that, I’m with Shepherd in maintaining a distinction between art & politics, drawing a line between poetic & political discourse. These forms of activity (along with religion) share culture as a whole between them : but they each have distinct ends or teleology. Art shows a kind of end-in-itself which political action does not : & that (artistic) self-sufficiency or integrity defines both art’s limit & its particular value.
Typo above — read “for the purposes” not “or the purposes” — bad cut and paste job on my part.
I’m completely baffled that anyone could read Jane’s post as far as the second sentence without understanding immediately that it’s Joshua.
Needs more Taylor Swift.
Always enjoyed Steve Evans’s zig-zag art is autonomous e-mail sig, even if it made me wonder a little about what everybody expected from autonomy, Kantian categories or otherwise.
But (it’s that Jane, yes) again we have shifted almost instantly to telling the first half of the story only, where the matter of whether art is/can be autonomous becomes a whole question. Certainly that’s how the Reginald quote that Boyd pulls above works: it insists the debate is whether poetry is or isn’t autonomous, or, blech, valuable.* Just fucking either/or-ing that issue is bullshit. It is exactly half a thought, and the partiality of it elides, well, all of Adorno’s politics.
I mean, if we’re insisting on actually reading the Adorno, let’s insist. I assume we’ve actually read at least the lyric poet essay, and hopefully Aesthetic Theory. So no need to pull quotes? Terminological hoodoo aside, Adorno never for a second proposed that autonomy was an end in and of itself. Reginald pretended he did, and in this he was neither the first nor the last.
* Even Mallarme knew that valuelessness wasn’t a rejection from or escape from politics, but partook of a politics: “Only one person has the right to be an anarchist, me, the poet, because I alone produce something that society doesn’t want, in exchange for which it gives me nothing to live on.”
The above is accurate. I should have mentioned that Reginald’s post confirms Jane’s original take. Also, these last few points allow us to reestablish bearings on the main topic. (Full disclaimer: again, my construal follows entirely from what Bob wrote in CLR and on his blog; I still haven’t had a chance to read his article). What I have been critical of in Bob’s response to Andrea is an ossilation between poles, one of which just is the unimpeded elision or neutralization of what J suggests must be “the second half of the story.”
This is quite right, & is exactly the sort of discussion I’d be willing to have (with, say, Henry) if we could indeed get past the either/or-ing of art’s autonomy. I don’t think anyone here was suggesting that for Adorno art’s semi-autonomy was apolitical or, well, autonomous.
But I was trying to get Henry on board w/ at least reading the essay so we could begin to have a discussion that went beyond “art is determined,” “no, it isn’t,” which is, & perhaps I was misreading him, the discussion he, & only he, was having in this thread.
To argue about Adorno’s account of the artwork as a “fetish against commodity fetishism” would be a goddamn relief.
Well, I appreciate your effort to engage me further in this conversation, Michael, but as I mentioned to you in an email, I may not be able to get to Adorno right away, since I’m going out of town for 2 weeks… I did get him from the stacks to my desk, though… & really mean to read him soon…
Somehow though I’ve sort of lost the thread here… originally I was hammered for not being up on Adorno, since apparnetly Adorno provides the answers we need for the relation between poetry & politics… now, however, it appears that the question of the status of art vis a vis politics does NOT hinge on Adorno’s theories, since, as Joshua, Boyd & MR have successively pointed out, Adorno does NOT, after all, propose a concept of art that is independent from political motivation or consequences… so I’m left being a little confused why it was so all-important for me, in the first place, to have read Adorno… is this how you guys lost your aesthetic virginity? In Adorno’s House of Ill Fame?
Boyd, re the Oscillation of Bob… I do recognize the gnarled & puzzling complexity of these issues… especially when we start putting Art & Politics into neat & separate conceptual boxes… but I would ask you to consider or at least entertain the notion that, one the one hand, a poet’s work could have enormous EVENTUAL political impact, as its ideas & representations filter into culture… even if the poet’s own personal political opinions might have nothing in common with the representations of the work… that there is no necessary connection between the two… but because the work is faithful to a certain disinterested representation of the truth in all its complexity, many diverse “ideological” conclusions are drawn from it… on the other hand… I can imagine certain poets filled with passionate enthusiasm for a cause… whose enthusiasm however gets in the way of their artistry & their disinterested apprehension of things as they are…
I think if one keeps these 2 potential situations in mind, one could give a little more credence to the position of a Reginald Shepherd for example… once you recognize the “ontological” distinctions between “making art” & “being political” – their very different means & ends -
I really don’t think it is at all right to say that Reginald thought that there was a clear line between poetry and politics. I do believe he felt that if your most urgent goal was to accomplish political change, poetry was not the most effective way to do it. For the record, I believe this too.
I regret that Reginald is no longer with us to speak about his position, and I regret being his (poor, inadequate) advocate. But I don’t think it is right to characterize his views in the way they’re being characterized here.
Perhaps people disagree about the paragraph in question. I’d urge them to look at Reginald’s work as a whole, his words and his actions, right up until his death.
Bob
The point was, of course, not to direct you to Adorno in order that you might discover that he agreed with you, Henry, but in order that you might understand the argument about art’s relation to the political—a more subtle one than it seemed you were ascribing to people in this thread, & certainly one that goes beyond what you still seem to want to frame as a question of whether art is “independent.” But now we are going in circles.
I didn’t get an email from you, btw.
I agree with Bob Archameau in all of this.
It seems to me that avant-garde poetry in particular will find it difficult to affect any sort of political change or influence simply because to do so it would have to have a wide readership, as well as being written in a way that is readily understandable to those readers it intends to influence (presumably those in the wider society outside literary coteries, and, perhaps, one or two politicians who read avant-garde political poetry—not a lot of those around, I expect). If these conditions are not met, then avant-garde political poetry can only really function as catharsis for its writers, or as interesting philosophical rhetoric.
Ah, another person having a conversation w/ himself. None of this is what is at issue. No one here disagrees with the obvious, so no one here disagrees with the above.
In that case MR, the matter is settled and we can all go home, as this seems to be the crux of the matter regarding the claims made about the efficacy of Cambridge poetry to affect political change. Outside of this, I don’t see what other issue inspired this thread.
First of all, I assume you mean “effect” political change, & second of all, I assume you haven’t read the thread. Nobody believes avant-garde poetry or any other kind of poetry will effect political change. The question was about resistance – poetry as carving out a space for (to quote Joshua paraphrasing Adorno) “purposes of preserving a space of critique of ideology, instrumental reason, relations of production.” Do you really think anyone was suggesting that poetry – its production, consumption, distribution, whatever – could directly bring about changes in power structures?
MR…point by point:
1) “First of all, I assume you mean “effect” political change,”
No, I’m afraid I do mean “affect”, which means “to have an effect upon”—confusing, I know.
2) “& second of all, I assume you haven’t read the thread. Nobody believes avant-garde poetry or any other kind of poetry will effect political change.”
Apparently, those cited in Bob Archambeau’s recent blog post do. He rightly questions their position on this.
3) “The question was about resistance–poetry as carving out a space for (to quote Joshua paraphrasing Adorno) “purposes of preserving a space of critique of ideology, instrumental reason, relations of production.”
The discussion may have developed into that area, but I am addressing the Brady quote, at the start of this thread, and its implications. If it is forbidden to re-focus the discussion back to its origin, I apologise.
4) “Do you really think anyone was suggesting that poetry–its production, consumption, distribution, whatever–could directly bring about changes in power structures?”
Not on this thread, perhaps, but again, I have to stress that I am addressing the Brady quote, and the claims made for Cambridge poetry’s political efficacy that Bob mentions in his recent blog posts.
Oh, those goalposts. Now it’s a thread on another blog that you’re responding to.
To be sure, I think the points Bob makes in that post misrepresent both the positions cited & public sphere theory, but we weren’t having that conversation here—confusing, I know.
You do mean “effect,” but I can see how you’d be confused about what you mean.
OED: effect, v.: 1. a. To bring about (an event, a result); to accomplish (an intention, a desire). (“to effect change”)
MR, my use of “affect” is appropriate for what I meant.
The word you suggest I use instead, “effect”, is used when you mean: “a result”, “to cause”, “to accomplish”, “to bring about”, or when preceded by “a”, “an”, “any”, “the”, “take”, “into”, and “no”.
“Affect” is used when you mean: “to influence something rather than cause” or “as a noun to express emotion”.
I was using “affect” to mean, “to influence something rather than cause”. See:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Grammar_Mishaps__Affect_vs_Effect
I assume that MR’s insistence that Adorno is the unspoken subtext or real topic of this confusing discussion (& I admit I have contributed greatly to the confusion myself) is that Adorno wold lend theoretical support to Andrea’s general position : ie. that it is a political act of “resistance” to teach & study & promote ethical alternatives to the established structures of power & their doings etc. & Bobby seconds this as the general sense of “being political”, whether immediately politically-efficacious or not. You form enclaves of ethical & artistic resistance to the status quo. The oscillation, between unrealistic claims of potential political impact on the one hand, and maintaining “counter-cultural” & victimized domains of struggle on the other – this ambiguity – is of the essence of these charismatic communities.
It seems to me that all this reflects an old dichotomy between reform & revolution. The revolutionary disavows any taint of co-responsibility for the structures of established politics or society. They are beyond redemption by the pure. Thus the whole idea of writing a “popular” poetry which might have a reforming influence on the larger culture is a laughable waste of time. The notion that poetry might have its own proper (aesthetic) ends, and that in pursuring those ends the poetry might also have an ethical influence on the direection of society, is equally compromised. That’s why we need an Adorno or another revolutionary theoretical scaffolding to justify our ineffectual enclaves of purist resistance : the scaffolding is their justification.
No! Read my very first post. I give up.
Yes! You’re right, MR. I’ve oversimplified or confused things yet again. Sorry. I’m in the woods, in Maine. So where are we? I’m supposed to read Adorno (he’s on my desk, back at work, where I do not wish to return) so I can understand these issues. & yet Jane/Joshua suggests that Adorno is not really an advocate for disinterested artistic endeavor. & yet my notions of the contemporary over-politicization of art & poetry are “silly”, because I haven’t read Adorno, according to you. So I’m just, like, lost in thw woods here.
Henry, what you say makes sense.
Andrea’s claim about teaching as political resistance is probably a common one among sensitive middle-class liberals who feel a personal guilt for the way the world is. I’m not against this, by the way, I admire it—but at least let us acknowledge it for what it might be.
I’m not sure, though, that this is the case generally. I assume some of the poets engaging with the issues we are discussing, are not doing so merely to exercise their philosophical wings or to assuage guilty feeling, but do, indeed, hope that some practical political repercussions are born of it—either in the short or long-term.